Keeping users informed about product updates is essential for any company aiming to maintain engagement, reduce churn, and foster trust. However, simply announcing changes is not enough—users must actually read and understand what’s new. Unfortunately, generic, overly technical, or poorly timed communications often get ignored. To be effective, product update communications should be timely, relevant, and crafted with the user’s experience at the core.
Why Product Update Communications Matter
Product updates signal progress: bug fixes, new features, improved interfaces, and enhanced security. But the way these updates are communicated plays a significant role in how they’re received. Done right, update comms can:
- Increase user affinity and trust by showing transparency in development
- Encourage adoption of new features
- Reduce support tickets by preemptively addressing likely confusion
- Maintain engagement and reduce churn
Unfortunately, many update communications fail to meet these goals—not because the updates aren’t valuable, but because users never read about them.
Understanding Why Users Ignore Update Messages
Consider the user experience: busy schedules, overflowing inboxes, and a growing skepticism toward any content perceived as “corporate noise.” Your average user is selective about their attention. If your product update communications are long-winded, irrelevant, or poorly timed, they’ll be dismissed without a second glance.
Common pitfalls include:
- Using complex or internal jargon
- Sending bulk emails without personalization
- Announcing too frequently or without meaningful content
- Highlighting engineering achievements over user benefits
To stand out, companies need to rethink how they position and deliver product communications.
Principles for Effective Update Communications
To craft communications users will actually read, it’s essential to follow a user-centric approach. Here are key principles to guide your strategy:
1. Be Clear and Concise
Avoid technical jargon and internal language. Speak in plain terms that inform users what’s different and why they should care. Brevity is key—use bullet points, bold text, or short headings to aid skimming.
2. Focus on Benefits, Not Features
Refrain from listing technical enhancements without context. Instead, focus on the benefit to the user. For instance, rather than saying, “We’ve updated our backend API architecture,” say, “You’ll now experience faster load times when accessing your dashboard.”
3. Segment and Personalize
Update content should match user personas. Power users, beginners, enterprise clients—each group has different needs and concerns. Segment your users and customize messaging accordingly to make communications relevant and actionable.
4. Use the Right Channels
Don’t rely solely on email. Consider in-app notifications, changelogs, blog posts, and even video content depending on your user demographics. Meet the user where they are most receptive.
For example, in-product banners or subtle modals are excellent for announcing updates that impact specific user flows. Meanwhile, emails are suitable for more comprehensive overviews or announcements targeting administrators.
5. Provide Visual Context
Accompany your updates with helpful visuals—annotated screenshots, short GIFs, or videos. Not only do visuals capture attention, but they also help users understand interface changes instantly without needing to interpret a wall of text.
6. Maintain a Consistent Tone and Schedule
Consistency builds familiarity and trust. Whether weekly, biweekly, or monthly, find a cadence that aligns with your release cycle and stick to it. Adopt a tone that reflects your brand, but also consider adding a human touch to avoid sounding robotic.
What to Include in Effective Update Communications
Every product update message doesn’t need to cover every minor bug fix. Instead, think in terms of user impact. Here’s a simple framework you can follow:
- Headline: A clear, benefit-oriented summary of the key update.
- What Changed: Concise explanation of the update, enhanced with visuals.
- Why It Matters: Explain how the update improves the user’s experience.
- Next Steps (if any): Are there new features they should try? Any action required?
- Support Link: Direct readers to your documentation, knowledge base, or support team.
Here’s an example of how this might look in plain text:
Subject: Faster performance on your dashboard is here!
Your dashboard now loads 40% faster thanks to performance enhancements behind the scenes. No action needed—just enjoy the upgrade. Learn more on our blog.
Treat Product Comms as a Strategic Function
Often, update comms are treated as an afterthought task before a deployment, delegated to whoever is available. Worse, product teams may assume that “release notes” tucked away on the website are sufficient. But effective product communications enjoy better engagement metrics when teams take them as seriously as feature development itself.
This requires cross-functional collaboration between product, marketing, customer success, and engineering. Consider nominating an owner of product comms or involving your content team early in the development lifecycle. Doing so will lead to more user-focused language and better distribution strategies.
Examples of Brands Doing It Right
Some pioneering companies have set the bar high for how to engage users with their product updates:
- Slack: Their in-app release notes are humorous yet informative, using real-world language and visual cues.
- Notion: Sends concise, visually-rich emails with clear step-by-step illustrations of what changed.
- Figma: Offers interactive release recaps within the product, combining visuals with optional deep-dives.
What these companies have in common is clarity, visual context, and user alignment. They treat every update, big or small, as an opportunity to offer value and improve engagement.
Metrics You Should Track
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Understanding what works (and what doesn’t) in your communication efforts helps refine the approach over time. Key metrics to monitor include:
- Email open and click-through rates
- In-app engagement post-update
- Feature adoption rates
- Support ticket trends related to the update
- User feedback and qualitative insights
Combine quantitative data with qualitative signals like user comments or survey results. This holistic view helps fine-tune your next communication rollout.
Conclusion
Product updates are vital touchpoints between your company and your users, but their value is lost if they go unread. By making communications user-centric—clear, concise, benefits-oriented, visual, and timely—you increase the odds of your messages being seen and acted upon.
In an age where attention is currency, treating product update communications as a strategic and intentional practice is no longer optional—it’s a competitive and operational imperative.
