What Top Companies Know About Analytics (That You Don't)

Having the right kind of insights available at the right time is crucial in today's business. But some brands are taking analytics a step further by not only relying on it to make sound decisions when opportunities present themselves, but making it the absolute core of every impactful business decision.

And their analysis isn't limited to one type of data. Rather, a study by Salesforce determined that top performers who made analytics their main focus looked at an average of 17 different kinds of data.

So what other things separate the top brands from under-achievers, and how can you make sure your own company is leveraging every possible facet of analytics to the fullest? Read on for all the details.

Analytics is Not a Magic Pill

First off, simply taking steps to understand your analytics and making solid decisions based on them is not going to instantly catapult you to the top of your industry. There are still many, many pain points strongly felt by executive decision-makers. There's simply too much data coming in too fast, among other things:

The Salesforce report details common issues with data and analytics

Fortunately, businesses on the cutting edge understand that having the right tools and technology to analyze the data they're given is a smart strategy, which is why top performers have indicated increasing their analytics-related marketing spend by 50% over the next two years. It's worth noting that they are over six times more likely to invest heavily in analytics tools, training and people than their more lackluster performing counterparts.

Analytics is the Fuel that Drives Exponential Growth

And what's more, analytics is quickly becoming the de-facto driver behind a wide range of business decisions – well beyond the website:

Analytics can be used well beyond improving a website

When analytics is used to improve procedures and processes across the board – from collaboration to developing new products and enhancing current ones, there's virtually no limit to the company's growth.

In addition, top performers are more likely to react in a timely manner based on the insights they receive from their analytics. They follow a predictable pattern of drawing details from all types of data, including (but not limited to):

• Emails


• Transactional information


• Log files


• Social media


• Partner data


• And much more

And many of these high-performing teams aren't leaving mobile analytics out in the cold either. Although still in its infancy compared to broader analytical applications, mobile analytics adoption is growing just as quickly as mobile adoption itself, and companies who know how to put this data to work are out-maneuvering the competition. Top performing companies are 3.5x more likely to put this information to good use.

Creating an Analytics-Based Company Culture

Perhaps the biggest and most telling difference between top performing companies and their lagging counterparts isn't just in how many different ways they use analytical data, or what data sources they pull from, but their entire approach to the concept of analytics as a whole.

The best performing teams have their entire executive team embracing the use of analytics as part of the company culture and not just a one-off thing managed by a handful of “marketing people”.

Top-level executives understand the need for analytics for everyone - not just a select few

But it's no longer enough to have the support of the C-suite to make analytics work for the entire company. Because of their technical nature, analyzing the data can seem overwhelming and at times unpredictable. But by putting reliable information in the hands of every employee, even more insights, ideas and strategies can be discovered and implemented.

Democratizing the whole analytics process paves the way forward for a truly data-driven company. And as noted in the study, top performers are fifteen, yes, fifteen times more likely to collaborate with other members and roles within their organization to help better organize and glean important actionable strategies and concepts.

That one difference in itself is enough to separate the truly data-driven from those that are struggling to wrap their heads around this whole “analytics thing.”

Embracing New Technology (Even if It's Still Not Proven)

Companies who stand to gain the most from analytics are also not averse to trying out new analytics tools. Both predictive (what will the user do based on their past behavior?) and prescriptive (what actions should we take based on the information we've gathered?) tools are included in the survey:

And of course, there are a lot of tools and technologies out there, including some that are just starting to tap into the potential of unstructured data – which is information that can't be organized or neatly fit into the company's pre-arranged data sets. This is where forward-thinking companies believe their customer behavior gold nuggets are to be found – which is why they're not shy about testing the waters with emergent technologies.

They'll either prove themselves in time, or they won't – but how can you know if you don't test?

So what really seals the deal for these companies when it comes to adopting new analytics technologies or solutions? How do they determine which choices are worth investigating and which might not be the best fit? As it turns out, their priority system looks like this:

A list of the must-have features top companies consider when evaluating analytics tools and technologies

Circling back around to the main points that differentiate them, top companies understandably want something that makes itself useful right from the start; something that employees and the more technologically-inclined can hit the ground running with. Something that lets them plunge right in and start making sense of the data they're collecting. Bonus points if it's mobile or cloud-based.

The Bottom Line in Becoming a Smarter Data-Driven Company

As you can see, it's not just a matter of being able to “read the numbers” that drives top performing companies. It's a full-on embrace and integration of everything analytics offers – from customer preferences to making processes and procedures more efficient. Analytics used in this way tends to have a ripple effect on companies – rather than being some kind of novelty that's stacked away in a silo, it's growing into its own as a formidable growth and revenue driver.

Not only that, but when done right, analytics drives the kind of collaboration that gets people thinking about continuous and measurable improvement. And all of these traits are what makes an industry top performer.

What are your thoughts? Do you feel like you have an analytics-centered culture at your company? Do you embrace new analytics technology or have a more cautious approach? Tell us your experience in the comments below!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

4 Ways to Reduce Churn With Email Campaigns

Churn is your arch nemesis.

And it's cutting into your profits.

Research shows that “80% of your company's future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers.” So, your team must focus on satisfying customers and ensuring they gain value.

To keep ecommerce consumers in the sales cycle, create email campaigns that engage and educate your audience. The goal is to engulf customers in a worthwhile shopping experience.

Retention emails are “designed to get customers more engaged, whether they are totally inactive or just not taking full advantage of your product.”

Initiate email campaigns to retain customer's interest in your brand and products. Try these four strategies:

1. Segment Your List

You've heard it before: segment your list. But what does that mean? And how will it benefit your customers?

Email segmentation is targeting specific groups based on a certain criteria. The notion is that everyone isn't the same.

Consumers live in different locations and possess different interests. More importantly, your business customers have different budgets.

Therefore, it wouldn't be logical to send the same mass email to all your subscribers. It would be useless to the customer.

“Nobody likes generic emails; they're lazy, unhelpful, and a waste of inbox space. So by segmenting your email sends, you're saving your customer time and helping them discover products they'll love,” writes Joe Stych, marketer at Zapier.

Segmentation gives rise to personalization. It lets you inform customers about products that fit their particular circumstances.

By segmenting your email list, your team can provide relevant content to multiple target audiences.

Athletic shoe company Brooks used data to create multiple campaigns based on the weather conditions. The emails below show how their team crafted the copy and inserted photos to fit the consumer.

Image Source

The million-dollar question is: How do you segment the email list?

Analyze internal data to learn about the buyer's habits. For instance, segment the list based on product usage, customer support tickets, or webinar training attendance.

“Identify at-risk customers. Even before a user cancels a subscription, there are several signs to help you identify that they're in danger of churning. Keep a lookout for engagement flags, such as less frequent website visits than before. For example, customers may go from using the service daily to weekly and then monthly,” says Shane Barker, a digital marketing consultant.

Be proactive. Send targeted emails to stop churn.

2. Offer Educational Content

Combat churn by actually teaching customers the value and functionality of your products. They will gain a deeper understanding of your brand.

Mark Quinn, a Segment VP of Marketing with Leggett & Platt, agrees:

“When you're educating people, you're helping them understand the benefit of a solution. Consumers can find information anywhere these days, but when it comes from you, the benefit is twofold: you establish a more knowledgeable customer base while you develop loyalty.”

Stop sending predictable emails; switch things up with gifs, video, and case studies. Educational content includes everything from a detailed guide to a Snapchat story.

And the best content answers questions from customers or concerns they may have.

How can I use your product more efficiently? What features can accomplish X task?

Use email as a launching pad to engage the customer. You don't have to include every little detail in the email. Your goal is to encourage them to take action.

For instance, write short snippets of the article in the email. Then, hook customers to continue reading. Add a “Read more” call-to-action button that takes the subscriber to your blog for the full article.

That's how LinkedIn does it. Their team engages with customers via email to boost blog traffic. See the email below.

If you want email subscribers to act now, create a sense of urgency. Use time limits or add bonus incentives.

“Apply the threat of scarcity to your educational content marketing. This works particularly well when you set up the classic challenge and solution scenario in your content, pinning something like time or money as the motivator to change a behavior,” writes Julie R. Neidlinger, content crafter at CoSchedule.

Keep churn at bay with educational content.

3. Send a Feedback Email

Churn happens for several reasons. And most of the time, it's preventable.

A good starting point is to collect feedback from your users.

“Target customers who have bought from your business before and ask them for a review or recommendation. Not only is this best practice but, for an eCommerce store, it is a genuine means of bringing customers back to your website to purchase again,” writes Chris Hexton, one of the founders of Vero.

Learn from your customers. The direct approach is to ask them questions like:

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you enjoy our product?


• How can we improve our customer service?


• Would you recommend us to a colleague?

Compose an email leading consumers to a quick survey. And keep the design simple.

Stay away from unnecessary images or headings in the email. Focus on the message and the call-to-action. The key is to reduce distractions and encourage consumers to take your desired action.

Below is a feedback email by Campaign Monitor.

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Analyzing your email campaign results is an indirect method to gather feedback. Find out if your customers are active.

Monitor your email open rates. Discover which links they click. And evaluate the replies you receive.

“Click-to-open rate can help evaluate the quality of your content and the engagement of your subscribers. It can point to possible ways to improve campaign performance and help compare your subscriber's expectations to what you are actually delivering,” writes Ben Niolet, former marketing director at Contactology.

Take advantage of customer feedback. Cater to their needs to increase retention.

4. Show Appreciation

Everybody needs a little love. It's time to show your customers some appreciation.

Use email as a communication tool to express your gratitude. Remind customers how much you value their business.

“These users have become habitualized to not thinking about your brand, and you need to break them out of that pattern with something special. Coupons, promo codes and special offers are the go-to incentives at this stage, and they have proven effective,” states Bob Colner, director of marketing and data science at Boomtrain.

Appreciation takes several forms. It can range from a simple thank you to a discount on a purchase to an all-access pass to an upcoming conference.

Image Source

Work with your team to determine how to distribute your appreciation. A 10-year customer may get free tickets an exclusive event, while someone who bought $50 worth of products may receive a 10% coupon.

Be mindful of your appreciation gifts. Some customers may consider your discount as a promotion, rather than a thank you.

Brian Morris, a writer for PsPrint, says, “You might think offering customers an upgrade or an add-on item at a discounted price qualifies as a customer appreciation strategy, but it's really an upsell or cross-sell. That's not a customer-centric strategy; it's a sales strategy.”

Decide how you will show customer appreciation. And use it as a tool to reel inactive users back to your brand.

Email to Reduce Churn

Existing customers are your best asset. With the right mix of nurturing, your team can fight high churn rates.

Segment your list to deliver customized messages. Send feedback emails to gather customer intelligence. And show appreciation with a simple thank you email.

Upgrade your email campaigns. Reduce churn.

Marketing to the right customer is the first step towards solving churn. Want to solve customer churn? Make sure you're marketing and selling to the right customer. Don't know who your best customers are or where they're coming from? Kissmetrics analytics shows you. Learn more in our new SaaS retention PDF

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

Recovering Lost Customers (and Revenue) with Kissmetrics

BI Intelligence estimates that $4 trillion dollars worth of merchandise is abandoned in online shopping carts.

$4 trillion dollars!

That $4 trillion dollars either winds up with offline retailers or just flat out never gets spent.

And we know that shopping cart abandonment is a big problem with e-commerce retailers. Almost every online shopper has at some point put a product in their cart only to never return to complete the purchase.

Given this large amount of money left on the table, it seems to me that most e-commerce marketers would be wise to spend their time working to optimize their shopping cart process (each funnel performance differs, of course) for customers.

One of the better, more reliable ways to improve a e-commerce funnel is by remarketing to those abandon customers. And fortunately, if you're a Kissmetrics customer there's a pretty easy way to do it. Here's how.

Using People Search to Find Cart Abandoners

The Kissmetrics People Search is one of our best tools. It allows you to find anyone on your site who fit a specified criteria. So, maybe if you're a SaaS marketer you want to find the people who signed up but haven't used a feature yet.

Or maybe an e-commerce marketer wants to find the people that have put an item in their cart but haven't proceeded to purchasing. Here's how to find those people.

The first step is to choose to find the people who did these events in order. We'll stick with the last 7 days as our date range.

Next we'll add a condition by finding the people that have added a product to their cart:

We'll add another condition by looking for people that have not purchased. So this essentially tells People Search to find the people that have added a product to their cart but haven't purchased.

We want to see when people last added a product to their cart (we don't want to send emails to people who just added a product). To do this we'll add a column to this data by looking at when people last added an item to their cart.

The last step is to run the report and get our list of people:

We'll get a few anonymous IDs (those that aren't email addresses) from people that haven't been identified yet. Once they register for an account or purchase, they'll be identified and all previous activity under that anonymous ID will merge with their new identity (which is an email address).

From here we can export this data to a CSV or export the list to MailChimp. Anonymous IDs will not be transferred to MailChimp (for obvious reasons). In MailChimp we can send an email reminding customers that they still have items left in their cart.

We can also utilize CRM retargeting in an attempt to get customers back on the site.

Lastly, we can click on each email address or ID to see each person's latest activity.

What You'll Need to Get This Data

This is all possible in Kissmetrics, but before you can can get this type of data you'll need to have a couple things in place:

• You'll need to properly set-up events and properties. There are some things that work out of the box in Kissmetrics, but for any custom events and properties you'll need help from a developer. We do have Click to Track which can help tremendously in setting up events.


• You'll have to identify people by email address. Any other form of identification (ie username) won't return a list of email addresses. People Search will only return a list of however you're identifying people, and most of our customers identify people by their email address.

Conclusion

This is just one way we built Kissmetrics to help you optimize your marketing. If you'd like to learn more about how Kissmetrics can help, check out our industry pages. We have one for SaaS, e-commerce, and agencies.

Questions? Leave them in the comments.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

The One Little Known (but Scientifically Proven) Email Marketing Change You Can Make to Turbo-Charge Open and Click-Through Rates

When it comes to your email marketing, you likely spend a great deal of time tweaking your message and analyzing how to improve your open and click-through rates. According to joint research by IBM and eConsultancy, fully 90% of marketers agree that personalized, relevant communications with their customers is crucial to their success. But when customers were asked if they felt like the average brand understood them, 80% answered no.

That's a huge gap – and something needs to be done about it.

Thankfully, there's a promising solution that's both cost effective and boasts some pretty significant results.

It's called “triggered campaigns”

What Are Triggered Campaigns?

You may have already implemented triggered campaigns for certain points in your sales funnel, such as “Welcome” emails for first time customers, or remarketing messages if someone left an item in their cart. But this is only scratching the surface on the potential of triggered campaigns, as a new report from YesMail reveals.

The report segments email communications into two groups: The Business as Usual (BAU) group, which commonly includes:

• Promotional emails and sales notifications


• New product launches or brand news


• Newsletters that customers have opted into


• Refer-a-friend campaigns

Triggered campaigns, however, are broken down into different segments, including Lifecycle campaigns which include:

• Welcome messages


• Onboarding


• Activation


• Milestones and


• Surveys or polls

They can also include the aforementioned Remarketing messages such as abandoned cart notifications. What many marketers don't realize, however, is that triggered campaigns can also consist of transactional emails, like:

• Order confirmations


• Shipping confirmations


• Backorder notifications


• Return/Refund requests

As well as real-time notifications from sports, weather or location-tracking.

So as you can see, there's a great deal of resources to work with. Within YesMail's report, they spotlight customer Le Creuset's campaigns. Le Creuset sells cookware of all kinds, and their business as usual emails include things like news, special offers or product ideas:

While these are well-made foundational emails designed to help keep customers informed about the company's products and other initiatives, they aren't designed to elicit an immediate response the way triggered campaigns are. To see just how well triggered emails compare to BAU emails, YesMail looked at 24 billion emails deployed within 2015 using their cross-channel marketing communication platform.

They noted that although triggered campaigns made up only 2% of all emails sent during 2015, those same emails generated 4% of all email opens at 9% of all click-throughs. Compared to BAU emails, the results from triggered mails were very impressive:

When Should I Use Triggered Emails for Best Results?

This is another common question marketers ask – since triggered campaigns have generated such solid numbers, when is the best time to use them? Of course, to get this information, you'll need certain details from your customer, and that customer will need to be at a certain point in the buying lifecycle. For instance, you wouldn't send an order confirmation blast to everyone on your list. Triggered campaigns are best thought of as a way to pounce on opportunities as they present themselves.

And as it turns out, marketers are really, really good at making customers feel welcomed. After that, the push to trigger relevant, personalized campaigns falls off substantially.

No wonder customers feel like brands don't really know them (or make an attempt to get to know them!)

The full YesMail report details the best triggers to take advantage of, including suggestions on how to make the most of them. However there were a couple that stood out to me as highly underutilized – especially in my own experience of conversion optimization for companies. They are:

The Browse Abandon Trigger

“Browse Abandon” isn't the same thing as getting an abandoned cart remarketing email – although it is similar in nature. The Browse Abandon trigger is a relatively new function which reminds the customer that an item on a page they browsed just went on sale. The Browse Abandon feature uses the same technology as an abandoned cart remarketing reminder, so it's easy to implement if you already have that reminder functionality in place. Here are examples of a Browse Abandon trigger and an Abandoned Cart trigger respectively:

And here's the kind of results they got:

After-Sales Service Trigger

After-sales campaign triggers can include (but are certainly not limited to)

• Purchase confirmations


• Shipping notifications


• Backorder notifications


• Return and Refund processing

“But Sherice”, I can hear you saying, “Our e-commerce platform already takes care of sending out this information to customers!”

And therein lies the problem.

Because most e-commerce platforms aren't designed to handle anything but the simplest basics when it comes to sending out emails after orders have been received. Their job is to juggle inventory, promotions, customer lists and a whole host of other features. Triggered email campaigns are general and boring at best.

Now, when you take these kinds of emails and turn them into triggered campaigns with a more rich-media experience that includes greater personalization and recommendations, you end up with a far better response. Just look at these numbers:

This is Not An Excuse to Do a Marketing Blast!

Now, since these types of emails are service-oriented in nature, the last thing you want to do is turn them into a full-scale marketing blast, as in “Now that you've bought this, go back and buy this other thing too!” Nothing turns off a customer more than getting inundated with marketing messages right after they feel they made a confident decision to do business with you.

Instead, you can leverage smaller, more one-on-one actions that the customer can take, like sharing their purchase on social media in a pre-formatted, beautifully designed “I just bought [X] at Brand Retailer” message, or encouraging them to update their preferences at your helpful Account Center, where they can tell you what kinds of messages they'd prefer to receive, as well as some other helpful tidbits they may choose to include like date of birth (to receive a coupon on their birthday), gender and so on.

The bottom line is that triggered campaigns simply aren't being used to their fullest potential – and there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to be picked here. Customers genuinely want personalized recommendations, fresh ideas and inspirations – otherwise personal shopping services and virtual pinboards like Pinterest would have long withered under a lack of use. Companies who don't use this information to learn more about their customers' interests and motivations are telling them that their business isn't important enough to be worth remembering or acting upon. And if you're not using campaign triggers yet, you can bet your competition will soon.

Now It's Your Turn…

Do you use campaign triggers in your email messages to customers? What have your results been so far? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below and let us know how they've worked for you!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

How to Use Release Notes to Drive Feature Adoption

Companies are understandably excited to tell the world when they push new features. New developments can take months and they are the hope for more users, greater engagement, and achieving milestones towards success.

So how do teams communicate these big announcements to their users? A blog post, an unread notification, an email, and… that's it. They sit back and wait for impact, but are disappointed if the anticipated uptick in usage doesn't arrive.

Here we'll explain why standard feature announcements are missing the mark, and how to drive new feature adoption amongst your users.

The Standard Feature Announcement

The BJ Fogg behavior model is a big component of our thinking on user experience. It explains that new behaviors form when three elements align:

• Motivation-the user wants to perform the action.


• Ability-the user has the capacity to perform the action.


• Triggers-the user is nudged to perform the action.

You can see how these three elements intersect in this graph:

When people have high motivation, they are more able to do hard things. When people have low motivation, they will only take action for easy to do behaviors. Triggers will push people into performing the actions, as long as there is sufficient motivation AND ability (above the action line curve).

When trying to change user behavior to adopt a new feature, an announcement serves as the trigger.

However there are three problems with conventional feature announcements:

1. Users miss them or forget about them because those channels are noisy and are out-of-context.
   
2. Announcements focus on HOW to use the feature and emails are a terrible way for this: we learn by doing, but emails are not interactive. We explain more here.
   
3. Announcements don't actually help a user adopt the new behavior, because they don't improve a user's ability (they don't make the new feature “easy to do”).
   

In these cases, the feature announcement email or notification or blog post is a trigger below the action line, and so it doesn't cause users to act and adopt the new feature or workflow.

Blog & Email Announcements

Blog and email messaging can help motivate users, but they don't help them adopt any new behavior. What's more, when a user is going through their inbox or reading a blog, they are away from the context of the app. Even if they see information about a new feature, it is difficult for them to internalize the new actions just through reading.

Automation tool Zapier has a whole section of their blog devoted to product updates:

They post once a month about new updates to their product. This is great information for new and current customers alike, but it isn't actionable. They are in the wrong place and the wrong frame of mind, so they don't have the ability to make any behavioral changes. They are just reading a blog, not thinking about using the product.

Following this up with an email highlighting the feature is also common. This is an email from email marketing tool MailChimp announcing improvements to their A/B testing tool:

Image Source

This email does tell you all you need to know about the new features. These types of update emails are great for maximum reach as you can send the update to the thousands of users on your email list. If any currently aren't finding good use for your product, this might be enough to bring them back.

But this doesn't help the user actually use the product. The call-to-action at the end of the email is to read more, even though they have just read a very long email about the product. Reading doesn't help the customer internalize the idea of the new feature. Though they might be giving use cases for the new features, the only way people can really learn is by using the product. MailChimp missed the opportunity here to direct the user into the product and to a tour of the new features.

In-app notifications

Ability is slightly higher with in-app announcements. In this case, the user is in the product and they are familiar with how it works.

But they are still way below the threshold needed to get the new user invested in the product. They are often delivered at the wrong time to the wrong user. Also, they just give the user more to read, instead of guiding the user through actions they need to take to get value from the new feature.

Most in-app notifications have this fatal flaw. For instance, if you've ever used project management tool Trello, then you will be familiar with Taco the Husky and his announcements:

Image Source

If you were to click on that link though you would be taken away from the product and to their blog:

This is the opposite of what you want. Users have been moved to a detailed description of your product, possibly raising their motivation, but lowering their ability. Plus, there's no guarantee users will come back once you send them away from your app. How many times have you clicked through a link thinking you'd just read one blog post or article and get back to what you were doing, only to disappear into a hours-long time sink? This is the fate Trello is tempting with this kind of feature announcement.

Instead showing them what to do in bite sized chunks through tooltips and product tours is much more effective. Users can internalize each new concept and start to use that feature, without being overwhelmed.

Increase Adoption with Targeted Product Tours

In each of the feature announcements we've looked at, users are simply told about the new feature and then left to find it themselves. They have low motivation and low ability. You need to get to your users when they have high motivation and high ability. This means teaching users with a product tour within the product.

Some products do this. For instance, Instagram's new Stories feature comes with a quick in-app tour that is easy to find, and pushes you towards using the feature:

These tours work best when they are in-context of what the user is doing at that very moment. For that, you need to segment users by both time and behavior.

Targeting the Right User

Sharing a new feature with all your users may seem the best way to increase engagement. But the truth is that each of your customer personas will have different use cases for your product. They will favor some features over others. Therefore, they will want to hear updates about some new features more than others.

Using behavioral data you can look at how different subsets of users have used a certain feature before, how engaged they currently are with the feature, or if they have used adjacent features recently.

You are looking for a behavior they have exhibited that demonstrates they are ready to learn about your new update. For instance, you could use Kissmetrics Analyze to identify specific customer journeys through your app and target different features to these different journeys.

Another example is the MailChimp feature above. If MailChimp wants to increase the use of their improved A/B testing they could target a tour towards users who exhibit the following behaviors:

• Have previously created five regular campaigns - this shows they have the motivation to continually create campaigns, but perhaps not the knowledge of A/B campaigns.
  
• Have two or more saved templates - they have the ability to start testing each of these templates immediately with A/B testing.
  
• Have 1000+ contacts in their list - they have enough users to make a test statistically useful.
  
• Are currently creating their next campaign - they are in the position to start their next campaign.
  

These are the users that will be ready to use A/B testing in their email campaigns. Users who are just starting out with a single campaign, don't have templates ready, or only a small readership will not find value in this new feature.

Targeting at the Right Time

Targeting at the right time is as critical as targeting the right person. In the MailChimp example above, pinging that ideal customer just as they start generating their new campaign with “Hey, there's a better way!” can be just the trigger to move them to the new feature.

This isn't as simple as targeting someone the moment they sign in or start using a feature. It depends on what the new feature is and how it corresponds to the current feature they are using. Look at this example from survey platform Typeform. They show the announcement at the start of building a new survey:

This is a lost opportunity. At this point I have a form to build. That is my main motivation. I am going to immediately dismiss this tour and continue with my main task. By the time I'm finished, I'll have forgotten about these “cool features.”

If instead this was targeted after I had finished my main task then my motivation could be to check the new features out. Once I had successfully completed one task, I would then be ready to learn more.

Conclusion

Emails, blogs, and in-app notifications all have their place when it comes to feature announcements. Each messaging channel can be used at a different point to inform, teach, and highlight features to users.

But the in-app tour is the most powerful tool at your disposal for engaging users with new features:

• You can target the right people: New features will appeal to a certain segment of your users most. Using behavioral data, you can find out who uses the features you're upgrading or aligned features and target a brief tour of the release only to them.


• You can target those people at the right time: in-app tours let you get your new features in front of users at the exact moment when they would find them most useful. This might be just as they finish a task, or just as they start another. But timing an in-app tour allows users to have the context needed for them to find value in the feature, as well as the ability and motivation to learn more.

When you target a tour to the right people at the right time you will have them when both motivation and ability are high. Then it only requires a small trigger to push them into action.

If you get this targeting right, then you have introduced the best customers to the most valuable features to them, meaning you are building success for them and your product.

About the Author: Pulkit Agrawal is cofounder & CEO of Chameleon, a platform for better user onboarding. He believes that first-user experience is a hidden treasure to drive improved user activation and retention. He writes on the Chameleon blog, which contains great resources on the psychology of effective user engagement. You can converse with him on Twitter.