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Slideouts by Appcues — Publish targeted messages to better engage your users
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Woah, thanks for the hunt @thinker 🙌
Jonathan here, founder & CEO @ Appcues. Holla!
We’ve been using Slideouts internally for months now and really like the format. It’s something you’ve probably seen on a marketing site or as a teaser for starting chats, but we think the pattern is highly under-utilized. Couple of ways we've seen it used so far:
- Tactfully launching new features
- Drive 50% more sales demos for hot prospects
- Promote webinar attendance for free-trial users
- Collect NPS & satisfaction scores in-app
As @bentossell will probably point out, this pattern is nothing new; we’re just putting it to work. Our different types of modules, real-time user targeting, and one-click publishing make this something that you can finally hand over to your product marketing team and not regret it later 😅
Really appreciate ya'll checking it out and giving feedback. Seriously, it means a lot.
I’m here all day to answer any questions!
@hijonathan Congrats Jonathan! Looking forward to checking it out and the rest of the platform. I'll send you a note to connect again :)
@hijonathan @thinker @bentossell Congrats Jonathan, Noel + rest of the team! We've also been trying to think about which other types of steps / UX patterns to introduce.. did you have a process for selecting this one over others?
@_pulkitagrawal thanks, Pulkit!
Prioritization's the magic behind building product, so there's much I don't know.
I'm a big fan of just trying stuff and seeing what happens. For slideouts (and many other ideas we've had), we built a hacky version to scratch an itch/problem/process that we shared with our customers. In our case, we needed to drive more demos and recruit user tester.
The experiment was incredibly successful, and along the way, we felt the limitations that would be lifted if it were part of our core platform, like leveraging our advanced targeting or the ability to change the content immediately. That experience made building it a no-brainer. Other experiments had less awesome results, and we just killed those.
Hope that's helpful.
Congrats, Jonathan and team. Had a great time chatting on the podcast a couple weeks ago, and have been looking forward to this ever since!
@marketplicity hey, great question Chris!
We were lucky enough to get advice from the wise @patticus early on, so we adhere to a value-based pricing. For us, that's monthly active users.
Our whole goal—the reason we exist—is to help you create a more engaged user base, so you only pay for the users who engage with your product in a given month. Prices start at $99/mo, less than the cost of 1hr of a dev's time (or 15 if they live in SF!).
That's what we have now, but pricing is an evolving conversation. What do you think?
@hijonathan I think the pricing model on MAU is great. $99 is a bit steep for entry level startups that are strapped for cash or just want to test the service out. Have you thought about a free-tier for sites with less than 5k (or how many ever) MAU?
@marketplicity yeah, I totally hear ya. I got Appcues to over 100 users before paying anything on third-party services, so I know this pain very well.
We're actually in the process of switching to a usage-based model that'll likely include some level of free service. I think Slideouts, being so simple and effective, could be a great candidate for a free plan.
Thoughts?
@mktackabery thanks michelle. the tool is definitely good for marketers. i can attest :)
Nice job with this. So you're finding slideouts work best to increase engagement for existing users, and other cues written better for initial onboarding?
@sarahadowney definitely. The main thing we've learned, and this probably resonates with many of the techies here, is that the right timing and expectations are incredibly important for good engagement.
Rather than giving a guided tour upon signup, we've seen a lot of success using a Slideout as a teaser that then leads users into a more detailed tour. We're still learning, but I think this works for a couple of reasons:
1. Most people aren't always ready for a guided tour.
2. Most companies are terrible at creating good guided tours (it's more often a bad episode of MTV Cribs).
Letting the user opt-in to onboarding or choose to do their own thing is better for everyone. It works well for onboarding, but it's also holds water when doing a feature release, asking for feedback, etc.
@hijonathan Got it. I agree that sometimes subtle is a lot more effective and it's cool you're giving your users that option.
Wondering i there will be a WordPress plugin for this for SMB's and non tech users - plus the ability to customise the colour?
And is there a pricing plan now as I see this was launched a year ago here.
Thanks
Perhaps you could also have the use case for getting started JS tours similar to introjs.com ?
P.S. Absolutely love the landing page. Super nice.
Tiny Feedback: Put a sign up button next to the login button at the top right. My eyes always look top right for that and I could not find it. Then I realized it's in the middle with test it out. (Also you have quite a lot of debugging code in console, especially after clicking login)
@james_osullivan all super good feedback. Thank you! The getting started intros are definitely something we offer, and we're actively trying to up our game in that area. The trick is helping people make something that's beautiful and concise, but those two things are hard to do for non-designers.
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