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Product Tours 101: Guidelines, Inspirations, and Tools for 2023

Build engaging product tours using these six simple guidelines and find inspiration in the best real-life examples.

Product tours are an essential tool for a product manager in guiding users towards their "aha" moment or showcasing high-value features that are being underused.

By offering contextual guidance while your users interact with your product, you help them recognize your product value quickly and take the right action to get their job done.

Creating product tours is both art and science . It requires design and styling, copywriting mastery, as well as data analysis, testing, and iteration until a tour perfectly meets your user needs. 

So how exactly do you create product tours that are effective at customer onboarding? Read on, we'll explain key guidelines in detail, and showcase some of the best examples of product tours out there.

Here is a quick summary video to tell you what this guide will be about:

Product tours are also known as product walkthroughs, in-app guides, onboarding tours, or product tutorials. Either way, they are a powerful tool for user engagement and product adoption. 

What makes a tour successful? To be effective, a tour should be short and non-intrusive, timely and relevant, contextual and informative. 

Each tour will have its purpose , whether it’s to onboard new users, walk existing users through a major interface redesign, or showcase new features. 

There’s no one-size-fits-all, but keep in mind that our Benchmark Report shows that three-step tours are the most effective , with a completion rate of 72%. 

Some of the key guidelines on how to create successful product tours include breaking one long tour into several shorter ones, using clear and concise copy, offering self-serve support, and continuous iteration. We go into details for each guideline below 👇

And, we dissect six best-performing product tour examples for your inspiration.

What are product tours? #

Product tours are interactive guides that give s a walkthrough of the product's key features. Their primary goal is to turn new users into active users and drive product adoption, ultimately achieving product-led growth.

On a technical level, product tours are composed of in-app messages that form the onboarding process. They are experiences layered over the product itself and provides an interactive guide while the user is navigating the app.

What are not product tours? #

Before we go further into what makes a great product tour, let's talk about what isn't a product tour because there can be some confusion.

Product tours are tools of customer engagement. In other words, they interact with the end-user to boost feature adoption. They are also experiences contained within the product itself.

This means that anything else than the above isn't exactly a product tour. Let's go over two particular examples.

Employee onboarding  #

Employee onboarding is the process of integrating new employees into the workplace and helping them adjust to the company's internal processes. It involves activities such as orientation sessions, and training programs.

While there are similarities between employee and product tours, such as the need for clear and structured guidance, they are very different. Product tours focus on user onboarding, which is introducing new users to a product or service, ensuring that they can navigate and utilize it efficiently.

Employee onboarding, on the other hand, is designed to help new hires become productive members of the organization and align with the company's goals and objectives.

Product demos #

Product demos are interactive presentations that showcase a product's features to potential customers, aiming to persuade them to make a purchase.

Think of it as a difference between a movie and a video game. A product demo is a movie, because you're simply watching what is occuring, while a product tour is a video game, because you're actively involved in what's happening on the screen.

Remember, true interactive product tours consist of in-app guidance used to onboard users and drive feature adoption.

6 essential guidelines for a successful product tour #

So now that we've covered what a product tour is, let's talk about what it takes to create successful product tours that convert new users and help existing users deepen their product knowledge.

Each tour you create will have its purpose – to onboard new users, walk existing users through a major redesign, showcase a new feature, guide customers through a product plan upgrade, or something else that is relevant to your product. 

Let's look into the most important principles and guidelines that will help you build engaging tours.

1. Don't lecture 🤐 #

When someone signs up for your product, they are excited to play with it and are often not prepared for long introductory tutorials. Showing a comprehensive tour as soon as they land inside your product for the first time will often be met with resistance – users will immediately seek to close/dismiss it. 

In fact, keeping things short has a lot of benefits. We analyzed 58 million Tours made with Chameleon – started within a period of 12 months – and found that top-performing product tours have a clear message with 25 words per step . That's the same length as a Tweet, so each step needs to be concise and instantly understandable. Otherwise, a tour could easily become overwhelming.

Why is this important?

Users typically want to get a "lay of the land" with your product before they are ready for guidance. That's why you need to gradually reveal your tours and offer just the right information at the right time.

Once users understand the basics of your product and how it helps them solve their problems, there will be plenty of time to introduce more advanced functionalities. 

Key takeaways:

Ask whether users are interested in a tour as the first step. Offer a “Snooze” button to enable users to come back at their own convenience. 

Remember that tours are part of your product marketing, so ensure that the messaging and design are compelling, engaging, and aligned with your brand

Use a less-invasive step design (e.g. don't cover the whole screen), or you could risk annoying users. You can go with slide-outs and modals, or enable users to start a tour by triggering a certain element on the page (e.g. icon or a hotspot).

2. Break up the user journey💔 #

People learn by doing , so giving users a chance to implement your guidance is critical. Long tours increase anxiety because users worry they have to ingest a lot of information before they can use it. And this is also backed up by psychology.

Miller's Law states that the average person can keep up to around seven items in their working memory. This means that the fewer items your users have to retain, the more successful they will be in learning new information. This is why you should build your Tours in as few steps as possible.

Findings from our 2022 Benchmark Report show that three-step tours are the most effective with a completion rate of 72% , three-step tours are the most effective, hands down. Add one step and the completion rate drops to 45%, while seven-step tours have a completion rate of only 16%.

In other words, people like shorter tours.

With timely, relevant, and contextual tours, you will navigate users step by step through each action they need to take. This way, you avoid overwhelming them with too much information to comprehend at once. Here is our CEO Pulkit explaining more in detail why this is so important:

Don't try to teach everything. Pick a single user action as the goal, and create a 3-step tour to convince a user to take that action.

Create many smaller tours rather than a single long tour. With Chameleon, you can also prioritize and sequence your Tours.

Copy is your #1 lever, make it clear, concise, and benefit-focused. Use copy to encourage users, make them feel comfortable, and put off any doubts they may have.

3. Provide value 💡 #

Users should feel thankful after seeing your tour. It should not be annoying or draining in any way for them to complete the tour, so don't ask them to undertake lots of work to get value.

Instead, surprise and delight them with additional information that they would not have otherwise gleaned from your interface.

If users don't find your tours valuable, they will exit and be less open to further teaching in the future – so it's vital that you don't reduce your credibility by building irrelevant tours.

On the other hand, our benchmark data shows that users are 4.5x more likely to complete a second tour if they complete the first instead of dismissing it.

Review your tour: Did you enjoy going through it? Ask your teammates, too. And, don't forget to ask your users directly for their feedback. 

You can use Customer Effort Score surveys (more specific and actionable than NPS) to measure user satisfaction with key features or UX/UI elements. 

Assess how well your tours are performing – make sure you have connected your product analytics tool to see a bigger picture. For this, if you're using Chameleon, leverage deep integrations with Mixpanel, Heap, Amplitude, and other tools to easily see performance data.

4. Embrace self-discovery 🔦 #

Although it's natural to want to pull your users through all of the hoops you want them to jump through, using product tours to do this will fail. You simply cannot force a user to use your product, and highlighting everything you want them to do is a bad way to encourage engagement.

For instance, our research shows that enabling users to take a tour at their own pace by providing a  “Snooze” button  will increase the chance of more users taking the tour and, eventually, completing it. Our 2023 Benchmark Report found that when given the option to snooze, one in five users will come back to the Tour to finish it, which is much better than them skipping it altogether.

Or consider onboarding checklists. These self-serve widgets allow users to go through the onboarding process at their own pace, and increasingly it is becoming a preferred method of onboarding in contrast to linear product tours.

Don't take our word for it. That's what the users say. Our 2023 Benchmark Report revealed that Tours started from Launchers had a 61.65% completion rate , which is almost double the average.

The BJ Fogg Behavior Model explains that people take action when they are motivated, they have the ability, and they are triggered, so you need a combination of these three elements to keep your users engaged. Focus on motivating users to take the action and offer self-serve support to enable users to learn at their own pace.  

Keep behavioral principles in mind when creating a tour, and make sure your users have the motivation, ability, and the right prompt to take action.

Focus your copy on explaining why a user should take certain actions; what value will they gain from doing so.

Use tours to highlight the most fundamental aspects of your product. For other ancillary features, use single-step tours as signposts.

5. Don't set it and forget it 😴 #

Traditionally, user onboarding was a set-and-forget project – teams would spend weeks overhauling the onboarding flow, then shift focus away, and repeat after 12 months. This is an inefficient and ineffective way to use product tours. Instead, collect feedback constantly on your product tours and iterate based on user feedback to continuously improve them.

For instance, a simple in-app survey like this one from Paypal below can go a long way in gathering constant feedback:

To keep up with ever-evolving user needs, apply Agile principles to the tour creation. Once you've built your tour, focus on collecting user feedback, analyzing the performance data, and iterate on until you're satisfied with the outcome.

Be outcome-driven, not output-driven. Focus on a key quantitative goal and continue to focus on improving your product tour until you get there.

Set a conversion goal, beyond the completion of the tour. For example, you can use Chameleon for this, as it lets you track goals (such as clicks) without writing any code.

Provide clear accountability to someone on your team to own product tours and be responsible for regular updates.

6. Timing and context are key #

Lastly, when it comes to delivering a great product tour, it's important to give users value exactly when and where they need it. For instance, if you have a tour that tells the user about a new feature, it should only launch when that feature is present on the page.

Our data from the 2023 Benchmark Report suggests that Tours positioned relative to on-page triggers have a completion rate of 69.56% which is well over the average, meaning that Tours that are contextually related to what is on-page are much more well-received.

Or better yet, have your Tours trigger only when there is user interest. Such as when users hover over certain icons to find out more or click on an element. Below are some examples of this.

Another way to do this is to target different user segments to see what context is best for optimal engagement. Not all product tours have to be shown to everyone. Show the right ones to the right users.

If your Tour pops out when it isn't wanted or it isn't related to what is being served, it'll only cause a negative experience for the user.

On the other hand, if your Tour actually helps the user along and educates them, that adds constructively to the experience, which means they're more likely to find value in your product.

Be mindful of the context that your tour is being launched under. Is it related to the experience? Is it something the user will find useful? The answer should be nothing but yes.

Think about when you're serving the Tour. Is it actually wanted? Or is it just a nuisance? Your Tours should be gentle nudges, not an intrusion. Try to trigger your Tours when there is a sign of user interest, such as a hover or a click over the element.

6 excellent product tour examples for your inspiration #

We gathered some excellent real-life examples to show you how SaaS companies are using product tours effectively. Let's dive in.

Psst... If you want to see more examples, browse our Inspiration Gallery .

Example #1: Heap #

Heap is a product analytics platform, and the first-time setup is more complex than something you simply use like Dropbox or Gmail. It's B2B software that needs to be configured for your product, so it comes as an 'empty bucket' that the user has to invest in.

Source: Heap

To reduce friction and help users make it through the rocky first mile, Heap built its product tour to coach the user through tasks that make its product's specific capabilities clear: set events, segment users, track conversions, and build reports.

Its tour has two interlinked parts – a user onboarding checklist and hotspots that trigger tooltips, showing the user how to complete each checklist task.

The tooltip copy helps clarify feature-specific language by offering examples that are rooted in a Heap user's everyday work.

The checklist gives users context on their setup progress and acts as a powerful motivator. Ticking checklist tasks sends small bursts of dopamine to the brain and makes your users feel good. 😄

Example #2: Typeform #

Source: Typeform

As an online forms software, Typeform is a Swiss army knife that can be used for lead generation, event registration, IT incident reports, fun office quizzes, and more. Because it's so open-ended, Typeform's onboarding tour depends on the user’s job to be done and whether they want to start from scratch or use a template.

The templates offered are a masterclass in Typeform best practices. They use advanced features like logic jumps and custom branding to cement the product's possibilities in the user's head and coach the user to make successful forms. 

For Typeform, the pre-made forms themselves act as the product tours – sequential, educational, and driven by tangible examples. This is a great way to drive users to the “aha!” moment quickly.

Example #3: Slack #

We are familiar with the explosive growth Slack has had, and a big component of it was how easy, friendly, and fun it was to set up at the beginning.

Source: Slack

Slack uses bright tooltips and personable copy in its now-legendary product tour . The series of tooltips highlight public channels and direct messages to help the user understand the differences, benefits, and product terminology.

As well as clearly communicating brand personality with a laid-back tone, the product tour gets you chatting with a bot straight away to instantly teach you the core mechanics.

Want to create a similar tour for your product? Check out the video below to see how to re-create Slack's user onboarding experience with Chameleon 😎

Chameleon Recipes: Recreating Slack's User Onboarding

Example #4: Dropbox Paper #

Dropbox Paper understands that its users want to create collaborative documents that are easy to share and fun to use. So, its product tour is built into a gorgeous example document – Getting Started with Dropbox Paper.

Source: Dropbox Paper

The document is packed with hotspots that show rich video tooltips explaining the core features of Paper: changing formatting, adding files, and – of course – inserting emoji.

In a fun product aimed at creatives instead of enterprise executives, it makes a lot of sense to sell the benefits of emoji so early; Dropbox shows the feature off even before it explains how to format code or embed files 🤓

Example #5: Airtable #

It looks delightfully like it was built by Fisher-Price, but Airtable is a very complex product that condenses the power of an SQL database into something as simple as Google Sheets.

Source: Airtable

To simplify that inherent complexity, Airtable's product tour shows snippets of high-level information and practical gifs on a self-serve basis .

The multicolored row of icons in the bottom right each represents one part of the tour and highlights a specific feature with its core benefit and a call-to-action.

Example #6: Pipefy #

With Chameleon Launchers, Pipefy created a self-serve onboarding checklist, which can be toggled on and off. It also added a progress bar to keep people on track wherever they are in the onboarding process.

What you should look for in a good product tour software #

Now that you know how to build great product tours, you might be thinking about getting a product tour tool or in order to create interactive walkthroughs.

There are many options out there and you may be unsure of which is the best product tour software for you. So we want to leave you with essential features that you should have when you get one.

No-code editor #

First and foremost, your tool should be code free, so that you could do everything without relying on your engineering team. What makes a product tour software a great solution is that it saves resources, and a big part of that comes from not having to take development support.

Therefore, the tool of your choice should require zero coding knowledge to create an effective interactive product tour.

Fully customizable styling #

Nothing derails the user journey like an experience that looks way off your brand style. From simple things like fonts, colors, and button shapes to custom CSS, you should be able to tailor every single in-product experience to look 100% on-brand .

Deep integrations #

Your team likely uses a stack of tools for various purposes, whether it's a CRM or an advanced analytics tool. Therefore, for the best results, your product tour software should be able to integrate deeply with a broad range of other SaaS products.

Now you might be thinking, why don't you just get an all-in-one tool rather than a focused and extensive product tour software? This is true, there are few like this, such as Intercom Product Tours, which is a product tour add on to its core offering of customer communication.

The problem with jack-of-all-trades tools is that they're always missing something compared to the next best product tour software alternative, and they also may not accommodate your specific needs from a product tour tool. There is merit to integrating the best tools together to create a stack that is optimally customized to your goals. 

Native A/B testing #

We talked about why it's important to take feedback and iterate your tours to improve. For that, it's best to experiment and test different versions of your product walkthroughs to know what really works.

Thus, you should be able to set up native A/B testing right from your product tour solution.

Contextual targeting #

A product walkthrough that gives the same experience to every user is not as effective as a hyper-targeted one. Because user behavior may diverge depending on various attributes such as profiles, as well as key actions taken during the user journey.

You can create a much more user friendly product tour by tailoring tours according to different context. For that, you need product tour features that allow you to target and adapt.

For instance, with Chameleon you can create custom audiences and configure environments, as well as decide how certain Tours will trigger.

Thorough Help Documentation #

Even if support is top-notch, they can't be there for you 24/7. In fact, the best kind of support is one that solves the problem before you ever have to get in touch with the support team. That's where the help documentation shines.

Great help documentation improves user onboarding, reduces the learning curve, provides consistent and accurate information, enables self-service support, and ensures scalability and accessibility. Overall, it enhances user satisfaction and promotes effective utilization of the tool.

So watch for how effective and thorough the tool's help docs are.

Chameleon's help center provides answers for all kinds of issues and troubles.

Technical reliability #

Last, but not least, technical reliability is a must-have. If your product adoption software is slowing your product down overall, or it's making your product less usable, that defeats the purpose.

So make sure to look out for how technically robust the tool is. Try out all sorts of functionalities in various contexts. If your product has a specific requirement, make sure that the requirement is smoothly fulfilled with the tool. These include but are not limited to:

Mobile support

Single Page Application support

iFrame support

Shadow DOM support

100% uptime

If your app is built on one of these frameworks, make sure it's supported by your tool of choice.

5 Product Tour Builders You Should Check Out #

Now that we've talked about everything that has to do with product tours, and what you should look for in product tour software, we'll leave you with a simple list of recommendations

1. Chameleon: The best-in-class product adoption platform #

We pinky promise that we say this with no bias. Chameleon is currently the product adoption platform with the deepest configuration and customization options.

From the way you can style your experiences to match your brand, as well as set granular targeting options, Chameleon is what you need if you're looking to create sophisticated product tours.

Pricing starts at $279 a month for up to 2,000 MAUs.

👉 Explore an interactive demo and see how easy it is to build a product Tour with Chameleon, without any code.

2. Appcues: If you need iOS and Android mobile product tours #

If you want to create product tours for mobile apps, then Appcues is your answer. Appcues is one of the most popular tools in the product adoption space, but what really sets it apart is native mobile onboarding for iOS and Android applications.

Pricing starts at $249 a month for up to 2,500 MAUs and cost is adjusted depending on how many users you'll be tracking as well as what more features you need.

3. Pendo: For those looking for product tours and onboarding in one #

If you're looking for analytics tools in addition to product tours, then Pendo is what you might be looking for. Pendo is a bit of a jack of all trades. Every product tour software comes with some kind of analytics dashboard, but Pendo's analytics solution is more advanced than your typical product tour builder.

So if you want to have both analytics and product tours in one solution instead of paying for two. This is an option. If you have an existing analytics tool, Pendo might be an overkill.

4. UserGuiding: The budget option that is simple and straightforward #

If the price tag of the above tools scares you a bit, then there is a cheaper option: UserGuiding. at $89 a month for up to 2,500 MAUs, it essentially has all the basic product tour features you would need to build something with.

Of course, as you get deeper into building more sophisticated product tours, you might want to invest in something better, but if you're budget-conscious, UserGuiding is where you can start.

5. IntroJS: An open-source library for DIY product teams #

IntroJS is not exactly a builder. It is a lightweight JavaScript library for creating interactive product tours and user onboarding. For teams with dev resource to spare, IntroJS can be a reasonable option, especially because it involves almost no cost at a one time fee of $9.99 for a commercial license.

Plus, it seems to have more support and frequent updates than other open source JavaScript libraries, which makes sense considering big brands like Amzon and SAP use the library.

Engage more users and drive customer success with masterful product tours #

Take away these core guidelines and key principles, create guided tours, and start testing and iterating until perfect. It's time for you to apply these lessons to your own product tour.

Before you know it, you'll be building effective product tours that can drive lots of happiness (and learning!) for your users , as well as increased user engagement for your product.

We're always happy to help – if you'd like to speak with one of our product specialists to learn what product tours you should be building based on your goals, let's talk! You can book a demo below, or start using Chameleon for free to explore by yourself and get a sense of what your next product will look like.

Build in-app guides to retain users

Chameleon makes it easy for product teams to create product tours, tooltips, onboarding checklists, and in-app surveys without code.

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How To Create A Product Tour for Customers in 2024

Think of your amazing product as an elaborate feast – without a guided tour, your customers may not fully understand the complex flavors it brings to the table.

That's where a product tour comes in, serving as a virtual tour guide that introduces new users to your app and helps them get comfortable with your UI.

It's the key to long-term engagement, product activation, product adoption, and user retention.

So, if you want to keep your customers coming back for more, let's dig into what a product tour is, how to create one, and why it's essential for your business in 2024.

What is a Product Tour?

A product tour is a guided walkthrough of your product given to new users when they sign up. It is the quickest way to successfully onboard customers and ensure they get value out of your product at the earliest. 

Through a product tour, you can showcase:

• How your product works
• Its benefits
• Hidden features
• How to use it

In other words, effective product tours are like a concise and clear roadmap that helps users quickly understand your product's flow and value by taking them on a step-by-step journey through its features.

What is a Guided Product Tour or Walkthrough?

Imagine having a personal tour guide that helps you unlock the full potential of a SaaS product with ease.

That's exactly what a product tour or interactive walkthrough offers.

Interactive guides showcase:

Think of effective product tours as a concise and clear roadmap that helps users quickly understand your product's flow and value by taking them on a step-by-step journey through its features.

5 Reasons Why You Need to Invest in a Guided Product Tour

Let's dive into the reasons why interactive walkthroughs are a game-changer for your business:

Adopt a Product-Led Strategy ‍

In today's competitive market, prospects have countless alternatives at their fingertips.

That's why it's time to let your product take the lead, backed by strategic sales efforts.

Here’s where you can leverage product tours to drive your product-led growth marketing strategy – allowing prospects to experience the value of your product and provide personalized guidance!

The best course of action is to let prospects explore and adopt your product independently, reducing their Time to Value through product demos. The longer it takes for them to see the value, the more likely they are to look elsewhere.

Improve Product Adoption and Upsell

How do you ensure user adoption ? Say goodbye to boring emails and elevate user experience with interactive product demos instead! You can use guided product demos to take your users through new features, introduce them to unexplored areas of your product for feature adoption, and optimize the onboarding process. Do this and see user satisfaction levels go through the roof! 

You can also upsell premium additional features with compelling tours that showcase their value. Onboarding process tours can drive cross-selling opportunities and entice users to upgrade for more benefits.

Ensure Customer Success

A guided product tour is the key to optimizing your customers’ user journey, ensuring they get the most out of your product.

Say goodbye to the hassle of googling "how to" guides and fumbling through software alone.

With a step-by-step product tour, they'll effortlessly learn how to maximize their product experience and save time.

Big win for customer success teams!

Good onboarding experiences also help to guide users to their "aha" moment with ease. Show them how your product can transform their work or life and build lasting relationships with customer loyalty.

Adding an interactive product tour on your website can captivate prospects and prolong their stay on your site, which can significantly boost your SEO.

This is because a longer dwell time can indicate to Google that your company is an authority on the topic and potentially result in a higher page ranking.

Improve Employee Onboarding Experience

Having a guided product tour as part of your employee onboarding experience is a great way to familiarise your new hires with your product. This saves the bandwidth of the customer success team, engineering team, and even the product team!

Get. Set. Go launch that Onboarding Tour 🚀

How to Create a Guided Product Tour on Storylane?

The fastest and easiest way to create an amazing product tour is with no-code interactive product tour software like Storylane . Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Capture Your Product’s Screens

To ensure that your demo is effective and beneficial, it's important to highlight the features of your product. To do this, start by using Storylane's Chrome Extension to capture screenshots of your software's screens.

For an interactive product tour that gives customers a sort of Sandbox experience, you’ll have to choose the Chrome Extension's ‘Record HTML’ option – this also gives you advanced capture options to make sure you’re covering all bases!

Step 2: Open the Storylane Editor and Add Guided Steps

Once you finish capturing the screens, you’ll be directed to the Storylane Editor.

Here, you can choose from a variety of widgets like tooltips and modals to create a flow for your product tour. These will form the steps of your product tour.

Step 3: Customize Your Steps

Each widget that’s added as a step can be customized to match your requirements. You can use product tour tools to make stylistic changes like the background color, the beacon color, add a backdrop, change size and alignment, etc. You can also make more advanced changes like:

• Adding close ‘x’ buttons
• Previous/next buttons
• Numbering steps
• Adding lead forms
• Enabling auto play of demos and more!

Step 4: Add Advanced Flows and Personalization

To make your tour more interactive and show more complex product features, you can create advanced flows like creating a product tour to keep users engaged and avoid drop-offs.

• Personalize for your tour structure: You can edit screens to change the content inside – such as editing text, adding graphs, embedding images, blurring sensitive data, deleting elements and more.

• Personalize at scale for your client’s needs: You can use advanced features to personalize text, day/time, image and video tokens to suit your customer’s specific needs

Step 5: Publish and Analyze

While you are building your demo story, you will notice that the status is "Draft". Once it’s ready, you can publish it by clicking on the ‘publish and share’ button in the editor. This will publish your demo story and provide you with different options for sharing – you can share it publicly or opt for secure sharing through passcodes/expiry dates.

Once you share your interactive guided product tour in the desired channel, it’s time to wait for a while and dig into the analytics ! With a product tour software like Storylane, the analytics feature often is the most valuable one too as it can help you uncover real time helpful insights. 

You can check overall impressions and engagement, story analytics, and even session analytics! These advanced analytics will equip you with valuable insights to optimize your product tours in the long run.

Here's an interactive demo that showcases the entire flow:

Also check out: Best Product tour software for SaaS

10 Best Tips to Create Effective Product Tours That Convert

To create a compelling guided product tour, you need to weave together essential elements. Here are 10 actionable tips to guide you in creating an effective product tour:

• Use a Storytelling Approach

The key to a successful product tour is storytelling. By narrating a compelling story that showcases how your software can be used, you can keep users engaged and help them understand the benefits of each feature.

Have fun and create a product walkthrough that delights your users – if they enjoy the app experience, they're likely to stick around and gain value from the product. It's not just a "nice-to-have"; it’s essential for user retention and satisfaction.

• Lead with Value

When creating a product tour, it's crucial to provide contextual guidance by showing users upfront how your product can enhance their lives. Make sure the value proposition is clear from the very beginning of their journey.

Ask yourself at every step: Does this help users understand the value of my product or feature?

Avoid overwhelming them with explanations of every little feature, as this can frustrate and annoy them.

You can always introduce additional features later on.

Instead, focus on highlighting the necessary features that will help them experience your product's core value and lead them to their "aha" moment.

• Make the Navigation Simple

Don't leave your potential customers in the dark with confusing navigation options. If your product tour is complicated, prospects may leave without exploring further.

Your product demos should be user-friendly, allowing them to move seamlessly between sections and understand your product with ease.

Show users exactly how to use your product, where to click, and what each action affects.

• Keep the Messaging Crisp

To avoid overwhelming or annoying users with an extensive product tour, focus only on the features that are relevant and important to them. 

Start with the most critical features first, so that users can understand how they work without getting confused by other things. Keep it simple and straightforward for a smooth and engaging product tour experience!

• Make Sure Your Tour is Structured

If prospects ask themselves, "Why is this feature showing up when I click something else?" during your product tour, it's a sign that your tour may be disorganized and confusing.

To prevent users from getting distracted or lost, create a clear structure for your complex product tour that allows for smooth and intuitive navigation.

This is especially important if you're a product manager showcasing multiple tools or features within the same walkthrough.

Make sure your users know where they're going and how they're getting there, so they can fully understand and engage with your product.

• Personalize for Better Engagement

Personalization is a powerful tool to create a sense of belonging and connection with your users.

By personalizing your product tour, you can focus on what's important, as the personalization has already been taken care of. Show your potential customers that you value their individuality and provide a personalized experience to drive engagement.

And with product tour tools like Storylane , you can effortlessly personalize text, images, and even video!

• Engage Users with Media like GIFs, Photos, and Videos

Don't let your product tour be boring and forgettable.

Spice it up with engaging media to capture your users' attention – like an intro video of yourself welcoming users to the tour or a funny GIF to put a smile on their faces.

A more interesting and enjoyable product tour will leave users wanting to click through, resulting in higher engagement and better conversion rates.

• Keep Users on Track with Calls-To-Action

A clear and prominent CTA can guide users and keep them engaged throughout extensive product tours, driving them toward taking a key action.

Depending on your product tour's purpose, the CTA can encourage users to try a new feature, add a new integration, or do anything else that’s your desired action.

Keep the CTAs prominent to guide users along the desired path, take meaningful actions, and drive customer engagement and conversions.

• Tailor Your Tutorial: Feature Relevant Parts for Different Users

Not all active users have the same needs or interests when going through your product tour.

Instead of bombarding them with irrelevant information, quickly customize your tutorial by dividing user segments and featuring only the parts that matter to each segment.

With Storylane , this can be easily done to make your product walkthrough more engaging and conversion-friendly.

By providing a tailored product tour experience, you can better meet the specific needs and interests of your new customers or prospects, resulting in higher engagement and better results.

• Keep Making Data-Driven Improvements with Feedback

A successful product tour should improve customer success.

After the tour, you should monitor user behavior from advanced analytics and collect user feedback to:

• Identify pain points
• Areas of confusion
• Locate drop-off points in your product tour

With this information, you can make necessary adjustments, refine your messaging, and optimize the user experience.

4 Examples of Great SaaS Product Tours

Let’s look at some SaaS product tour examples that have nailed it in getting customers to love their products!

Grammarly is one of the product tour examples that leverages interactive elements such as hotspots and beacons to transform its onboarding process into an engaging experience that promotes meaningful learning and action.

Hotspots and beacons are strategically placed to draw users' attention to important features and guide them through the learning process.

This approach is particularly effective as Grammarly's actual product functionality operates in a similar manner, using hotspot-like elements to highlight grammar errors.

Plus, Grammarly considers returning active users or those already familiar with the tool by providing the option to skip the tour, avoiding repetitive onboarding for those who don't need it.

Slack’s product tour highlights the collaborative features of the platform – showcasing how active users can communicate and collaborate with their team members. This helps users grasp the value of the product and how it can enhance their work processes.

Another unique aspect is its interactive and personalized approach, led by a chatbot named Slackbot. Through a conversational style, Slackbot engages users by asking about their interests and preferences and then customizes the tour accordingly. This creates a more engaging and interactive experience compared to a traditional one-way presentation, paving the way for better product adoption.

Upon registering for an account and logging in, new users are guided to create their initial project by Asana. The creation of a new project is a pivotal action that highlights the value of Asana's features to new users.

And for those who complete Asana's engaging product tour, they can look forward to receiving personalized app guidance tailored to their unique needs, leading them to their "aha" moment of discovery and success!

Asana's user-friendly approach includes contextually relevant tooltips that provide helpful guidance during the onboarding process, ensuring that new users are supported every step of the way.

Evernote is a versatile note-taking tool designed for both business and personal use. This product tour example shows how Evernote's product tour is designed to help users get started by showing them how to create their first note. It then provides a series of feature walkthroughs that cover more advanced use cases related to organization and note editing. Additionally, the product tour includes an onboarding checklist that allows users to complete individual tasks, fostering a sense of accomplishment and progress as they explore the tool's capabilities.

Q1. What is a product walkthrough?

A product walkthrough is a guided demonstration or tutorial that showcases the features, functionalities, and benefits of a product to a user or customer. It typically involves step-by-step instructions and visuals to help the user understand how to use the product effectively. Product walkthroughs are commonly used in software applications, websites, and other digital products but can also be used for physical products or services. The goal of a product walkthrough is to familiarize users with the product, highlight its key features, and provide a positive onboarding experience to promote product adoption and customer satisfaction.

Q2. What is an interactive product tour?

An interactive product tour is a dynamic and immersive way to showcase the features, functionalities, and benefits of a product to users or customers. It usually involves a guided, interactive experience that allows users to actively engage with the product and explore its various aspects.

An interactive product tour may include elements such as interactive elements like tooltips, modals, pop-ups, step-by-step guidance, visuals and multimedia, and customization.

Q3. How to do a product walkthrough?

To make a product walkthrough, first identify the key features and functionalities of your product that you want to showcase. Then, you can use a product tour software like Storylane to create a step-by-step guide or interactive experience that highlights those features, provides clear instructions or prompts, incorporates visuals or multimedia, and allows users to actively engage with the product to explore and understand its value proposition effectively.

Q4. Why use a product tour?

Product tours are beneficial because they provide an engaging and informative onboarding experience for users, helping them quickly understand the value and functionality of a product. They can improve product adoption, customer retention, and satisfaction by guiding users through key features, functionalities, and benefits, and helping them become proficient users, thus maximizing the potential of the product.

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—CHRIS LANCASTER, SUPPLY CHAIN PROJECT

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Home » Digital Adoption » Product Tours from 0 to 100: For Product Creators and Enterprises

Product Tours from 0 to 100: For Product Creators and Enterprises

• Updated September 16, 2022

Product tours are an essential element of any product adoption cycle, since they define the rest of a customer’s relationship with a brand and a product.

In this guide, we’ll cover product tours from top to bottom, including:

• What product tours are and how they benefit product developers
• The components of an effective product tour
• How product tours fit into the adoption life cycle
• Best practices, tips, and strategies

And much more.

To start with, let’s cover a few of the most important concepts related to product tours.

Product Tours: Definitions and Key Concepts

Product tours take place against the backdrop of other strategic business efforts, such as digital adoption , product adoption, and the product experience.

Before designing product tours or implementing onboarding software, therefore, it pays to understand these concepts in a bit of detail.

After all, to get the best results from any product tour, organizations must understand how those tours fit into their overall product strategy.

These concepts and definitions will help set the stage for developing that strategy:

• Product Tours – Product tours are automated, in-app tours that guide users through the core features and functionality of a software product. As we will see below, product tours improve the user’s initial experience of a product, which can have a positive impact on the user experience.
• Product Adoption – Product adoption is the process where users integrate a product into their daily workflow or routine. It encompasses product tours, product onboarding, and initial product training. The more effective the product adoption process, the more engaged and productive users are.
• The Product Experience – The product experience itself is even larger in scope, including every aspect of a user’s interaction with a product or service. Depending on who you ask, this can include pre- and post-onboarding experiences, such as marketing, sales, training, support, and more.
• Digital Adoption – Digital adoption refers to the process of using a software platform to its fullest extent and for its intended purpose. Because today’s users are inundated by technology, digital adoption sets its focus on integrating digital workflows, maximizing software utilization, and accelerating training – among other things.

The bottom line is that product tours are not isolated.

Product tours are integral parts of larger business strategies aimed at improving user experiences, streamlining the onboarding process, and increasing user growth.

Product Tours FAQ: 5 Top Questions and Answers

Below, we will cover some of the most frequently asked questions (FAQ) about product tours, starting with one of the most important…

Why should my organization offer product tours?

Offering automated, in-product tours present many benefits to product development companies.

Effective product tours, for instance:

• Drive adoption and improve engagement. Just dropping new users into a product or application sight unseen can leave users confused and lost. This is especially true with complex B2B software. Product tours sidestep many potential problems by introducing users to core features quickly and automatically, improving engagement and adoption rates.
• Easier, better onboarding experiences. Better onboarding experiences increases user satisfaction and decreases frustration levels. This, in turn, helps improve people’s overall impression of the product or service, increases retention rates, and ultimately positively affects users’ lifetime value.
• Lower frustration, burnout, and abandonment. Products should be usable and user-friendly. However, users should not be expected to learn a platform on their own. That can dramatically increase mental effort and frustration levels, ultimately fueling burnout and even abandonment.
• Improved employee performance. Product developers are not the only organizations that can implement product tours. Enterprises and businesses that adopt new software can also use product tours to increase employee productivity , performance, and proficiency. Below, we will see how digital adoption platforms (DAPs) can assist not only with product tours, but also with product onboarding and training.
• Streamlined user support. With the right product tour software, organizations can automate and streamline support functions. Customer support and technical support, for instance, can be delivered directly inside the app without the need for human assistance. This can significantly improve adoption rates and user metrics.

In short, product tours help improve a wide range of user metrics, such as engagement and time-to-competency.

Who manages product tours?

The individual overseeing product tours will vary from organization to organization.

This can depend on both the size of the organization as well as the type of organization in question.

Startups may delegate this task to a business leader, while enterprises may have departments specifically dedicated to product adoption.

Also, a manager will typically not work alone. 

Instead, that individual will be supported by a number of others, including, for instance:

• User experience professionals
• Customer success managers
• Employee experience managers
• HR professionals
• Account managers
• Business leaders
• Marketing managers and executives

The person or business unit may differ, but the responsibilities and goals of product tours will typically remain the same.

For that reason, it pays to learn about the aims and best practices of product tours (see below for more).

What are the components of a good product tour?

Product tours are typically just what the term implies – a quick in-product tour that showcases features and functionality.

However, these tours are also part of the onboarding process, so it is important to keep that in mind when designing tours.

Tours, in other words, should fit seamlessly into the other stages of the product adoption cycle.

Typically, the first step in any user’s “official” interaction with a product is signing up and logging in, which is where the product tour should start.

After that point, the product tour can begin, and include components such as:

• An initial walkthrough or tutorial. An automated walkthrough is perhaps the most essential element of a product tour. Some may even claim that the walkthrough itself is the product tour. However, there are other elements that can be integrated within a tour to help improve the outcomes.
• Interactive, contextualized guidance. More advanced product tours can include interactive guidance, such as chat bots or search engines. These features allow users to immediately access the information they are looking for, decreasing the need for technical support. This, in turn, helps users achieve their aims more efficiently and become more productive in less time.
• Convenient messaging and contact options. In the event that users need to contact a live human, it is useful to have that as a convenient option. This is why many products, such as web apps or SaaS platforms, have convenient contact boxes somewhere on the screen.
• Accessible self-support. Self-support is also another option that should be integrated within product tours. In many cases, self-support options are integrated with chat and chat bot support. 

Ideally, the initial product tour should be short, sweet, and painless.

Users should be given just the right amount of information to help them reach their “Aha!” moment. 

That is, they should learn the core feature set that allows them to start working as quickly as possible.

Later on, product training solutions – such as digital adoption platforms – can augment this information even further.

What makes a great product tour?

There are a few ways to get good results from a product tour:

• Businesses should focus on helping users become competent quickly and with minimal effort
• The product tour should maintain a consistent brand experience with the rest of the product adoption cycle, keeping the same brand voice and visuals
• The product introduction should be simple and straightforward, reducing the amount of effort required to achieve basic productivity

The reason for this last point is that engagement drops as mental effort rises.

This truth perhaps motivated Steve Krug to coin the phrase, “Don’t make me think,” which describes how users feel about using new products, web applications, or interfaces.

However, as BJ Fogg’s behavior model points out, motivation and ability have a compensatory relationship.

That is, the harder something is to do, the more motivation users need to complete an action.

Product tours, therefore, should aim at minimizing effort and maintaining motivation levels.

Product tours vs. product onboarding vs. product adoption … what’s the difference?

Earlier, we saw how product tours fit in with other key processes, such as product adoption and the product experience.

Let’s explore a few of these concepts in more depth, to clarify their differences:

• Product tours. Product tours, again, are the initial tour that users receive the first time they use a product or platform.
• Product onboarding. Onboarding includes product tours, as well as the steps just prior to and after the product tour – such as signing up, logging in, training, and support communications.
• Product adoption. Adoption is the entire process by which users integrate a product into their regular routines and workflows. This implies that users must become competent and proficient, not simply that they install the software and start using it.
• Product training. Training is often necessary for many products, particularly complex SaaS platforms and enterprise tools.
• The product experience. The product experience itself is a term that embraces all of the aforementioned terms, including backend functions that customers never see. After all, these backend systems also contribute to the overall experience.

Ultimately, any product development company will engage in all of these processes. This is why it is so important to understand them from a high-level perspective.

Product Tours for Customers vs. Product Tours for Employees

Product tours are useful for businesses that develop software, as well as for businesses that implement new software in-house .

Let’s explore these two scenarios to see how they can benefit each party.

Tours for Product Development Companies

So far, we have seen that tours can benefit product developers and their customers by:

• Quickly introducing product features to new users
• Simplifying the initial experience with a product
• Accelerating time-to-competency
• Reducing frustration and abandonment

Products that are easy to use, such as B2C apps or straightforward B2B tools, do not require involved product tours.

However, as the platform grows in complexity, so too should the product tour.

Enterprise-grade software, for instance, often needs a more robust onboarding experience.

Tours for Sophisticated Enterprise-Grade Platforms

Enterprise platforms, such as high-end CRM platforms or marketing automation platforms, require more in-depth introductions.

There is also a great deal at stake, since product tours and onboarding experiences impact:

• Employees’ performance and productivity
• How quickly employees become competent
• Users’ motivation levels
• The overall return on investment of the software platform

For that reason, businesses should consider adding features above and beyond a simple walkthrough.

Here are a few other features to consider including:

• AI-driven interactive chatbots
• Search engines and chatbots that integrate with a knowledge base
• Integrating the tool with technical support and customer support 

By integrating the product tour with communication and support functions, organizations can further improve the user experience, as well as the results of their product onboarding program.

How to Save Time and Money by Automating Product Tours

How much of the product tour should be automated?

Some organizations offer tours exclusively through external content, such as videos or blog articles.

While these certainly can be useful, they are less engaging than tours that are in-app, interactive, and fully automated.

Automation tools can take users one step at a time through their very first product tours, immediately and with zero human intervention.

With the right tools, any organization can implement product tours without hassle and without the need for code.

Good product tour software, such as those covered below, can automate key parts of the product tour, including:

• Welcome messages
• Guided tutorials that showcase product features
• To-do lists 
• Management and distribution of specific content, such as videos
• Interactive help

When it comes to automating product tours, there are a number of options on the market.

Below, we will look at digital adoption platforms, one of the best solutions to automating product tours, as well as product training.

How to Automate Product Tours with Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs)

Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) are ideal solutions for any organization that wants to implement product tours, improve new user engagement, and get better results from its onboarding efforts.

DAPs have several features that automate and streamline product tours, including:

• Contextualized, in-app guidance. Users are provided with exactly the right information at exactly the right time, directly inside the application. Interactive, in-product assistance removes the lag time that occurs when contacting human support or researching support article. This speeds up learning curves and enhances the user experience.
• Step-by-step instructions and walkthroughs. Tutorials can guide new users through workflows and introduce them to the basic features of a product. The first product tour, of course, should help users realize value as quickly as possible. However, DAPs can do much more than just a product tour – they can provide complex in-app training for beginner as well as advanced users.
• Software analytics. Analytics offer insight into the performance of product tours, as well as other DAP uses, such as product training. Effective use of analytics can help businesses optimize their product tours and get even better results from them over the long term.

The benefits of using DAPs often extend beyond other product tour software and can include:

• Faster, more efficient product tours and onboarding. DAPs’ interactive capabilities, along with its inbuilt software analytics, help organizations create product tours that are fast and effective. Brand new users can quickly learn a platform’s essential features and then become productive.
• Increased feature adoption. Initially, product tours only need to introduce core features and workflows. However, to help users extract the most value from an application, it pays to continue introducing new features to them. DAPs can do just that, by promoting targeted features and helping to maximize platform utilization.
• A more streamlined user experience. Beginning immediately from the first sign-in, users can be taken on a guided tour of a product or platform. This dramatically improves users’ first impression of a product and brand, reducing – or removing – initial apprehensions about using that product. In turn, user churn decreases while retention goes up.
• Lower technical support costs. Interactive learning reduces users’ reliance on technical support and customer support. This not only improves the user experience, it also decreases the costs and burden on technical support.
• Greater customer growth. Effective product tours and onboarding ultimately have a positive impact on customer growth. And the more customers a business has, the more revenue it can earn.

Clearly, DAPs offer a great number of benefits when it comes to product tours.

However, there are other product tour applications on the market … so why choose DAPs over other options?

3 Reasons Why DAPs Are Superior Product Tour Solutions

There are a number of reasons why DAPs are the best platforms when it comes to product tours.

Here are just three:

• DAPs do product tours very well. The features covered above – such as contextualized guidance and tutorials – are perfectly suited to product tours. They can perform every function necessary to product tours, but DAPs go several steps further…
• DAPs extend beyond product tours and cover the entire product adoption cycle. Businesses should not just be concerned with product tours. They should be concerned with the entire product adoption cycle, which includes pre- and post-tour activities, such as support and training. Many product tour solutions don’t cover these stages of the adoption journey, but DAPs do.
• DAPs have AI-driven interactivity and analytics. Cutting-edge DAPs, such as WalkMe’s DAP, use AI to further improve behavioral analytics and insight. These enhancements dig deeper into users’ needs, helping organizations develop training programs that are truly modern, personalized, and profitable.

Naturally, a DAP alone is not enough to deliver stellar product tours.

That is, organizations cannot simply “set and forget” their product tour software.

They must develop, execute, and monitor a structured onboarding program.

Below, we will look at several tips to help organizations improve their product tours and their onboarding experiences.

7 Best Practices and Tips that Can Enhance Product Tours

Let’s look at some best practices and tips that can help organizations get the best results from their product tours.

1. Maintain a consistent brand experience.

Today, it is critical that brands maintain a consistent experience across their communication channels.

This includes every aspect of the product experience, such as:

• Product tours
• Support 
• Marketing and sales communications

Across every channel and touchpoint, brands must maintain the same:

• Tone of voice

When that consistency is disrupted, then the customer experience is negatively affected – customers expect one thing, but get another.

The start of the product tour, therefore, should begin precisely where the previous touchpoint left off.

That is, pre-tour communications should lead seamlessly into the product tour itself. And once the tour is over, it should hand off the torch to the subsequent stages in the user journey.

To maintain consistency, consider designing user journey maps and customer onboarding maps. 

These maps describe the user’s journey as a series of stages, helping align teams around the customer’s perspective, rather than their own business units.

2. Keep users at the center of the product tours.

Users should lie at the heart of every customer-facing business endeavor, including product tours.

There are several reasons for this:

• Products that are user-driven are more relevant, useful, and loveable
• Linking product designs to users’ needs reduces waste within the business
• Collecting and analyzing user data allows businesses to personalize products, services, and communications

The aforementioned user journey maps are one useful tool that can help organizations stay customer-centered.

However, they are just one among many.

Other approaches include:

• Following user-centric business models, such as lean and agile
• Continually collecting user feedback and using that information to improve business processes
• Track user behavior through software analytics and DAP analytics
• Develop a user-led approach to product onboarding and continually improve it over time
• Improve products with the help of user surveys, user testing, and software usage

These are just a few of the many tactics that organizations can use to stay focused on their users’ needs and wants.

They can be very useful, but ultimately a business should adopt user-centrism as a guiding principle within the organization.

It should guide not only product tours, but the entire product experience.

Organizations that follow this principle of user-centrism will experience far better results from its product adoption efforts.

3. Continually analyze and learn from the onboarding program.

Continual improvement is a well-known principle of business among certain circles.

The concept of kaizen , for instance, become popular in the manufacturing world, but has since spread to other disciplines.

Other business approaches, such as lean and agile, are not only built around users, they are also built around continual improvement.

In The Lean Startup , Eric Ries writes about the Build-Measure-Learn cycle. 

This process outlines a business process based around user-driven continual improvement. 

Its stages include:

• Build a new iteration of a product
• Measure feedback, results, and progress
• Learn from those results

Then incorporate that understanding into the next iteration’s “build” phase.

Regardless of whether a business uses the lean approach or not, continual improvement is a very useful approach to business and design.

Applying the same approach to product tours and product adoption can help product teams evolve and extract more value from their product tours over time.

4. Test different approaches, such as interactive tours and different learning modalities.

Contextualized learning and interactive tours deliver the best results out of any training approach.

This is almost certainly a major reason why DAPs have become so widespread in recent years.

However, it is worth testing other approaches as well.

After all, different users prefer different learning modalities.

For best results, product tour coordinators may want to offer options for all of the major ones, including:

• Kinesthetic (that is, interactive learning-by-doing)

If users have easily accessible pathways to these options, they can pick and choose the pathway that they prefer.

The bottom line, however, is that product tours should be experimented with, tested, and optimized – this user-centered approach is the only way to know which approach people actually prefer.

5. Deliver value as quickly as possible.

Customers use products in order to achieve a specific purpose or goal.

The more quickly products can help them achieve that goal, the better.

After all, motivation decreases as people wait to realize value from a product.

There are a few principles that product teams can follow when designing product tours for maximum effect:

• Usability. Usable products are learnable, memorable, navigable, and easy to use. Product tours take this usability to the next level, by demonstrating the value of the product in as little time as possible. 
• Utility. Utility is another word for functionality. To demonstrate value, product tours should show off that functionality – but with the aim of helping users realize basic levels of proficiency.
• Efficiency. Time is of the essence in product tours. Prospective customers are busy, especially in the business-to-business world. Therefore, businesses should strive to create product tours that are short and compact.

For best results, organizations should pool talent from different sources, such as outside vendors and in-house teams.

And they should all be aligned around the same aim: helping users realize the product’s value as efficiently and quickly as possible.

6. Provide tours both before and after sign-up.

An interactive product tour can occur both within the app as well as outside the app.

For instance, Wrike is a popular project management tool that offers an interactive product tour directly on their website.

Naturally, the product on the website is not fully functional – it is just an interactive walkthrough of a few product features.

However, it accomplishes many of the main goals of a product tour, including:

• Quickly introducing core features and the main interface
• Demonstrating the product’s value proposition quickly and efficiently
• Seamlessly bridging the gap between touchpoints on the user journey – in this case, between the web page and a trial

This is an excellent example of how to introduce a product quickly and efficiently, even before users sign up for a trial.

However, it is most certainly worth continuing this journey even after sign-up, for the reasons we have covered above.

7. Look beyond the product tour, at the entire digital adoption experience.

As we have seen, there are plenty of benefits to offering interactive product tours, including:

• Better user experiences
• Lower churn
• Improved engagement and productivity
• Accelerated training time
• Lower technical support costs
• Faster feature adoption

To name a few.

However, these benefits are really only part of an organization’s digital adoption agenda.

To maximize the benefits of product tours, organizations should:

• Develop holistic digital adoption strategies that encompass adoption, onboarding, and product tours
• Use digital tools such as DAPs, which help streamline the entire adoption process , including product tours and product training
• Regularly optimize product tours and onboarding programs, in order to extract the most value from those programs over time

Also, businesses that use product tours for in-house product adoption should extend their scope even farther, to digital transformation itself.

After all, digital transformation is often the driving factor behind any digital adoption program.

At the micro level, product tour design will not be directly linked to digital transformation agendas.

However, the results of product tours and onboarding do have an impact on the overall effectiveness of digital adoption efforts … and, as a result, digital transformation efforts.

In short, organizations should keep their strategic focus fixed on the bigger picture, whether that picture is digital transformation or the product experience.

Conclusion: Product Tours Offer a Significant Lift to Both Enterprises and Product Developers

Product developers are the companies that most concern themselves with product tours.

After all, it is in their best interest to improve customer onboarding, streamline adoption, grow their customer base, and earn more from their products.

Product tours – both pre- and post-signup – can help do just that.

However, enterprises can also benefit by offering product tours to their employees, during employee onboarding , digital adoption, and digital transformation.

In either case, the rewards help both end users and the organization in question.

To gain the most value from their product tours, organizations should:

• Stay user-centric at the micro level
• Keep focused on the big-picture product adoption strategy
• Continually optimize their product onboarding programs and product tours
• Use the right tools, such as DAPs

Following steps such as these will help organizations reap the biggest returns from their product tours, both in the short term and the long run.

A wonderful team of Digital Adoption, Digital Transformation & Change Management Experts.

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The Ultimate Guide to Product Tours in 2024

Modern enterprise software buyers have a lot of choices. Instead of long, drawn-out RFPs, buyers want to see products firsthand. Forrester research shows that 60% of buyers will go to a vendor’s website before accepting an online or in-person sales meeting.

As a result, the ability to effectively showcase the value and features of your offering to users is critical. Product tours, or product demos , have emerged as a powerful tool to engage, educate, and convert prospective users. This comprehensive guide will dive into detail on product tours, exploring what they are, why they matter, and how to create them successfully. We will also discuss the tools and software that can streamline the process, as well as showcase some of the best product tours.

What is a Product Tour?

A product tour is an interactive, guided walkthrough that introduces users to the key features, functionalities, and benefits of a digital product or service. Think of it as a virtual guide taking users on a journey through your product, highlighting its value and guiding them to their desired outcomes.

The Importance of Product Tours

Product tours are not just a nice-to-have in your product marketing strategy , they are a strategic tool that plays a pivotal role in bridging the gap between your offering and your users. In fact, product tours can be more effective than traditional PLG tactics such as SaaS free trials. Understanding the significance of product tours is crucial for businesses looking to engage, educate, and convert users effectively.

• Faster Sales Cycles and Higher Conversion Rates

The moment a user visits your website, their level of engagement can determine whether they stay, explore your product, and eventually speak with sales or convert into customers. This is a use case where product tours shine. Product tours capture users’ attention right from the start, allowing them to experience the product for themselves before committing to a sales conversation. After speaking with sales, your champions can use product tours as a tool to convert other committee decision-makers.

By engaging prospective buyers and potential customers, assisting them in onboarding, and ensuring they discover the product’s key features, tours can significantly boost conversion rates. Users who understand a product thoroughly are more likely to take the desired key actions, whether it’s making a purchase or adopting a higher product tier than they have today.

• Onboarding Assistance

The onboarding process can be a make-or-break moment for many users. If it’s overly complex or confusing, users may abandon your product before experiencing its true value. Product tours act as expert guides during this critical phase, ensuring that users get started quickly and smoothly. They serve as a roadmap, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing any initial hesitation users may have.

• Feature Adoption & Discovery

Many complex products offer a wide variety of features and capabilities. However, users may not be aware of all these features, or how to use them effectively. This is where interactive guides like product tours are effective educators. They systematically introduce users to each feature, explaining its value and providing hands-on experience. This ensures that users don’t miss out on any of the product’s capabilities.

In summary, product tours are a strategic tool that can significantly impact conversion rates, customer engagement, onboarding success, and feature utilization. When designed thoughtfully and executed effectively, product tours become the cornerstone of a user-centric approach, fostering positive user experiences and long-lasting relationships with your product or service.

Essential Elements of a Successful Product Tour

Creating effective product tours involves integrating several critical elements that collectively enhance user experience and maximize the tour’s effectiveness. These elements ensure that users not only engage with the tour but also gain a deep understanding of your product or service.

User-Friendly Design

At the core of a successful product tour is a user-friendly design. A well-thought-out design serves as the foundation upon which the entire tour is built. It encompasses both the visual aesthetics and the navigational aspects of the tour. Ideally, your product tour will look and feel like your real product, and show off your product in the best possible light.

• Visual Aesthetics: A visually appealing design captivates users from the moment they start the tour. It should align with your brand identity, while putting the product’s most prominent features front and center.
• Navigation: Navigational ease is equally crucial. Users should be able to effortlessly move through the tour. This reduces friction and ensures that users remain focused on the tour’s content.

Interactive Presentation

Interactivity is a hallmark of an effective product tour. Interactive product tours and product walkthroughs transform a passive viewing experience into an engaging journey where users can visualize themselves using your product and immerse themselves in the content.

• Engagement: Interactive elements, such as tooltips, quizzes, and surveys, grab users’ attention and maintain their interest throughout the tour. That way, users are not passive observers, but active participants in the product tour experience.
• Effective Recall: People tend to remember information better when they actively engage with it. Interactive elements make it more likely that users will retain the knowledge shared during the tour and ultimately become more qualified prospects.
• User Feedback: Interactive tours provide valuable opportunities for collecting user feedback. Users don’t always have to participate in solicited feedback such as surveys. Interactive demo platforms provide user analytics that detail areas of engagement, so you can pinpoint which areas of your product tour generate the most engagement.

Clear, Concise Information

The effective communication of information is key during a product tour. Clarity and conciseness are essential to ensure that users grasp the key messages without feeling overwhelmed.

• Effective Communication: Clear and concise information ensures that users not only receive the message but also understand it. Try to avoid complex jargon and lengthy explanations in favor of straightforward language.
• Time Efficiency: Today’s users appreciate efficiency. Keeping descriptions brief allows users to quickly digest essential details without spending excessive time on the tour.
• Reduced Cognitive Load: Cognitive load refers to the mental effort required to process information. A well-structured tour with clear and concise information minimizes cognitive load, making it easier for users to absorb and retain knowledge.

Achieving the right balance between brevity and completeness can be challenging, but it is crucial. While it’s essential to provide sufficient information, it’s equally vital not to overwhelm users with unnecessary details. That’s why any successful product tour is built upon these essential elements: a user-friendly design that captivates users visually and simplifies navigation, interactive elements that engage users and facilitate effective learning, and clear, concise information that ensures effective communication.

Mastering these elements can significantly enhance the impact of your product tour, resulting in more engaged users and higher rates of conversion. Keep in mind that choosing an interactive demo platform with analytics will help you understand exactly how your buyers are engaging with your product tour, so you can refine your tour to optimize conversions.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Product Tours

Now let’s answer the question: How do you create a product tour? Let’s navigate through this journey step by step.

Step 1: Define the Flow of the Product Tour

Defining the flow of your product tour is where the journey begins. It’s the foundational step that shapes the entire tour experience. However, it’s not without its challenges and potential setbacks. Here are a few things to consider in this process.

• Clarity of Purpose: Defining the flow is essential to ensure that your tour aligns with your objectives. Without a clear purpose, your tour may wander aimlessly, leaving users confused and disengaged. A lack of a well-defined purpose can result in a disjointed and confusing tour that fails to meet user expectations. For example, if the objective is site conversions, you want to think about where to put your CTA. If it’s new feature awareness, it’s important to hide all other features that might serve as a distraction.
• User-Centric Approach: Structuring the tour based on user needs and goals is recommended, but a one-size-fits all tour may not be the right approach for your company. Users are diverse, and their pain points or use cases may vary dramatically. Incorrect assumptions about user segment preferences can lead to a tour that doesn’t resonate with the target audience, so it’s worth investing in a tool that can streamline the process of creating more personalized tours targeted at a variety of personas.
• Efficient Development: A well-defined flow can streamline the development process if you aren’t using an interactive demo platform. Even so, when requirements change, adapting the tour can be time-consuming. Keep in mind that frequent changes in requirements can disrupt the development timeline, potentially delaying the tour’s launch. Working with a low-code or no-code tool can help product marketers and other stakeholders like sales AEs build interactive product tours themselves, minimizing involvement from developers or SEs.

Step 2: Design Each Step of the Product Tour

Designing each step of the product walkthrough involves creating the visuals, interactive elements, and content that will guide users. When crafting your product tour, keep the following things in mind:

• Visual Appeal: Effective design captivates users and leaves a lasting impression. However, creating a visually appealing product tour can be resource-intensive, requiring skilled designers and creative effort. Using a dedicated interactive demo creation tool can make your product tour look and feel exactly like your product, taking the lift off of designers and creatives on your team.
• Alignment with Brand: Consistent design reinforces your brand identity, but achieving this alignment can be challenging. Maintaining a harmonious visual theme throughout the tour while accommodating various design elements can be complex. Keep in mind that consistent branding strengthens brand recognition and trust.
• User Engagement: Thoughtful design can keep users engaged throughout the tour, but it also raises concerns about implementation. Making design changes after implementation can be a complex and time-consuming process if you aren’t using an interactive demo tool. An inflexible design can result in a static tour that fails to adapt to changing user needs or feedback.

Step 3: Implement User Feedback

User feedback is invaluable for refining your product tour over time. With the right user analytics, this process becomes much simpler.

• Continuous Improvement: Embracing user feedback is essential for tour enhancement over time. However, the process of collecting, analyzing, and implementing feedback can be resource-intensive, requiring dedicated efforts. It doesn’t have to be that way. Choose a solution that provides product tour advanced analytics, so you can understand exactly which aspects of your demo resonate with your users.
• User-Centric Approach: Implementing user suggestions demonstrates that you value their input, but it can be challenging to strike the right balance. Differing opinions among users can lead to conflicting feedback. When in doubt, it may be easiest to tailor multiple, custom demos if feedback differs dramatically.
• Bug Detection: Users can be valuable bug detectors, but addressing technical issues highlighted by active users can be resource and time-consuming. It’s possible to avoid technical demo failures by using a demo creation tool that’s divorced from your product’s backend, so that if anything goes wrong with your software in production, demo users won’t see it.

Creating a Product Tour with the Best Product Tour Tool

Many marketers and product teams develop product tours without the aid of a dedicated demo creation platform. The process often involves the following steps:

• Seeking Expert Guidance: Product marketers reach out to technical experts, typically SEs or developers, for insights into the latest features or updates. Technical experts, while willing to help, often have tight schedules, leaving marketers with limited time for guidance and collaboration.
• Manual Recording: The SE creating the demo usually then enters the live product environment and manually records each step of the user experience, from login to navigation. The process can be meticulous and time-consuming, demanding substantial effort.
• Dependency on Live Product: Since the team is dependent on a live product, a lot can go wrong. Also, teams often need to wait until new features are live before creating the next demo, leading to a cyclical process of having to reinvent the wheel for each new tour.

Leveraging a Demo Creation Platform

To contrast, many teams use a dedicated demo creation platform, such as Reprise, to craft product tours. This method introduces efficiency into the process, since it’s easy to create a tour without substantial effort from developers or SEs. Here are some of the key benefits of using a demo creation platform:

• Selective Screen Capture: Teams select only the screens they wish to feature in the demo, bypassing the need for time-consuming login or homepage steps. In some cases, they can access test environments to preview features that may not be available yet.
• Focused Content: Rather than elaborating on every single feature, demo creators can focus on capturing the ‘aha moments,’ or the critical interactions that resonate with users and accelerate time-to-value.
• Efficiency and Precision: The entire process — including demo creation, data cleanup, and anonymization — can be completed in a matter of hours, without the need for coding skills. If you need to tailor more demos to a different persona, it’s easy to start with a golden demo and make edits to customize it to each user group.
• Flexibility for Updates: When new features are introduced, demo creators can effortlessly swap out a few screens, avoiding the need to recreate the entire demo.

Modern B2B buyers increasingly seek tangible experiences with products. Marketers or product teams relying on a manual approach may struggle to bridge the gap between technical functionality and user experience, limiting their ability to offer immersive demos. To contrast, leveraging demo creation software empowers marketers to create interactive, engaging, and personalized experiences without the need for coding skills. This approach frees up SEs for strategic, technical demos later in the sales cycle, where their time and talent is best spent.

Inside the Reprise Interactive Demo Creation Platform

Product demos on a company’s website are one of the first resources buyers use during their evaluation process. According to Gartner, modern buyers only spend 17% of their time meeting with suppliers, and highly value when companies provide information (like product tours) up front to navigate their purchase. Once the prospect reaches sales, demos become a critical tool in accelerating the buying cycle even further. Sales AEs and SEs leverage demos to tell detailed stories, showcasing how products meet prospects’ specific pain points. The Reprise demo creation platform is meant to address needs throughout the GTM lifecycle, via three integrated products:

• Reprise Reveal™: easy customization of live demos by presales and sales teams for a first call
• Reprise Replay™: creation of interactive product tours and guided demos by marketing and presales teams
• Reprise Replicate™: cloning of a full application to create a reusable, interactive demo environment

The goal is to make it easy to start with Reprise, and provide the flexibility, extensibility, scale and security to expand to hundreds or thousands of enterprise users across multiple use cases.

For product tours specifically, demo creators can build their own interactive product demos quickly and easily. Walk-through guides that help tell a product’s story — without extensive technical resources. Global find and replace capabilities make it easy to edit demos and anonymize data on the fly. Finally, demo analytics and user activity insights show teams which demos are performing the best, and which features resonate most with specific users.

Best Product Tours

So, now that we know how to create one, what makes the best product tour? Let’s walk through some of the criteria that make product tours most effective:

• Clarity : Focus only on the aspects of your product that are most relevant to the target user, avoiding a “feature dump” style of demo that can easily lose users in the details.
• Engagement: Regularly review your demo analytics to understand what parts of your demo generate the most engagement with users. Refine your demos over time and focus them on what resonates best.
• Conversion: The right product tour can help you generate leads and convert them to qualified prospects for your sales team. In fact, Reprise-powered demos delivered 60% uplift in average website interactions converted to leads, and a 50% increase in average conversion from lead to pipeline.
• Reusability and Customization: With a demo creation platform like Reprise, you can reuse and customize demos to avoid reinventing the wheel. That way, you can create custom demos based on certain features, pain points, or use cases. According to the same study cited above, Reprise users experienced a 400% increase in demo capacity, without SE involvement.

Top Product Tour Examples

The Reprise platform enables teams to create interactive product tours for a variety of use cases. Here are a few examples of highly effective Reprise-powered demos.

• Pendo, a product experience company, leverages interactive walkthroughs as an alternative to free trials for prospects. The company’s marketing team has spun up an extensive demo library to showcase all of its offerings. The company’s demos are the highest-performing CTA, dominating website conversions and scaling to 200,000 visitors per month.

• EvaluAgent’s quality assurance platform is so robust that it almost needs to be test driven in order to grasp its full potential. As a result, the EvaluAgent team launched an entire library of custom, interactive product tours that highlight specific product features. The brand sees more than 400 monthly visits to its interactive product tours, resulting in faster sales cycles. Check out how EvaluAgent created a library of product feature demos , with popups like the one in the screenshot below.

We hope this guide has been helpful to get you started on your journey to creating effective product tours. Let’s address some of the most common questions.

How Do I Make a Product Tour?

Creating a product tour involves defining the flow, designing each step, and implementing interactive elements. Utilizing a demo creation platform like Reprise can streamline the process.

How Effective Are Product Tours?

Well-crafted product tours can significantly enhance user engagement and conversion rates, delivering more qualified leads to your sales team. As noted above, Reprise-powered product tours and demos delivered 60% uplift in average website interactions converted to leads, and a 50% increase in average conversion from lead to pipeline.

How Do You Make a Good Product Tour?

A good product tour is user-friendly, interactive, and provides clear, concise information. It aligns with user needs and objectives, and doesn’t overwhelm the user with too much information on features and functionality.

What Are Product Tour Trends to Watch?

More and more companies will be considering how to incorporate demos throughout their GTM lifecycle — not just as an initial product tour on the website. For example, companies will expand their use cases for demos to include live demos, interactive demos, conferences and events, and leave-behinds for committee decision-makers. As a result, the role of an all-in-one, interactive demo platform will become more prominent. It will become crucial to enable sales and marketing teams to deliver hundreds or even thousands of demos without the need for extra technical resources.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ve covered everything you need to know about product tours in 2023, from their fundamental elements to the step-by-step process of creating them to some of the best examples in the industry. Remember, the key to a successful product tour is to take a user-centric approach. Think about how to tailor your demo to your key personas and use cases to deliver a memorable and engaging experience for your audience.

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Product Tours: A Definitive Guide to Enhance User Engagement

Product tours are a helpful tool used by product managers when guiding their users to find value in their products. By guiding how users interact with your product, you highlight how your product can add value to their everyday life.

Effective product tours are a combination of science and art. It equally requires data analysis and design to match the needs of your users perfectly.

So, the big question is: How can product tours enhance user engagement ? This article will give you a definitive guide to using product tours to increase engagement.

But first, what is a product tour?

Table of Contents

What is a product tour?

What is not a product tour, #1. new users may need more information, #2. it saves time and money, #3. it builds trust, components of good product tours, #1. focus on your key features, #2. promote a dependable brand experience, #3. provide value, #4. trigger product tours with user action, #5. embrace self-discovery, #6. personalize, #7. timing and context are key, #2. typeform, #1. userpilot, #3. appcues, #4. userguiding, how gamified websites are engaging their audience, 19 awesome gamification ideas – ted talk edition, 12 ways to use gamification in banking for better engagement.

Product tours serve as a guide that provides a complete walkthrough of your product’s features. Its main goal is to encourage new users to become active and drive product adoption . This will lead to product-led growth and, ultimately, product success.

Source: appcues

Interactive product tours are created with in-app messages that make user onboarding easier. It’s composed of tutorials that help users navigate the app. It helps companies simplify the onboarding process as well as boost user engagement.

To understand product tours better, let’s discuss what they are not.

Some product managers must distinguish product tours from product demos, employee onboarding, or client onboarding.

A product tour is a customer engagement tool that interacts with end-user to boost product adoption rates. It’s a set of experiences within the product itself. Therefore anything else that does not focus on the product experience is not a product tour.

Product demos are used to show off your product’s new features and are used to drive sales. Hence, they focus on selling rather than guiding users as they explore your product.

Why do you need a product tour?

Only some products out there have a product tour, so you may need to be more familiar with why your product requires it. Here are three reasons why your product needs a product tour:

Imagine signing up for a new product you’re very interested in. After signing up, you can explore and navigate the product independently.

Isn’t it confusing not to be given any guidance as to how you can maximise and fit the product into your routine?

Doesn’t it make you want to exit the app or the website and not give it another go?

Some product managers must remember that, although they are very familiar with the product they developed, their new users must be.

A good product tour highlights the value of your product, making it easier to understand.

A product tour will save you and your users time. 

You can also save money with a successful product tour. New users will likely engage with your product immediately because of the tour. This will pique their interest and prevents customer churn.

Guiding your users straight to what they expect from your product shows reliability. It shows that you are willing to walk them through and save them the trouble of figuring out everything independently. This builds trust and helps you gain loyal customers seeking your business.

You can use your product tour to build trust with your customers. That’s why you need to know what makes a product tour exceptional.

Product tours are simply what the word implies – a quick tour highlighting your product’s key features and functionalities.

However, these engaging tours are critical to boosting user engagement, so keep that in mind when designing your product tours. They should fit perfectly into all the stages of the product adoption cycle.

Product tours start after new users sign up and log into your product. At that point, ensure that your tour includes the following components:

• Initial product overview or tutorial – The first thing your users need to see upon logging in is an initial product walkthrough. The product overview may be the tour itself. However, the tour can still include some important elements for better results.
• Interactive guidance –   You can add chatbots to accompany your users as they go through your product tours. You can use it to provide easy-access information and minimise the need for technical support. This helps users navigate your product flawlessly and become productive in no time.
• Live messaging options – Adding a live messaging option is helpful if your users need to talk to customer service. With this feature, you give them the convenience of choosing what kind of help they want.

Provide your users with all the information they need to reach their “Aha!” moment. You must introduce your product’s core features as soon as they log in.

Guidelines for creating the perfect product tours

Now that you know what product tours are, let’s discuss creating a successful product tour to increase user engagement.

Every product tour has its purpose. It may be to onboard new users, walk current users through a product update, or highlight a new feature.

Creating the perfect product tour must be your top priority regardless of your main goal. Here’s a definitive guide to making the ideal product tours:

A good product tour should be clear and definitive. It must define the product and its features, but only some things at a time.

Focus on the most essential elements of your product. Provide meaning to your product and what users can accomplish with it.

Source: fastercapital

Let’s say you are to create a product tour for a social media app. Here are the key features you can highlight:

• Point to where the search tab is
• Where the friend list is
• Where their subscriptions are listed, and
• How to subscribe and follow content creators

Answer your users’ questions while displaying how simple the functions are and how they can easily navigate the app.

Maintaining a consistent brand experience across your channels is very important. Remember that to have an excellent user experience, your brand must have a consistent design, tone of voice and approach. This includes your onboarding, training, support, and product tours.

When your brand experience is inconsistent, your users will likely feel confused because specific standards are unmet.

To maintain brand consistency, design a user journey map. This will help you lay out the stages of the user journey and align the experience around your customers’ perspectives.

Product tours should never be disrupting or draining from your customers’ point of view. Instead, they should feel thankful and at ease during the tour. So introduce your product’s value as soon as you can.

If your customers don’t find tours valuable, they’ll likely exit and won’t be open to anything similar. That’s why it’s essential to create relevant and efficient product tours.

Product tours don’t have to start after users sign up for your product. It’s much better to trigger these tours with a specific user action to give it more context.

A quick overview is helpful, but initiating the tour in one go will overwhelm your users.

Give your users ample time to get used to your software and provide guidance whenever they hit a milestone. What’s the use of rushing them to keep them in your mobile apps anyway?

One of your main goals is to show your users the gem that is your product. However, always telling them which way to go differs from how to achieve this. You can’t limit what your users will do with your product.

According to research , users who are free complete the tour at their own pace are more likely to complete it. You can add a pause button to allow users to return to the product tour whenever they want.

Creating generic product tours for all users is just as good as not creating a product tour. If you want to appeal to all users by making one basic product tour, you will likely appeal to none.

You can personalise product tours through segmentation and gamification.

Segment product tours according to user roles

To personalise your product tours, segment users based on their characteristics and purpose for using the product. You can also segment users based on their language preference, product version, user persona , and geographical location.

Source: clevertap

You can implement user segmentation by:

• Tracking user behaviour – Use a product analytics tool to add information about product usage and user behaviour. Understand how the different groups use your product and create product tours that are interesting for them.
• Comparing activity – After putting your users into groups, you can compare the different types of your users. This will help you understand how to create a tailor-made product tour just for them. You can also increase engagement for users with low activity and prevent them from churning.
• Measuring impact – By measuring the impact of your product tour on different user segments, you can make relevant changes to increase user engagement.

Applying gamification strategies

Another way of personalising product tours is through gamification .

Gamification is the application of game-like elements, such as challenges and rewards, to encourage participation and engagement.

Here’s how to gamify your product tours for a more personal touch:

• Avatars – Allow users to design their avatars in a way that resonates with them. This adds to your product’s fun value and excites them of what’s to come.
• Checklists – Providing a list of all the stages of your product tour helps keep users focused and attentive. Knowing what’s in store gives your users a grasp of the tour and how it will help them.
• Rewards – Some users may need more motivation to finish your product tour. That’s why you can use a rewards system to spice it up. Rewarding users with coupons at your store is the best and most effective way to motivate them.
• Badges – To ensure that users will return and finish your product tour, reward them with badges for every stage they accomplish. This allows them to recognise their progress and encourages them to go through and finish the tour.

The last tip for a perfect product tour is to showcase your product’s value exactly when your users need it. If you create a product tour about a new feature, launch it when the feature is already on the page.

If your product tour is misplaced where it’s relevant, it might cause a negative experience for the users. However, when your tour pops up exactly when it’s needed, it enforces the value of your product. Find the perfect combination of timing and context for your product tours, and you’re golden.

Best product tour examples of 2023

Demio is a webinar hosting company with one of the best product tours because of how interactive it is.

The highlight of their tour is a fake webinar for their users. The webinar will start with a Demio employee explaining what the webinar is all about. They will then give you the hosting spotlight and allow you to share your webcam and presentation.

Source: demio

To make things more exciting, some fake guests will attend to give you the feel of using the product.

Demio perfectly captures the meaning of a successful product tour that highlights the value of its product. All of this while giving their users the time of their lives!

Typeform is an all-in-one online forms platform that their clients use for registrations, incident reports, lead generation, and many more. Because of its vast platform, Typeform’s product tours vary for different users.

What makes Typeform’s product tour unique is its laid-back and friendly tone. They let the users get comfortable before the tour.

Typeform replaced the start button with a  “Show me the highlights” button, as seen below. This conveys that the tour will be quick and concise, only showing the essential features of their product.

Source: typeform

If their client doesn’t want to start from scratch, Typeform offers masterclass templates relevant to their needs. They use these templates as product tours to educate, engage, and drive their customers to make successful forms.

Introducing their users to various unique templates is an excellent way to establish their value.

Slack is one of the most successful messaging apps many corporations use today. 

For their product tour, Slack uses helpful tooltips and personable copies. Their tooltips explain how public channels and direct messages work and how to differentiate each one.

Source: slack

Slack also perfects brand consistency with its app and website’s design and laid-back tone. The product tour encourages you to chat with the bot to learn the key features and mechanics of the product.

Best product tour software to create engaging product tours

Userpilot is a product tour software that provides personalised in-app experiences that help their clients increase engagement. 

Aside from their friendly interface, they also offer many ways to segment users. Here are some ways Userpilot segments your customer base:

• Custom event
• Feature tags

Your product tours should be a memorable experience for your users. That’s what Mambo is all about. This gamification platform helps businesses enhance user engagement and experience with game-like strategies.

Mambo adds competition and rewards to your product tour, making it fun and engaging. With custom app gamification, you can provide a personalised experience your users can access anytime from any device.

An interactive product tour that excites your users about your product is what you need to increase user engagement.

Since its launch in 2013, Appcues made a massive wave of transformation to the SaaS product tour landscape. 

With its easy product tour builder, you can create elegant visualisations for product walkthroughs and slideshows. You can construct tooltips and slideouts across your product tour to make your users’ journey smooth.

Whether you want to enhance your existing product tour or start from scratch, Appcues will guide you through every step.

If you want to create great product tours but need more coding knowledge, userguiding is the product tour tool for you.

Its code-free software lets you choose the popups you want for your product tour. You can also select the type of welcome modal you need by adding the details and images.

Userguiding allows you to design great product tours easily and on a budget!

Finding ways to enhance user engagement is undoubtedly one of your top priorities as a product manager. A successful product tour will increase engagement, improve onboarding, increase adoption, and help generate more sales.

Following this definitive guide, you can earn more significant returns from your product tours today and in the long run.

To create a fun and interactive product tour, book a demo with Mambo today!

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How to design more effective product tours and walkthroughs.

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Product tours do the important job of introducing users to your product or new feature. When done well, they improve UX, motivate users to take key actions, and shorten new users’ time to value —improving activation, conversion, and retention rates. Really, what’s not to love?

Quite a bit, actually.

When they’re used with a heavy hand, product tours can quickly start to feel overbearing and annoying. The additional friction could even block users from discovering your product's aha moment . (Turns out that nice, leisurely 32-step walkthrough wasn't such a good idea!)

And if users don’t find your product tour valuable, you don’t just have a product tour problem—you have the beginnings of a much larger user engagement problem.

That's why it’s so important to continuously monitor the performance of your product tour, analyze your data, and repeatedly iterate on the experience to make sure you’re not just educating users, but also steering them toward desired actions. Without clear goals for your product tour in place, you risk squandering your users' attention and motivation—which, once lost, can be almost impossible to regain.

But don’t despair just yet! The following guide will help you diagnose common product tour issues and give you actionable next steps for fixing each problem and turning your product tour into the effective user onboarding experience it should be.

Read on to learn about what to do if users:

• Dismiss your product tour immediately
• Start a tour but don't finish
• Finish a product tour but don't take action

What to do if users dismiss your product tour immediately

If your users saw your product tour but didn’t opt in, there could be problems with the targeting or design.

Note that opting in can mean slightly different things for different UI patterns. For tooltips , modals , and slideouts that are triggered by landing on the page, this means that the user clicked out of the first element immediately. For hotspots , which are opt-in by nature, it means that the user never clicked the hotspot.

If you’ve set up analytics to track your product tour, you’ll see a drop-off after the initial product tour prompt.

How to make your product tours more effective:

1. improve targeting.

Consider where your product tour appears and why users are navigating there.

New feature announcements are often targeted to appear upon login, when users expect to see their dashboard. If users log into your product regularly to perform specific and quick tasks—such as looking up a customer’s phone number in a CRM—a product tour prompt at login may get in the way.

If the product tour is triggered by an action, it’s worth questioning whether or not that action—visiting a certain page or clicking a button—is meaningful enough or shows enough intent to warrant a product tour.

ACTIVATE EARLY

Product tours are table stakes in saas.

• Give users a warm welcome and set them up for success
• Improve activation by testing Flows against each other (without a developer)
• Pick your favorite UI pattern for the job

2. Motivate the right users

If your product tour’s goal is to onboard new users, it’s clear who you should target. But what about improving feature adoption for all users? New users may not know your product enough to care about new features in the same way that power users would.

For example, this new feature walkthrough was shown to returning GoToWebinar users, which makes plenty of sense. But if this message had town to new users who don’t yet know their way around the core UI, his information may not provide the same value and might actually overwhelm and deter action.

3. Choose the best UI pattern for the job

The most well-intended product tours can fall flat because they use the wrong UI pattern. A less invasive slideout or a series of well-placed hotspots may be more effective than an attention-grabbing modal window , especially if your users are trying to perform an important task.

If you are going to monopolize users' attention, be quick about it. LinkedIn used a hard spotlight and a single tooltip to effectively draw attention to their new reaction feature. They were walking a fine line, though— any more than one step like this would have felt jarring.

(Psst: We actually wrote up a whole guide to choosing the right UI pattern for your product tour. Check it out .)

4. Improve design and copy

Users are people and people like pretty things. Folks are more likely to engage with your product tour if it’s well-designed and looks native to your product (as opposed to an obvious third-party integration). If you’re building in-house , that won’t be an issue. Appcues also allows you create native-looking onboarding flows like Qordoba 's. (Just sayin’. )

And the importance of good UX copy can’t be overstated. Put some thought into how you’re communicating with users during your product tours. Use clear, concise copy and try to integrate UX power words wherever possible.

What to do if users start a product tour but don’t finish

Your users started a product tour but dropped off somewhere in the middle. This means that your first step was intriguing enough for users to opt in, but the next few steps couldn’t hold their attention.

If this is the case, your user data will show a dip somewhere in the middle of your product tour:

5. Reduce the number of steps

The more steps your product tour contains, the more drop-off points users have.

While some users will surely enjoy the guidance, it’s worth testing different product tour lengths if you do see a dip in the middle of the product tour. Hone in on your product’s core value and eliminate steps that users can discover for themselves at a later time. Remember, effective product tours should reduce time to value, not “time to discovering every feature.”

InVision does a good job of limiting the number of steps in their product tour to 6, even though their toolbar is packed with features. The result is focused onboarding that gives new users the essential information without exhausting their patience:

6. Avoid information overload

If you read the last point and thought “oh great, I’ll just smush all the information in my 9-step product tour into 3 tooltips”—think again! Condensing a ton of information into a short amount of space puts cognitive strain on your users.

Remember back in grade school, when your creative writing teacher told you to “show, not tell” with your writing? Well, the same goes for product tours.

7. Hook users in with upfront value

Your users might have dropped off during the product tour because you didn’t hook them in with a convincing narrative at the start.

For instance, Slack kicked off it's brief product redesign tour with a compelling, straight-forward modal. In 3 short lines, the modal lets users know exactly what kind of information they stand to learn by completing the tour.

To strike the right chord, you have to know your users. Why are they using your product? What problem are they trying to solve? How does your product solve that problem? How will the features you point out help them achieve their goals? Use the answers to these questions to craft your messaging and keep your product tours focused on the path to value.

Wha to do if users finish a product tour but don't take action

If your users completed the last step of the product tour, but didn’t take the desired action, that’s a sign that your product tour was engaging, but  not optimized for the desired outcome.

Your analytics data would reflect a drop in usage after the last step of the product tour:

How to make your product tour more effective:

8. make key actions easier.

While it’s tempting to drive users toward a key conversion metric, doing so too early can come off as pushy and turn users off before they have a chance to discover your product offerings.

Vintage marketplace Chairish , for example, uses a single tooltip tour to show users how to save an item, a lower-effort activity that correlates to eventual purchase. Instead of trying to get users to complete a complex or high-stakes action in one fell swoop, use your product tour to reduce friction on the path to conversion by encouraging smaller commitments.

9. Explain why the action is important

Don’t overlook the importance of explaining why an action matters to the user. Instead of merely pointing to key features, explain why each one is relevant.

This tooltip from is a great example of how being prescriptive can add value:

No matter how intuitive you think your product is, or how obvious its value, you can’t expect every user to just “get it.” Set clear expectations about the value users can expect to achieve upon completing the product tour.

Effective product tours = a better user experience

The act of building a product tour alone won’t create value. User onboarding is rarely a set it and forget it solution.

Like all user onboarding experiences, the best product tours focus on goals, not features. Build yours with consideration, creativity, and an in-depth understanding of how you can help your users solve a problem. Monitor user behavior to identify bottlenecks, roadblocks, and points of friction that may not have been apparent when you first published your product tour.  Then go back and fix your product tour where it’s broken.

You won’t just be solving a product tour problem—you’ll be solving a much bigger user engagement problem before it starts.

• Product Demos
• Video Series
• Walnut News

How to Create the Best Interactive Product Tour in 2024

These days, it feels like every company and their mother are pulling out all the glitz and glamor to present their products to prospects. 

Don’t get us wrong. How you present your product is important. But it’s about how you do it. 

2024 is the year to delve into interactive product tours to ramp up the power of your sales and customer engagement strategies. By offering unparalleled insights into products with just a click, you can take a more memorable and impactful approach to your lead nurturing strategy . 

Because let’s face it, as a collective, our attention spans are increasingly fleeting. Interactive product tours stand out by providing detailed sales demonstrations that uniquely speak to each user in a manner that not only informs them on the value of your product, but will also engage them. 

With the right approach, an interactive product tour can transform the user experience, leading to higher engagement, improved understanding, and ultimately, delighted customers.

So, join us as we break down everything you need to know about creating the best interactive product tour. 

• Understanding your audience 
• Setting clear objectives 

Research and competitive analysis

• Analytics and iterative improvements 

Storyboarding

Interactive elements and features, content creation guidelines.

• User testing and feedback 

Optimizing for mobile devices

Promotion and distribution, choosing the right platform, using interactive product tours to build a winning b2b sales strategy.

Create interactive product tours today with Walnut >  

Understanding your audience 

Creating the best interactive product tours requires having a deep understanding of your target audience and their respective journeys. 

If you haven’t already defined your user personas, now is the time to do so. This will allow you to tailor the live sales demo experience to meet their specific preferences and needs by considering factors such as demographics, behaviors, and goals.

Personalization is key here, as it’s the ultimate way to show your prospects you care for them and their needs. 

In addition, by segmenting your product tours based on user roles or behaviors, you create a more relevant and engaging experience that’ll increase the likelihood of them saying “yes.” 

However, while working on your product tour, remember that your audience has varying degrees of comfort with technology. So, be sure to stick to the essential features of your product that present the most value to prospects, while also leaning on building confidence and trust. 

Setting clear objectives 

If you start creating an interactive product tour without clear objectives, that’s pretty much like winging a series of paid ad campaigns without any form of strategy set in place. 

It’s crucial to start off with a firm grasp of your goals—whether it’s elevating feature adoption, boosting user engagement, or streamlining the onboarding process. 

Setting such objectives will shape the structure of your product tour, and also ensure that every element introduced is purposeful and impactful for your audience.

It’s also important to delve deep into competitive analysis to understand how your peers introduce themselves to users. This step is crucial in identifying your unique selling points and differentiating your product tour in a crowded market. 

Pay close attention to how competitors highlight key features, sequence their information, and guide users through the buying journey. Adopting best practices while infusing your product tour with innovative elements that reflect your product’s unique value proposition can set you apart.

Visualizing the end goal for your users is paramount. Your product tour should not only acquaint users with the product’s features, but also inspire confidence in its utility. 

By mapping out a user journey that is logical, intuitive, and aligned with your defined objectives, you create a coherent narrative that incrementally builds the user’s understanding and skills. Every step of the tour should be a stepping stone towards enabling users to fully harness the power of your product, ensuring a seamless transition from curious buyer to proficient user.

Diving into the creation of an interactive product tour demands thorough market research and competitive analysis. 

But what we’re referring to here is the analysis of competing product tours. The purpose isn’t to copy what everyone else is doing. 

Rather, it is to understand your competition’s approach while also uncovering opportunities to innovate and stand out from the rest of the pack. This will allow you to grasp the prevailing trends, identify what resonates with users, and pinpoint areas that you know you can easily improve on.

This form of competitive analysis is instrumental in highlighting your product’s unique selling points, as it provides a clear landscape of how competitors communicate their value proposition and engage with their audience. 

Embracing best practices in market research and competitive analysis ensures your product tour is not just another drop in the digital ocean, but a beacon that guides users effectively towards realizing the unique value your product delivers. Through this lens, every aspect of your product tour becomes a strategic move to elevate your product’s visibility and appeal in a crowded marketplace.

Analytics and iterative improvements 

When it comes to perfecting an interactive product tour, the journey is continuous, and it is underscored by the powerful role of analytics and performance tracking. 

Your initial demo won’t be perfect, but it will serve as a starting point, and its real value will lie in leveraging data for ongoing refinement. 

Analytics are a lifesaver because they offer insights into how users interact with your product tour, while also pinpointing areas of engagement, and identifying stages where improvements may be needed.

Your team will need to be open for continuous improvement by closely monitoring performance metrics. This will allow you to adjust and optimize each element of the tour to better meet user needs and expectations. 

This process is not about seeking perfection on the first attempt, but rather about being responsive and adaptable, using real-time feedback to incrementally enhance the user experience. 

To build an effective product tour, you’re also going to need to rely on storyboarding.

Storyboarding refers to visually organizing your interactive product tour, to ensure your message is conveyed with clarity and impact. 

At the heart of effective storyboarding is the flow design. This helps in setting the stage for a compelling narrative that guides users through your product’s features and benefits. This process begins with defining the flow of your product tour, a task that requires a thoughtful balance between your objectives and the needs of your users.

The flow needs to lead users on a journey that progressively builds their understanding and engagement with your product, with each step of the tour meticulously designed to contribute to a cohesive story. 

Visual elements play a crucial role in enhancing the overall experience. Imagine taking users by the hand, leading them through your product’s landscape where every feature and benefit is a scenic stop. This journey is thoughtfully plotted to deepen their understanding and investment in what you’re showing them. And here, visuals aren’t just decor; they’re powerful tools that grab attention and make a lasting impression.

When tailoring each step of the tour, it’s about viewing it through the user’s eyes—acknowledging the diversity in their backgrounds and challenges, and customizing the content accordingly. Adding interactivity turns the tour from a monologue into a dialogue, boosting engagement.

But the storyboard isn’t set in stone. It evolves through user feedback, a critical step where your product tour undergoes continuous refinement. This feedback loop is your product tour’s lifeline, ensuring it stays relevant and resonates deeply with your audience. 

Through this process of ongoing enhancement, informed by user insights and analytics, your product tour doesn’t just keep pace with expectations—it sets new standards.

Integrating interactive features and elements into your product tour transforms it from a passive presentation to an engaging journey. 

These kinds of engagement tools are much like hosting a lively party where every element sparks interest and makes guests feel right at home. Variety is key, with each UI pattern bringing its unique flair to the event for user interaction.

Interactive tours serve as personal guides, leading users step-by-step through your product, simplifying complex processes into manageable chunks. Hotspots, the subtle nudges within your app, draw attention to specific points of interest, encouraging discovery and exploration.

Tooltips provide bite-sized pieces of information without demanding action, enhancing understanding with minimal intrusion. 

Together, it all helps create an immersive experience that not only educates but also engages, ensuring your software makes a lasting impression.

Content creation for interactive product tours requires a blend of engagement and education, aiming to capture the attention of today’s software buyers who prefer experiencing products directly over hearing sales pitches. 

The core of a standout product tour lies in delivering content that is not only rich in information and visually captivating, but also clearly demonstrates your product’s benefits and value.

The ultimate aim is to connect your product with its potential users in a way that not only educates and engages, but also streamlines the path to conversion and onboarding. 

By embracing these guidelines for content creation—prioritizing a design that speaks to users, ensuring interactivity, and maintaining clarity in your messaging—you lay the groundwork for a product tour that resonates deeply with viewers

And this will enrich their experience with your product from the first click.

User testing and feedback 

Conducting user testing is a critical step in validating the effectiveness of your interactive product tour. 

It offers a direct line to understanding how real users interact with your product tour, what they find engaging, and where they may encounter confusion or barriers. This process is not a one-off event, but rather an ongoing cycle of feedback loops and iteration, essential for refining and optimizing the tour experience.

Interactive tours provide opportunities for collecting user feedback, not limited to direct inquiries like surveys. Advanced analytics from interactive demo platforms can reveal detailed engagement metrics, highlighting which aspects of your product tour captivate users’ attention the most. This data simplifies the task of identifying strengths and pinpointing areas needing improvement for lead nurturing .

Embracing a continuous improvement mindset is vital. While gathering, analyzing, and acting upon user feedback can seem daunting, leveraging solutions with robust analytics capabilities can streamline this process. These insights allow for targeted enhancements, ensuring that every iteration of your product tour resonates more effectively with your audience.

It is worth noting that navigating through varied user opinions to make meaningful improvements can be challenging. It’s sometimes necessary to create customized versions of your product tour to cater to distinct user segments, ensuring relevance and effectiveness across diverse audiences.

Additionally, users can inadvertently help detect bugs or technical issues. Addressing these promptly enhances the tour’s reliability, ensuring a seamless experience. Utilizing tools that separate the demo environment from your product’s back-end can safeguard against exposing users to any technical glitches, maintaining the integrity of the user experience. 

Through this iterative process of testing, feedback collection, and refinement, you can continually enhance your interactive product tour, making it an ever-more powerful tool in your engagement and conversion arsenal.

These days, optimizing your interactive product tour for mobile devices isn’t just ‘nice-to-have.’ 

If anything it’s a necessity. That being said, you need to ensure your product tour delivers a friction-free experience across various screen sizes and operating systems with responsive design. 

This will also ensure cross-device compatibility. With all the tech that’s available, there’s no excuse for not being able to provide customer delight .

Mobile optimization enhances user engagement and accessibility on any internet-connected smart device, whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, or desktop, making it easier for potential customers to explore your product anywhere and at any time.

There are many marketing tactics that can maximize the visibility and impact of your product tour. 

It’s highly recommended to go beyond social media promotions and enforce a multi-channel approach to reach your target audience. Email campaigns, tailored to highlight the value and uniqueness of your product, can spark interest and encourage clicks from those already interested in your offering. 

Forming partnerships with related businesses or platforms can further extend your reach, introducing your product to new but relevant audiences. 

By strategically leveraging these promotion strategies and distribution channels, you can significantly increase the engagement and effectiveness of your product tour, turning viewers into users and advocates.

When it comes to selecting the right platform for interactive product tours, you wouldn’t just want to choose randomly from the first page of your Google results. 

This is a very important decision that can significantly impact your product tours’ effectiveness. 

Beyond having a smooth UX, you want to make sure your platform of choice offers in-depth analytics. This will enable you to gauge how buyers interact with your tour, which is invaluable for ongoing refinement.

At the end of the day, a platform that offers robust analytics, flexibility in creating diverse tours, and supports your promotional strategies will be key to maximizing the impact of your interactive product tours. 

You know, like Walnut (wink, wink).

Creating an effective interactive product tour in 2024 has become a core requirement for engaging and converting tech-savvy users. 

This journey starts with understanding your audience, crafting a compelling narrative through storyboarding, and integrating interactive elements to create an engaging user experience. 

Additionally you wouldn’t want to forget the importance of optimizing for mobile devices, utilizing effective promotion and distribution strategies, and choosing the right platform are crucial steps towards ensuring your product tour reaches its full potential. 

Strategically implementing these guidelines will not only enhance your product’s visibility, but also significantly improve your user engagement and conversion rates.

What are you waiting for? Start creating winning interactive product tours by clicking that “Get Started” button.

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Essential product tour best practices for engaging user experiences, share this article.

Discover the top product tour best practices to enhance user engagement and provide a seamless onboarding experience. Learn from real-world examples and expert tips.

Skip Ahead: 

All you need to know about product tours

What is a product tour, key elements of an effective product tour, step-by-step guide to creating a product tour.

• Checklist for product tour design

Real-world examples of successful product tours

Measuring the success of your product tour, common mistakes to avoid.

You know your product has the potential to transform the way people learn online. But the key to unlocking this potential lies in how you introduce it to your users. That’s where product tours come in — they’re not just a feature, they are your first interaction with the user, setting the tone for their entire experience.

The success of your customers hinges on how well they can navigate and engage with your product from the get-go. This article is crafted to guide you through the nuances of creating product tours that are informative,  engaging, and tailored to your audience’s needs.

By the end of this read, you’ll have a clear understanding of best practices to craft product tours that resonate with your audience. Our goal is to equip you with the knowledge and confidence to create experiences that educate and empower your users, fostering a connection with your product from the first click.

A product tour is your first chance to communicate with your users. It’s an interactive guide that introduces your digital product’s key features and functionalities. The purpose? To make users feel comfortable and confident as they navigate your platform. Think of it as a friendly, knowledgeable guide that walks new users through your digital landscape, helping them understand how to get the most out of your product from the start.

Product tours are critical in user onboarding and throughout the user journey. They’re the bridge connecting users to your product’s value proposition. A well-crafted tour not only showcases the features but also aligns them with the user’s needs and goals, ensuring they understand the immediate benefits of your platform. This understanding transforms a first-time user into a long-term, engaged learner.

Why they should be used

Users frequently face a learning curve in the digital world, especially with sophisticated software. Product tours are instrumental in smoothing this journey, perfectly balancing instructional support with user autonomy. Here are key reasons why product tours are essential:

• Streamlining user experience: A thoughtfully designed product tour simplifies the learning curve, particularly for complex enterprise SaaS products. It focuses on teaching users about the key features most relevant to their roles, making the learning process more intuitive and less daunting.
• Driving meaningful action: Beyond just showcasing features, product tours guide users to take action. This approach of ‘learning by doing’ ensures knowledge retention and helps users master your product more quickly. It’s about moving from passive observation to active participation.
• Enhancing user engagement: Well-executed product tours reduce friction in the onboarding process. A smooth initial experience with your product increases the likelihood of continued engagement, helping users recognize and appreciate your tool’s value. This is pivotal in boosting user retention rates.
• Expedited onboarding: Product tours accelerate the learning process. By guiding users through essential features and functions, they enable quicker proficiency and reduce the time it takes for users to derive value from your product.
• Reduced support requests: By providing a clear and comprehensive introduction to your product, these tours can significantly decrease the volume of support inquiries. Users are more likely to understand how to use your product effectively, encountering fewer issues requiring support.
• Fostering the ‘Aha’ moment: The ultimate goal of user onboarding is to lead users to the ‘aha moment’ — the point where they recognize the value of your product. A well-crafted product tour can hasten this realization, propelling users toward full product adoption .

They are not product demos

Product demos are like interactive presentations aimed at potential customers. They showcase a product’s features and benefits to persuade the audience toward a purchase. However, unlike product tours, demos are typically passive experiences where the audience observes rather than interacts.

If a product demo is a movie, a product tour is more like a video game. In a movie (demo), you’re an observer of what’s happening, while in a video game (product tour), you’re actively engaged and involved in the experience.

Product tours are defined by their interactive, in-app nature. They’re tools for onboarding users to a product, helping them understand and adopt its features effectively. This sets them apart from other forms of customer engagement and educational tools.

Crafting a product tour that resonates with your users involves several critical elements. Here’s an expanded look at what makes a product tour not just functional but impactful:

Personalization and contextual engagement

• Segmented approach: Tailor your product tours to different user roles, offering a personalized experience that speaks directly to each user’s unique needs and objectives.
• Action-triggered tours: Initiate tours based on specific user actions, ensuring that tutorials are contextually relevant and appear at just the right moment.
• Match UI patterns with use cases: Choose UI patterns best suited for each part of your tour. For example, use pop-up modals for welcome messages and tooltips for quick feature explanations.
• Design consistency: Ensure a seamless experience by maintaining consistency in design across all elements of your product tour.
• Conciseness and relevance: Keep your product tours brief and focused, quickly demonstrating your product’s value without overwhelming users with lengthy steps.
• Focus on the ‘why’: Go beyond instructions to explain the value behind each action, fostering deeper user engagement and adoption.
• Continuous updates: Regularly review and update your product tours based on user interaction data, optimizing the onboarding experience.
• Skip option: Allow users the flexibility to skip the tour, catering to those who prefer a more hands-on approach or are already familiar with your product.

Engagement techniques

• Interactive elements: Use features like clickable areas, animations, or quizzes to keep users engaged and promote active learning.
• Pacing: Find the right balance in the pace of your tour to maintain user interest while allowing sufficient time for information absorption.

Clarity and simplicity

• Clear and concise content: Provide straightforward, jargon-free information. Each step should clearly contribute to the user’s journey and understanding.
• Purpose-driven steps: Ensure every part of the tour serves a meaningful purpose in the broader context of user education and engagement.

Creating an engaging and effective product tour is a structured process. Let’s walk through the essential steps:

Planning your product tour

Effective planning is the foundation of a successful product tour. Here’s how to approach this phase with precision and purpose:

• Define objectives: Start with a clear vision of your goal. Are you aiming to increase feature adoption, enhance user engagement, or reduce onboarding time? Your objectives will guide every aspect of your tour.
• Identify key features: Determine the critical features and functionalities that need to be highlighted. Understand how these align with your users’ needs and contribute to the overall value of your product.
• Map the user journey: Visualize the user’s path during the tour. Consider the logical flow of information — how one step leads to another- to ensure a coherent narrative that gradually builds users’ understanding and skills.
• Sequence and structure: Decide on the order in which to present information. The sequence should feel natural and intuitive, guiding users from basic features to more complex functionalities.
• End goal visualization: Remember the ultimate goal of enabling users to effectively understand and utilize your product. Every element of the tour should contribute towards this end.

Designing for different user segments

When crafting your product tour, recognize each user’s uniqueness. Design a tour that adapts to various user segments, acknowledging their differing experience levels, interests, and usage patterns. This tailored approach is not just about inclusion but effectively connecting with every user.

• Segmentation by needs and interests: Understand that users have diverse needs and preferences. A survey reveals that 67% of customers favor self-exploration over extensive interactions with representatives. This preference highlights the importance of delivering a product tour that aligns with individual user preferences.
• Customized content for each segment: Avoid overwhelming users with generic or irrelevant information. Customize your tour by dividing your audience into distinct segments and then tailor the content to suit each group. This might involve creating different versions of your tour or using adaptive content that evolves based on user actions and feedback.
• Engagement through relevance: By providing a product tour experience specific to their needs and interests, you’re more likely to see higher levels of engagement. Tailored tours make new customers or prospects feel seen and understood, leading to better outcomes in terms of their learning, engagement, and overall satisfaction with your product.
• Continuous adaptation: Remember that user needs can evolve. Review user feedback and engagement data regularly to refine your customer segmentation strategies. This ongoing adaptation ensures that your product tour remains relevant and effective for all user segments over time.

The key to designing for different user segments while avoiding learning barriers is balancing personalization and inclusivity. By acknowledging the unique journey of each user, you create a product tour that resonates more deeply, fostering a sense of belonging and understanding. This approach enhances the user experience and reinforces your product’s perception as user-centric and adaptable to diverse needs.

Choose the right UI pattern

Selecting the most effective UI pattern for your product tour involves understanding the options available and their unique strengths. Here’s a breakdown of different UI patterns and how they can be utilized:

• Pop-ups: These can range from simple splash screen graphics to modal windows requiring user action. Pop-ups quickly engage users and explain the value of your application. They are effective for immediate engagement and conveying key information at the start of a product tour.
• Interactive walkthroughs: These provide step-by-step instructions for key workflows within your application. Users learn about processes as they actively engage with the product tour. Interactive walkthroughs are particularly useful for complex applications, simplifying training and enhancing user understanding during initial onboarding or feature rollouts.
• Hotspots (Beacons): Small icons or alerts, hotspots draw attention to specific application elements. They’re great for delivering information about feature updates or workflow changes. Hotspots enable a self-serve onboarding process, allowing users to interact with training material at their own pace.
• Tooltips: Tooltips offer a quick overview of a feature or UI element’s function. They are less intrusive than guided product walkthroughs and are excellent for providing concise, crucial information without prompting users to take action.
• Explainer videos: Integrating explainer videos with pop-up modal windows can create engaging welcome messages for new users. A video overview of key features upon first login can significantly increase the likelihood of users engaging with and understanding your product.
• Task lists: Reflecting the concept of sustained acceleration, task lists help maintain momentum and enthusiasm throughout the user’s interaction with the product. They effectively guide users through actions or learning objectives, keeping them engaged and on track.
• Progress bars: These visually indicate a user’s progress through the product tour. By showing how many steps are in the tour and how much progress has been made, progress bars offer a sense of control and achievement. They are crucial for managing user expectations and motivation throughout the tour.

When combining these UI patterns, the goal remains consistent: to engage users interactively at all stages of technology adoption. Well-designed product tours cater to a wide range of users, from tech-savvy to slower adopters, without overwhelming or frustrating them.

Crafting engaging content

The content of your product tour is where you connect with users. Make it count by focusing on these key aspects:

• Clarity and brevity: Use clear, concise language that’s easy to understand. Avoid jargon and overly technical terms that might confuse new users.
• Visual aids: Enhance your text with relevant visuals. Videos can provide an overview, screenshots can highlight key features, and infographics can simplify complex concepts.
• Interactivity: Incorporate elements like clickable areas, animations, or quizzes. This not only maintains user interest but also encourages active learning.
• Relevance: Tailor the content to reflect the users’ context and needs. Show how your product solves their specific problems or enhances their work or lifestyle.
• Supportive tone: Adopt a friendly and encouraging tone, mirroring a knowledgeable guide or mentor. This helps in building trust and makes the learning process more enjoyable.
• Consistent brand voice: Ensure the content reflects your brand’s voice and personality. Consistency in tone and style across all your communications reinforces your brand identity.

Checklist for Product Tour Design

• Define Objectives: Clearly articulate your goal with your product tour.
• Identify Key Features: Select the essential features and functionalities to highlight.
• Understand Your Audience: Gather data on your user segments to tailor the tour.
• Map the User Journey: Plan the tour flow from start to finish.
• Create Engaging Content: Develop clear, concise, and visually appealing content.
• Incorporate Interactivity: Use elements like quizzes or clickable areas to engage users.
• Test and Iterate: Pilot the tour with a small group of users and refine it based on feedback.
• Monitor Engagement: Use analytics to track how users interact with your tour.
• Optimize for Different Devices: Ensure the tour works seamlessly across all platforms.
• Update Regularly: Keep the tour current with any changes in your product.

Following this step-by-step guide and checklist will help you create a product tour that introduces users to your product and engages and educates them , setting the stage for a successful and long-lasting relationship with your platform.

Learning from successful examples can provide invaluable insights into creating effective product tours. Let’s explore some case studies:

Case studies and analysis

Slack’s product tour is notable for its unique blend of collaboration highlights and interactive personalization. The tour, guided by Slackbot, a friendly chatbot, asks users about their preferences and tailors the experience accordingly. This conversational approach makes the tour more engaging and helps users quickly grasp the collaborative nature of the platform and how it can enhance their work processes.

Asana greets new users with a guided setup to create their first project – a crucial step that showcases the tool’s utility. Users receive personalized app guidance post-tour, leading to their ‘aha’ moment. Asana enhances its onboarding process with contextually relevant tooltips, ensuring users feel supported throughout their journey.

Evernote’s tour helps users kickstart their experience by guiding them to create their first note and then progressing to more advanced features. The tour includes an onboarding checklist, allowing users to complete tasks and experience a sense of achievement as they explore the tool’s functionalities.

Canva begins its tour with a quick, 2-minute onboarding video, followed by a hands-on experience where users are prompted to create a design using templates. The journey concludes with a demonstration of sharing or downloading their creation, seamlessly integrating learning with doing.

Dropbox focuses on core functionalities, providing clear, step-by-step guidance through each feature. The tour includes practical exercises, allowing users to try out features — enhancing retention and building user confidence in navigating the platform.

What makes them stand out

These examples excel due to their strategic fusion of clarity, engagement, and personalization. They use a mix of conversational interfaces, interactive elements, and visual guides to maintain user interest. Each tour is tailored to the user’s needs and interests, facilitating a deeper understanding of the product and fostering a positive initial experience.

To ensure your product tour achieves its objectives to transform your user’s journey, you’ll need to measure its effectiveness accurately.

Key metrics to track

• Completion rate: This directly indicates how engaging and appropriately paced your tour is. High completion rates suggest that your tour is resonating well with users.
• User feedback: Direct insights from users are invaluable. They provide a qualitative measure of what’s working and areas needing improvement.
• Engagement metrics: Observing which parts of the tour users spend the most time on and which features they interact with can reveal a lot about their preferences and pain points.
• Conversion rate: Ultimately, the effectiveness of your product tour is also measured by the actions users take afterward, like signing up or making a purchase.

Tools and techniques for analysis

Here are some tools and techniques, along with insights into their unique capabilities, to help you analyze and refine your product tours:

Analytics tools

• Google Analytics/Mixpanel: These platforms offer comprehensive insights into user interactions with your tour. They provide valuable data on user behavior, tour engagement, and conversion rates, enabling you to see what’s working and what’s not.
• Pendo: Known for its deep product usage insights, Pendo helps you understand how customers interact with your product. This information is invaluable in identifying the most needed aspects of your product tours, though Pendo may have limitations in self-help content creation compared to other tools.

A/B testing

A/B testing is essential for fine-tuning your product tour. By comparing different versions, you can understand which elements resonate best with your audience.

• Whatfix : While primarily an interactive guide creation tool with an easy-to-use editor, Whatfix can be a valuable asset in setting up A/B tests, especially since it doesn’t require extensive coding knowledge.
• Appcues : This tool, focusing on product-led growth, integrates seamlessly with your product to make UI patterns appear native. However, its analytics features might not be as comprehensive as some of its competitors.

User feedback tools

• User Surveys: Conducting surveys is a direct way to gather qualitative feedback. This feedback is crucial for understanding the user’s perspective on your product tour.
• WalkMe : Though robust in features, WalkMe might require IT assistance to create content. It can be an excellent tool for gathering user feedback, especially in more complex product environments.

Heatmaps and user behavior analysis

• Hotjar : Creating heatmaps, Hotjar provides visual insights into where and how users interact with your tour, revealing user behavior patterns that might not be obvious through traditional analytics.
• Userlane : This tool is particularly suited to small and medium-sized businesses. While it may not offer the depth of customization larger enterprises might need, it’s effective for straightforward product tour analysis.
• Storylane : Ideal for engaging website visitors, Storylane allows you to create automated, code-free demos that can enhance your product’s experience. It’s a tool that facilitates engagement and product-led growth by enabling you to clone your environment quickly and provide an optimal product experience.

Each of these tools and techniques offers unique benefits. The key is choosing those that align best with your specific needs and goals, ensuring that your product tour educates, engages, and converts.

Selecting the right product tour software

When choosing a product tour tool, consider these essential features:

• No-code editor: A tool that doesn’t require coding allows you to create tours without relying on your engineering team, saving time and resources.
• Fully customizable styling: Your product tour should reflect your brand style. Look for options that offer customization in fonts, colors, button shapes, and custom CSS customization.
• Deep integrations: The best product tour software should seamlessly integrate with your existing tools, be it a CRM or analytics platform.
• Native A/B testing: Inbuilt A/B testing capabilities are vital for refining your tours based on user responses and behavior.
• Contextual targeting: Hyper-targeted tours, adapted according to user behavior and profiles, provide a more personalized and effective user experience.
• Comprehensive help documentation: Ensure the tool comes with thorough help documentation, critical for user onboarding and self-service support.
• Technical reliability: The tool should be robust and support various functionalities, such as mobile and single-page applications while ensuring it doesn’t hinder your product’s performance.

Remember, the right tool should align with your goals, balancing comprehensive features and user-friendly functionality.

Creating an effective product tour is a journey marked by learning and adaptation. However, certain common pitfalls can hinder this process. At Thinkific Plus, we believe in guiding you away from these mistakes, ensuring your product tours are as effective and user-friendly as possible.

Avoiding information overload

Packaging your product tour with as much information as possible is tempting, but this often leads to user overwhelm. The key is to focus on clarity and brevity:

• Focus on essentials: Highlight your product’s most crucial features. Determine what your users need to know first to get started.
• Simplicity is key: Use clear, straightforward language. Technical jargon can be off-putting unless your audience specifically requires it.
• Digestible content: Break down information into smaller, easily digestible segments. This approach helps users absorb and retain information more effectively.

The objective is to inform your users, not to flood them with information. A well-structured tour guides users through your product effortlessly, enhancing their understanding and engagement.

Embracing user feedback

Ignoring user feedback is like sailing without a compass. User insights are crucial for the continuous improvement of your product tour:

• Active feedback collection: Use surveys, direct communication, and user testing to gather feedback. This should be an ongoing process, not a one-time event.
• Adapt and improve: Analyze feedback to understand user needs and pain points, and be prepared to make changes based on what you learn.
• Evolving with your users: Your product tour should evolve alongside your product and users. Regular updates based on user feedback ensure it stays relevant and effective.

We believe in the power of listening to and learning from users. Their insights are the key to refining your product tour and making it an integral and evolving part of the user experience.

What are the key components of an effective product tour?

The key components include clarity and simplicity of content, engaging and interactive elements, personalization to cater to different user segments, and consistent alignment with user needs and goals.

How can I measure the success of my product tour?

Measure success through metrics like completion rates, user feedback, engagement metrics, and conversion rates. Utilize tools like analytics software, A/B testing, user surveys, and heatmaps for comprehensive analysis.

What are some common pitfalls in designing product tours?

Common pitfalls include overloading users with information, neglecting the importance of user feedback, lack of personalization, and failing to keep the content updated and relevant.

Conclusion 

As we conclude our exploration of creating impactful product tours, the essential takeaways are clarity, engagement, and personalization. It’s about striking the right balance — providing enough guidance to be insightful, yet not so much that it becomes overwhelming. Continuously adapt and refine your approach based on customer feedback, ensuring your tours remain relevant and resonate with your audience.

Download our free Product Tour Planning Guide

If you’re ready to take the next step and get personalized guidance to streamline your Product Tours with online learning, get pricing details, and a live demo of Thinkific Plus, don’t hesitate to reach out to our experts.

Request a call with a member of our Thinkific Plus solutions team today, and let us help you unlock the full potential of your online learning journey.

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Stephanie is a content marketing expert with a passion for connecting the dots of strategy and content. She has worked with industry leaders including HubSpot, Oracle, Travel + Leisure, and Forbes.

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Home Blog How to Create Interactive Product Tours to Enhance the Onboarding Experience

How to Create Interactive Product Tours to Enhance the Onboarding Experience

June 27, 2022 Edwin Kooistra

Onboarding is an essential process for products. It’s the time when you hook new users and get them interested in your product. One way to do this is by using product tours to show new users around.

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to create interactive product tours and what benefits they can bring to your onboarding experience.

What is a Product Tour?

A product tour is a guided tour of a product or service. It is usually created by the company that makes the product or provides the service to show potential customers what the product or service can do and how to use it.

Moreover, product tours can be in person, over the phone, or online. They are often given as part of a product demonstration or presentation. SaaS product tours can introduce new products or services or show potential customers how to use existing products or services.

Product tours are a great way to learn about a product or service before buying it. They can also help you decide whether a product or service is right for you.

Why are Creating Product Tours Essential?

Product tours are essential because they help product users learn about the product and its features. They can also be used to promote a product or to increase customer satisfaction. Product tours can have many benefits, including:

1. Improved product understanding and engagement: By providing a guided tour of the product, users can better understand how to use it and its features. This can lead to increased product engagement and satisfaction.

2. Increased product adoption: By making it easy for users to learn about a product, product tours can increase the likelihood of adopting and using it.

3. Boosted sales and conversions: Product tours can be used to promote a product, leading to increased sales and conversions.

4. Improved customer satisfaction: By providing a guided tour of the product, customers can be helped to use it more effectively and troubleshoot any problems they may have. This can lead to improved customer satisfaction.

5. Greater product awareness: SaaS product tours can help to increase awareness of a product, leading to increased sales and adoption.

5 Type of Product Tours

There are several types of product tours for SaaS products, each with advantages and disadvantages. Below is a list of some of the most popular types of product tours, along with information on what makes each one unique:

• Guided Tour
• Interactive Tour
• Screenshot Tour

1 – Guided Tour

A guided tour is a type of product walkthrough that takes the user step-by-step through the key features and functionality of the software. This type of tour is typically very comprehensive and can be quite helpful for new users who want to learn about the software before using it. However, guided tours can also be quite long and detailed, making them daunting for some users.

2 – Interactive Tour

An interactive tour is a type of product tour that allows the user to explore the software on their own, at their own pace. This type of tour typically includes comprehensive information about the software. Still, it is presented in a way that is less linear and more flexible, making it more user-friendly for some people.

3 – Video Tour

A video tour is a type of product tour that uses video to show users how to use the software. This tour can benefit new users as it provides a clear and concise overview of the software. However, video tours can also be long and detailed, making them daunting for some users.

4 – Screenshot Tour

A screenshot tour is a type of product tour that uses screenshots to show users how to use the software. This tour can benefit new users as it provides a clear and concise overview of the software. However, screenshot tours can also be long and detailed, making them daunting for some users.

5 – Text Tour

A text tour is a product tour that uses text to explain how to use the software. This tour can benefit new users as it provides a clear and concise overview of the software. However, text tours can also be long and detailed, making them daunting for some users.

5 Steps to build better Product Tours for your SaaS Business

Building a better product tour for your software as a service (SaaS) can help new users learn the ropes and existing users stay up to date on new features. Product tours can be delivered in many ways, but some critical steps to keep in mind are as follows:

• Plan your product tour around key user goals
• Keep it short and sweet
• Make it interactive
• Personalize the experience
• Test, test, and test

1 – Plan your Product Tour around key user goals

Consider what your users want to accomplish with your software, and design your tour accordingly. What are the essential features of your product? What will help your users achieve their objectives? Focus on those areas in your time.

2 – Keep it short and sweet

Your users’ attention span is limited, so ensure your tour is concise and to the point. Highlight the most important features and benefits of your product without overwhelming users with too much information at once.

3 – Make it interactive

Product tours should be interactive and engaging so users can get the most out of them. Use multimedia content such as images, videos, and animations to bring your tour to life. And provide opportunities for users to try out your product themselves to see how it works in real-world scenarios.

4 – Personalize the experience

Tailor your product tour to each user based on their needs and interests. This will help ensure they get the most relevant and helpful information from your time.

5 – Test, test, and test

Before you launch your product tour, test it thoroughly to ensure that everything works as intended. Get feedback from beta testers and other users to see if any areas need improvement. And once you’ve launched the tour, continue to monitor it and make changes as required.

5 Tips for using your Product Tour Effectively

Here are a few tips for making the most of your product tour:

• Start with the basics
• Keep it concise
• Use engaging visuals
• Highlight key benefits
• Use calls to action

1. Start with the basics

Ensure that your product tour’s best practices cover all of your product’s basic features and functionality. This will give users an excellent foundation to build upon as they explore the rest of your product.

2. Keep it concise

Don’t try to cover too much ground in your product tour. Stick to the essential information and leave out any extraneous details.

3. Use engaging visuals

Utilize images, videos, or other visuals to help bring your product tour to life. This will make it more enjoyable for users to follow along and understand what you’re trying to communicate.

4. Highlight key benefits

Throughout your product tour, highlight how using your product can benefit users. This will help motivate them to stick with the tour and see how your product can help them achieve their goals.

5. Use calls to action

Encourage users to take specific steps throughout your product tour. For example, you might ask them to sign up for a free trial or download a white paper. You can keep users engaged by providing clear calls to action and helping them get the most out of your product tour.

By following these tips, you can create a practical product tour to help users learn about your product and see how it can benefit them. By providing a great user experience, you can encourage users to stick with your product and keep using it long after the tour.

4 Best Product Tour Examples for Inspiration

There are many different ways to design a product tour. Some common examples include:

• Google Drive

1 – Dropbox

It is a file sharing and storage service that allows users to sync files across devices and share them with others. The product tour example for Dropbox walks users through the service’s various features, including creating and sharing folders, accessing files offline, and using the security features to protect their data.

2 – Google Drive

It is a cloud-based storage service that allows users to store and access their files anywhere. The product tour for Google Drive walks users through the service’s various features, including how to create and share documents, collaborate with others in real time, and access their files offline.

3 – OneDrive

Microsoft’s cloud-based storage service allows users to store and access their files from anywhere. The product tour for OneDrive walks users through the service’s various features, including how to create and share documents, collaborate with others in real time, and access their files offline.

4 – iCloud

Apple’s cloud-based storage service allows users to store and access their files from anywhere. The product tour for iCloud walks users through the service’s various features, including how to create and share documents, collaborate with others in real-time and access their files offline.

Wrapping up

Creating interactive product tours is essential to providing a great onboarding experience for your SaaS. By following the steps we’ve outlined, you can make better product tours that help users understand how your product works and increase their confidence in using it. We hope these examples have given you some inspiration for creating your product tour.

Edwin Kooistra - Product Marketer & Founder

Technology can be a huge differentiator but leveraging emerging technologies can be challenging. After my degree in Business Information Technology I decided to work on the provider side of Technology, because I believe Technology providers play an important role in guiding enterprises on their digital journey. Besides helping tech businesses to optimize their growth and go-to-market strategies, I also like to write about the topic. I hope you find it useful!

Related Content

SaaS Product Tours: 11 Tactics & 18 Examples

Scroll down to see all examples

Product tours are unbeatable for helping new users get to know your product’s interface. These tours are typically a series of tooltips, or contextual tips, that spotlight UI elements one at a time. They’re perfect for showcasing key features or guiding users through processes by indicating where to click or what to do next.

For a straightforward feature introduction, users might progress through the tour by clicking a “Next” button. However, if the goal is to teach a process, consider a more interactive approach. Encouraging users to engage directly with the product can make the learning experience more memorable and demonstrate the simplicity of your interface.

Importantly, don’t feel restricted to just one tour. Consider having a comprehensive initial tour to orient new users, and then offer additional, focused tours for specific processes or features they need to understand or set up.

While multiple tours are beneficial, be mindful to keep them concise and not overloaded with text. People are unlikely to retain information from lengthy or dense explanations. The primary goal of product tours is to spotlight critical elements at the moment, not to detail every menu item or icon.

SaaS Product Tour Tactics

Skip the intro message.

Informing users about what a tour will cover can help manage their expectations. However, from my user onboarding research, I’ve noticed a big difference in how users feel when they’re given the option to start a flow versus being automatically put into one. Having the choice makes users feel in control, while being automatically placed in a flow can make them feel like they have to just go with it.

Make it more personal

Adding a personal touch to marketing often enhances its effectiveness, and the same principle applies to product tours. Consider introducing yourself with your name and a photo to establish a more personal connection with users. While many user onboarding tools might not offer this feature by default, unlike Intercom, implementing it manually is generally straightforward and can significantly enrich the user experience.

a) for even more context

If text explanations in your tooltips seem insufficient, enhance them with screenshots to show users exactly what steps to follow.

b) to make it more engaging

Indeed, images serve more than just an informational purpose—they can also make your communication more engaging. Take inspiration from Livechat’s onboarding process, which incorporates well-crafted graphics to highlight features.

Show progress

Incorporating numbers for each step or adding a progress bar in your flow can significantly enhance the user experience by providing clear indicators of how much is left to complete.

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Use a short survey to personalize further experience

Pendo, a user onboarding software, employs a clever strategy for managing a high-friction step in their setup process—adding their code to your app. Instead of presenting this task upfront, they guide users through exploring other features first. Only after users have completed the product tour do they introduce the Polls feature, asking if users are ready to add the code or prefer to explore more.

Add follow-up actions

The conclusion of a product tour shouldn’t leave users wondering about their next steps. Ensure you guide them by suggesting further actions they can take.

Let users replay the tour: 

A) use “remind me later”.

b) Allow to start the flow over

c) Link to tours from your Resource center

Focus on the bigger story rather than the UI

Mixpanel offers a notable variation on traditional product tours. Rather than guiding users through the interface with instructions on where to click, their user onboarding approach focuses on teaching the key concepts behind their software.

Want to see other user onboarding examples?

• 32 Signup flow examples
• 94 User onboarding Checklist examples
• 92 Feature setup page examples

18 Product Tour Examples

Exploring compelling examples of feature walk-throughs, also known as in-app tutorials or product tours, can spark inspiration for crafting your own SaaS tour. This collection includes screenshots of various tours accompanied by brief commentaries. Each example highlights unique approaches to guiding users through a software’s features, from interactive tutorials that encourage direct engagement to conceptual overviews that deepen understanding.

Airtable product tour

What’s good about this product tour:

• Introduces the main features in an easily digestible form.
• Allows going back to previous steps.
• Shows your progress through the tour.
• Ends with a follow-up action: pointing to the Resource Center .

What’s bad about this product tour:

• The elements are not sufficiently highlighted; they are only outlined with a barely visible yellow border.

ActiveCampaign feature explainer tour

What’s good about this feature explainer tour:

• Is based on an example automation that doesn’t require users to set up anything. For more complex features, this might be a better approach than having users create it from scratch.
• Helps users understand the functionality rather than just explaining the UI.

What’s bad about this feature explainer tour:

• The text is heavy and demands a lot from the reader, leading to a high cognitive load.
• It’s not very engaging—reading through, I found it hard to get excited about starting to use the product.

Ayoa product walk-through

What’s good about this walk-through:

• Features short and easy-to-read copy, highlighting the most important information in bold text.
• Allows you to navigate back and forth.

What’s bad about this walk-through :

• Progresses with the click of the “Next” button, encouraging the user to focus on reading instead of doing, which might be perfectly suited for this scenario.
• Lacks a progress indicator.

Bluescape in-app tutorial

What’s good about this app tutorial:

• Includes descriptive images that aid in understanding what to do.
• Is concise and straightforward.
• Begins immediately, without an introductory message.

What’s bad about this app tutorial :

• The name “Welcome Tour” could be changed to reflect the benefit or outcome of completing it, such as “Start Creating,” which aligns with the message displayed midway through the tour.

Booksy UI walk-through

What’s good about this feature walk-trough:

• Displays your progress throughout the tour.

What’s bad about this feature walk-trough :

• Could focus on teaching the process through a specific example instead of merely highlighting UI elements.
• Initially displays two messages simultaneously, which nearly replicate each other in text.
• Features low contrast between the tooltips and the main interface, affecting visibility.

Chargebee embedded tour

• Allows you to grasp the potential of Chargebee through a simplified demo, without any prior setup required.
• The copy is captivating and motivates you to start exploring.
• Smoothly incorporates three setup options into the tour, linking each to a specific feature.
• Recommends follow-up actions in the final step.

What’s bad about this product tour :

• If you rapidly click through the steps, focusing only on the titles, it’s not entirely clear whether you’re setting up your account or simply taking a test drive.

Conceptboard intro tour

• Short, no bullsh*t approach.
• Shows your progress and lets you navigate back and forth.
• In fact, shown are 2 tours at the same time which creates confusion in terms of what to focus on.

Conceptboard web app tour

What’s good about this web app tour:

• Makes you go through the process of creating the board and using the main features—thus experience the main value yourself.

What’s bad about this web app tour :

• Has a few unnecessary steps which could be removed, making the experience smoother and less tiring.
• The amount of text and elements in the tour make it hard to comprehend.

Hubspot contacts UI tour

• The tour lets you experience what it’s like working with Hubspot and efficiently goes through the main points without pointing out unnecessary features.
• It’s based on dummy data so you don’t need to set up or import anything in advance.
• The story make the experience more engaging.
• Buttons are self-explanatory, telling you what’s going to happen next.
• Some parts of the copy could be shortened or a bit more clear at the first glance (so that one understands the point without reading it all).
• Adding links to additional content inside the tour can be distracting. New concepts should be introduced after users finish the tour.

Copper walk-through

Intercom conversations tour

What’s good about this in-app tour:

• Adding the name and the photo of the guide make the tour more personal and friendly.
• Is short and easy to understand.

Jira new feature design walk-through:

Livechat tour

Miro intro tour

Monday.com base feature walk-through

Shipbob onboarding tour

Freshdesk UI walk-through

First screen examples

Onboarding checklist examples

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What Is A Product Tour And How Do You Build One Code-Free?

10 min read

If you’re building a product tour for the first time, it’s hard to know where to start.

You want an onboarding process that matches your brand values, respects the needs of multiple user groups, is intuitive to follow, AND that ultimately ends up making you money!

Just the thought of creating something like that from scratch is probably enough to make you dizzy with anxiety.

But fear not! You don’t have to re-invent the wheel.

Let me explain how you can build a product tour without writing a single line of code.

• A product tour shows customers how to use the features of your product that they need in order to activate .
• Make sure your product tour is interactive , not linear .
• Most good product tours contain a welcome screen , a microsurvey for segmentation , a checklist , and multiple experience flows.
• It’s incredibly difficult to build a product tour from scratch unless you’re a coding genius, or have substantial dev resources available.
• It’s much easier (and cheaper) to use a product tour software like Userpilot instead.

Definition of a product tour

Product tours are used in user onboarding as a way to show customers how to derive value from your app.

Ideally, they illustrate to the customer what your product does in an interactive and engaging fashion.

A good product tour will guide users towards the core value of your product, a measurement that is relative to the person using it.

As the value of your product dawns on the customer, they will experience something known as the “ Aha Moment ,” which is when the penny starts to drop about why working with your business might be personally beneficial to them.

Once the customer experiences the value of your product in a first-hand way, they are said to be activated .

SaaS businesses often use product tours to onboard new users.

That being said, tours are just as valuable for highlighting new features during secondary onboarding as they are for the initial part of the user journey.

Feature adoption is correlated with metrics like retention, which have major financial consequences for SaaS businesses.

For more information about the value of retention, please read this post .

I’ve also seen SaaS businesses use product tours as part of employee training, especially when understanding a complicated app is essential to working in towards customer success.

Interactive product tours are essential

We’ve written numerous times on this blog in the past about how onboarding is like customer education. It’s an ongoing process, which never ends.

If you think back to your time in school, there were some teachers who would drone on and on, regardless of how engaged you were in the experience.

But there were also other teachers who turned learning into an interactive, two-way conversation and took your needs into account. I’m willing to bet you liked their classes more!

The product tour equivalent of the boring teacher is the linear product tour . And users hate them…

A linear product tour will generally deliver:

• Exactly the same information
• About exactly the same product features
• In exactly the same way
• To every single user

Put another way, a linear product tour doesn’t take the unique needs of individual customers into account.

The customer is simply processed by means of a top-down system, one that was pre-decided by a remote group of SaaS executives long before you ever came onto the scene as a customer.

If this sounds soulless and tedious, it’s because it is.

All it leads to is confused customers. Look at this example from a newsletter product tour where a user was asked to create a newsletter before uploading their email list. Hmmm…

So what’s the alternative? Interactive product tours.

As the name suggests, interactive tours are a back and forth between the customer and the product they are using.

The customer is only shown the narrow range of product features which are of interest to them, which is probably not many for a new product.

And they are an active part of the interactive product tour, which means that they get to complete small tasks and engage in “learning by doing.”

Since the SaaS world commonly associates the phrase “product tours” with the linear variety of tour, we often refer to great product tours on our website as “interactive walkthroughs,” just to make the distinction a bit clearer.

If you’re wondering how to create interactive product tours for your business, read on!

Main elements of a product tour

While every product tour is different, there are a number of key elements that we see repeatedly cropping up in the best tours we see online.

Here is our recipe for an excellent interactive product tour.

Start with the welcome screen

The welcome screen is a really important component of every great product tour, because it’s the first thing that your customer sees after sign-up.

It’s what’s known as a “ dedicated UI pattern ,” meaning that it takes up the whole of the user interface.

Here are some things that are included on most welcome screens:

• A smiley photo of one of your team
• A friendly message to welcome the new customer personally by name
• An introduction to your business, complete with a quick recap of the value you’re providing
• A quick outline of the next steps in your onboarding process

For example, if you were operating project management software, your welcome screen might say something like:

Welcome David!

We really appreciate you signing up to use PM HQ, your one-stop-shop for making sure all the tasks in your accounting business get done on time, every time.

Allow us to show you what a task board looks like on the next page!

Here’s a simple example of a welcome screen that was built using Userpilot by social media scheduling app Postfity:

Note the smiley face, the friendly tone, and the playful reminder to the user of what Postfity’s main value proposition is: turning the user into a social media ninja!

To improve this welcome screen, Postfity could address the user by name and include a photo of one of their team.

Remember to segment your users

But here’s the thing: if you were to make too much of being warm and fuzzy on your welcome screen, you’re just going to get in the way of what the user ultimately wants to do: which is to use your software.

So the smartest SaaS companies also use the welcome screen as a way to segment users into distinct groups.

Each customer segment has its own “Jobs to be done,” or types of goals that they want to achieve by using your product.

So for the project management example, those might look like this:

• Project manager: organize tasks and make sure they get done on time
• Junior employee: focus on own tasks
• Accountant: view financial data for each task
• CEO: ensure that the bigger picture of the business is proceeding according to plan

Practically speaking, the easiest way to segment your users in-app is by using something called a microsurvey .

This is a short survey with 2-3 questions that pops up right after the welcome screen. Here’s what a microsurvey looks like, courtesy of Kontentino :

I always think it’s a nice detail when SaaS businesses send surveys like this in-app, rather than to the user’s email inbox.

Even though an email might feel a bit more familiar, using the microsurvey keeps the customer in your app and away from the distractions of their inbox.

This means that you can expect a higher rate of engagement.

Create an activation checklist

Once the user has filled out your microsurvey, you should have a pretty good idea of which customer segment they belong to and which Jobs to be Done they want to aim at.

The next part of the product tour is create a checklist which summarizes those Jobs to be Done and get the user to work through them.

Your checklist should be different for every user cohort, and it should only contain the 2-3 specific product features that a particular customer segment needs to understand in order to activate.

If you give any more guidance than that, you’ll end up overwhelming your user, and risk giving them a linear product tour instead of an interactive walkthrough.

Here’s a good example of a checklist, once more from Postfity:

In Postfity’s case, to get their users to experience the core value of their product and activate, they need them to do two things:

• Add a social media account
• Schedule a social media post

Looking at the screenshot again, you can see that Postfity’s checklist asks new users to do both of those things.

This means that Postfity knows that any new users who complete the checklist will end up activating as a matter of course, which is great news from a commercial perspective.

But there are a couple of additional items on the checklist: Signed up , and Account Created . Why is that?

Here, Postfity’s thinking is that it’s motivating to give users credit for easy tasks that they’ve already achieved. That makes it more probable that those users will want to finish the rest of the checklist.

You’ve probably experienced the psychological pull of an unfinished checklist item. It’s quite hard to resist finishing it!

This is called the Zeigarnik effect, and it ensures that unfinished checklist items stay on our minds.

If you’re wondering what tasks to put on your own checklists, it will depend on what your users need in order to activate.

To find that out, look at your product analytics and compare the product features adopted by power users against those favored by users who churned early.

The features that are always favored by power users but never learned by Day 1 churners are likely to be the features that a given segment needs in order to activate.

Build an experience flow for each checklist item

To really make sure that your user internalizes how each feature works, your product tour should include an interactive experience flow for each activation step on the checklist.

That’s a bit jargon-y, so let me explain what I mean.

Going back to our Postfity example, it would be tedious for the user to read instructions like:

• Click on the blue button to the top-left which says “Connect accounts”
• Choose a social media account
• Click “Connect”
• Specify who this account belongs to

I can guarantee that the user would be starting to doze off at this point!

Far more effective is to have the user experience what it’s like to connect their account first hand through an interactive product tour.

In this case, Postfity created a tooltip that automatically highlights the right button to the user to get them started:

And for the next stage of activation, there’s also a handy tooltip showing the user what to do:

Tooltips are just one of a wide variety of UI elements that you can use to give guidance to your users in an interactive product tour.

Other resources include:

• Progress completion bars
• Demo content
• Content templates

For more about UX patterns, I recommend reading this post .

Is it better to create a user onboarding process with or without code?

Now that you know what goes into an interactive product tour , you’ll need to choose whether you build your user onboarding systems manually or look for a tool to help you.

Unless you’re highly tech-savvy and have built websites and mobile apps before, my guess is that it’s going to be tricky to build a product tour from scratch.

Consider that even creating something as simple as a tooltip will normally require 70-100 lines of code.

Then multiply that by all the different UX elements you need in your product tours… and remember that you need a separate product tour for each individual user segment!

It’s a daunting task, to say the least!

Do your developers really want to build (and maintain) multiple interactive walkthroughs AND build your whole site at the same time?

Use code-free product tour software

Fortunately, in 2022 you don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time you want to build a new product tour. The right software will save you a lot of time.

If you can allow even your non-technical product manager to build great product tours, imagine how much time (and money) this will save your development team!

The right product tour software will empower your product marketing team to be able to run cost-effective product experiments at the drop of a hat.

Since no product tour is perfect the first time you build it, being able to A/B test results on the basis of performance data is really helpful.

So which product tour software should you choose?

Give Userpilot a try

Our software, Userpilot , makes it easy to build product tours without using any code.

All you’ll need to do is install our Chrome extension, add a snippet of Javascript, and then you can get started.

It’s easy to build microsurveys in Userpilot. To find out how, read this article .

If you want to customize the microsurvey to your brand’s personality, you can do that as well, without using any code.

If you want to segment your users as part of your onboarding, Userpilot lets you do that too. You can use a combination of the following segments…

• User attributes
• Custom events
• Feature tags

… to create some really unique user cohorts:

If you want to assign experience flows to your segments, Userpilot will firstly let you create a checklist …

… and then build a unique flow for each of the activation tasks on the list.

It’s in the building of experience flows that Userpilot really shines. The sheer diversity of tools you have at your fingertips is huge, ranging from tooltips and modals to hotspots and sliders.

Here’s what building a tooltip looks like in Userpilot:

To help you A/B test your product tours, Userpilot’s software also comes with a dedicated analytics suite.

Userpilot starts at $249 per month for up to 2500 MAUs.

Get a demo today!

After reading this article, your user onboarding should be a breeze!

You now know how to:

• Distinguish a linear product tour from an interactive walkthrough
• Recognize the key features of a product tour
• Build product tours without writing a line of code

Userpilot is an incredibly sophisticated tool that specializes in building interactive product tours.

You can give it a try for free, with no obligations whatsoever.

So what do you have to lose? Click on the banner to get started.

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How to Design a Great Product Tour

Guidelines and examples for creating beautiful and effective product tours.

Product tours handle the essential job of introducing and familiarizing users with your product or new features. When executed well, they improve UX and encourage users to take meaningful actions. Great product tours also decrease new users’ time to value, enhancing conversion, activation, and retention rates. 

However, when they first hit the market, product tours got a bad name. V1 product tours weren’t interactive or efficient. Long tours bombarded users right when they logged onto the platform, forcing them to click through every little thing the platform could do. Overall, product tours were overwhelming and not immediately helpful, with no clear goal in mind. Chances are you’ve taken a bad product tour, but we can guarantee it wasn’t a Lou product tour. 

In fact, the contrast between good product tours and bad product tours was so stark that some companies started labeling good, interactive product tours as “guided tours” or “product walkthroughs.” They claim they are better than typical product tours because they interactively teach and help users reach milestones and key activities. Here at Lou, we think that’s exactly what a great product tour should do. So we keep it simple and just call product tours, product tours.

Let’s dive into what makes a great product tour and why they’re a powerful tool for increasing product adoption. 

What Makes a Product Tour Powerful?

Great product tours are powerful because they can:

Drive product adoption and the adoption of new features

Make onboarding self-serve and decrease support tickets

Catch users in-product at just the right moment to increase engagement

Gamify the onboarding process & lower the learning curve for adopting a new platform

Give insights into user behavior so you can analyze, iterate, & improve their experience 

In fact, in 2021, 85% of users who experienced a Lou product tour reported that it was helpful!

5 Qualities of a Great Product Tour 

Distinct features and varying user needs may make effective product tours look different from platform to platform. However, there are universal best practices for designing a great product tour that helps users adopt products with ease. 

They’re designed with a goal in mind

They’re timely and relevant to the user’s journey

They’re well-designed (to-the-point and look built-in house)

They let users opt-out 

They’re tested and iterated on

5 Qualities of a Bad Product Tour 

Bad product tours do not consider the user’s journey or goals. They ultimately give users more obstacles to overcome instead of actionable assistance.

They don’t have a clear goal and aren’t driving users towards an action or milestone

They require too many steps or include too many blocks of text

The information contained isn’t relevant to where the user is at in their journey

They hold users hostage and force them to take the whole tour

They’re published but never iterated or tested on again

What Makes a Great Product Tour? 

Let’s dive deeper into what specific elements make a product tour great. 

They have a clear goal

The best product tours focus on goals, not features. They include concise but in-depth directions on how to help users solve a problem. Without a clear goal, you risk squandering your user’s motivation and attention, which may be difficult to regain. 

Goals might look like reaching “aha” moments, or when a user has an emotional reaction and suddenly grasps the value of your product. Goals could also look like significant milestones in a user’s journey, like getting them from signup to onboarded, or even to an upsell. Similarly, goals could be achieved on a smaller scale, like getting users to adopt a new feature or visit a particular web page. 

In this example from GMail, they launched a tour that announced two new features, the ability to "chat and make video calls in GMail". As you can see in their 4 step tour, GMail announces the new features and then guides the user through navigating to the new chat and meet options in the GMail nav bar.

By setting a goal, product tours will drive results for the milestones and metrics you care most about. Additionally, goal-setting is a fast and effective way to see if your product tour generates the results you want. 

With Lou, designating a goal for your product tour is as simple as one click. Lou’s goal tracking feature captures how many users adopt a feature, click a button, or visit a page in your app. By creating a goal and linking it to a Lou tour, you receive access to advanced analytics that show exactly how effective the tour is at driving users toward its associated goal. 

They reach users at the right time 

Great product tours trigger tailored messaging to specific users and meet them at the right time in their journey, like when they’ve reached a particular page or completed a specific milestone, for example. Showing tours to the right users when they complete a milestone can encourage further engagement. 

For onboarding tours , we recommend setting them to start immediately after a user creates their account. Sometimes, it’s helpful to trigger a product tour the second or third time a user logs in if they didn’t complete the tour the first time. Note that just because a user opts out once doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t be interested in taking the tour a little later. 

Segmenting your audience will allow you to display the right tours, to the correct users, at the moment it's most helpful to them. Targeted tours help users reach their “aha moment” efficiently.

When purchasing a product-tour solution, make sure it offers the ability to easily create user segments so that you can launch targeted tours without involving your dev team.

In the example below, you can see two different onboarding tours within the same platform. One onboarding tour is geared towards admin users whose first milestone is inviting their team, while the second onboarding tour is designed for general users whose first milestone is to create an account and join the team the admin invited them to. Targeting tours to different user segments ensures that the message is relevant and personalized to each user.

They are well-designed 

Users are more likely to engage with your product tour if it’s well-designed and looks native to your product. It’s also imperative that you keep your tour short and to-the-point. Users are 3 times more likely to complete a tour if it has 5 steps or less. If you need a tour to cover a bulk of information, think about how you can break it up into multiple tours that are easier to digest. 

Here are some more tips for a well-designed product tour:

Choose a color for the tour steps that stands out against your platform, and keep the font and corner radius of the tour steps consistent with your brand. Choose a text color and size that’s easy to read, too. 

Add visuals. Images are valuable because they can make tours more engaging or allow users to see simplified examples. Occasionally, embedding instructional videos right into a tour step is helpful so that users can watch them without leaving the page they’re on. 

Ensure you position each tour step close to where the user needs to click or read and that it’s not obscuring important information. If it is, be sure to change the positioning of the tour step. 

Consider darkening your platform’s background during the tour. A dark environment is helpful to minimize distractions if there’s one place you want to draw your users' attention to. However, do not add an overlay on users' screens when you want to familiarize them with an entire page, like in an onboarding tour on a dashboard.

They let users opt-out

An excellent product tour doesn’t hold users hostage—rather, it allows them to opt-out through these 3 methods: 

Tell users what the tour is about at the get-go and ask them if they’d like to take it. They can continue by clicking the button (call-to-action) that would allow them to start the tour.

Include an exit icon in each step of the tour so users can choose to leave at any time. 

Lastly, you can also elect for product tours to close when a user clicks on the background of your platform. This can be a powerful option in the right setting, but we recommend being cautious when choosing this opt-out method, as an accidental mouse click could cause users to close a tour before they are ready. 

They’re tested and iterated on 

Don’t treat product tours as one-and-done solutions—test and iterate based on the analytics you receive. A/B testing unlocks the ability to compare the behavior and progress of users who received product tours to those who didn’t. You can also pair an A/B test with a code-free goal to obtain access to advanced analytics that can help you determine how effective your experience is at driving users towards a key activity.

We recommend evaluating how long users are spending on each step of the product tour, where they’re dropping off, and which particular product tours are more helpful than others. Integrating your product tour software with your analytics provider will help you better understand the impact product tours have on your overall metrics. At Lou, we offer one-click integrations with no set-up time with most major analytics providers. 

Lastly, we recommend surveying your users at the end of a product tour to gain quantitative data into their experience. However it’s important to be thoughtful about how often a user would be asked to take a survey so that you can be sure to maintain a frictionless user experience. 

With all of these elements to consider, product tours can feel like a technical and challenging undertaking. But with Lou, you can create completely code-free product tours with very little time and effort. Our average user launches their first product tour in less than an hour!

Ready to create compelling product tours that guide, train, and delight your users? Create a free account now and start building your own tours.

Published on September 10th, 2021

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The 19 Best Product Tour Software for Marketing, Sales, & Product

In order to effectively sell software to someone, they have to first understand what it does. 

Screenshots and descriptions work to a point, but they often leave something to be desired. Free trials are great if your product is simple, but if it's too feature-rich or complex for prospects to understand it easily, they might never make it to that "aha" moment. 

Getting a prospect into a trial or on a monthly contract is only the beginning of the battle. Even if someone purchases your product, if they’re not able to accomplish what they want with it, chances are you’ll struggle with retention. 

One great solution in the market to overcome these challenges is product tour software. 

What is product tour software?

Product tour software is a type of no-code application that makes it easy to build walkthroughs that help leads and customers better understand your product. 

Product tour software can be used by marketers to give site visitors access to interactive product tours, by sales teams to demo their products and create POCs, and by product managers to create onboarding tours that improve the onboarding experience for new users.

The 19 best product tour software platforms

Each of the different use cases of product tour software — marketing, sales, and product management — has its own set of tools within the space that caters to the way they need to use the software. So below, we've split the tools into lists for marketers, sales, and product to help you better understand which specific tools are right for your team's needs.

Best for sales teams

Product tour software for sales teams is often referred to as demo automation software . It's used by sales teams either as a custom demo environment for running live demos or as a way to create product POCs quickly and easily.

Here are the five best product tour tools for SaaS sales teams.

TestBox sits on top of a real, live instance of your product, so it not only includes 100% of your product's features and functionality, but it also always reflects the most up-to-date version of your product. That means that when your product changes, there's no work for your team to do to get new features to show up in your TestBox sandboxes.

Each TestBox sandbox is preconfigured with sample data and functional integrations, so leads don't have to enter PII or connect critical company systems to fully experience your product — it feels as though they've already been using it for months.

Additionally, a quick links menu lists your top features, enabling leads to quickly navigate to the features they care about testing the most, and guided walkthroughs explain what each feature does and how to use it. This saves your team time and eliminates the need for sales reps to hand-hold leads as they navigate your product.

AEs can run live demos using TestBox sandboxes. Unique sandboxes can be generated instantly and infused with data that's specific to a prospect's industry. Additionally, AEs can enable and hide specific features in the quick links menu to keep sales demos focused on what leads care about most.

After a live demo, AEs can send unique POCs to leads as leave-behinds instead of static sales enablement slides and PDFs. Then, using TestBox's advanced analytics, they can see which stakeholders accessed the playground, what features they tested, and how long they spent testing overall and on individual features to follow up with hyper-personalized communications.

Want to learn more? Schedule a demo to see how TestBox can help you create on-demand, personalized demo environments and POCs for every lead.

2. Demostack  

Demostack has two different plan options: One lets you do an overlay of your existing demo environment to show different leads custom data during live demos. The other lets you create a clone of your product to send to leads as a POC. 

Demostack offers a number of interesting features like the ability to create demo templates, which can save your sales team time when building demos. They also offer a presenter mode so sales folks can include notes in their demos, ensuring they hit all the most important talking points throughout their pitch. 

Related Reading: The Best Demostack Competitors and Alternatives

3. Consensus

Consensus is kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure video demo tool. Essentially what you do is create demo videos of different features of your product and upload them to the Consensus platform, and then their software lets prospects select which features they want to learn about, effectively letting them create their own demo path. 

You get access to performance analytics which show where people drop off in a demo or which CTAs are converting best to help presales folks further optimize demos. They also have a few integrations that allow you to easily share links with prospects.   

4. Reprise Replicate

Reprise Replicate lets you create a clone of your software to give prospects an in-depth look at your product’s functionality. You’re able to customize the data in the clone per prospect to make it as relevant as possible. There’s also the option to create templates for different verticals, which gives reps a great starting point and saves a lot of time. 

Another standout feature is the ability to clone your product quickly at any time. That way you can always have the most up-to-date version ready for leads. You also get access to analytics that show what’s working with your demos and the areas you can improve.

Related Reading: The Best Reprise Competitors and Alternatives

Saleo helps teams deliver more streamlined and personalized guided product demonstrations with its browser extension that lets sales reps overwrite the data displayed in an existing demo environment.

Teams can create one or more overlays inside of Saleo to show more personalized information while demoing. None of these overlays change the data in the actual demo environment; instead, they're just masks over the underlying data created by Saleo's browser extension.

If AEs make changes to the data while demoing, those changes are abandoned after the browser extension is turned off, ensuring that all sales reps have clean demo environments to work out of every time they start a new demo call.  

Related Reading: The Best Saleo Competitors and Alternatives

Best for marketing teams

Product tour software for marketing teams, often referred to as interactive demo software , are screengrab-based tools that allow marketers to embed step-by-step walkthroughs of the products on their websites to turn more site visitors into trials or sales leads. These code-free tools let marketers build tours with a Chrome extension or another browser add-on.

Here are the five best product tour tools for marketing teams at SaaS companies.

6. Storylane

With Storylane you’re able to quickly create product tours with no coding knowledge. Their tool records you going through a process, then automatically stitches the different steps together to create the walkthrough. You can also build multiple flows within a product tour to give viewers the option to go through the tours for features that are most relevant to them. 

You can further personalize the experience using Storylane’s integrations which allow you to send specific demos based on a person’s job and market segment. You can also include custom forms from a number of marketing automation tools like HubSpot to capture prospect information during their intro to your product.

7. Navattic

Navattic is another no-code tool that allows you to create product tours. It also uses screengrab technology, but it doesn’t automatically stitch together the steps. This can give you some more control over the flow, but it also means a little longer initial setup time in most cases. You grab screens of key features and then stitch the screens together using tooltips and modals.

They also offer a good amount of design tools to help your product walkthrough match the look and feel of your website. 

Further, you can view performance analytics to understand what product tours are most compelling or where people drop off, and you can even connect it to other marketing tools like Salesforce to better understand how your product tours affect prospects at different points in your sales funnel.

Related Reading: The Best Navattic Competitors and Alternatives  

Arcade offers marketing teams the ability to make incredibly dynamic interactive guides that show off your user experience. Instead of having static pages, you can do things like pan across a page and zoom in on a certain point to make the demo feel more interactive. You can also create hotspots on a page to draw attention to a certain feature and show viewers where to click. 

Another standout feature is the ability to break product tours into chapters. This way you can segment out the tour and even include CTAs at different points to encourage conversions. Last, Arcade has a synthetic voice feature that allows you to create voice-overs on demand in multiple languages.    

9. Reprise Replay

If you want to make sure your product tours are pixel-perfect, Reprise Replay is a good one to consider. They offer a robust design toolset that lets you make your interactive walkthroughs look just as good as any of your other digital properties. You’re also able to do things like create pulsing elements in the walkthrough to draw viewers’ attention to a specific spot. 

Another great feature is the ability to use clips — which are elements you can add to mimic the functionality of your product — to make your interactive tour more dynamic. You also get access to advanced performance metrics to better understand the impact of your walkthroughs.  

If you create a high volume of product walkthroughs for a number of prospects, you’ll want to check out Walnut. With it, you’re able to create walkthrough templates that team members can then personalize further for specific folks. You’re also able to do things like set expiration dates or add access codes for walkthroughs to ensure only the right people have access. 

Another standout feature of Walnut is its AI integration that can help you write text quickly and efficiently for guided tours. You’re also able to collaborate with teammates in real-time to help make the best walkthrough possible. 

Finally, you’re able to collect viewers' comments directly in your demos to get their feedback and respond right away to any questions or concerns they may have.

Related Reading: The Best Walnut.io Alternatives and Competitors  

Best for product teams

Product tour software for product managers is often referred to as digital adoption platforms or user onboarding software. It's used to help new customers get onboarded with a product quickly by showing them around the product, helping them find the features they need, teaching them how to use those features, improving product adoption and user retention, and decreasing churn.

Here are the nine best digital adoption tools for SaaS product managers.

Pendo is a tool that lets teams create effective product tours and engaging in-app guides. It’s great for the new customer onboarding process and can help with feature adoption and activation, decreasing the amount of time your customer success team needs to spend getting new customers up to speed. 

Recently they added an AI product that lets you automate making guides. The AI also gives insights into what’s working well with your current user journey and offers suggestions to optimize the product experience further. With Pendo you also get access to analytics to better understand how customers are using your product and areas where they might be struggling.

12. Whatfix

Whatfix offers two distinct products. Their first product is a digital onboarding widget that lets you add in-app messages to help guide customers. It’s similar in functionality to others on the list but does include some interesting features like auto-translation for content you create in their app. 

You can also export content and flows you build in their app to use in knowledge base FAQs or learning management systems.

Their other product is an analysis tool. It tracks customers’ actions when they’re using your site or product to gather insights about the customer journey and help you better understand how they are using and navigating your product. You can view high-level analytics or segment cohorts to dive deeper into results, helping you get laser-focused with your efforts.  

13. Userpilot

Userpilot is one of the better-known names in the digital onboarding space. With their product, you can create a variety of in-app messages to help with customer onboarding. You’re also able to create messages to help with account expansion and automate them for certain points to help the message land and increase user adoption for key features. 

One unique feature is the ability to A/B test messages to see what works best. You can also localize content so viewers see messages in their local language. You’re also able to customize the design of the in-app messages through custom CSS, which helps keep all your experiences on brand.

14. Intercom

Intercom, primarily a customer support tool, is a little different than some of the others on the list. Instead of using in-app messages that function like pop-up reminders, it lets you interact through pop-up CTA windows. You can send messages based on actions, and it gives customers the opportunity to ask questions if they’re stuck. 

You can also create microsurveys and NPS surveys, showing them to customers through Intercom’s in-app widget to gather customer satisfaction data.

If you want to get really in-depth with your onboarding, Intercom’s Series product lets you do that. You can create custom onboarding flows with conditional logic to contact customers through a variety of channels and at a variety of points. It’s incredibly useful to help you keep things moving forward, reduce the learning curve, and curate specific experiences.  

15. Appcues

If you’re looking for something that’s quick to set up and easy to use, Appcues might be worth checking out. They have a visual builder that makes creating in-app messages quick and easy. You also get access to a number of different design tools to create a cohesive experience. 

Some other features of note are the ability to create segments with conditional logic to have custom flows that align with user behavior. You can also collect customer feedback through surveys to measure customer satisfaction and continually iterate and improve your onboarding flows.  

16. UserGuiding

If you’re a smaller team with a tighter budget, UserGuiding could be a great product for you. They have one of the most cost-effective plans available — good for startups — and you get a lot of functionality for the price. You can create onboarding checklists, add dynamic in-app messaging to guide customers, create a resource center, and even have custom user segments. 

You also get access to engagement analytics as well as the ability to identify and track specific users. On their higher-cost plans, you also get access to additional product tour features like content localization and material scheduling, which allows you to show content within a specific time frame you set.  

17. Userflow

Userflow is similar to Intercom in the sense that it primarily uses chat-like window pop-ups to interact with customers. You can create workflows to engage customers and encourage them to complete different tasks. These come in a few different forms like messages and checklists. 

They also have an AI bot tool you can train on your documentation and website data to respond to customer requests. It’s offered on all their plans and could be a great way to further engage customers. They also have no-code event tracking, which empowers non-technical teams to create events and limits reliance on developers. 

18. Chameleon

Chameleon is a highly customizable option for teams who want to get more granular with segmentation. You can create custom audiences and trigger certain events based on the group someone falls in. They also offer dynamic personalization, which means you can have different content or styles based on the account or user viewing the page. 

Chameleon also offers the ability to A/B different flows to see which performs best and a variety of on-page triggers like hovering, clicking, keyboard inputs, and more. They also have a scheduling feature that allows you to pre-set when experiences start and end, which can be useful for sales or other promotional efforts.  

Walkme is unique among the options on this list because it offers solutions for both employee onboarding and customer experiences. Both have similar functionality, like pre-built templates for different application processes, to help your team get started quickly. Both also offer user recording analysis so you can see what steps users are taking and what roadblocks they face. 

Both let you create on-screen tips and suggestions to build tutorials that educate and encourage users. They also offer a tool called Action Bot, which can provide answers to questions and even set up automation for the user with one click. If you need a tool for both internal and external adoption, Walkme is one to look at. 

Another newer feature in Walkme is the ability to identify who your active users are in the products your company pays for. This can help teams save a lot of money by knowing which users in user-based pricing subscriptions are inactive and should be removed. 

Choosing the right product tour software for your team

Product tour software is an important tool to show customers what your tool is capable of and to further support them once they sign up. The truth of the matter is no one will buy your product if they don’t know what it does, and even if they do buy, they won’t stick around long if they can’t figure out how to do what they want with it. 

Having a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish with your product tour software and who will use it most is a good place to start when looking for options. Create a list of non-negotiables to help weed out options, and focus on the solutions that are best suited to your — and your potential customers’ — needs.

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