How to Drive More Product Activations Using Personalized Messaging
If you are learning to drive, the driving instructor tells you what to do. They tell you when to press the gas and when to press the brake, when to change gear and when to use your turn signals. They tell you everything you need to know to be a successful driver.
You don’t have that luxury with your product. A PM can’t sit there with every user giving them a driving lesson to be a successful ‘driver.’ But that doesn’t mean you can’t teach them. Most good teaching is just personalized messaging. “Hey Ray, brake, brake, BRAKE!” is a personalized message.
Adding personalized messaging to your product is a great way to teach your users what the most important features are and how to be successful with the product.
A good personalized message has two components. Both are best, but depending on context just one can suffice:
- Profile data, such as name or role (the “Hey Ray” bit).
- Behavioral data, such as what the user has or hasn’t been doing in the product (the “brake, brake, BRAKE!” bit)
We wrote recently about how you can develop an activation thesis, prove it, and iterate to drive better activation and more retention. To recap, our example product is a video messaging tool a la Loom. We know from our initial experimentation that an important activation milestone for users is sharing a recorded video.
Let’s continue our activation experiment and add personalized messaging to help people get to the sharing activation milestone and continue to be successful with the product.
Here we’re going to go through two ways to implement this with Freshpaint and an integration.
- In-product. We can improve our onboarding flow for new users by adding data to a personalization and onboarding tool such as Appcues or Chameleon.
- Out of the product. We can nudge users later using email messaging using a platform such as Iterable.
Both of these can use profile and behavioral data to help users get to the activation milestone and be successful in your product.
In-product messaging: improve your onboarding experience through personalization
When users are interacting with your product is the ideal time to highlight the most important features and help nudge them toward your activation milestone.
If your activation milestone is during the onboarding phase, or early on in the user journey, then you can use your initial onboarding flow to highlight the journey and its culmination in the milestone. The problem with this is that:
- It’s not always ideal to have your activation milestone too early and during the onboarding phase as users haven’t yet experienced the value of the product fully.
- As users haven’t done anything in the product yet, it’s difficult to personalize.
- Users might just quickly click through the flow and not pay attention (Hands up who’s done that. :raising_hand:)
A better option is a checklist. You can enumerate the basic flow to get to your activation milestone easily:
As the user completes each component, they can see their progress and the implicit goal (the activation milestone):
Though a user can dismiss this, it can also stay open in the corner on subsequent visits. So if a user here creates their account, visits the dashboard, and records a video initially, they will still be reminded to share the video the next time they come.
The above checklist is from Appcues and is personalized in that it uses behavioral data to assess whether you completed the task. During our experimentation, we instrumented our ‘Record’ and ‘Share’ buttons, and we can start sharing this data out to an onboarding tool such as Appcues:
In Appcues, we can then set the ‘Record a video’ checklist item as sending the user to the /record page, and marking it complete when the record button is clicked:
We now have a checklist that will follow a user’s actions in the product, and keep them on track to complete our activation milestone.
But we can take this one step further. We can also use profile information to create specific checklists for different users and personalize according to role. In this scenario, we’ll say the user signing up is in sales. There are a ton of use-cases for video in sales, so we can personalize the messaging on this checklist accordingly, and have the checklist about creating a video to send to a prospect:
This is great for the user as it is more specific to their role and makes them successful in a meaningful way quicker. But it is also great for us, as we’ve added an extra impetus to the messaging. It’s no longer about just ‘sharing a video,’ now it’s about ‘sharing a video with a prospect.’ It’s a specific action related to their job that they need to do.
What if your activation milestone is further out from onboarding? One option is to use tooltips to highlight important features for the milestone. Let’s say we want to remind users who haven’t yet shared a video to do so later. We can create a segment in Appcues of ‘non-sharing users’:
Then we can use this segment to show a hotspot, pin, or tooltip within the app attached to our ‘Share’ button.
Meet your audience where they are is a well-worn business adage, but it rings true. Using in-product personalization is a great way to meet your customers where they are, in your product, at exactly the time they are trying to be successful with your product–you should do all you can to help them.
Away from the product: Reminding users what they can still achieve
Sometimes we have to admit that our products aren’t the center of our users' worlds. They aren’t always in them, clicking on checklists and tooltips. The other way of reading Meet your audience where they are is meeting them outside your product, where they are 99% of the time.
So they’ve gone into our product, recorded a video but not shared it and left. And not come back. Why should they? By our own definition, they haven’t reached the activation milestone and seen value in the product. So we have to reach out to them, remind them what they missed, and get them back.
This is where customer engagement platforms such as Iterable come in. We can use these to reach out to users who haven’t hit the milestones and nudge them back to the product.
In fact, this is exactly what Loom does. When you record your first video and don’t share, you get a little nudge in your inbox:
This messaging leaves you in little doubt about what you have to do next. The in-email button takes you directly to your video to share it.
These emails don’t have to be one-off, behaviorally-activated emails. Instead you can trigger entire campaigns from the Freshpaint data you are sharing to Iterable. And because Freshpaint can provide Iterable with a unified customer profile, we can personalize using personal information as well as behavioral data.
Again, we’ll suppose the user is in sales (you might get role information from a signup form, or through enrichment through a service such as Clearbit). We can personalize this messaging further using this information:
Now we have a specific nudge back into the product. Not just through the link, but also through the links to content as proof of the importance of what we want them to do–share video with prospects.
Customer engagement platforms are omnichannel, so we can also use push notifications or SMS to remind users what they need to do (though these can be seen as more invasive). But whatever channel we use, personalized messaging
Teaching your users to be successful
Here’s an important point that is true for every approach in this article: all of this is taking place within the loop we outlined in our activation thesis article. Improving your onboarding, messaging, or segmentation is all part of the wider, ongoing experiment to increase activation and, in turn, retention.
But any improvement is really an improvement in the ability of your users. You aren’t making your product better, you are making your users better. You are teaching them to be successful. Personalized messaging is the best way to do this as it mimics teaching–you are literally telling users what to do. If you see your messaging through that prism, as a way to make people successful, you are always going to have successful, activated users that come back again and again to your product.
The trick now is to be able to iterate on the events you'll need to build highly personalized onboarding and messaging campaigns without waiting long cycles for engineering sprints to get them into the codebase. If you want to learn more about how Freshpaint can help you do that, reach out to set some time with one of our product experts.
