In this bonus section, you'll get access to previously recorded live expert workshops and Q&A from PLG experts such as Todd Olson (CEO of Pendo), Tara Robertson (CMO at Teamwork), Nelson Joyce (Co-founder of Tettra), and more.
Jane Portman:
Thank you Ramli for giving the opportunity to share what we do in a learning sense. The funnest part is that ever since we wrote this up, there are things changing every day and onboarding is more like always work in progress. We always have doubts whether we can do better. It's always an area for improvement for any app. And more interestingly, since then we have chosen user onboarding as the primary product angle for Userlist itself. So it's very, very super meta. We have been creating content on the topic as well. We created a guide that I'm going to share a little bit later. We recorded a season of a podcast, all dedicated to user onboarding and Ramli was one of the guests as well. So we can talk about that a little bit later. And every day we keep learning new things that work and don't work for the founders and of course it's tempting to imply them all, but all products are so different and I hope we can shed some light on that in today's presentation.
Jane Portman:
So the hook story is that we do have this onboarding video that all the new visitors, all the new sign-ups see, and we often get positive feedback about it. And one of the users wrote to us with a compliment and he was like, "This is the onboarding I love," and some users wrote with other feedback like, "Oh, your user onboarding is really like no tool tips, no tours, you just have that video. Where's the onboarding?" Yeah, sure. Our onboarding is just one video and it seems so, but it's like a tip of the iceberg that we have behind the scenes that supports it.
Jane Portman:
And this is just a friendly video that everyone sees there. It's a minute long and you can also find it online. It's the three of us, the co-founders who address the users and say we're there and get in touch anytime. So that's basically the core, that's what we have instead of the slide shows and the user who got in touch with us, they asked do we get much feedback regarding this video? Well, that part probably, yes. What do people think about it? They think positively. And were you able to measure the impact of this video? Surely not, because how can you measure an impact of a kind of a stepping stone, entry point that's only goal is to recreate the emotional connection between us and the customer? So the aim for this is not to drive any action, it's to create the personal connection.
Jane Portman:
And I would love to share the principles that are behind our user onboarding and in this article that Ramli refers to had five principals, but later we kind of elaborated and made them more abstract. So let me walk through them a little bit. And principle number one always is autonomous. So this means allowing the user as soon as possible to dive into their autonomous journey, browse around and do their own things, which means no tool tips, no slideshows. And from 10 people that we interviewed for the podcast, the 10 founders and the experts, everybody agrees that obstructing the users' path with that is not a good strategy. Minimal, meaning that we need to figure out the minimal path to success and then in designing the product, everything else can be relied on default.
Jane Portman:
And Ramli, your episode, you mentioned stress multiple times that, this aha moment is not enough to truly mean the product adoption. But that doesn't mean that we still shouldn't try for shortening whatever path we have to first have the successful aha moment, than more continuous activation still should be not the full use of your product. Do your best to shorten that journey. Should be targeting, meaning that the communications you send to the user, they should be relevant to what they have already been doing. And a user list helps people do that with behavior based email. And one of the interesting aspects is that we use behavior data not just to trigger automations, but also to skip on irrelevant things. And this is a hard concept for many people to wrap their head around because behavior based mails, something happens, we email. Vice versa actually, you can skip on things and the ultimate successful onboarding for the person who's autonomous would be don't receive anything at all. It may be just one little email or something.
Jane Portman:
Frictionless, of course, that's the key principle. And I'm sure as product people, you don't need explanation of that. One of the big principles for us is to inspire people. And we have been doing this for three years and we've observed many different situations. And most times when the founder who is joining us is inspired, they have no problem whatsoever finding resources for the integration or doing anything else and vice versa, no matter how nudgy we are, no matter how pushy we are, it still doesn't work if they're not truly motivated to start using the app to start talking to their customers. They should be delicate, and that of course depends on your marketing style. In our case, we would like to treat our users in the way that we'd like to be treated, which means not being pushy, not resending emails dozen times. And we would love to be personal.
Jane Portman:
And that video that you watched definitely relates to that aspect, and we prefer to create a personal and inspiring connection instead of trying to display integration options in six different programming languages to the first time visitor. So that's our approach, but take it all with a grain of salt, because we have not been super amazingly 5X activation rate kind of use case and it's all an ongoing learning study. But ultimately the goal from onboarding is to automate as much as possible so that we can free our hands for other activities.
Jane Portman:
And that means creating those personal relationships using automated messaging. Basically doing all these check-ins, supporting hand, offering calls, using automated messaging so that there is no dedicated person who's sitting there and like try to track all the trials and figure out. Of course we do our best to provide our support to people who react to those messages, but at least we don't have to move them along the Trello board and try to figure out the deadlines. So that's our primary company principle. And let's walk through the steps of what we do. That's not too much really. So one is that video that we talked about, then we do use blank slates like this for every screen. And it's not revolutionary, basically it replicates the UI, but instead of the data, it will show you links to some help resources.
Jane Portman:
And there's no reason why you shouldn't be doing that and linking to help docs in blank slates, it's not just simple, but it's also great because it's static and it's not going to go anywhere. It's not flimsy like bubble that you would close on a guide or something like that, it's always there until you're really done. Then we do have our onboarding email campaign and it's also not complicated. We do offer a little welcome email. Then the next day we suggest people to book their personal onboarding call. It's not very often that people take us up on that. Then after one day also to everybody, we do send over a library of the resources that we have, the templates, the blueprints, and everything else to inspire them. And then we basically leave them alone. Then after seven days, we check in with people, but only with those who have not integrated and we use their behavior data to inform that. We offer them an engineering call, and if they did that but still don't have any campaigns running, we offer them another call with me to discuss their and onboarding strategy.
Jane Portman:
So basically this is a series of automated check-ins, very minimal, very simple. So the onboarding calls which we have in Calendly, and there's little infrastructure on that as well, because that links our calendars and we have all these Slack notifications so that everybody on the team knows when we have demos incoming. And we used to do some of these calls, the duration was 50 minutes and 60 minutes, but really boiled down to 30 minutes because it ended up being more optimal for everybody to get together, solve the problem as fast as we can, and proceed to our day. And that's not just us, but also the customer. The important assets we've had to build to address onboarding is the free planning worksheets, which are also a part of our marketing strategy. So people can download them, print them out and try and plan their events, properties, campaigns and things like that in advance before they talk to their engineer. We have a knowledge base, which we redesigned this summer and we took it under our own domain name not only for convenience, but also for SEO purposes. And that's a common recommendation we've been hearing. And we do have email templates, they're existing in the knowledge base, but also in the app itself. So when the user creates a new campaign inside user list, they can just select a drop down and it will automatically populate the campaign with the emails.
Jane Portman:
One sentiment that we have learned from other founders that works with them is that for some applications, it makes sense to have templates, not just for individual projects like in our case, but for the entire setup itself. The onboarding for them would be essentially logging into the app, then seeing a typical setup and then modifying that setup to match their needs. We don't have that, but it is something that we are also brainstorming. Also this month, we are running experiments with the free concierge setup for our customers. And we do retargeting ads, therefore the bright yellow visual that you're observing. And it's been just a handful of companies that took us up on that. But it seems to be promising, it's something that has worked for convert kit in their early days. When it's hard to activate customers, you just do it yourself.
Jane Portman:
And our primary goal with this, it's not just activate those users, but also learn about the hardships that they face. Here's a snapshot off our web lending page about concierge onboarding. So we do a discovery call, Benedict will do the integration, and then we take it all, set up the segments for them, set up the campaigns and we can actually even write the messages, even though I should say, we have not proceeded to that stage. Typically, writing the messages was the most challenging part. So far, the technical aspect has been more challenging. Then I would love to point you to a couple of resources that we've created in the topic. One of them is the user onboarding guide where we lay out the philosophy and the learnings, and how to wrap your head about onboarding for your particular product. And all products are different. Ours is hard to set up, but then it's rather easy to run. Other products that are easy to set up, but then it's about designing for behavior change while trying to change the everyday routine of whole team. So all the challenges are different and maybe some of the questions there and answers will help you do that in your product.
Jane Portman:
And also Better Done Than Perfect is a new podcast that they've been talking about. You can find Ramli's episode on there, it's available at userlist.com/podcast, and we already have I think five, six episodes out. And if you're interested, you're welcome to head over to this landing page. You'll find a little discount and enjoy using our product, but only if you're just really just... If I were you I would tune in to the podcast first. Because we have plenty of nice resources. We have a special writer who does the recaps for every episode, one to two page summaries, et cetera, et cetera. That's basically and any questions are welcome.
Ramli:
Thanks for sharing that Jane, I really do appreciate that. I didn't know about the concierge set up. Can you walk us through, do you offer that to anybody or do you just have a target? Like you have to be a certain size or a certain type of company before you offer this very high touch service?
Jane Portman:
We offer it to all new accounts except for the starter plan that's below 100 users. And the primary reason for that is because we want to learn first and then it's not the primary goal to make money or do things like that. So we want to do this with a maximum number of companies, but one thing I can tell you for sure, it's a limited time offer. So I'm hoping that it's killed. We won't have to do this all the time because clearly it's a big team effort.
Ramli:
Yeah I can imagine it. So how much time does it take for you... You said you'd done two. You must have an idea now how much time it takes for both you and Benedict.
Jane Portman:
It's not too bad. And I can't really give an approximation, some of the things they're fast because let's say segmented integration allows basically to do that in a few clicks. But yeah, it's at least a Zoom call that we try to show up together. So that's already pretty significant effort. And then it depends on the business really. So things have been different.
Ramli:
I want to ask... Oh, we have a question from Ryan, great-
Jane Portman:
One interesting aspect we even had to sign a contractor agreement once already. And the one thing we want to do is we signed the other party's contractor agreement. But we'd like to think more about the legal aspect of that, because in this case, essentially, we represent the consulting side, and that leads to IP management and things like that.
Ramli:
I never thought about it. I think that makes sense. You're right. Some kind of IP. Yeah. I have a question from Ryan here and he's asking what are the biggest wins you've had, enticing changes in your new user signup flow and onboarding flow?
Jane Portman:
We have not been doing plaintiff testing primarily because we are an early stage company and there are always more dramatic changes that we can try. One thing that was beneficial was adding a field to the signup form that asks people where they heard about us. So that's been rather informative. And that's not hard at all. Overall we have three signup screens, two that collect the minimum viable information about the user and their company. Basically I should have included them in the presentation I'm not sure why I really missed that out. So screen number one collects basically your name and email address, then it's the company name, company website and things like that. Not very long at all. And number three is the payment information. Number one experiment we want to run is to remove the credit card requirement. We are not yet ready for that, but we know for sure, based on mentor feedback and everything, it's usually three to four X times increases the conversion rates for free sign-ups.
Ramli:
Yeah, let's go there. I mean, we had you on the Power Play podcast which I'll drop the link in the comments for people to check it out. But we talked about that idea when you posted it up in the hackers how you first of all you don't have a free plan, but also second you require a credit card upfront. Can you explain why for people? We had the conversation already on the podcast, but just, can you talk a little bit about why your team decided to add the credit card upfront and what are things that you're thinking about in the future with that?
Jane Portman:
Sure. There is no right or wrong answer there. And of course it's specific to the business. In our case, it includes email sending and email sending at scale, which is super sensitive. So when we introduced that, our philosophy was that we want to protect the potential subscribers or anything from abusive accounts or anything. We also wanted to protect the reputation of our own domain and everything like that. So Benedict was super set on having the credit card upfront. We know for sure that some of the email service providers they face the same problem. They don't have the credit card requirement, but instead they vet each user individually in order to enable their email sending. So that's basically an alternative. Another thing we were concerned about was that Userlist is an essential business tool, once you have the campaigns running, it's a fairly important thing in your business, in your SaaS company.
Jane Portman:
And if you sign up without your card and then start sending onboarding emails, and then what happens if you don't add your card later at the end of the trial? That process of, I don't know, asking for that card, switching off the emails that are already running, that kind of thing really made us have a headache about it. So we didn't want to be the bad guys. So we decided to be the bad guys upfront. But we do have a suspicion that all these kinds of problems, they can be solved of course. And it's definitely a way to reduce friction, is to reduce the credit upfront.
Ramli:
Yeah. The other thing you mentioned is you're going to get four to five times more signups and that's four to five times more-
Jane Portman:
I think three to four, but yeah.
Ramli:
It's a good problem to have, but there's also the support you need. People are going to be asking for help and you might have three to four times more support requests.
Jane Portman:
It's also a factor of course, even though for us doing support most times is a good thing because it's a chance to talk to people and answer their questions. Most times, that means they're already in the activation funnel if they're having questions. So as much as support is not fun, it's still a great sign to have customer conversations at that stage.
Ramli:
That's true. That totally makes sense. And David said he really loves your punchline. "We decided to be bad guys upfront." Well, what I do like though, and when I did a tear down on Userlist, is that one of the principles that I believe should be, we talked about it in the podcast as well is that you have to set people's expectation and right from the pricing page, you were like, "Hey guys, you have to give a credit card before you can sign up." So even in the first page of the sign-up. Can you talk a little bit about that? What are some things that you've put into place to make sure that people aren't surprised at the third page of the sign up? Like, "What the heck I had to put in my credit card just to sign up for this?"
Jane Portman:
Yeah. The label on the first screen was exactly to prevent their frustration when they arrived at this screen, number three. But in addition to that, and in our new landing pages, we also added another link next to the sign up button that said, "Here's our sign up button. We're going to ask you for a card, and here's why you have a special support article that talks in detail about what's the reasoning behind that."
Ramli:
Yeah. And I think that's another big piece. It's like you're asking them to do something hard, but you're also providing a reason to why you're asking for it. And I feel like that kind of helps people understand it. If you're going to ask them to do something hard and they know why then maybe it makes sense to me enough to get over that hump.
Jane Portman:
And there's definitely a trust issue with the relationship between the potential customer and our brand. And from the marketing activities that we've been doing, the cold signups that arrive at our landing pages, they don't convert well because they need to get familiar with our brand, learn more about the team, may be listen to some of our content first. And that's a good and a bad thing at the same time. So those people who have done that, they probably have less problem committing and entering their credit card upfront.
Ramli:
That makes a lot of sense. And for anybody else feel free to just drop your question on the comment section. Also, you can unmute yourself to jump right in, but I had another question that keeps popping up in terms of technical products, where you require IT to install a code snippet or some other team to complete an onboarding step, whether that's analytics to do something or success. You've already talked a little bit about what things you guys are doing, but can you share like a little bit more about that piece? How do you make sure that more people end up installing the code snippet so that especially if it's Mark that's signing up or non-technical founders? It's a big friction point for people signing up.
Jane Portman:
I'd say that our audience is small to medium size as founders, most times they're technical themselves. So to be entirely transparent with our most loyal customers and this integration part was not even a problem at all. So, however yeah, sure. With the larger teams that have larger infrastructure, it becomes more challenging and I'm going to disappoint you further, it's not just a matter of facing the snippet in the code base, however it's a little bit more because you do send behavior data, events, practice and such. What Benedict's working hard on making the documentation transparent and building the libraries for particular languages. We have a few and we're working on more. We're also working on dedicated guides that address specific one, two three brief steps for every particular language.
Jane Portman:
Yeah. It's interesting. We've been receiving all kinds of feedback from how dramatically easy and amazing it is to like, "Oh my God, this hurdle," and yeah, it's hard. One sentiment is that we've been having some mentor calls as part of tiny seed. So we've been having access to some most amazing mentors and some of them say that if a product requires complex integration like that, they wouldn't build the product themselves. It's not an easy product path to pick yourself such journey, such fight. In our case at this particular moment behavior based aspect is super important. So yes, that's the trade-off you need to do in order to be able to use this powerful data with your communications. Yeah, though we don't have any great answer to that unfortunately, there is no bullet point I can drop and things like that.
Ramli:
It's good. No, you're doing a lot of stuff to make sure that you help people through. Right at the get go, you ask them if they need help, they can book a call with you. Benedict is providing all the technical documentations that... You've dug people connected through segment, I believe as well, right? That's something that's super easy. I want to jump and talk a little bit about product tours. And you have a very strong tunnel view about this.
Jane Portman:
Yeah, it's kind of a long conversation.
Ramli:
Let's jump there. Let's talk about product tours because usually people when talking about onboarding product tours is top of the list. You've got to have product tours. Can you just state your philosophy and principle around this, and second, can you ever imagine yourself using a product tour, maybe when Userlist gets more features or something like that?
Jane Portman:
I'm not going to make any promises, but most times since I come from the UX background and typically when I see products where the bubbles were slides that you see, they fall into camps. Ones are really complex and need explanation, and the others are there to make it an even number and to add something to the... It's just like, "Here is your content." It's like, "Sure, here's my content. It makes sense. Here's the add new button." I think two thirds of the problems of these can be made very transparent using the interface itself. And then things that can't be, you should either make extra effort to make them transparent as well, or I am a proponent of brief introduction videos and not the personal kind of videos that we mentioned, but sometimes you just need to share an important concept of how things are done in your app.
Jane Portman:
And it's much faster doing that in a 60 second video in the beginning, than trying to make the user replicate those steps themselves with the bubbles or whatever slideshows. So that's the kind of approach I preach. Samuel Hulick for the show read his book ages ago. He still shares that it breaks hard on the autonomous principle. It really violates it because most people want their own journey, even though they need help. I also had a fascinating recording with Allie Bluhm, who's literally the queen of user search interviews. And so in her doing don't section shows, like do not ever put your slideshow anywhere, in any app, nobody's going to take a look at it, et cetera. So, yeah. We're not alone in that kind of philosophy.
Ramli:
Yeah. We also had Allie Bluhm on one of our expert webinars. Yeah, she is totally great. And when you say slideshow, you mean never put a point and click here kind of guide, is that what she meant by...
Jane Portman:
So everybody has their own pet peeve. My hate is directed towards still tips and tours mostly. Because these slide shows you can quickly close that. Try and close and item like a quick tour, that's worse. And Allie's main opponent is the slideshow. So I think she talks about those fancy illustrated things that you see very often in mobile apps, for example. When it's like, "Hello, beautiful app. Look, we hired the illustrator." It's like, "Yeah, we did."
Ramli:
That makes a lot of sense.
Jane Portman:
Yeah, sure. Even though I should say that the slideshows for me as a designer, they serve one little purpose of showing their effort and that they had resources and time and money to invest into that. That's a good sign, right? That's not a super scrappy company, and that they're actually trained to care about their users. So I do appreciate it. But yeah, most people just try to get rid of that and click through.
Ramli:
Yeah. That totally makes sense and now I'm in the same way. I love what you said earlier about the autonomous principle. That when you're a kid and somebody tells you to do something, you're like, "No, I'm not going to," right? If people are inspired enough, they're going to drive them. They're going to keep going forward and I guess at least to my question, one of your other principles is inspire not instruct. How do you inspire people even before they sign up? What are some things that you're talking about at Userlist to make sure that people are feeling inspired and when they get to that hurdle of, "I need to install the snippet," they're already highly motivated to get through?
Jane Portman:
Well first and foremost, the best inspiration you can talk about is the big pain in the customer's life. So it depends, some customers do feel the pain of their onboarding really bad, and they don't need any motivation on our side. Then with the others, we can try and create I would say compared to the feeling of when you think about drawing something and then you shop around for pencils, and then you open up an art book, and there are some nice examples of what other people have done with these pencils and things like that. And you get this creator inspiration of what you can now do using those examples. So that translated into B2B, boring world. We tried to provide worksheets that people can tangibly work with. The templates, of course we have articles that break down what other people can do with the product and things like that. Surely from the conversion standpoint, it's not like it's in front of their face all the time. I don't think it produces dramatic results, but at least that's something that we can do in that direction. And of course the inspiring content altogether, the podcast series, and things like that, that generally raise the topic of user onboarding and what we can do to help them with it.
Ramli:
It just kind of amplifies the idea that the user onboarding, the inspiring piece can start at the very touch point, right? Of that whole onboarding piece. And you're just talking about getting people excited and motivated. Those motivated people are easier to onboard. You talked about some of your best customers are ones that didn't really face that hurdle and they installed it really quick.
Jane Portman:
That's exactly like that.
Ramli:
So we have some questions here about tool tips. Noel said tool tips are a big pain in a customer's life. I've used apps and they were a pain, but what's interesting, and I'm not sure if David's asking this, but I'm curious is, should companies, and this is about working, but I think it's a bigger problem that you're talking about. Maybe onboarding is like a band-aid solution to a bad product, right? I'm curious what you think about that-
Jane Portman:
Yes, I [crosstalk 00:33:52] Please keep going, but yes.
Ramli:
Oh, you're going to go? I'll go at that, I guess. How do you know when onboarding is a band-aid solution to a bad product design?
Jane Portman:
A couple of hours ago I went out of a mentor call and they told me, "Don't listen to anybody's advice. It's you, what you want to do, what you believe in, and it's your customers that hold the answer. Don't listen to my advice, don't listen to anybody's else advice." That firsthand, and then I guess it's when that magical product market fit happens, which essentially when it's translated to the language of user onboarding means that you have a clear, transparent niche value proposition that resonates with your audience. That's communicated clearly on the website or the landing page, the landed that is translated into rather frictionless signup, which is not hard to create, just don't do obvious, bad things. And that translates into the first front of the app and the navigation they see there. If that meets their expectations of that functionality that they sign up for, if there's a clear pain well communicated that is then addressed in the UX, then onboarding should not be a giant issue. Then yeah, of course there are products that required technical setup, brainstorming, and yeah, I can't do more. You can take the horse to water, but you can't make them drink really most times. So a good sign is when they drink themselves.
Ramli:
All that's true. That's a good point. So when you're bring the water. The application of that is, let's say a company doesn't have product market fit. Should they even look at improving their onboarding or should they more look at doubling down on finding the product market fit?
Jane Portman:
That and does other things to grow their traffic and everything like that, so there is always so much to do for SaaS founders, but there are some times signs that you feel like you've been doing enough and there's enough traffic, and then you experienced that something's not working, and then you should talk to your users. So there are multiple types of user interviews you could do. And one is the newly acquired customers. So these are switch interviews. Then you use jobs to be done to figure out what their life was like when they switched. Then there is a type of interview you can do with your super raving fans to figure out what they love most and why and try to talk more about that. And then there is research interviews you can do with people who are not using your product and try to ask them the same questions like not why you're not using your product, but try to understand if what you're solving is even on the plate of their discussion every day. And I'm highly recommending the book The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, it's really super straightforward, helps you run those interviews better and try and avoid those false positives.
Jane Portman:
Because as founders, as part of community, we'll always get cheers from our peer founders and even bad customers can give us cheers and compliments and for the research, it's not a great thing, unfortunately. So it's hard.
Ramli:
No, that's totally true. I think that's a good point. There was one other principle that you talked about that I want to ask about, but I just want to encourage anybody else if you have any other questions, feel free to drop it and any comments. But I want to talk about rewards. You said that rewards can yield negative results. I've seen ones where they gamify the process where you get an extra day of trial if you do X, Y, and Z. Some other places like Sprout Social, they give you a t-shirt, even Abaqus they send you a t-shirt if you finish their onboarding academy. What are your thoughts about rewards and when shouldn't you give a reward to motivate or encourage people to-
Jane Portman:
I'd like to address another book I think it's called Why We Do what We Do by Edward Deci and so this is more of a classic book about influencing user behavior. And there's a ton of examples of... I think my favorite one is, there was a problem of, I think it was people crying out loud in some medieval town, or I'm over simplifying that. So the problem was that people were doing something and to fix that problem, they assigned them a monetary reward and then slowly reduced it. And then people had no motivation whatsoever to continue with their behavior, because first it just reduced their motivation because it was something they had to do as a job. And then it was something that had to do as a low paid job. In the same way they did multiple experiments when people were assigned, like let's say, crossword puzzles, and those who were then promised rewards for this they were way less productive than people who just did it for their own internal, fun motivation.
Jane Portman:
And endless different kinds of experiments that all arrived with the same conclusion. So basically it's not like you can't use a t-shirt, and of course there are products that deal with consumers at scale, and they just need to lure in as many people as possible, as fast as possible, and then deal with them. But for B2B it's hard. Of course it depends on your product. For us personally, and maybe it's going to be helpful for others, we have tried sales, we have tried ads that promote discounts, and it's not exactly the kind of thing that motivates our potential customer. They have to have a much more intense, inner motivation to improve the product experience and it works much better than a temporary deal. That's for sure, but that's from our experience. Tell us what your experiences are with that, so.
Ramli:
Yeah. I think that makes sense. I think you don't want to reward. I agree with that study, sometimes once you pull away the award, then it does have a negative result which can have a drawback. And like I said, it does depend on the product as well, for sure. I want to... Oh, you want to-
Jane Portman:
I think you can use anti rewards such as making people, at different angles to that, making people pay for something, some kind of, I don't know, onboarding academy, or make a commitment in terms of a large set up fee, or just altogether try and hike your price 10X and see what happens because it definitely increases the perceived value. And just overall dramatically shifts the dynamic off the customer relationship.
Ramli:
Interesting, I never thought about that as well. I want to shift gears and talk about behavioral base messaging and emails. Two questions, the first question, and let's jump on that first is how can people think about behavioral messaging? When people don't do something, how do you know what to send them in terms of, do you send them templates? Do you send them like, "Hey, here's my calendar, book some time with me?"
Jane Portman:
You just don't know. You test, you try, or you basically do your best and ultimately any effort counts. So there might be something that works dramatically amazing for your particular product. I know there are products that like ours, where there's some thinking that needs to happen and not just generic thoughts, but brainstorming your particular products. So for these offering calls would be particularly effective. Then maybe for other industries, it can be more generically described in like downloadable guide or a video or something. It depends, of course.
Ramli:
That makes sense. And the second question is something that actually has come up with some of the people I've talked to, what they find is they use a different system for those behavior basis emails, whether they're using Userlist or Intercom or other things, and marketing is done using another tool, like MailChimp or something else. How do you make sure that those things collide in a technical sense, or even in other sense? How do you make sure that the behavior-based transactional stuff doesn't collide with marketing and other types of messaging?
Jane Portman:
It's a super hard question. We don't have a good answer to this at the moment. That's particularly because we don't have at the moment web hooks for data going out of Userlist, we just accept data and process it, but ideally you'd want these tools either talking together or you'd want these tools be under the same roof like Intercom does. I'm not sure if they gracefully solve it, though, because still we've been talking to Intercom customers, they still don't have clarity on how their mailing activities overlap. And so the technical setup of these tools talking together is one. And then you have to figure out the strategy of what do you do with people from your mailing list who become customers whether you unsubscribe them from everything, whether you unsubscribe them from sales campaigns, but keep sending them occasional newsletters, so things like that.
Jane Portman:
Ideally, I would say yeah, that if we leave the technical aspect behind, that would be ideal to keep the newsletter going out to them, as well as to the general marketing list and then eliminate sales aid pushes, anything. But then again, if you have marketing automation and goals, you can already do that by figuring out goals. There's a giant mismatch between people's work emails and home emails, that's one giant thing that cannot be solved with automation, only for, I don't know, it's hard. And then even within Userlist, it's an open question. All our emails are considered educational by default, so you can unsubscribe from them. And then it's a question whether that unsubscribe should also mean unsubscribing from newsletters. And we also do have a feature that allows to send to users who are already unsubscribed, which means that if you need to make a super important critical announcement of something, you can still do that with the Userlist. So the idea is, do you still have all users in there no matter what? No. Very easy answer. It's a can of worms, literally, this kind of problem.
Ramli:
It could be a million dollar problem. It is true. It is a hard thing to... I was trying to-
Jane Portman:
But yeah. What's your take on that, I wonder?
Ramli:
It's a hard problem. The dea is the systems talk to each other, but that's sometimes what are the incentives for those two systems to talk to each other unless like there is some middle piece that they can set it up somehow. Or use a zap to set up tags in each other's thing so they don't collide, but that's complicated
Jane Portman:
In my previous startup, Tiny Reminder, when people would unsubscribe from Intercom stuff I would go and send a zap to MailChimp and unsubscribe them from newsletter and vice versa or backwards. But yeah, so I did that thing and I'm very positive. I was one of the few people who really cared about it because as an early startup founder, I should have thought about more dramatic problems than this. But from observation, a lot of founders don't particularly dedicate a lot of thought to that. So it's like it's something and it's fine.
Ramli:
That makes sense. I want to jump to a question and Henry, I have to ask you to jump in to explain what exactly you do here. Henry works with security software and he's wondering how they can motivate technical people, lead architects with something else rather than fear-based marketing, because they're dealing with security. Do they appeal to their needs of things professionally and protect the own customer privacy? Do you have any thoughts about that? If you have any question Henry is on the call and he can unmute himself or drop more details.
Jane Portman:
Well, customer search is key. Talk to them and try and figure out what matters, but generally it varies like that Maslow pyramid of things people need, and I don't recall the whole thing, but there is a number of causes that can make the content stand out. Each should be either super useful or entertaining, or it should make people look good in front of the others. And there might be a couple more in this list of motivations. So maybe you can make these people good in front of their peers. That's a super powerful lever. Maybe you can handle that quest and maybe you can drop tunes for them, whatever angle you can take to make them interested. But the fear based marketing, I would also steer clear from that. That's not the positive thing.
Jane Portman:
Of course, it's a powerful one. I recall Joanna Wiebe's case study from ages ago. And I think I heard about in some podcasts she was doing a copywriting project for people who need rehab, talking about medicine and rehab clinics and what they did I think they did Amazon review analysis, or I don't recall exactly what, but they came up with some amazing copy that was not like shiny positive, and it was catchy enough for this audience but it wasn't also dramatically bad. I think they ended up with a headline something like "If You Think You Need Rehab, You Do," something like that. It really stuck in my mind. Review mining is a great technique for any project.
Ramli:
Can you talk a little bit about review mining, do you just go to Amazon to look at it? Is that essentially what that is?
Jane Portman:
Well, I think it's a variation of Sales Safari, what Amy Hoy teachers about product development and you can use it for building a new product, is the most powerful thing, or as just figuring out the audience's problem. So the key idea is to figure out where your audience hangs out, be it forums or review sites or everything. Review sites are great because you can see positive and negative from users all together in one place. And in such kind for you, the good thing is you don't need to schedule any calls with people. And when people write at forums or reviews, it means that the problem bothers them that much, that they cared to put their thoughts in written form. And typically that's a good degree. Understanding matters for them and therefore you can use these sentiments as foundation for your product development.
Ramli:
Yeah. That makes sense. Wes just posted up Gremlin. And they're doing the server outreaches and they're selling to the IP. The other thing that I think of is look at insurance companies and gyms, they can totally go on the fear-based side, right? Like life insurance, but some of them are very inspirational and, "Prepare yourself for the best to come," or something like that.
Jane Portman:
Well, I love Gremlin's tagline so much, "Prepare for the moments that matter." So calming, right? So grimly nice.
Ramli:
Yeah, the resilience. Who doesn't want to be resilient? Not resilience to failure.
Jane Portman:
Great example.
Ramli:
If there's no other question... Wes is there anything else you'd like to add, or if there's anybody else we have five minutes left. You can just jump right in, but Wes you have to...
Wes:
Yeah. No, I got tons of good takeaways on this one. So thanks Jane for going through this, your whole approach-
Jane Portman:
It's been lovely to see your head nodding from time to time there in the little Zoom squares.
Wes:
I've been taking notes. No, this is awesome. One of my favorite pieces of this was really just your key principles around onboarding. And I wrote down three of them, one of them was inspiring people and motivating and one of the big pieces, I think that I'd like to echo here is, as it relates to just inspiring people. In the onboarding experience, we often think of motivation is like, back to those taglines, like Henry was mentioning, how can we uplift people? How can we get them excited about what our product can do? But sometimes it might just even be a template or something easy to get someone thinking about something from a different perspective. And I thought what you were doing with even just the templates and different pieces of it is really powerful. Sometimes it's just outside of your product, getting resources, showing how people are doing this at a world-class level is really, really fascinating. So I'm curious, how did you come to those key principles?
Jane Portman:
So five of them we... So there was this original article where we talked about our onboarding video and how we arrived there. And a lot of these principles come from my own UX background and Benedict is also super versed in product design. So we generally agree there. So both me and him ha years of other products experience. So that comes from there. And then another portion comes from our company principles. So treating users humanly as well as we'd like to be treated ourselves and things like that. And for us, Userlist is also a reflection of our values and these values are then continued in those principles. So I can't say that some unethical company will will not follow this principles. They surely can succeed. They can surely be great with their persistence onboarding and resending the email via five different channels to make sure it finally hammers the customer, but that's not our style, I guess. And the part of running your own product is to be able to call your own shots in that. And that's the shots we call.
Wes:
I think it's just... Well, there's obviously values of the company and how important those are. We all know that, but as it relates to the values of your onboarding, I think that's a really unique perspective too, as you're thinking about, okay. I know for a lot of the folks on the call too, it's the ends of the onboarding program. So when they're thinking about, :Hey, what should we implement here?" If you have these values, it's going to be a little bit more clear for you. Hey, maybe something spammy like sending these people a hundred messages on every Sundays, that's probably not personal. That's probably pretty annoying. So let's not do that kind of piece so awesome. This is fantastic.
Jane Portman:
My university training was in the legal field and before we would study a new field of law, let's say, I don't know, criminal or civil law, I was actually software engineering for legal companies. So when we would study legal field, they would always start with the principles because they're always collisions and situations when you need to make a decision and those principles they help you go in the right direction. And so having them for your company is super important and onboarding is just a way of displaying that for the user.
Wes:
Yeah. That's awesome. Thank you.
Jane Portman:
Glad to participate.
Ramli:
Well, I think that's all the time we have left. Jane, I know it's almost 10:00 PM where you're at, so thank you so much for sharing your time here in your evening, but for everybody else, thank you so much for also attending. But other than that, thank you. Have a great weekend, Jane. Thank you again. We'll stay in touch-
Jane Portman:
Thanks for having me, everyone have a great weekend.
Wes:
All right, you too.
Ramli:
Bye.
Jane Portman:
Bye.
Wes:
Thank you. Bye.
Ramli:
Bye.
Jane Portman:
Bye.
