Category: Feature Onboarding

Unlock the Secrets of Black Friday Success with Contextual User Onboarding!

In case you thought it was too early to be talking about Black Friday sales, think again.

This period from Black Friday through Cyber Monday is make or break for retailers, accounting for up to 40% of annual sales. With the holiday season just six weeks away, data.ai reports a staggering 22% increase in visits to mobile shopping apps as consumers eagerly research, compare prices, and hunt for discounts.

But here’s the catch: while downloads are important, user engagement on mobile shopping apps has grown nearly twice as fast. The time users spend in these apps directly correlates to higher retail sales. As the world faces an acute shortage of software developers, retailers struggle to quickly adopt a mobile-first strategy to capitalize on this massive trend. Additionally, inflation continues to impact consumer wallets, making the upcoming holiday season even more challenging.

To win over mobile users and maximize sales, retailers and service providers must do more than simply release a mobile app. They need a solid strategy for mobile app user onboarding and ongoing user engagement. Mobile shopping apps, in particular, are prone to high user churn, making it crucial to guide users to the “Aha moment” swiftly. This moment occurs when users experience the initial value of the app, such as finding a desired product and making a purchase—also known as “Activation.” Activation aligns with the methodology of Product Teams, ensuring the app fulfills a potential customer’s needs to be done (JTBD). Since users invest only a few minutes or even seconds before moving on, a well-designed mobile app walkthrough is essential for them to activate and return to the app repeatedly.

When it comes to mobile app user onboarding, best practice involves designing contextual mobile app walkthroughs. Contextual mobile tooltips deliver the right information to the right user at the right time, enhancing the onboarding flow and ensuring a seamless user experience.

Experienced retailers understand the art of maximizing customer spending by optimizing impulse buying decisions. Mobile app shopping is unique because time is of the essence, and users will quickly move on if their needs aren’t met within seconds. This is where contextual mobile in-app tooltips come into play, helping users achieve their goals and nudging them toward the next desired action, such as checkout and continued shopping.

As mentioned earlier, software development resources are expensive and in high demand. They are also slow. To catch the wave of mobile e-commerce consumers, app developers, designers, and product managers must move faster than traditional software development sprint cycles allow. The market is evolving too rapidly for current methodologies to keep up. That’s where Contextual, a no-code SDK plug-in, becomes invaluable. It empowers product teams to create mobile app user onboarding guides, in-app tooltips, onboarding carousels, mobile app videos, and user feedback surveys through an Engagement layer, without the need for extensive coding. This preserves precious development resources, allowing them to focus on the app’s feature layer.

Don’t miss out on the incredible opportunities presented by Black Friday and beyond. Embrace Contextual User Onboarding to supercharge your mobile app success and leave your competition in the dust!

October 18, 2022
Mobile app user onboarding walkthrough guides ever more critical as spending on non-gaming apps overtakes games for the first time ever

Spending on Apps Overtakes Games on Apple’s Platform for the First Time Ever

A strong lead indicator that consumers are depending ever more on mobile phones to conduct their day to day lives is borne out by the latest Sensor Tower Q2 2022 Data Digest: U.S. which reports that spending on Apps Overtakes Games on Apple’s Platform for the First Time Ever.

U.S. consumer spending in non-game mobile apps “pipped” spending in mobile games for the first time ever in the second quarter of the year to $3.4 billion.

Both traditional bricks and mortar businesses and technology led firms are increasingly realizing the potential for greater customer engagement by achieving tenancy on their customers handheld devices.

However despite the massive amount of investment pouring into the development of apps achieving success it’s not as easy as just launching an app! Over 70% of new app installs are used just once and then abandoned and studies have shown that the drop off rate after a free trial period can be as high as 60%. [5 Tips on how to reduce Mobile user churn]

The apps that have survived that initial install and free trial period Gauntlet of Death and become part of the latest success numbers have achieved this by helping their users achieve Activation by shortening the time to “Initial Value” via effective mobile user onboarding strategies and maintained a path of “Realised Value” through effective in-app user engagement via ToolTips, new feature announcements, in-app FAQs and User Surveys.

Sensor Tower also reported that the preferred revenue strategy adopted by B2B and B2B2C mobile apps have also proven to have had a significant impact on these numbers.

The comparative difference between the two sectors (with $3.3 billion spent on mobile games) puts the delta in spending between the two at a mere $100M. However, the difference in comparative growth rates with gaming apps on 20% v non-game mobile apps at 40% compound annual growth rate has non-gaming apps on a trajectory to grow to almost $15B and increase the delta in spending between the two by almost $1B in 2023.

These numbers will place product teams and software developers of B2B and B2B2C mobile apps under even greater pressure as they seek to take advantage of this phenomenal growth. Apps that do not have an effective contextual mobile user onboarding walkthrough strategy will struggle to claim their share. Established mobile and web apps that do not have in-app messaging and tooltips to help guide users find new features and nudge users towards deeper engagement with existing features will lose ground to competitors.

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July 21, 2022
Onboarding: the tip of the engagement iceberg
We all love to talk about “sprints”.

Mature Product teams know that user engagement is a marathon. Startups and under-resourced Product teams think in sprints. They often only consider the “immediate” that neglects the true lifecycle of their (soon to be successful) App.

“We just need a home page guide”

“We only want a Carousel for our Apps splash page”.

These are common opinions and definitely part of the Apps journey to success. But the sprint perspective believes the “first 5 minutes” is a panacea for user retention. The “first 5 minutes” is just the tip of the iceberg.

Beneath the surface is the real volume of the iceberg. Here lies the massive breadth of engagement activities that includes:
1. Onboarding
2. Feature Announcements
3. Feature Discovery
4. Guides
5. Tips
6. Training videos
7. Self-Service help and docs
8. Tooltips
9. Nudges
10. Goal Completion
11. Re-engagement Emails and Push
12. Feedback Questions and Surveys
13. NPS or CSAT
Plugging the leaky bucket

Growth comes with Progressive Onboarding. The way to get DEEPER ENGAGEMENT & RETENTION is to progressively guide users to “aha moments”. The MAGIC of deeper engagement is getting users to understand and interact with:
- Your primary use-case in the onboarding process
- Secondary functions and uses down- played to achieve your primary goal
- Nudging at the right time to go further
- Providing contextual help when a user needs it.
Beneath the Surface

This post covers the first 4 of 13 listed engagement activities. We give screenshot examples of how Product Teams have deepened engagement.

Example 1 – Onboarding

For Examples of “Onboarding” refer to some other posts.

Example 2 – Feature Announcements

Here Google introduces a new feature in two different ways. One is a grand announcement and tour. The second if a contextual prompt to nudge the user at the moment of maximum impact.

Example 3 – Feature Discovery

Vimeo has been around for years and needed to catchup with the cool-kids like Loom who were making video/screen recording simply. With the advent of Covid-19 and work-from-home the need to have RECORDED zoom sessions arose. This was sitting under the hood until I “discovered” it.

The second screenshot surfaces a feature that you might easily miss.

The 3rd from Twitter is amazing because I never knew your could Bookmark tweets. I use it all the time now!

Example 4 -Guides

Using a crypto wallet is a new experience, not for the faint-hearted. Metamask do a good job in walking the new user through important fields and actions.

Next time…more iceberg!

In the next posts, we’ll continue with the next group of engagement methods:
1. Tips
2. Training videos
3. Self-Service help and docs
4. Tooltips
5. Nudges
6. Goal Completion
7. Re-engagement Emails and Push
8. Feedback Questions and Surveys
9. NPS or CSAT
July 14, 2021
How one Bank App uses Feature Announcements
Contextual was designed for Apps to make onboarding, education and Feature Discovery simple and code-less. Most commonly the use of Tips and Tours to nudge a user into action is a great user engagement approach.

But what happens when you are rolling out a major feature?
- Perhaps tips of a popup are a good introduction but not impactful enough.
- A Home Screen carousel is just too interrupting to the user flow and has low conversion rate.
Try a Feature Carousel

St George Bank is a major bank and they made a significant investment across their ATM machine network to support “Cardless Cash”. If you’ve not heard of Cardless Cash its a major improvement to getting money easily for your wallet – the benefits are:
1. Card Security – you don’t need to pull your card out and put it in the machine, where you might forget it. Risk of “skimming” is also eliminated.
2. PIN Security – you don’t need to expose your PIN where someone may spy it.
3. Fast – its pretty quick to get the cash out, just a few keystrokes at the terminal.
4. Money for others – A parent can send the access code to a child who can then get cash for an emergency.
The challenge is that whilst a huge rollout investment is made, getting customers to use this feature hits the human fear, uncertainty, doubt and plain laziness.

So the Product Management team at St George obviously wanted to give the new capability the best chance of uptake and embedded a Feature Carousel into the App. So if a user explores this section of the App for the first time, they get a richer walk-through that is eye-popping and more persuasive than just a tip. Here is the introduction.

There is a couple of interesting things to observe:
1. They decided to reduce the number of swipes by putting 2 steps on each page. I don’t know if this helps with memory retention of activation – but its an interesting experiment. With Contextual, you could run an A/B split to see what gets better conversion.
2. Short Sharp Action-oriented text. Notice how there is no waffle and Verbs like “Get”, “Find”, “Withdraw” get task focussed.
3. The explanation is contextual and the user can immediately perform the task.
October 31, 2020
Feature (Re)Discovery – Google Meet example

Amidst so much suffering, angst and business collapse caused by COVID-19 there has been some companies that have grown incredibly. Back in early March, I commented on Zoom’s breakout success.

Looking back now in June, Zoom has leapt from upstart B2B App to massive consumer awareness.

Behemoths like Google and Microsoft needed to respond – Google Meet gets a relaunch. Microsoft Teams loosened usage limits.

We’ve started to see Google aggressively using their other properties (Gmail) to (re)announce Google Meet as a Feature Re-Discovery inside calendar appointment.

These are the kind of announcements that Contextual lets you launch from within your own Apps.

With Contextual, the “Learn more” link could send a user to another step in a guide or launch a video to do a deep-dive.

This popup can be placed in the flow of creating an appointment – a perfect example of “Product-led growth” by the product teams at Google.

Kudos to Google using Tips and Popups to remind the user of a feature they could use rather than default to Zoom!

Update: 26 June 2020

I stumbled across a post from Explodingtopics that shows Google Meet is experiencing sustained attention “by Google Search Volume”.

That may not be entirely unbiased but is interesting to see.

The data shows search volume for both Zoom and Google Meet is exploding.
Which suggests: Google Meet’s search volume has been climbing WAY faster. Zoom’s has plateaued a bit and is even declining at the moment.

Its possible Google’s Feature (Re-) Discovery discussed in this post – by putting overlays in other Apps may be strengthening brand awareness.

June 22, 2020