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Onboarding automation is the use of automation to streamline onboarding-related workflows to guide new customers or new employees through every step with little or no manual assistance.

Why is Onboarding Automation important?

Onboarding automation has a lot of benefits and can help you nail your onboarding program and delight new users or employees right from the beginning.

Here is what onboarding automation can offer:

• Create personalized in-app experiences tailored to specific use cases and reduce the time to value.
• Provide consistent and well-structured in-app onboarding flows to drive new users to the activation point.
• Minimize time-consuming manual onboarding tasks and boost productivity.
• Build an in-app help center and reduce the workload of the customer support team.

Do you need tools for Onboarding Automation?

Wondering why you even need an onboarding automation tool? There are several reasons why you may need one:

Onboarding is a key step that has a great impact on whether customers will stick with you or they will look for alternatives

But what if your support team is busy with more complex tasks and doesn’t have time for proper onboarding and you’re tight on budget to hire onboarding specialists? Well, no worries. There are a lot of affordable tools to assist you with your efforts and help you create seamless onboarding experiences at scale.

Here’s how onboarding automation tools help:

• Create welcome screens to greet new customers and segment them based on their use cases.
• Build hyper-personalized interactive walkthroughs with tons of UI patterns – all of these without any coding.
• Trigger flows based on user behavior, and avoid intrusion.
• Build an in-app help center to store all documentation, tutorials, and videos in one place and offer on-demand support.

The list of benefits can go and on. As you can see, onboarding automation tools can offer numerous benefits and reduce organizational costs. Next, we will be listing the best onboarding automation tools.

What are the best tools for Onboarding Automation?

Looking to automate your onboarding but unsure which tool to trust? Here are the best tools that you can try and see if it’s the right fit for you:

• Userpilot: best onboarding automation tool with rich UI patterns, advanced segmentation, and customization functionalities.
• Appcues: best onboarding automation tool for mobile user onboarding.
• Whatfix: best onboarding automation tool for employee onboarding.
• Userguiding: best onboarding automation tool for user onboarding on a tight budget.
• Pendo: best onboarding automation tool for creating in-app resource centers.

Let’s dive deeper into how each stacks up for different company sizes, budgets, and jobs to be done!

What are the must have features of Onboarding Automation tools?

There are many onboarding automation tools available, so you may be confused about which one to choose.

Though the right tool will depend on your business goals and needs, here are the must-have features for any onboarding automation tool.

• Make sure the tool you choose isn’t limited to just product tours. Pick a tool that provides various UI patterns (modals, slideouts, banners, checklists, hotspots) to create beautiful welcome screens, and interactive walkthroughs to guide new customers and delight them from the very beginning.
• Look into getting decent segmentation capabilities based on in-app behavior and in-app experience engagement so you can trigger onboarding flows properly.
• An in-app help center is another feature that you should be looking for in an onboarding automation tool. With this, you can collect all your documentation files, tutorials, and videos in one place and offer on-demand support.
• Integration with 3rd party apps and tools so you can gain more insights and collect them in one place.

There you have it. These are the basic features that any solid onboarding automation tool should cover. Do your own research before buying a tool and make sure it’s aligned with your business goals.

No-code growth is a method of achieving product-led growth (= using your own product as a lever and revenue growth channel) without coding, using no-code tools.

It essentially allows people like product managers, product marketing managers or marketers (who may not necessarily have a background in engineering) to create e.g. in-app onboarding experiences, optimize signup and onboarding flows etc. in order to achieve higher conversion rates, user activation rates – and in the long run –drive retention.

No-code movement in general empowers non-programmers to create software elements using a graphical user interface, instead of writing code. According to no-code advocates, technology should enable and facilitate creation, not act as a barrier.

Why is No-Code Growth important?

Product-led growth may be a bit of a buzzword, but achieving no-code growth is particularly important for SaaS companies with low ACV, freemium models and generally those in the SMB sector.

Product-led growth is a way of generating revenue from the product itself – by improving user engagement metrics, working on smarter pricing and product plans to unlock more revenue through expansion, promoting word of mouth etc.

It’s essentially free revenue from your existing user base, which is particularly important when your customers’ LTV is around $150 in total. By giving your product managers and marketers no-code tools, you can generate more no-code growth. Simple.

Let’s look at more detail at some reasons why no code growth is important, especially for companies such as the ones mentioned above:

• No code growth can massively reduce your CAC.
• Generating Product-led Growth without code also means you don’t need to hire programmers to implement these tactics – which further reduces your operational costs.
• Applying product-led growth practices also reduces your customer support and success costs – as your agents don’t need to reply to the same repetitive questions over and over again, and can replace them with reactive tooltips – themselves, without any help from the developers.
• This contributes to higher satisfaction from the users in general – as they tend to prefer to self-serve rather than talk to support.
• Finally, no code product-led growth means free expansion revenue for your company – and who wouldn’t welcome that, especially nowadays.

Do you need tools for No-Code Growth?

One thing is clear – to drive no code growth, you will need to use proper tools to automate flows and drive engagement.

To achieve product-led growth without coding, you need a no-code tool that will allow you to:

• Capture feature usage (with tools like feature tagging) and record all the events happening in-app regardless of the interaction type (clicks, hovers, form fills.)
• Capture qualitative data with e.g. session recordings
• Create interactive walkthroughs and onboarding flows
• Use product to promote upsells

What are the best tools for No-Code Growth?

Ok, so now that we convinced you that investing in product-led growth is important, and that you definitely need no-code growth tool for it, the remaining question is: which one?

• Userpilot: best no-code growth tool for personalised user onboarding and analytics for mid market SaaS companies
• Userguiding: best growth tool for product adoption for small startups on a budget
• Appcues : the no-code growth tool for user onboarding for web and mobile app
• Chameleon: best growth tool for customer feedback and sentiment analysis
• Pendo: the product growth tool with the best user analytics

What are the must have features of No-Code Growth tools?

Before deciding which no-code growth tool deserves your try, you should have a basic understanding of what features you should be looking for in “the one.”

Although the exact features you need will differ based on factors such as the size of your company, your business strategy, and your goals, here are the most crucial features you should look for:

• Truly “no code” – make sure the no code growth tool you pick really allows you to build and style robust and native-looking in-app experiences without coding. You will be surprised how many tools require the knowledge of CSS to publish decent-looking onboarding flows.
• Make sure the tool you choose has all the basic UI patterns available – e.g., checklists, modals, tooltips, banners, and hotspots. This will allow you to create all the product-led growth experiences you may need.
• Targeting the experiences to the right user segments is extremely important for your PLG plays to be successful. Make sure your no-code growth tool offers advanced segmentation capabilities, so you can build customer segments based on product usage, in-app behavior, feedback, and user persona to craft hyper-personalized messages and trigger them at the right time.
• On that note – real-time, event-based triggering is an important feature of a product growth platform that only a few solutions on the market currently offer. Being able to respond to your users’ actions in real-time can be critical to pushing them toward those precious conversion points.
• Finally, product analytics is another “must-have” that a good no-code growth platform should provide. You should be able to monitor your users’ behavior with it, the engagement with your PLG in-app experiences, and how they contribute towards improving your metrics.
• The right code-free PLG tool should also offer integrations with other tools so you can add them to your stack and get better insights on your data under one roof.

Onboarding new customers is the process new users go through to set up and begin using your product. It covers the entire funnel, from initial sign-up to product activation and adoption.

When onboarding new customers you aim to deliver value to your customer as early as possible — in their first use, if possible.

Why is Onboarding New Customers important?

Onboarding new customers is crucial because it establishes the tone for their continued engagement with your product.

With a proper onboarding in place, you will be able to:

• Keep new customers engaged: they’ll start using your product successfully if you help them clearly grasp and experience the value they’ll receive from it, but more importantly, you’ll provide them a reason to log back in and use your product repeatedly.
• Improve trial retention rate: when customers are onboarded, they can experience the value of your product if you provide a free or subsidized product trial. Their likelihood of converting into a paying customer will increase if you can show them real value during the onboarding process, at the beginning of their trial.

A successful customer onboarding process positions your clients to benefit from utilizing your product over the duration of their usage.

Do you need tools for Onboarding New Customers?

Wondering why you even need an onboarding new customers tool? There are several reasons why you may need one:

It’s not enough to get people to try your product. Once they sign up you need to make sure they have a good experience and see the value in your product.

Here are the main reasons onboarding software could be beneficial:

• You can personalize the new customer onboarding process using user segmentation is made possible by many tools. If new consumers haven’t even used your core features, it wouldn’t make sense to flood them with information about additional functionality. The right message may be delivered to the right users at the right time with the use of user segmentation.
• Trigger in-app experiences contextually and don’t overwhelm users during onboarding while prompting them to engage with the right features.
• Help users complete their jobs to be done with interactive guides and in-app help. This will help you reduce time to value and increase retention.

There’s more, but I think you get the point. It shouldn’t be a question of do you need tools, but which tool to get. As there are multiple ones out there, this article will help you pick the right one for you.

What are the best tools for Onboarding New Customers?

What is the best customer experience management tool for my SaaS? You might think, right?

Here are the five best tools that you should consider:

• Userpilot – for creating microsurveys and advanced segmentation.
• Appcues – for building personalized onboarding experiences for mobile users.
• UserGuiding – for tracking in-app interactions and collecting customer data on budget.
• Pendo – for detailed product and user analytics.
• Chameleon – for creating contextual in-product surveys.

Let’s dive deeper into how each stacks up for different company sizes, budgets, and jobs to be done!

What are the must have features of Onboarding New Customers tools?

Before deciding which customer experience management tool works best, you should understand what features any solid tool must provide.

Here’s what to look for before making a buying decision:

• Make sure the tool you choose supports a variety of UI patterns so you can create nice interactive walkthroughs and onboarding flows for your customers. And all of these without writing a single line of code.
• You should also be able to track in-app interactions such as clicks, and hovers to see what customers are doing in the product and act accordingly.
• Monitor their progress and detect friction points that block the customer journey.
• Product analytics with filtering options and custom attributes is another feature that will be beneficial for you.
• Not to mention different types of surveys such as NPS, CSAT, CES to collect contextual feedback and make an analysis to optimize the customer experience.

Product analytics studies user interactions with a product or service, allowing product teams to monitor, evaluate, and assess data related to customer engagement and behavior. This information is used by teams to optimize their product or service to improve user experience.

Why is Product Analytics important?

Product Analytics provides actionable insights into how users interact with a product. It tracks metrics like engagement, retention, and feature adoption, serving as a compass for product development. By understanding what users want—and how they use a product—companies can make data-driven decisions that drive growth.

Do you need tools for Product Analytics?

Have you ever wondered how to actually connect with your customers and produce a product that resonates? The answer resides in the strength of product analytics tools. Let’s look at why these tools are essential for better understanding and supporting your users:

• Product analytics tools give you assets to track user interactions, engagement, and activity to identify usage trends and patterns.
• Not just quantitative data, you can use product analytics tools to capture qualitative data across different touchpoints of the customer journey.
• You can set up different product analytics dashboards to gain actionable insights into how your users interact with your product. For example, you can create a funnel to find friction points in your user journey. From there, you can determine where visitors leave or encounter challenges, allowing you to streamline the experience and increase customer satisfaction.
• With segmentation, you can respond to user demands and resolve concerns at scale by triggering follow-ups or delivering targeted offerings.

What are the best tools for Product Analytics?

Let’s look at the product analytics tools that can help you deeply understand your users, enhance your product’s performance, and develop experiences that truly resonate:

• Userpilot: The best no-code tool to provide contextual in-app experiences and comprehensive product analytics — from user activation to feature adoption and A/B Testing and segmentation to enhance KPIs.
• Hotjar: Best for product analytics with features like measuring rage clicks and session recordings.
• Heap: Most comprehensive product analytics suite that tracks everything your users do.
• Mixpanel: Best product analytics tool for tracking data.
• Amplitude: Best for making predictions of users’ future behaviors and reducing churn.

What are the must have features of Product Analytics tools?

Here are the features to consider while opting for a product analytics tool:

• Event tracking: Allowing you to capture both no-code and server-side event.
• Capture qualitative data (i.e. survey or session recordings).
• Analytics dashboards: Having different analytics dashboards to monitor user behavior with options to view and break down data in different ways.
• Segmentation: Sending product offerings, in-app messages, or trigger flows by segmenting users based on various attributes such as demographics, behaviors, product usage, user feedback, etc.
• Integration support: Can connect with other data sources through integrations or webhooks for a more well-rounded understanding.

A product walkthrough is an interactive tutorial that guides users on how your product operates and what features it offers. They often use a combination of different UX patterns, like modals, tooltips, hotspots, etc., to demonstrate how your product works.

Product walkthroughs are essential for users to achieve the Aha! moment and continue using your product in the long run. Without walkthroughs in place, your users might feel overwhelmed and switch to a competing tool with a better onboarding process.

Walkthroughs are not only meant for new users – you can leverage them for existing ones when announcing new features or looking to engage them.

Why is Product Walkthrough important?

You’ll seldom see a successful SaaS company without some sort of product walkthrough in place. Developing a product takes significant effort and investment, but its true potential can only be realized if users are made aware of its capabilities. Without showing a product’s unique features and benefits, all the hard work and resources spent on development would go to waste.

Here’s why building product walkthroughs is important:

• Improves user onboarding: A product walkthrough educates new users on how your product operates and functions. This can shorten the time to value and reduce any friction from the onboarding process.
• Increases product and feature adoption: By informing users about your product features, you’re essentially communicating how valuable your product is. This will boost product and feature adoption and encourage long-term product usage.
• Reduces customer support requests: Most queries come from people struggling to use your product. Since a product walkthrough gives a thorough understanding of your product, users are less likely to have questions or need support. This can greatly reduce the cost of and burden on customer support teams.
• Increases user retention: Since product walkthroughs help users realize value, they are less likely to switch to a competing tool. Hence, increasing user retention.
  

  Do you need tools for Product Walkthrough?

  Is a tool even necessary for creating effective product walkthroughs? Can’t my in-house developers create one from scratch?

  While your developers surely can, it’s not the most effective way of approaching walkthroughs. Developers are busy people – they might not have the bandwidth to create a detailed walkthrough from scratch.

  Regardless, a developer’s time and expertise are best spent on developing the product, not creating walkthroughs. A no-code tool enables anyone from your team to create interactive walkthroughs without relying on developers.

  Other than this, using a tool for creating walkthroughs is essential because it:

  • Enables you to trigger guides contextually, based on user segments and actions. This will help in creating personalized user experiences.
  • Allows you to track the performance of walkthroughs through product usage analytics. You can see which users completed the entire walkthrough and identify any friction points along the way.
  • Provides A/B testing functionality to see which version of the product walkthrough performs better.

  What are the best tools for Product Walkthrough?

  Looking for the best tools for creating interactive product walkthroughs? You’re at the right place since the below list of tools is the top-rated in town.

  • Userpilot – recommended for contextual interactive product walkthroughs (best value for money)
  • Pendo – recommended for creating walkthroughs on third-party apps
  • Appcues – recommended for creating walkthroughs on mobile apps
  • Chameleon – recommended for designing highly customizable walkthroughs
  • WalkMe – recommended for employee onboarding

  Let’s explore which tool is ideal for different company sizes, budgets, and jobs to be done.

  What are the must have features of Product Walkthrough tools?

  There is an abundance of tools that enable you to create product walkthroughs. But which one is worth your time and money?

  To create effective walkthroughs, the tool you decide on must include the below essential features:

  • Multiple UX patterns: Your chosen tool must host a variety of UX patterns, like modals, banners, tooltips, driven action, hotspots, and checklists, to create an interactive walkthrough.
  • Customization: It should enable you to customize the walkthroughs with your brand color, logo, and style to give a native look.
  • Segmentation: The tool must support segmentation so you can create personalized experiences for different user personas. Look for a tool that enables you to segment users based on multiple dimensions, like JBTD, roles, demographics, etc.
  • Analytics: You should be able to track how many users completed the walkthrough, the time spent on each step, and where they face friction.
  • A/B testing: The tool should let you test different versions of an interactive walkthrough to determine the best-performing one.

  The above list is just a starting point. Considering your product, you might require more features, like localization and integrations with third-party tools.

   

  Check out how Userpilot helps you with Product Walkthrough!

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Product tours are an essential way of showing users the features they need to engage with in order to activate and get value from your product. They’re vital tools for SaaS businesses because of how much their usage correlates with financially important metrics like activation, retention, and feature usage.

You should avoid building linear, top-down product tours. Instead, use contextual and interactive product tours. These don’t force the user to sit through a series of screens explaining all your product features in one go.

Why is Product Tour important?

Nobody really questions the need for product tours, do they?

This is real Product Management 101 stuff: when new users sign up for your app, your product tour will help them reach activation before they lose interest.

Most users – engaging with your product for the first time – are not going to be able to immediately know how they can do that. So, you need to show them!

So product tours are aimed at:

• Increasing user engagement so that users get to adopt new features faster.
• Decreasing friction and shortening the learning curve to enhance the user experience.
• Demonstrating your product value through contextual in-app onboarding.
• Reducing customer support costs, through interactive in-app guides that educate and support users.

Given that so many SaaS teams think that product tours are necessarily linear information dumps, the term “product tour” has become somewhat tainted. To avoid confusion, we therefore often refer to effective product tours as interactive walkthroughs.

Do you need tools for Product Tour?

Wondering why you even need a product tour tool? There are several reasons why you may need one:

You could build all the necessary features and tours in-house from scratch, but who has the time or spare tech resources for that? This is an arduous process that will just drain time and energy from your development team.

By contrast, using product tour software tools would allow you to build product tours for your SaaS company code-free! And it comes with a few benefits:

• It’s a much more agile approach because you don’t need to bug your devs every time you want to make a change to your experience onboarding flows.
• It frees up time to run product experiments and conduct A/B tests, which is what really drives the quality of your product tour.
• Using product tour software is just a more scalable approach than doing everything yourself.
• It’s easy to build new tours or customize and iterate on the old ones without needing developers.

The million-dollar question is: with so many tools on the market, which product tour software should you choose, and why?

What are the best tools for Product Tour?

There are many good choices out there, so we narrowed it down for you. Here are the top 5 tools you should choose from, depending on your budget and priorities.

• Userpilot: best tool for contextual and interactive onboarding product tours
• Appcues: best tool for building user onboarding product tours on mobile
• Pendo: best tool for building product tours on 3rd party app ( for employee onboarding)
• Userguiding: best tool for creating product tours on a budget (has limitations)
• Chameleon: best tool for in-depth customization of product tours (requires CSS)

Let’s dive deeper into how each stacks up for different company sizes, budgets, and jobs to be done!

What are the must have features of Product Tour tools?

So when we talk about the best software for building better product tours, we’re going to be quite specific about what makes a product tour worthwhile and what features a tool needs to achieve those things.

Here’s what to look for before picking a product tour tool:

• Access to different onboarding UI elements to build your product tours the way you want.
• You should be able to trigger these contextually to specific user segments. So, segmentation and triggering options are important.
• Since no product tour is perfect the first time you build it, being able to A/B test results on the basis of performance data is really helpful.
• Product tours analytics are important too as you need to be able to track their performance against your onboarding and activation goals.
• If the tools lack proper analytics, they should at least offer integrations with other analytics tools so you can leverage relevant data in one platform.

There’s more functionality you could be looking at, of course. For example, localization, but we’ve listed the most important function a product tour software should offer. Now, let’s check some tools.

Product-led growth (PLG) is an approach toward organizational growth that focuses on using the product as the primary driver of growth. A product-led growth strategy allows users to experience the product right away without jumping through hoops of advertisements, marketing strategies, and plans before starting the engine.

To achieve this, PLG companies usually have a free trial or a freemium pricing model to get potential customers through the door.

Why is Product-Led Growth important?

If you were just to skim the surface of product-led growth strategy, it would seem like just another model asking the buyer to ‘try before you buy.’ Should you dig a little deeper, you will understand that PLG is an extensive methodology that businesses can benefit from.

Here’s why a product-led growth approach is important for SaaS products.

• PLG is unique because it allows businesses to lower their acquisition costs, improve retention, enjoy shorter sales cycles, and enhance customer satisfaction.
• A better way to persuade users to purchase your product is to show them the value rather than tell them about it.
• A PLG approach asks for small incremental commitments from the user so the sale process doesn’t feel like a burden.

Sounds good, right? If you’re looking to drive growth with product-led you should also keep in mind that adding a free trial or freemium version is not all. You still need marketing to attract users and in-app guidance to make sure they experience value inside the product fast.

Do you need tools for Product-Led Growth?

Wondering why you even need a product-led growth tool? There are several reasons why you may need one:

It’s not enough to get people to try your product. Once they sign up you need to make sure they have a good user experience and see the value.

Let me guess. You don’t have huge customer success and customer support teams, nor the budget to hire more. The good part, is you don’t need to.

Here’s how product-led automation tools help.

• Easily automate in-app guides like welcome screens, checklists or tooltips without having to waste your developers’ time to custom code these inside the app.
• PLG tools provide product usage analytics that helps you understand which users need help and when.
• It’s easier to trigger in-app experiences to the right user with segmentation (you couldn’t do this if you were to custom code all in-app guidance)
• Implementing and A/B testing different product-led strategies is faster and easier with a tool that allows you to automate this.

There’s more, but I think you get the point. It shouldn’t be a question of do you need tools, but which tool to get. As there are multiple ones out there, this article will help you pick the right one for you.

What are the best tools for Product-Led Growth?

Looking to drive product growth but not sure which tool offers the best value for money? Here are the ones that should be on your shortlist and why.

• Userpilot: best product-led growth tool for personalized user onboarding
• Appcues: best product-led growth tool for mobile user onboarding
• Pendo: best product-led growth tool for in-depth user analytics and feedback
• Userguiding: best product-led growth tool for user onboarding on a budget
• Chameleon: best product-led growth tool for collecting feedback to improve

Let’s dive deeper into how each stacks up for different company sizes, budgets, and jobs to be done!

What are the must have features of Product-Led Growth tools?

Before deciding which product-led growth tool works best, you should keep in mind that there is a minimum set of features that you should get with it. Otherwise, you won’t be able to properly build in-app guides and product tours to help users experience value.

Here’s what to look for before picking a product-led growth tool:

• Make sure the tool you choose doesn’t restrict access to basic UI patterns and guides on the starter plans. The most important ones for implementing a product-led strategy are checklists, modals, tooltips, banners, and hotspots.
• Look into getting decent segmentation capabilities based on in-app behavior and in-app experience engagement so you can properly personalize your messaging for each,
• Proper analytics will help. Look for a tool that allows you to track how users progress through the journey, and how they engage with the product’s features and give you at least basic functionality to collect and analyze feedback
• The right tool should also offer integrations with other tools in your stack so you can get better insights into your data in one place.
• Having the ability to build an in-app Resource Center is a plus as you’ll be able to offer self-service support without having to code. This is quite important when focusing on becoming product-led.

There you have it. These are the basic features you should be looking for, but depending on your specific needs, you might be ok going for a solution that doesn’t cover all.