The guide to more impactful in-app guides

You can never go wrong with some old fashioned FOMO. The product team at SecurityScorecard set out to promote curiosity and discoverability around paid features that free users may not have known were available. They created an in-app guide to act as an advertisement for a feature available to paid users, and served the guide only to their free users.

The guide had something for everyone: a one-minute video about their Rule Builder feature, a brief overview of its capabilities and value drivers, and an option to be reminded of this feature at a later date. The team measured the guide’s success by looking at traffic to their pricing page (where the guide CTA led) since the guide was implemented and comparing it to the previous time period.

The largest segment in one of Nelnet’s products didn’t have access to their knowledge base, and users from this segment made up the majority of the organization’s support call volume. So, the team got creative and used an in-app guide to stand in as a resource center for these users and proactively answer their most common support call topics.

Users can choose from five different topics, and click to see more detailed tips and best practices. But Nelnet didn’t stop there. They personalized the guide even further and tailored it four-fold to account for two different markets and both web and mobile experiences. And now, they’re using these guides as a jumping off point to provide more help, like showcasing feature enhancements that are relevant to this specific user segment.

In an effort to personalize (and streamline) their free trial experience, the team at Aysling launched an in-app guide on their MagHub product’s trial site specifically for prospects logging in for the first time. It included a short welcome video to help orient users, and from there they could select a specific feature to learn more about.

The goal was to put users in control and make it easy for them to explore different areas of the product. Since free trials can often be overwhelming, this guide helped direct prospects to the specific product features the Aysling team knew were high-value and correlated with positive customer outcomes.

Bloomerang’s product team wanted to encourage customers to activate a certain feature that comes free with their subscription. Rather than sending an email blast, they turned to in-app guides to let users know about this functionality when the nudge would be most relevant: while they were using the product.

In addition to informing users of the feature, the guide also includes a direct link to the page in Bloomerang’s app where users can activate it. After initially placing the guide on their home page, the team identified two other areas in the app where pain points might surface and where this particular feature could help.

Like all support teams, Energage support members can only be in so many places (figuratively speaking) at once. To better enable quick onboarding for their customers who forgo dedicated support and are managed through a one-to-many approach, Energage leverages in-app guides to bear some of the load.

Energage created a four-step onboarding walkthrough for the set-up portion of their employee engagement survey, and segmented to only show the guide to the appropriate customer base. The team also created a fifth guide that appears for users who dismiss the guide in step one and after they answer “Yes” or “No” to “Was this series of guides helpful?” in step four. This final guide gives customers the option to schedule a call with a member of the Energage team if they need additional help.

After overhauling a feature that needed to be upgraded, the ShippingEasy team attached an in-app poll to gauge user satisfaction with the changes. Nearly two-thirds of users rated the updates a 4 or 5 out of 5, but they used the lower ratings as an opportunity to hear directly from customers about how they could improve.

Users who responded with a 1, 2, or 3 were presented with a field to provide feedback on what they didn’t like about the changes to the feature. From there, the product team created a second poll that showed an animation of a prototype fix for one of the problems users mentioned, and asked whether or not users thought it would be a good approach.

One of Inseego’s legacy portals had not yet been updated to their latest and greatest interface, resulting in an overwhelming number of calls to their support team. What’s more, the requests were predominantly simple in nature–questions like, “What sales code should I use?” or “What should I enter in the user name field?”

Luckily, their technical writer devised a solution that was equally simple in nature: create in-app guides to educate users on the most common subjects of these support calls. After identifying the UI elements that generated the most calls, he created 16 lightboxes and tooltips to address these repetitive inquiries–and users and the Inseego support team were better off because of them. Call it a win-win.

The product team at Cartegraph set out to onboard users onto Cartegraph Capture, a feature in their Cartegraph One mobile app that allows users to collect an infrastructure asset in the field by simply taking a picture. In order to drive repeat adoption of this feature, they created a four-step guide that shows users how to take a photo that will generate a high likelihood of success.

The creation of this guide also provided the added benefit of replacing a legacy, hard-coded walkthrough their development team had built in the past. Now, they can tweak the guide whenever they need to without relying on development resources.