Imagine walking into a cloth store with mismatched labels. You find children’s wear in the underwear section and then pants in the blouse section. I bet you’ll be pissed. You’ll hurry out of the store as fast as possible without talking to anyone at the counter. Now, that’s what an ambiguous tour causes. No conversion. Hence, product managers seek a way to build effective and organized product tours for their businesses. That’s why product tour tools are necessary for your product management.
What’s even worse than an ambiguous tour? No tour at all.
We don’t always want to ask questions or go to the counter countless times to figure out things. Everyone loves self-discovery. Even the potential customers for your B2B, B2C and SaaS brand want to savor that Aha moment when they get a hang of your product and want to use it.
Product tours help your customers to explore your product by themselves. It lays out all the information on your product and allows them to interact effectively with the product. It’s like the warm welcome of a foot mat and a doorman on getting to a house.
What is a Product Tour?
A product tour is a means to help your customers discover your product and interact or engage with it without physically being with them. It can be defined as a sort of user onboarding that helps users understand and familiarize themselves with the product’s interface.
The aim is for users to recognize the product’s value and influence their decision towards adopting the product.
Sixty-seven percent of customers worldwide prefer to self-discover products using product tours compared to getting physical customer support.
Sometimes, one-on-one physical user onboarding may still work, and for digital products, it may work by using live chats or calls. However, with products with low average revenue for each user, especially in most SaaS businesses that are product-led, product tours are a lifesaver.
Product tours are safe for users. The added costs of building product tours would not compare with the numerous benefits.
Product tours would help users understand your products and be led by the hand to find not just anything but the real benefits of your product, more than just features. User engagement also increases rapidly, which is very important to help you improve your product.
Benefits of Product Tours
1. Effective User Onboarding
User onboarding is indispensable for SaaS products. With the highly competitive SaaS market, user onboarding makes your Software stand out among the sea of other Software.
High onboarding conversion rates are achieved from effective product tours. Twenty-five percent of people abandon an app after the first use. Getting past this drive of people leaving your Software can only be achieved with a product that is not just functional but is engaging and can leave a great first impression.
2. Easy User Navigation
As with the case of new Software, the product tour helps the users navigate its features without difficulty. This would be the opposite if the users had to do so without the tour.
It would be difficult, tedious, and draining to navigate through, especially if it is a sophisticated product. The more technical a software is the higher its need for profit tours.
Even simple-to-use Software needs product tours to make them even more straightforward. The goal is to make your user feel like they did no work and figured things out quickly.
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3. Highlights product uses and benefits
A good product tour will help the user understand how to use the product clearly and simply. This will effectively achieve product adoption and, eventually, product retention. The product tour also focuses on the areas of the development that would benefit the user, highlighting even minute details that would affect the user’s eventual decision.
4. Improves feature adoption and product adoption:
This is the goal of every product tour. Users adopt products only when they understand them and see the purpose in their lives. A lot of times, starting with a free trial means they want to use the product but may not be convinced to pay.
A product tour that goes ahead to even explain the paid features gives them all the tea and would persuade them to stay.
5. Saves time and resources
Product tours don’t need consistent human input, saving the product managers lots of time and resources.
They don’t have to help users navigate their problems or answer the same questions repeatedly. It also saves time for users and increases the product adoption turnaround time.
Seven tips on building effective product tours
1. GIVE A PRECISE AND HEARTY WELCOME
What is a good product tour without a warm welcome to the users? The welcome is an exciting introduction to the tour and a way to make the users feel at ease. Remember that your tour must be clear and straightforward. So, keep it warm, precise, and not bulky.
2. MAKE IT A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Many people are at ease and closer to making a solid decision (product adoption) when the tour can relate to them personally. As much as possible, the product tour can be adapted to various roles of users. It can also be customized to the users after inputting their first details before the onboarding.
3. AVOID LENGTHY PRODUCT TOURS
Part of keeping it simple is avoiding lengthy product tours. The longer it gets, you stand the risk of users abandoning the product tour without taking serious action. There should be precise and clear steps in the product tour.
Every section of the tour should end with a solid call to action. A product tour with three clear and concise steps should do the trick.
4. “WHY?”
Well, the focus of your tour should be the “why” of taking action. Let the users see the value and results of taking specific actions. You don’t want to be in their faces even though you guide them. This makes your product more dependable, giving them more reasons to take serious action.
5. BE CONSISTENT WITH THE DESIGN
Haphazardness with design can be costly and ineffective. Be consistent with colors, codes, and styles in the tour. Avoid mismatches with styles and colors. They can be disruptive and even displeasing to some users. If a particular sequence with colors is adopted, stick with it.
6. UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE
This would involve close monitoring of product tour performance. A mechanism for feedback from the users will help the evaluation of data. As you study the data from the feedback, steps that most likely need to be updated will be spotted. Go ahead to edit and create a better experience for users
7. GIVE VALUE
Your focus should be on giving value to the users. This is the base of every other thing you decide to do to make the tour effective. You can choose to provide additional help. The users will appreciate your tour and, eventually, the product.
Checklists, skip buttons, or a tab where the users can catch up on parts of the tour they have completed can be ways to add value to your tour.
Be sure to follow through with these steps and have an exciting product tour for your existing and incoming users.
Product Tour Tools and How to Use them
A lot of times, product tours are effective with the use of product tour tools. Product tour tools make understanding, navigating, and buying a product easier. To choose a product tour software, you must analyze and adequately research the features, benefits, pros, and cons of every product software you’re considering.
Often, no-code options are an excellent pick for project managers who don’t have a good hang of developing. Product tour tools come with analytics to understand user demographics and better user tracking and enable you to know how to update product tour steps for better efficiency.
More than that, it tailors the experience to the target audience at a particular time. You can leverage user data to improve product tours and user experience.
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1. A good Product Tour tool should be:
- Easy to install and use by both product managers and product users.
- It should have a large variety of product experience options such as feature highlights, interactive help centers, in-product messages, and detailed analytics.
- Able to integrate with other products such as Slack, Salesforce, Amplitude, Heap, Zendesk, Mixpanel, and HubSpot.
- Excellent at monitoring and analyzing user data to yield better user-derived experiences.
- It should have no-code user tracking features.
- It should be linked to an experienced support team dedicated to assisting customers.
- Able to be used effectively on mobile phones and can work with mobile apps.
- Easy and fast for use in creating a product tour.
Wrapping Up
Building an effective product tour is an investment in your business that lasts for a long time. Interactive Product Tours would help your users self-discover and comprehend your products while increasing product adoption and user retention.
You have to be intentional to be able to achieve these results. This would include investing time and energy in seeking the right product tour tool and using the tips mentioned here to customize your product tour.
Author’s Bio
Martins Favour is a creative content writer with over five years of experience writing SEO content for various brands. She finds a home in weaving worlds out of words. Stories are her life and LinkedIn is her favorite tool.
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