Getting personal with onboarding

Pendo’ing can mean a number of things. It could mean a solution for seamlessly onboarding new users, directing designers to an upcoming webinar on new features they should know about, or simply problem solving a way to present the right information to the right user.
Pete Richardson, Senior product marketing manager, Splash

New user, what’s this?

No matter how intuitive you think your product is, you can’t simply drop new users into the platform and hope for the best. Not to mention different types of users will leverage your software in different ways, so a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work either. With Pendo, you can easily personalize this crucial first experience with your product.

Like many companies in their industry, Splash was continuously working to develop improved solutions for their customers—both by updating existing functionality and building brand new features. But their new users wanted additional ways to learn the depth of functionality available to them. “We found opportunities to provide in-product guidance to help customers discover new key areas of the platform that would make their events more successful, and lives easier,” said Pete Richardson, senior product marketing manager at Splash.

The Splash team needed a better way to communicate directly with users and ensure they were getting the most out of the platform, right off the bat. They turned to Pendo’s in-app guides, largely because they could customize guides in two key ways: to make them look and feel like an organic part of the Splash product, and to tailor messaging to different groups in their user base. Pendo’s analytics capabilities also added an important layer of data-driven insights. As Richardson put it, “The icing on the cake was the ability to see how often users were actually interacting with the guides. This helped us learn which parts of the product were working best and which parts we could improve upon, so we can continue constructing a thoughtful product roadmap.”

To onboarding and beyond

Richardson’s first order of business with Pendo was to personalize their app’s onboarding experience to display different messaging (and encourage different workflows) for different user roles. “Designers should be directed to a portion of the product where they can establish their brand, whereas on-site specialists need to know about our guestlist functionality,” he explained. “We’ve found that keeping people in their funnel and not distracting them with an immense amount of information that may or not be relevant creates more efficiency for teams.”

In addition to creating role-specific welcome guides (for example, one targeted to Splash admins), Richardson leveraged the Resource Center in Pendo to extend this personalized in-app guidance beyond a user’s first login. “The Resource Center is a one-click entity that allows users to get all the support they need in one place,” Richardson noted. 

Splash’s Resource Center includes direct access to their Zendesk-powered help center, onboarding walkthroughs, details for upcoming webinars and events, on-demand educational courses, and information about how to get involved in the Splash community. There’s also summaries of what’s new in the platform, including videos users can play right inside the Resource Center itself. To make the experience even more personalized, the suggested help center articles update based on where a user is in the product.

After implementing their Pendo-powered in-app onboarding, the proof of its success was in the product data. “We’ve seen a large uptick in new users creating events quickly, which tells us that our onboarding materials are working,” said Richardson.

Beyond the initial onboarding experience, Richardson also used Pendo guides for ongoing education to direct users to new features and other improvements in the product. “Our marketing and sales teams do an excellent job communicating what’s new and improved, but we can be even more effective helping users in-flow,” he said. “We’ve found that actually embedding guides inside the product has been the most impactful for ensuring adoption.” When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of these guides, Richardson explained how the fewer clicks, the better. “If we see users clicking a badge icon to launch a help guide often, it tells us that we need to improve that part of the product. That’s really useful information that we probably wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.”

In other cases, Richardson definitely does want users interacting with a guide, for example the guides he creates to promote upcoming webinars. In addition to making sure these guides are clean and simple, Richardson explained how personalization comes into play here, too. “We’ve been able to experiment with segmentation so that we’re only showing [the guides] to certain users to avoid being too invasive to a user’s workflow in the product.” And this strategy has proven successful: “When we promote a webinar using a Pendo guide, we see an increase of about 10-15% in terms of attendees coming directly from that guide. And that’s been really huge for us.”

Pro tips

• There’s a lot you can do with Pendo, but it’s important to first decide what will be valuable for your team and what you’re trying to solve
• Imagery matters—to ensure users engage with your in-app guides, keep them to a minimum with cohesive copy and bright and engaging imagery
• Consider what different types of users need from your product, for example by creating personalized onboarding flows and in-app support that are hyper-relevant to a user’s role