How GoTo uses Pendo to power work for millions of users and grow the bottom line, efficiently

GoTo’s mission is to make IT easy. The company provides remote management and support and business communication tools that enable work to happen anywhere. And with tens of millions of users across their applications, GoTo is one of the largest software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in the world.

Most recently, GoTo has been focused on growing efficiently with a product-led growth strategy—using its own suite of products to increase trial conversion and improve customer engagement in-app. “Every product is starting to have a product-led growth team,” shared Elon Harris (Marketing LifeCycle Automation Specialist at GoTo). “We’re all working together to analyze product usage data [in Pendo] and increase activation, retention, and conversion.”

Using Pendo to optimize onboarding and increase conversions

Grasshopper, a phone service for small businesses and entrepreneurs, is one of GoTo’s longest-standing homegrown products. In late 2022, the company identified an opportunity to leverage Pendo to improve user engagement and, ultimately, increase their trial-to-paid conversion rate.

The first order of business? Understanding how users were engaging with Grasshopper. “We didn’t have a great understanding of which features customers and trial users were actually using,” said Michelle Ouellette (Marketing Automation Specialist at GoTo). “So we learned a lot [with Pendo], and that really helped us form a new strategy for the product overall.”

GoTo’s marketing, product, and UX teams used Pendo Analytics to identify which features to highlight in their free trial onboarding experience. From there, they built out in-app onboarding flows and created custom segments so they could specifically target users who hadn’t already engaged with these key features. The team also created an in-app guide to engage users later in their trial and encourage them to purchase the premium offering.

“We were able to see how many conversions we were getting from Pendo, which averaged about eight conversions per week directly from our Pendo In-app Guides that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

Michelle Ouellette | Marketing Automation Specialist, GoTo

After using Pendo to create a more personalized trial onboarding experience in Grasshopper, GoTo saw a 4% increase in their overall trial-to-paid conversion rate. “It’s helped bring in more revenue for the product and helped with retention numbers as well,” said Ouellette, noting a $130,000 increase in revenue due to these additional conversions.

With this initial success, the team decided to leverage Pendo to optimize onboarding and the overall trial experience in Grasshopper’s mobile app as well. They also built out their Pendo Resource Center to provide answers to frequently asked questions, information on upsell features, and a way for users to share feedback directly inside the application.

Ouellette added, “We’ve really taken [a product-led] approach to identify features that are pain points for trialers and customers in order to improve the product, increase retention, and create a better user experience throughout our suite of products.”

Increasing user activation with a data-driven approach

GoTo also turned to Pendo for one of its newest products, GoTo Resolve, which is an IT management and support solution. After launching the product, the team set out to increase the activation and retention rates for free and trial users.

They started by building a general in-app onboarding flow and also used Pendo to track how users navigated the product, see which features were the most popular, and identify the features that correlated with retention.

“Pendo is integral in how we operate with our PLG teams because it makes communicating with customers so much easier versus having to do anything on the backend that’s super development heavy.”

Elon Harris | Marketing LifeCycle Automation Specialist, GoTo

Harris explained that for this product, a key step in users’ onboarding is to download a device in order to use all of the other features. After looking at the data in Pendo, she noticed some clear friction in the download process. “We realized users were getting stuck on the very first step,” Harris noted. 

The GoTo team took action on this data right away and removed set-up steps that were getting in the way, making it a single click to download a device. “We were able to remove some of the friction to increase our activation and get more users to actually use the product,” said Harris. 

Additionally, Harris and team used Pendo In-app Guides to create four distinct onboarding experiences in GoTo Resolve, segmented by use case. As a result of these efforts with Pendo, GoTo has seen some record high activation rates. “Our free user activation increased to 10.6% and our trial activation increased to 53%,” Harris shared. “Since GoTo Resolve was a new product, we were very satisfied with how quickly we were able to see these kinds of results.”

This project has also spurred additional important work at GoTo, as Harris and team are exploring even more ways to leverage Pendo to create a smooth customer experience. “We’re excited to [use Pendo to] personalize the user experience even further based on specific use cases and where users are in the customer journey,” she noted.