Communicating your value clearly and simply is the core of a successful product-led growth strategy. That’s where the conversational bumpers from the Bowling Alley Framework come in.
In this course, you will:
Ramli John:
That's the first step. The second step gets a little bit more interesting. This is where you create a behavior based email flow. Now there's many types of email flow, so you can do the first one that you're probably familiar with is a time-based onboarding email. This is when every email is already set by time, day zero is when they sign up, day one, you get email number one, day four, you get email number two, day seven, you get trial end then you get another email to remind you, "Hey, your trials ended." What are the limitations of time-based onboarding emails like this? One of the challenges with this is you don't really know what the user has done in your app, based on that you can be telling them to do something that they already did, which is super annoying. Imagine when you were young and you threw the garbage out and your dad's like, "Throw the garbage out again," you'd be annoyed, right?
Ramli John:
You want to make sure that your messaging is based on what the user has done. This takes away from the personalization that I talked about. This is another form of segmentation, essentially for me, this is segmenting by behavior now in the app. And for me, the problems with time-based emails, like I said, it doesn't consider what the user has already done in your product. It doesn't personalize email. So if you don't know that, you can't help them take the next step in the onboarding. It doesn't really also adapt to the user's needs, anxieties, and challenges. Because maybe they're stuck in step two in your straight-line onboarding and you don't really know what anxieties or help you can give because you don't know where they are. So what I argue for and what we propose here at Product Lead are behavior based emails. And like I said, it applies to conversational things like SMS as well, text messages and even direct mail.
Ramli John:
That's another thing that I didn't really talk about. Behavior based conversation is multiple times better than just purely time-based because you can now personalize your interaction based on what your user has done or not done in your product. And I'm going to give an example of Canva here. So Canva, I've showed you the straight-line onboarding, you know the straight-line onboarding just four steps to get to the desired outcome. And what you can ask yourself if you're designing the straight-line onboarding emails for Canva is for each user that sign up, do you know where they've gotten stuck? Where are they? And if they're stuck, what are ways that we can provide help to get them to the next stage? And let me give you an example of a straight line onboarding email flow here for Canva.
Ramli John:
So what you can do you, I'm going to show you a little bit, you can do this in Trello, but this is just some photo that you would say where they sign up. Have they selected a template? So if yes, you go to the next step, if no, what are ways that you can help somebody? What are reasons why somebody might not have selected a template in Canva?, One might be they don't know, maybe they got stuck. They don't know how, or maybe they need inspiration, whatever that is. You can add that in, talk to your customers that don't end up converting. I suggested this three classes ago, offer people who didn't convert some kind of incentive, like a $50 Amazon gift card or a Starbucks gift card to find out where they got stuck and why. And based on that, you can craft emails to get them back. This is now where it's really clear that this is like a bowling alley bumper, because it's trying to bring it back to the straight line.
Ramli John:
So if they don't select a template, you can maybe share relevant templates because Canva knows that you've set up the personal onboarded, this is a small business owner, and they can share with you relevant templates that small business owners might find useful. If they don't convert there, maybe you can give inspiration design. And I just gave you two levels of conversation here, and you can spread out the days when you send these emails, but the point here is you're trying to get them back to the straight line. So maybe they end up selling a template after these two conversational triggers and they get stuck at editing template. So how do you edit in Canva? So there could be many reasons, maybe they still don't know how and now maybe it's send them to relevant help articles.
Ramli John:
Maybe this is time when support, knowing that they're a good customer fit, I might reach out and say, "Hey, this is Ramli from Canva. We'd love to really know if you had any challenges with editing your template. We noticed that you selected a template," and then maybe they do come back, but they'll end up adding their own photo. So why are reasons why somebody might not have added their own photo? It could be because they needed more inspiration. They're still not motivated, or maybe they need help and they want some help articles. And you can do the same thing with publishing a design, maybe they don't know how to publish a design and you send them a video about how to publish, and maybe you can send more support outreach. So you can see, this is what a behavior triggered email flow is. You're taking where they are at, where to stuck, why might they be stuck in, and giving them resources to really craft it to come back to the straight line onboarding experience.
Ramli John:
If you have any questions about this, I'd love to answer them. What kind of questions do you have, just send me a message on Slack or by email, love to answer them, but you can build this in Trello. We love Trello. You can build it as Notion or Excel, but what I love about Trello is you can move things around. So you can see this is this a straight line onboarding email. Each of the... What is that called? The columns the stages in your straight line onboarding. And you're providing emails that are conversational topics that you can provide. I didn't really get into this, but when you're thinking about this, you have to think about it, you can use the BJ Fog behavior framework that our model that I just talked about earlier.
Ramli John:
So when you're thinking about why didn't user end up adding a template, you can think about it in three ways. First, maybe they're lacking motivation. So if for your users, if they get stuck somewhere, they're not doing it, it's because they lack motivation. In this case, what you want to be thinking about is can you share stories that really amplify that pain? Can you reiterate the value of your product? So this is what you need to be doing if you realize through your customer research or your user interviews that this is the reason why they lack the motivation, this is what you need to do.
Ramli John:
Another reason why they might lack the ability, maybe it's too hard for them. You can give them resources or templates, or maybe you can do a high touch outreach if they're really valuable to you, that customer, and ask them if they need help. And maybe you do need some more communication. Finally, this is something that you need to experiment with. What is that perfect email sequence or number of emails in your onboarding emails? And the answer is it depends and you need to be experimenting with that. I would suggest going and adding it one at a time. This is so critical. You need to think about this. And we've actually provided a worksheet etiquette, you use a worksheet in the learning portal that you can use this. You can find it there, and then you can just go through that, what we've talked about.
