We have a productivity desktop application where you can get maybe 90% of the value utilizing it without login. How would we motivate people to sign in? Are there any examples of products that have made 90% of clients to sign in? Are there any configuration tricks that work?
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Q: Why do you need people to log in? What’s the benefit to their productivity that logging in would enable?
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Annoy them - Show Ads to those that don’t login 
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Try to find a very good licensing model.
Add some features like the ability to ‘Save’ and ‘Share’
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Could you get users to log in to store their to-do lists on the app?
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@KaranTrivedi, Good question: having them log in will make it easier for us to get them to try out collaborative features with their teams. And these features are tied to our monetization .
@CathrynCui That’s a good idea. 
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So, I think there’s lots of ways you can ‘enforce’/require logins or even suggest a login as a clear step in your initial user flow— it’ll reduce your overall conversion rate, but if collecting data was your only goal might be worth it.
But… that doesn’t seem to be what your challenge is. You’ve got a freemium product that isn’t getting enough people to use the monetized parts of the product. I don’t think logins are the answer as much as finding the users where your paid product features are really delivering value, and interviewing them. Then you can try to find similar behaviors in your freemium product and promote those extra features to the right-fit users.
TL;DR - getting everyone logged in won’t change your user behavior, just hide your high value users in a blended ‘logged in’ metric. Find the behaviors of high value users and adjust your marketing to get more people like them.
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Agree with @MichaelYoffe. It sounds like you’re solving a company problem, not a user problem. If you really want to do that, one coarse way to do it is move more of the existing features behind login and see if users follow.
For new features, you need to find out what’s useful/solving a pain point. Talk to your users and build a hypothesis of what they would find compelling. Maybe it’s those analytics/share features Fae mentioned. If so, they’d better be solving enough of a pain point such that a user wants to log in to get them.
In short, login for login’s sake shouldn’t be the goal. Login to add value should.
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Thank you all! Agreed that small tactics can’t fix this problem.
It’s a tricky product since most users expect to not have to log in for a utility like this.
We’ve landed on focusing our product development on online features the users can’t live without. Then it’s justified for us to ask for a login.
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Sounds like you’ve nailed it, @LawrenceMartin . If you find users who find this problem painful, and you are solving their problem in an easy to use way, they’ll gladly pay (or login) for the value.
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Agree with a lot that’s been said here, but I’d often try taking a look at your power users and how they are using your app. Usually these folks are ahead of the learning curve for your app and can help you unlock what missing link or value proposition can be gained from collaborative features. Well, that’s what I think…
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