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:
So why is conversational bumpers important? Just think about that for a second. Why is emails, onboarding emails super important? Well, going back to what we talked about last week, this model that I brought up is the BJ Fogg Behavior Model. So if the concept behind this is that if you want to help users achieve or adopt a new behavior, this is really three things that we can influence. The first one on the Y axis in this graph is motivation. So we can increase motivation. The second is the X axis on this graph, the one that's horizontal, is ability. Can we make it easier for our users? And the third are triggers. And all of this three combined increases the likelihood of new users adopting a target behavior that we're helping them to, which is the first strike.
Ramli John:
This, we're going to talk a little bit more about triggers, and in the Hook Framework that Nir Eyal wrote in his book, Hooked, the first step to building habit-forming products is triggers. These are triggers that help you remember to do something. And there's actually two types of triggers that Nir Eyal talks about.
Ramli John:
The first one is internal triggers. These are things that are internal to you. These are things that you're doing because it's who you are. Think about those things like whether that's... Every morning, you don't have to think about it. You drink that drink, whatever it's coffee or tea, you have a morning ritual. Those are things that is already ingrained inside of you, that you don't need anybody to tell you. What is that morning ritual that you have every morning? Like, is it waking up brushing your teeth, drinking coffee? Nobody tells you to do that stuff. It just happens because it's already inside of you.
Ramli John:
Then there are external triggers. These are things that whether that's email, or your partner who nags at you, or something that triggers you to do something based on that external force, whatever that is. For me, every Wednesday, I have to take out the garbage. And one time I forgot, I was upset because now I have to keep my garbage for two weeks. So actually I have an alarm on my phone to say, throw out garbage every Wednesday, 8:00 PM. So I never have to hold two week's worth of garbage again. That's an example of an external trigger. Another one could be getting messages in your phone. When you get a text message, it goes beep, or Slack. You get that messages. Those are external triggers.
Ramli John:
One thing to keep in mind of is that this external triggers have a very short life span. The analogy that Wes used in his book is it's like kindling for starting fire. It starts that fire, but it's not enough to sustain behavior, but it's good to start things off. And really what we wanted them to do is internal triggers, and we talked about that in the first module where really the goal of onboarding is helping users adopt a new identity, whatever that is, is turning small Mario, coming back to Mario, to super Mario.
Ramli John:
In the onboarding journey, I look at this triggers as in two ways you can help them. And I'm talking about external triggers, you can also talk about them now as conversational triggers or communication triggers. But the first way we can do this that helps the onboarding experience is getting your people to come back. I show this stats from Intercom, the 40 to 60% of the users will sign up once and usually not come back again. And this is the stats that they provided that the first week, the first week that users have your product, it's super critical. The standard is you will lose users there, but one way you can get them back is through triggers. Sometimes people sign up for something, they forget about it. And then how sending an email or some kind of notification will help get them back to remind them what that value of your product is, why is it they signed up for.
Ramli John:
The second way I looked at this kind of triggers, external triggers, it's helping getting users to that Tipping Point. Remember the first strike is just the first step into getting a user to be fully onboarded. For me, fully onboarded user means getting to the point where they've adopted your product, they've showed signals. And just a recall, just to remind you the example with Slack that I give is that the co-founder of Slack, Stewart Butterfield, said that, for them, this tipping point is when team sent 2,000 messages or more. Sending the first message might be the first strike, but that tipping point is there.
Ramli John:
So how do you get from the first message, which is the first strike, to 2,000 messages within the team. One way you can do that is through... Get so hard, we're talking about triggers... So that's how I see conversational triggers can help is looking at the journey. It could be when somebody signs up for your trial, or experience, or the free product, and getting them to the first strike. And the second way is helping them after the first strike and getting them to the tipping point. This is why it's so important because the people do need that triggers to help them, encourage them, and get them into adopting a behavior like what we saw with Hook model.
