.webp)
For product communities, the growth of your product overall is the biggest determinant of your community’s growth. Not all new users will want or need to join your community, but for those who do, there are lots of opportunities to maximize awareness. These opportunities are community on-ramps.
You want to guide as many people with a need via these on-ramps to your community as possible. Some on-ramps are obvious, others not so much. Either way, they're important for both prospective and existing members alike. In this article, we’ll step through common on-ramps and how you can use them to maximize community growth.
OK, let's start with the obvious ones. For new and existing users alike, many people will want to access the community from your homepage. From the main top nav, often under a section like resources, or in the footer is where people expect to find a link. If you post community-related content on your social channels, or it’s a place where users go for help, then it’s helpful to provide a link to your community within the bio of social profiles, too.
For those with a forum aspect to the community, then your discussion pages will often become one of the main ways people find your community. Especially for complex products with multiple use-cases that aren’t easily documented, then search will be a huge source of potential members. Atlassian’s community gets 90% of its traffic from search. UiPath’s forum accounts for 70% of its traffic. While a typical answer on Salesforce’s forum gets viewed 20 times. Even if you use Slack, then solutions like Tightknit, provide a way to make those conversations accessible on the web and indexable by search engines. Plus, Google is now favoring forum-based content in its algorithm and sites like Reddit have seen their traffic double in the last year as a result, so it's worth investing in.
However, it’s an oft missed opportunity to highlight the value of the community and make it easy to get from the discussion page to signup. UiPath does a good job with a modal highlighting the main benefits without getting in the way of finding an answer (although it’s a little wordy). The design hierarchy of discussion pages usually only consider posting topics and replies. Try to imagine you've never visited the community before, go to a discussion page and see whether you can work out what the community is, who it's for, and why and how they should join. There's often a number of optimizations you can make to improve the experience for prospective members.
Your product itself can also be another great source of members. Whether you provide a general link to join the community, or it’s context-specific, like when you know a member might be looking to get help or provide feedback.
Such efforts shouldn't be limited to help use-cases, though. There are many positive opportunities to flag the community to users, too - for instance, when someone reaches a particular threshold of usage, or uses a range of features. Asana, for example, has turned many of its most engaged product users into community super users by using in-product signals like feature usage and time in product to trigger a notification inviting the user to join its ambassador program.
Other products go further still, integrating elements of community within the product itself. Whether that’s a plugin gallery in Figma, accessible from the product dashboard, or exposed as templates like in Notion with a link out to its templates page.
Of course, product real-estate is precious and getting a link can be easier said than done.
Product-related comms provide the most opportunity to highlight your community’s value to potential members. Onboarding emails, when people are first trying or getting started with your product is a good one. As are changelog updates - directing users to provide feedback or get help with a new feature. Since changelogs are often read by some of your most engaged users, they can be a great place to flag ways to deepen existing member involvement, such as by joining ambassador or early-access programs.
Any product with a creation element should be showcasing users and their creations on social channels, and the same goes for community contributions too.
It’s common for help centers, product training materials, and community to be closely integrated with links to each in their respective navigation bars or from within the content itself. However, don't forget to highlight the community in slides within sales and customer success materials, too. Getting new users into the community early can help with customer outcomes long-term. For instance, new Atlassian product users who visit the community in their first two weeks are two to three times less likely to churn.
If done well, a product conference should effectively become a big showcase of the value of community, from member-run talks to awards and member meetups. You can see the impact of conferences on dbt Labs’ growth for instance, with spikes in signups following each event. When members are at a conference, especially in-person, their enthusiasm for your community is at a peak. Having a booth, staffed with team and community members, can be a great way to encourage others to further their involvement via MVP or champions programs, for instance.
OK, so now you have a great range of on-ramps funnelling prospective members to your community. You now need to focus on two things: attribution and optimization.
Understanding when and where people are finding out about your community and taking the leap to join can be difficult to understand. Most analytics tooling is setup from a product signup perspective, not for tracking referral sources to joining the community. So it’s important to instrument your setup so that you know which on-ramps are proving to be most effective and why. These are the easiest on-ramps to optimize and provide the greatest opportunity to drive additional growth. With effective tracking, through a combination of dedicated web analytics and UTM parameters, you can start to develop this understanding and know where to focus your optimization efforts.
How do you optimize on-ramps to maximize signups? You need to align the need the prospective member has at the time they come in via the on-ramp with the experience they get and the value you communicate to them. Communities often serve a range of needs, but not all of them are equally important to different people in different contexts. For example, if someone has come into the community via a banner within your help docs, you should be highlighting the unique value your community offers in terms of support - such as the ability to get questions answered 24/7 or from subject area experts.
The member experience offered when someone is seeking help should differ to that offered to someone who lands in community via an onboarding email, or after inviting a super user to get involved based on product usage. You can get started with this by creating dedicated landing pages optimized for different scenarios, or personalizing on-page elements, like titles and page copy. The better job you do at explaining the value of joining your community in the context of their need, the better your conversion rates will be.
By having the right community on-ramps, optimized to provide a relevant experience, you can improve the growth trajectory of your community overall.
