Product Walkthroughs are the key to unlock the full potential of your product to the world. But many companies are guilty of not utilizing them effectively to meet their customer’s expectations.
They go with one size fits all approach and create a product tour or product demo that gives unsatisfactory results.
This creates a negative impact on the efforts that your organization is taking to succeed in the market. Making your product adoption journey difficult results in an increased churn rate and poor retention rate.
An ideal Product Walkthrough solution should be contextual, and interactive which should ultimately help to increase the product adoption rate.
We put together a guide of Product Walkthrough to answer the most common questions about walkthroughs, including:
What is Product Walkthrough?
A Product Walkthrough is also known as Product Tour. It interactively guides users to realize the value and functionality of the product. They are the means to onboard new users or empower the existing ones.
Tours help your users to stay motivated and use your product properly. A good walkthrough should be valuable to users and help them identify how a new product can satisfy their needs.
Product Walkthroughs are not a one-time thing and can be utilized to introduce new or updated essential features to your users.
You can also customize your tours so that only specific features are shown in a product tour to a specific set of users. For example, you might create a tour that highlights premium features if you’re trying to upsell a user to the next subscription tier.
However, a feature walkthrough should be limited to a few relevant steps to get started. Once the user gets hang of your product environment you can go ahead to present other features when users are ready.
Why do you need a Product Walkthrough?
When a new user starts to utilize your product they usually encounter some kind of challenge. It creates a bad product experience and as a result, a user can drop-off.
Users must remain engaged and satisfied throughout the user journey. Businesses should keep them motivated by providing great user experience. You need Product Walkthroughs because they can help you:
- Make Users take action:- A new user needs guidance and providing them with interactive in-app walkthroughs does wonder. As a user need not leave your platform to learn about your product; they can learn by doing, thanks to interactive walkthroughs.
- Achieve better Adoption rates:- The product tour help users to achieve their goals immediately with fewer touchpoints. It reduces the learning curve. This makes users adopt your product seamlessly without being dependent on anyone. Which eventually increases the product adoption rate of your application.
- Increase Retention Rate and Reduce the churn rate:- Acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times costlier for a business than retaining the existing one. With a software walkthrough, you can retain the user and reduce the churn-rate. Reducing churn and increasing adoption improves your bottom line.
What makes a great Product Walkthrough?
A well-designed Product Walkthrough can determine the success of your product. Here are the few aspects that make a great product tour:
- Focus on providing value:- Initially, a user wants to see the value that your product can provide. To achieve this ask a few questions upfront to know what they want to achieve with your product. Once you know that guide them to achieve those goals as soon as possible.
- Keep it meaningful:- It can be tempting to showcase all the features to your users but doing so will overwhelm the user and they could drop-off. Show users the specific features they’ll find most important within a few-touchpoints.
- Don’t confuse the user:- Don’t show too many things at once, and never jump from one task to another especially when they are very different. Doing so could overwhelm and confuse your user.
- Mention the Next steps:- Once the user completes a task let them know what next steps they have to take. This is especially important when trying to convert free trials to active users. Leverage the end of a walkthrough to push to the next action such as making a purchase.
How Product Walkthrough can be Used?
Product Walkthroughs are one of the most powerful tools that SaaS products can use to pave their path to growth. Here are a few ways you can put Product Walkthrough to use:
- ntroducing new features and updates:- In-app guidance tools have an announcement feature which helps businesses to grab the attention of the user. It lets users know about the latest update and how to make use of it.
- Better onboarding experience:- When a new user opens the application for the first time, he could be confused and could find it difficult to start. Having a product tour in place guides users from one step to the other with the help of contextual walkthroughs and tooltips.
- Training new and existing users:- Most users aren’t going to sit through video training or want to read a bunch of help articles. So providing complete training via walkthrough on their own time using in-app guidance tools makes more sense. This saves a lot of time for the user in comparison to traditional training.
- Enabling sales:- A Product Walkthrough can begin from the moment a user visits your website and a well-built site backed by dedicated hosting ensures the experience starts smoothly. Use a walkthrough to guide users through your sign up process. It is an effective way to increase the conversion rate by creating a cohesive product experience across the board. It helps businesses to convert users into customers.
The product tour as a whole is helpful to boost your key business metrics. The product team should leverage walkthroughs to drive growth.
How to choose the right product tour tool?
A product tour or walkthrough tool guides users through each step by designing onboarding flow with tools like Tooltips, Announcements (Pop-up), and on-screen guidance.
The tools and software to create this content come under the umbrella of Digital Adoption Platforms (DAP) or Digital Adoption Solutions.
Selecting the right Product Walkthrough tool can be challenging. Having a basic tool could be helpful but for a more targeted user onboarding experience you must delve deep and go with a solution that offers mobility, flexibility, and customization.
Usually, companies must go with a product tour tool which offers the following:
- Walkthrough:- Step-by-Step walkthroughs are one of the basic things. It guides users from one step to the other seamlessly. Each of these steps could be highlighted in numerous ways. The main purpose is to let a user how to complete the step and what to do next.
- Tooltips:- These are generally available right next to a field. On Hovering over the icon which is right next to the field will give users the basic information about that field. It includes information such as:-
- Why the field is important?
- Why it is mandatory?
- Multi-Language-support:- Having support in multiple languages is essential as your user could hail from any country. It helps you to acquire new users from different regions and helps you to increase your retention rate.
- In-depth Analytics:- A modern Digital adoption solution helps you to get two types of insights:-
- Application Insights:- It helps you to understand how the user is utilizing your application.
- Workflow Insights:- It helps you to understand how the user is using the deployed workflow or walkthroughs.
- Customization:- Based on the insights available from the above steps a business can design their workflow based on each user type. Audience segmentation helps you to provide a customized onboarding experience.
How to Create a Great Product Walkthrough?
Traditional Digital Adoption Platforms are not capable of creating workflows based on user behavior. Product tours in legacy systems are created by assumptions made by the product team on what they think users need.
Creating workflows by merely using “assumptions ” is not an ideal way.
On the other hand, a Modern DAP(Digital Adoption Platform) like Apty does have capabilities to create a workflow based on each user type by understanding user behavior.
With Modern Digital Adoption Platform, you follow the DAP cycle which guides you to create a relevant onboarding flow-
- Application Analysis:- Understand how the user is utilizing an application this helps you understand their pain points and the issue that they are facing.
- Design workflows:- Based on the application analysis the workflows can be designed for each user type, this way you create effective workflows that a user will use effectively without dropping-off.
- Analyze workflows:- Once the designed workflow is deployed then you can analyze how the workflow is performing and then tweak it based on the drawn insights.
- Improve the adoption:- With all the data and insights available you can automate, improve, and build upon the existing workflows and make it more interactive.
What are the Benefits of using Product Walkthrough?
- Enhanced user engagement:- The user is hooked after their first interaction because of the Product Walkthrough. They go from one step to another, accomplish one goal after the other and all this contributes to a better engagement rate.
- Improved product adoption:- One of the biggest challenges is to enable customers to use your product. If a product is not used, then a SaaS company could lose their customer.
- Effective utilization:- In the long run, better utilization of the product is of paramount importance. A well-designed product tour that helps users to complete one task at a time and makes them realize their goals at their own pace ensures better utilization of the product.
- Decreased support-ticket:- Since the in-app guidance tool has all the relevant documents, knowledgebase links, videos, and walkthroughs. It empowers users to do the tasks on their own. It reduces the user’s dependency on any kind of support. It helps the organization to save costs and utilize their resources in a much effective way.
- Decreased churn-rate:- Once the user is able to properly use the product it helps the businesses to reduce the churn-rate as the users tend to use the application more often.
- Increased ROI on training:- Digital Adoption Platform helps you to save time and money by enabling your customers to adopt your application in less time. On-screen guidance quickly shows users how your product works and guides them towards mastering it.
Here’s how Apty makes Software Training simple, better and faster.
Dos and Don’ts
Here are a few tips that you can follow to get most out of your Product Walkthrough:
- Do align your Product Walkthrough strategy with the overall organization’s strategy:- This might appear far-fetched but it is essential to align your Product Walkthrough strategy with your overall organization strategies such as product adoption strategy, training strategy, customer experience strategy, customer success strategy, and sales strategy.
- Do co-ordinate across the board to get the walkthrough right:- Since the goals of the organization are aligned it is a must to involve important stakeholders to design a consistent walkthrough.
- Do understand your users:- Understanding users by analyzing product usage is important for creating relevant workflows for your user. To operationalize this, teams often complement DAP analytics with product analytic tools that tracks activation, feature adoption, and post-onboarding friction by segment; a 2026 roundup compares leading platforms that connect analytics to in-app guidance and no-code event tagging
- Do create customized workflows:- Customized workflows created based on the data available helps the user to achieve the “aha moment” consecutively as the experience attached to it is personalized.
- Do Ask for Feedback:- Even if you can analyze all the flaws and merit of an application, it is always better to ask for feedback from a user. A real person could help you to know where your product stands and allows you to check the efficiency of the insights drawn by the digital adoption solution.
- Don’t set and forget the onboarding flow:- As onboarding, is a continuous process and the behavior of the user is continuously changing. Keep an eye on the analytics and update the workflow regularly. This doesn’t mean that you have to it daily or weekly. You can do it on a monthly or quarterly basis but the bottom line is to maintain the workflows and keep a check on them.
- Don’t make the workflow lengthy:- You can be tempted to make a new user see all the features in one go but doing so will overwhelm them as they can barely remember such an exhaustive experience with your product. Moreover, it will impact the retention rate. The best option would be to dissect your Product Walkthrough flows and segment them in an organized manner. It will help your users to absorb your product in a much better way.
Going Forward!
A Product Walkthrough is a great means to onboard new or existing users. It enhances the user experience and increases product adoption rates.
Look for a modern digital adoption solution like Apty that helps you to deploy the walkthrough without even writing a single piece of code. It saves time for your development team, training professionals, and customer support.
Modern software walkthrough solutions are one of the most cost-efficient ways for any business to train and onboard users.