Category: guides

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
Announcing the New Contextual Web Creator
In the upcoming weeks we are releasing an update to our Chrome Extension for web apps.

This is a great addition and actually shoots past the current mobile guide creation interface which will adopt some of the elements here. Specifically:
- New design for a user friendly experience & navigation
- New targeting tool for tip placement & repositioning
- New guide settings interface with improved selection criteria process for a more streamlined experience
- Tight point-and-click selection of targets and launchers with css/class/DOM overrides.
- Search & filter guides easier with the new guide home screen
- Edit guide name easily
There are so many great features here, we’ve split it into two videos. If you’ve got any questions, hit us up on support@contextu.al or our on-site chat!

https://vimeo.com/566908938/641fa71371https://vimeo.com/568797474/a90ded76ab
July 12, 2021
New: Guides, FAQs, Digital Adoption
We had big releases this month expanding guidance on Web and Mobile Apps.

Backed by our existing targeting engine and analytics we help you get the right guides to your users at the right-time.

Digital Adoption Platform

Contextual has mostly been used by Product Teams to help onboard new customers and understand the Web and Mobile Apps.

Contextual Digital Adoption lets your colleagues make guide/tips/videos each other on the SaaS you use. e.g Using your CRM in a particular way? Then Onboard new sales with a Guide. Want your engineers to do Jira or Github tasks based on your process? Drop in tooltips that might even show a video.

You don’t need to to write code or ask IT to install, just install our browser extension.

Here is an explainer video:

https://vimeo.com/436316149

Contextual Digital Adoption can work with many popular SaaS Apps like Salesforce, Jira, Workday, even explain Xero to a baffled new accounts-team-member! ????‍♂️

In this example, you can see how easy it is to add a guide over the top of Salesforce to explain what should be entered when adding a new “Opportunity”.

https://vimeo.com/440574118

To find out more, checkout the product page.

FAQ and Lists

We are super-excited to give our customers ability to have a floating widget and popup FAQ List on their App (web or mobile) that allows users to:
- play (or replay Guides or Videos)
- jump out to existing long form help content
- ask for feedback
So now, Apps can have a unique FAQ list per page or a general one site-wide. You can still target different FAQs to different users (job roles or stages of a user’s journey)

Guides and Experiments

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Until now we used the term “Experiments” for any tip, tour, popup, video, feedback.

This was because we could back any element with the analytics of what happened with your users. On some plans we also let you do A/B experiments.

Problem was: most people just want to do tips, tours. So we admitted that a better overall term is “Guides”.

So now is a good time to get started with Guides:
- for your own Apps
- or for the SaaS apps that your team uses.
To try it out, head to our Dashboard or just book a screenshare to learn more.
July 28, 2020
New Feature: Individual User Sessions and clicks

For some time, Contextual has had the ability to track pages visited and (on some plans) clicks.

We’ve also allowed Product Teams to see a user’s targeting with Tips, Tours, Tooltips and Popups. We’ve taken this one step further and allow you to see a users sessions and what they click on within a specific session – you can also see WHEN they interact with the guide content you’ve targeted for them.

Above you can see the user “William Gibson” in Session 1, visited particular screens and was presented with a Carousel – their engagement was to interact “accepted” rather than dismiss it.

Dashboard user can click into any user and like a CRM can see each individual’s:

a) their device (phone, tablet, iPad, web browser)

b) how many sessions, when they installed, last user.

c) experiments and how the user engaged

d) select from a drop-down of sessions (as seen above)

e) Custom Tags (attributes) to target, personalize, segment or add to an audience. For example, a tag called JobRole could be synced with your App to be able to target “Project Managers” or “Sales Team” for specific guides.

These two examples illustrate how you can drill down to any user and see which guides they’ve seen and how they responded. The first user “Rejected” and “Touch Out”, the second user “Accepted” the guides.

This is a per user version of the Guide Analytics that visible when tracking the performance of any content you have created.

June 17, 2020
Privacy Features in a compliance world
A key part of a user’s journey that Contextual helps out with are Feature Discovery and Feature Adoption. Typically this is (a) announcing new features, (b) explaining complex features, (c) targeting unused features to the audience who havn’t engaged.

The goals are to:
1. measure the uptake before,
2. announce or guide the users,
3. measure the uptick in usage and engagement
This morning I was presented with a new use that Contextual could and should be helping our customers with.

Compliance Management

I was presented with a typical sequence in Facebook that looked similar to what our customers create. A modal dialog with a small journey and a CTA (call-to-action).

What was different was the content – I could (tongue-in-cheek) call this Feature Justification 🙂 but it does show an evolving trend that all Apps must do in a GDPR, CCPA, post Cambridge Analytica world.

That trend is to explain what you are doing with user’s data and engender trust.

Everyone is sick of clicking “cookie banners” on every site and app they visit and nobody reads privacy policies due to the monolithic legalese.

As a SaaS platform that uses data to add value, we still get plenty of questions about how we treat data. For example with GDPR there are specific questions around PII (personally identifiable information) that need to be answered.

Facebook’s goals/User goals

Facebook know they need to earn back trust. They’ve targeted users (i.e “me”) to re-earn that trust (fat chance), by explaning a feature, its net benefit to me and the value they can add.

Here is the subsequent guide steps.

Previous
Next

Note the penultimate step has the “Turn On” CTA defaulting to what Facebook’s goals. That might seem a little snakey but I’m sure that most platforms would do the same thing.

Now a Compliance world

I was at the Segment.com conference earlier this year and they have added features to let Apps pass data to other tools in a “need to know” basis.

We see that Apple, Firefox and Google are locking down the browsers exposure to 3rd party cookies – so as a customer of Contextual you may feel from time to time you need to explain more about a feature to deepen engagement. You can guarantee Facebook is doing this in a data-driven way – they wouldn’t do it otherwise.

Think about it – you’re users may trust your App a little more.
February 10, 2020