Back
Post
How do you share your product features with customers?
How do you share your product features with customers?
Let's say there's a feature they’re not using, and you know could help them. How do you tell them at the right time?
I feel people don't usually read product newsletters, blogs or webinars.
There must be a better way to improve the usability of your product.
There must be a better way to improve the usability of your product.
👋 Join WIP to participate
Webinars kinda work for us (
#crisp) but only a very small fraction of users will attend.
And yes, users don't read anymore! We shoot a monthly email with new features (ie. changelog).
What we're trying right now is to show a popup (something users cannot ignore) in the app to highlight a specific feature (it may be a new feature or a feature that exists since a long time). Conditions to show this popup can be: user plan, whether they already used this feature or not, whether they use another complimentary feature, etc. The popup is very simple, a title, a small description, a screenshot of the feature (very important) and a CTA to navigate to that feature.
I think the summary of all this is that the best is to share the feature directly in your app / service, this is the best way to get noticed.
Thanks for sharing this! I also thought about in-app sharing, but to be honest I find these annoying. I never pay attention when I come across a popoup and skip all tours 😆 I prefer to figure out myself and read the docs/look for tutorials when I'm having issues.
Landing page with screenshots and/or videos (visuals are a must).
I haven't figured out a good way to share new features in the app itself yet. All the ways I've seen are incredibly annoying like those popup notification things.
Half the time when I try a new app or log into one I haven't used in a while, I instantly get greeted with 10,000 popups explaining how to use the app or about new feature X, Y, Z, Q.
I never read these popups and just try to get them to go away as fast as possible. I'd rather read an email vs. get bombarded with new feature notifications in the app.
I was thinking of tactics to improve user adoption, so more on the customer support/success stage. I have the same experience with pop-ups, not sure why everyone keeps implementing them 😅 I usually block them.
If your product has a dashboard, usually an unobtrusive notification in the dashboard. Bell with a red dot, upper right corner. Or a "What's new" link somewhere in the sidebar.
But I hear you, it's hard to know who will click on what. Can't guarantee 100% coverage.
It depends on personality, too. As a user I will sometimes click on those red dots. I will sometimes read the update emails from the products I use, too. But I know others will ignore for eternity.
Usually only when things go wrong > users contact support > support tells them "Akshually there's this feature...". Ta-daaa! That's when they find out. 🤓
Sorry if not helpful Paulina, just sharing my experience 😅
I like the idea of showing the red dot. As little annoyance as possible while still letting the user know that there's something new to review.
Thanks for this idea, will probably implement at some point
This is actually helpful! My take away is to take advantage every opportunity to educate your customers. And I've noticed they're more receptive to advice when they have an issue, so the support contact case makes total sense.
Great question! The best is in-app as @eliott suggested but also emails.
I created noticeable.io exactly for this purpose. It centralizes your product updates and lets you choose where to publish them: in a widget in your app (like a bell icon, as suggested by @poppacalypse, or an auto open modal popup on your dashboard), a customizable news page, via email, Slack, and more — all with a single click. Of course, I use Noticeable for all my own products update announcements ;)
Nice. Do you have any stats on how the % of users read the emails or click on the widget? Or any tips to make people read them?
I wouldn't want to put a lot of time into something no one would read.
Noticeable shows the open rate for each announcement you send by email. I have some customers hover around 50–60% opens, while others see only 30–35%. There is no magic solution or number: your results depend on your audience, how compelling your content is, and how consistently you engage them.
On the widget side, you can track both the number of openings and views. If you enable auto-opening, your announcement will pop up automatically when users open their dashboard. Whether they read it thoroughly depends on the strength of your content and its relevance to them. Services like Noticeable expand your reach and supply analytics to help measure how well it resonates, but what you write remains the biggest factor.
Regarding tips to increase readership, the essentials include using attention-grabbing titles, placing key insights or important details near the end of your announcements to encourage thorough reading, and keeping the message clear and visually appealing by adding a featured image or video.
This is super helpful. Thanks for the advice Laurent!
I have a case like this recently where I want to highlight a particular feature in the current page where the users might be better off using. So after a triggering event (where the user chose an action that I thought would be worse), I pop up a little tip. There's a short clip showing it in action here bsky.app/profile/did:plc:bryy…
I intend to adopt this technique more often.
This is super clever. Was it hard to implement?
No. It's easy for this particular case. It helped that both the less-desirable and better feature is localized to this particular page.
Amazon.com has a PR/FAQ workaround where potential customers can get a preview of your product features, so I think it's important to tell a good product story.