Integrations with Other Products
Objective: Acquire new customers by leveraging the existing user base of products that you integrate with, offering an improved user experience in the process.
How: To explain how this tactic can work well I'd like to showcase one of the masters of this: Zapier. For those of you that don't know, Zapier is a platform that focuses completely around connecting apps together in order to create unique value from them. Zapier's whole business revolves around leveraging integrations and it's primarily how they've scaled the business to date.
The real takeaway here is where Wade talks about integrations that “[fill] a gap in another company’s product offering that they’re unlikely to fill.” An integration has to be mutually beneficial to each partner company while also adding more value for the customer than just simply using the two products independently.
Take Stripe’s integration with Shopify. This is an integration that I’ve personally taken advantage of and it has actually been a huge factor in selecting Shopify as a CMS. There have been many other examples of integrations similar to this that have had a big impact on product adoption – another good example is when PayPal directly integrated with eBay.
The hard part can often be to find the right integration partner. For an integration to be both appealing to the individual partners and also add value to customers, there shouldn’t be too much overlap in existing functionality. I’d start by figuring out features that your customers would find useful but in areas that you’re not going to actively pursue as a product development priority.
From here you can shortlist solution providers and evaluate who would add the most value from a customer acquisition point of view. Things to consider when evaluating potential integration partners are:
- Their total customer base.
- The likelihood that their customers would be interested in your product.
- Their online reach (i.e., email list, social followers, etc.).
- Ease of the integration.