Benchmarking your enterprise is an essential part of progress. Without insight into what you’re doing great (and what you can do better), your path toward growth can become directionless. Yet for too many product teams, measurement and data fall to the wayside.
To help you avoid the same trap, we analyzed anonymized, aggregated data* from 1,100+ applications at enterprises on the Pendo One platform.
Let’s take a look at enterprise product performance across four KPIs across four brackets: low (25th percentile), average (50th percentile), high (75th percentile), and best-in-class (90th percentile). We’re covering four enterprise KPIs in this blog, but you can view all nine benchmarks in our interactive benchmarking tool.
1. Monthly active user growth
Across industry and region, enterprises are growing six-month MAUs by an average of 2%. In other words, products with 100 users will add two new ones at the end of six months. While an average of 2% MAU growth may seem low, enterprises have long-established audiences and offerings.
The top 10% add MAUs 34x faster than average
The top 10% of enterprise products are growing MAUs by 68%. Rapid MAU growth like this often follows the launch of a new product in its early days—like Meta’s Threads app.
Four ways to increase active users
- Capture and apply user feedback: Your product team should listen to users and add their ideas to your product roadmap. This is the easiest way to create products that delight and engage users.
- Educate users in-app: From day one and beyond, emphasize the value of your product via in-app guides, walkthroughs, resource centers, and other tools.
- Segment communications: Gather information about your users, and create segments by role to share relevant resources.
- Offer freemium and free trial offerings: Product-led organizations rely on their product, rather than marketing methods, to drive user growth. A low-friction, low-commitment offering is an easy way to add and convert users.
2. User retention
Enterprise products keep 35% of users after one month, on average. After three months, about 28% of users are still returning to the product. This means for every 100 active users your product adds, 72 users will leave.
Over three months, enterprise products keep 28% of users
Retention rate tends to vary with the age of a product. For a new offering, a one-month user retention rate of 35% indicates that your product adds value to users. For an established product, this might reveal underlying functionality issues.
Improving retention revolves around guidance
- Simplify user onboarding: When a new user logs into your product, your PMs should highlight core features, offer product walkthroughs, and link out to the resource center. See how five product teams are improving onboarding.
- Continue to add value: Nurture customers even after they’ve gotten the hang of your application. Your teams should use in-app messaging and widgets to create a product environment where users are always learning and uncovering features at their own pace.
- Put your product analytics to work: Your team can’t improve retention without defining the problems. Look at your product’s qualitative, quantitative, and visual data across different user segments. Session replay, product analytics, and feedback reveal what top users are doing, so your team can guide at-risk customers to value.
3. Feature adoption
Average enterprise feature adoption for digital products is 6%. For best-in-class enterprises, this jumps to 16%. Across industries, products in the Manufacturing industry have the highest feature adoption at 7%. Products in Media are lagging, at 4%.
Only 6% of features drive 80% of clicks
Determining what constitutes a successful feature adoption rate will depend on the nature of the product/feature in question. If your Business Services product has a 6% adoption rate, that might be a success. However, a 6% feature adoption rate for your social media app’s newest messaging feature might ring some alarm bells.
Four ways to exceed feature adoption benchmarks
- Make adoption easy: It should be as simple as possible for customers to find and use features. Once you’ve announced a new feature, create in-app walkthroughs to guide users through the desired steps—especially for features that require multiple steps in the workflow.
- Announce new features in-app: One of the best tools to promote features is your product itself. When your team announces features in-app via guides or tooltips, you reach users when and where the message is most relevant.
- Make the value and desired action clear: As your team creates in-app messages or other content about features, use straightforward language that clearly communicates their value. Then, point users to the next action you want them to take (like watching a guided demo).
- Target your communications: Not every feature is relevant to every user. Your PMs should create segments within your product experience platform by role, permissions, and technical proficiency.
4. Stickiness
On average, 51% of users will engage with products at least one week out of a month, and 15% engage with products at least once per 24 hours. That means over half of users find enterprise products valuable and have created enduring habits.
The top 10% of products are 1.5x stickier each month
For best-in-class enterprises, weekly stickiness jumps to 76% and daily stickiness is 37%. That means more than ¾ of users will log in on any given week, and 37 out of 100 users will log in on any given day.
How to make your product stickier
- Encourage engagement: Your teams should add features and communications that encourage regular product interactions. These can include in-app notifications, emails, and other triggers.
- Promote the behaviors of engaged users: PMs should use product analytics to discover common behaviors among their most engaged users. Then, they can encourage other users to adopt those same behaviors with in-app guides.
- Understand what’s causing drop-offs: Watch visual data of your least and most sticky users to understand their behaviors. From there, PMs can use in-app guides and walkthroughs to help build habits and uncover value.
- Use in-app guides to speed up the time to “aha!” moments: The faster your teams can add value to your users, the more likely they are to return.
This is just a taste of the benchmarks your enterprise’s product team can (and should) track. Explore our interactive product benchmarks tool to drill into your performance by industry and region.
*Quantitative data for the 2024 Mind the Product Benchmarks Report is from analysis of aggregated and anonymized product data from a sample of Pendo customers from May 1, 2023 to March 30, 2024. Pendo customers that opted out of anonymous data sharing were excluded from this analysis.
