Activation rate measures the percentage of new users who complete the key action that demonstrates they've received value from your product.

Many products lose users before they ever become customers. Not because the product is bad, but because the first screen they see gives them nowhere to go. An empty state without guidance is a dead end. Instead, use that space to teach users what to do next.

The most common empty state (46%) across 809 tracked mobile apps is a simple “nothing here” message. Just 13% of the tracked apps used their empty states to provide a guided setup checklist. If you design your product to include this type of quick-start onboarding, you are ahead of the pack.

Empty states are high risk touch points because most churn happens in the first few days of using a product. Having the empty state help guide new users toward key actions builds trust in your product at a critical moment.

Every user who fails to activate represents lost revenue potential. You've already paid to acquire them. If they leave because they don't know what to do next, that acquisition cost never has a chance to pay for itself. Improving activation rate means helping more users reach the point where your product begins delivering value.

Make, one of the most widely used no-code automation builders, ran into problems with their onboarding experience. The product wasn’t giving new users inline guidance when they went to create their first scenarios— the key part of Make’s activation journey.

Make partnered with Caglar Ekim, a Growth Specialist using the product tour platform Candu. He redesigned the most common empty state to show popular app and template combinations, which helped inspire users trying to create their first scenarios. This new design showcased some of the platform’s possibilities, combatting the “blank page” problem.

Make’s activation rates rose 3-5%.

Guidance. Learning a new piece of software can be daunting. Make targets non-technical users, so getting started raised extra challenges. Redesigning the empty state to show some inspirational examples and possibilities helped demystify the potentially complex action of creating an automation.

Imagine your SaaS product attracts 3,000 new signups each month. Today, only 35% complete your activation milestone. That's 1,050 activated users.

You change all the empty states on your product, getting rid of the “nothing here” messages and replacing them with actionable or inspirational content just like Make did.

20% of those activated users could become paying customers on a $100/month subscription.

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