2. Activation  >  Build A Product Tour

Build a product tour to reduce SaaS churn

Product tour is a perfect way to helping users understand your app and learn using it. A quick product tour helps users achieve activation quickly. It reduces the churn rate and boosts user engagement.

●●● FUNCTIONALITY

Proposify

ProdPad used product tours to onboard new users. It decreased their trial to paid period by a whopping 80%.

Dropbox

Dropbox has a great onboarding product tour that guides the new users and makes it dead-simple to understand their tool.

ProdPad

Proposify totally transformed its user onboarding process with a focus on product tour. The change increased trail to paid conversions by 5% and users who complete the product tutorial are 3x more likely to convert.

How to use the technique

  • Link product tour to customer flow map. What is the most important action in the flow map? What are the critical events? Add them to product tour. Read our article on customer flows to learn more.
  • Identify the key features of your product and include them in the product tour. Don’t focus on all the features. It will make product tour boring and lengthy.
  • Personalize product tour by linking to buyer personas and to user’s history. What actions does the user take on your app? How did he/she found it? Use existing information for personalization to reduce churn.
  • Keep UI simple yet attractive. Don’t add a lot of information. Make it intuitive and catchy.
  • Keep it short. It should have 4-6 steps in the product tour with actionable instructions. Long product tours make users churn.
  • Show users how they can achieve first success with your app. Help them get to activation. Show what benefit they will get.
  • Make action-taking easier. Do you have CTAs within the tour? How many steps are involved in action taking? The easier it is for them to follow the tour, the better it is. It will reduce churn and boost engagement.
  • Test different product tour types. There is no best product tour for onboarding. Test different variations such as nickel tour, coach marks, guided tour, explainer video, tooltips, task completion, and others to see what works best in terms of retention and churn reduction. This free guide has more details.

Mistakes to avoid

  • No follow up. Having an amazing product tour doesn’t necessarily mean the user will activate. Follow up if the user doesn’t activate after the product tour.
  • Not focusing on activation. The purpose of the product tour is to guide users to achieve success with your app and activate. A product tour is useless if it doesn’t focus on activation.
  • Unable to track critical events. If you’re not tracking critical events during onboarding, you won’t be able to track activation and if the user followed instructions. Even if you have to do it manually, don’t go without tracking.

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Research evidence

Research by Localytics found that 21% of users never open an app after a single use. App retention can be increased by 50% with a solid onboarding process (such as product tours).

50%

This is how you can grow your retention rate with a solid onboarding process only


Related techniques SEE ALL THE TECHNIQUES >

Implement with our proven SaaS Churn Optimization Framework

Download a PDF with an exact process we use with our SaaS clients to research, define optimization opportunities and test.