Engage users through automated in-app drip campaigns with walkthroughs

To increase product adoption and conversion from free trials to paid subscriptions, many businesses use a marketing strategy that consists of sending a series of pre-planned automated messages to their current and prospective customers. These messages can be triggered by time, customers actions or changes in their status, their interactions with a product or service, and other predetermined triggers.

Benefits of drip marketing

One of the main reasons businesses use drip campaigns is to keep in touch with their customer base in a timely manner helping them boost their sales and remain relevant.

But there are many advantages before, during and after a drip campaign.

• — Before: Thanks to the automation, the only hard part is the planning phase. Once you have written the chain of messages and set up the triggers, the job is done, saving you and your colleagues time to focus on other tasks.
• — During: With all your messages sent, you will be in constant contact with your current and prospective customers. This will allow you to catch potential leads in a timely manner and provide support to your current customer base exactly when they need you.
• — After: Once your drip campaign has ended, analyze your results. Identify where you could have done better and what worked well, that way you can improve and repeat your successes in the future.

Reach out your users at the right time

Welcome your customers. For the most part, a welcome message is the first interaction your prospective and current customers will have with you, that is why it is so important to show them the value of your product right away. It is a great opportunity for you to show your leads and new customers what they can expect from your product, and to showcase some of your most important features or services.

Nurture your leads. Keeping in touch with all your potential customers can be hard, they all have their own priorities and like different things about your products and services, that is why automating a campaign dedicated to them can be an effective way to keep them informed and excited about what you offer. Thanks to the time saved with a drip campaign, your sales team can focus on leads that prefer a closer relationship with you and your company, helping you provide tailored care for every customer.

Onboard your users. Helping your new customers along the way through the onboarding process has almost a limitless amount of advantages, but most importantly, the main goal is to make your customers proficient in using your products and services and to maintain their interest in working with you. However, it is not an easy task. Some of your customers might have very busy schedules and might forget to resume their tutorials and training materials, others might skip them entirely and if left unattended they might not come back to finish their free trials. That is why setting up a carefully built drip campaign for newcomers is a great way to encourage them to keep up with their training, get them involved in your activities and maintain their curiosity for your features, products and services.

There are many other use cases for drip campaigns such as; new feature announcements, welcoming back returning customers, recommendations based on your customers interests, confirmation emails from sales and much more.

Drip campaigns with Inline Manual

With our tools you can automate your in-app user nurturing strategy with autolaunched product walkthroughs, welcome messages, feature announcements and other personalized messages based on user behavior.

Automate your content with Autolaunchers

With autolaunchers you can automatically launch in-app content to specific segments of users and or rules. The aforementioned in-app content can be walkthroughs, messages and other types of content you create in your site, and with autolaunchers you have the ability to automatically display it to your users by setting up rules and triggers. Onboarding walkthroughs are a common use case for autolaunchers as they will launch the onboarding automatically as a new user enters your application or product, here’s how to create and automate your own autolaunched onboarding walkthrough:

The first step when creating an autolauncher for an onboarding walkthrough would be to make sure you have people tracking enabled, once enabled, you will be able to create the appropriate segment for your new users. All that is left is for you to build the onboarding walkthrough and to follow these steps to create and assign your autolauncher to it.

In the autolauncher configuration screen:

• — Assign your walkthrough to the autolauncher in the topic section.
• — Select the segment you created for your new users as your audience to let the autolauncher know to whom it should display the walkthrough.
• — Lastly, select where you want the walkthrough to display by adding the URL of the page you want it to display or select an element within your desired page you want the walkthrough to display by in the user environment section.

Done! Once a new user is created and they are in the page you selected in step 3 they will be automatically greeted with their own onboarding walkthrough.

Show the right content to the right user

You can further improve your automation by adding advanced trigger conditions and rules to your autolaunchers. Adding more rules and conditions to your autolaunchers is a great way to hand-craft your product experience. For example, having different segments for your new, experienced or returning users can help you ensure their experience will be balanced and productive.

One common use case is new feature announcements. Let’s say there’s a new feature you would like to showcase, but this feature might be hard to understand for users who haven’t completed their onboarding walkthrough. You can set up an autolauncher for the feature announcement to not display to users who haven’t completed their onboarding and instead you can have it display a reminder to complete their onboarding.

This is only one example of what you can achieve with segmentation, but there are other rules and conditions that can help you improve your product experience with autolaunchers:

• — Device: If your product runs on both mobile and desktop you can set up autolaunchers to be shown to mobile users, desktop users or both. For example, there might be a new feature you want to promote but this feature can only be used on desktop. You want to display a message to all users the next time they log-in on their desktop computer. The trigger would in this case display the feature announcement message to those users who haven’t yet seen the message and those logged in on desktop, users who logged in on their mobile device wouldn’t see this message unless they logged in using desktop in the future.
• — Language: When you have multiple languages on your product, it is very important to keep your users up to date with all your announcements, especially if you are adding new languages slowly over time, this can create learning gaps between users that use your product in its original language and users that use your translated product. Moreover, if your product contains legal documents that your users must fill-in it is very likely that users from different countries will have to fill in different fields that are required by law in their countries. Making sure that all users have the correct information and are kept up to date on important announcements of your product is key for a smooth product experience.

Autolauncher campaign

We have talked about drip campaigns and how businesses often use drip marketing to keep up with their audiences in a timely manner based on their audience’s behavior, how autolaunchers can help you automate your content for different use cases and ways to improve your product experience by adding more rules and conditions. The next step to create your own drip campaign with Inline Manual is to make use of the autolauncher campaign feature.

An autolauncher campaign will give you more flexibility and control over time delays. For example, if you have five new features to showcase, you might want to space out the announcements to let your users learn of each feature separately, this way they will have time to focus on one feature at a time, try it out and get confident using it, before learning about another feature. By adding the autolaunchers for each feature announcement to the campaign you can set up time restrictions to only display one announcement per day and login, with this set up a user will see an announcement the first time they login today, after 24h if that user logs in again the second announcement will be shown to them and so on.

There are other use cases for an autolauncher campaign such as nurturing leads, onboardings and more.

Nurturing leads

To keep your leads curious and interested it is very important to maintain them informed with your biggest announcements, activities and features, products or services. Let’s have a look at a scenario where you are losing potential customers after their free trial.

During your one month free trial you provide them with a week long onboarding walkthrough that shows them how to navigate your application and how to make use of its most important features and during the last three weeks of their free trial they have several new feature announcements to go through, release notes and articles that explain everything about your app in great detail.

All of this content isn’t bad on its own, in fact it’s very extensive and provides answers for many commonly known issues and questions that you have gathered over the years of development of the app.

You decide to send a feedback form to all of those leads that decided not to continue using your app and after a couple of weeks you have enough replies to review. Everyone seems to agree that the onboarding isn’t the issue, it is after their onboarding that they didn’t know what to do, there are too many messages, notifications and articles to read through. Many of them also point out that they are really busy and don’t have enough time to read everything carefully, they would rather see all of that content slowly over the remaining three weeks of their free trial.

After reviewing all the content, you decide to use the autolauncher campaign feature to better pace the last three weeks of the free trial. Using time delays, you decide to only show one feature announcement every day alongside its article which covers in more detail that specific feature. This should provide enough content for the next two weeks. As for the last week of the free trial you are building a walkthrough that will guide your leads through other guides that showcase creative ways in which users can utilize some of your app’s features.

Onboarding

Oftentimes an onboarding is the first interaction a user will have with your product or service. That’s why it is very important to perfect it as much as possible, the key is to show them the full value and potential of your product as soon as possible whilst teaching them the basics. Let’s look at a scenario where you are revising the first version of your onboarding after receiving feedback from your users.

On one hand some of your users mention that they were able to finish their onboarding during the same week they started their free trials and that after finishing their onboarding walkthrough they don’t know what to do, on the other hand some users feel overwhelmed with the amount of content they have to go through.

After talking about it with your colleagues you agree that the onboarding process needs to be more structured. Right now there’s too much content to go through each day, and it isn’t time gated, so when a user is done with the content meant to be completed on their first day, they can start the content meant to be started on their second day if they have the time and want to do it, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it is putting different users at different knowledge levels, moreover users with more free time finish their onboardings really fast and they are left without guidance for the rest of their free trial.

Using the autolauncher campaign feature you will be able to set in stone how much content to show each day. You decide to shorten the content meant to be done each day and to build five different walkthroughs that will have a twenty-four hour gap between them to provide enough content for the first week of your free trial. For the following weeks they will continue their onboarding with some of the content that you cut out from the old version, this will consist of a few shorter walkthroughs that go along with practical tasks, this will follow a twelve hour gap since they are shorter and more interactive.

How to set up an autolauncher campaign?

With all the data you’ve gathered from Analytics you can begin to plan your campaign. Having a specific audience in mind will help you build meaningful content that will enhance your product experience. Once you have created the segments and content you need, follow these steps to create your Autolauncher Campaign:

Create and configure an autolauncher:

• — Assign the content: Link the content you created with the autolauncher in the Topic section.
• — Choose your audience: Target your segment in the audience section.
• — Select the trigger(s): Choose between time or action triggers. For example, you can decide to show your content only to users who have already completed certain walkthroughs or other types of content you created previously in order to understand the content from your campaign.
• — Select the location: Choose where you want the content to be displayed within your site once it’s triggered.
• — Add the autolauncher to the campaign: Select the checkbox called ‘Play as part of Campaign’ to add the autolauncher to the campaign.

Repeat these steps for every piece of content you want in the campaign. For example, if your campaign consists of three walkthroughs, create and assign three autolaunchers to each walkthrough.

Creating a campaign based on your users’ behavior will provide a comprehensive and rich experience to your audience.

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It is now easier than ever to create your own drip campaigns with the Autolauncher Campaign feature; nurture your leads, keep your users engaged and show returnees everything they’ve missed one step at a time.