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.
Check out how Userpilot helps you with Product Tour!
