🤔 Challenge: How can Product Education Managers improve users’ onboarding and get actionable in-app feedback without worrying about a native style?
💡 Solution: By creating self-serve personalized onboarding checklists and using contextual in-app Microsurveys to capture challenges and sentiment
🏆 Results: Increased activation likelihood, with up to 99% completion rate for onboarding Walkthroughs, started collecting in-app feedback, and increased visibility for users’ needs
Foleon is a content creation platform that empowers businesses to create interactive content experiences optimized for B2B customer journeys, without the need for coding skills. Through its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, Foleon enables non-designers to create dynamic, responsive sales and marketing assets while staying on brand.
Why did Foleon turn to Chameleon?
Foleon was using two different product adoption solutions to drive activation and discovery of new features within their product. But with both, they needed more control over the look and feel of the in-app patterns. Not being able to add custom fonts and achieve a native style posed a limit to engaging users around product enhancements. As a result, Foleon wasn't using in-app guidance as much as their customers needed and was lacking a way to collect in-app feedback from their users.
It was really important for us to use a tool that feels like our platform, and not that it’s a different layer stacked on top.
Foleon picked Chameleon because of the ability to deeply customize in-app patterns, the intuitive building flow, and seamless integration with their stack. They found it was easy to design native onboarding Checklists and Microsurveys by leveraging their custom fonts and brand graphics. And better understand what drives impact by syncing in-app data with their analytics platforms.
Joran Bloemen, Product Education Manager at Foleon, can now use Chameleon to:
Create native patterns that drive activation, adoption, retention, and high-quality feedback from users
Provide insights to the wider team and better visibility into experiments and their results
Create open communication between the product team and users on their needs and challenges
Here’s how Joran successfully implemented a self-serve, personalized onboarding flow and improved product education and adoption at Foleon.
Adopting Chameleon to engage users with confidence
Joran’s first goal was to continue driving new feature awareness and adoption in a similar style as they did in the past. He built Modals to introduce new features with branded visuals showcasing the update. Joran used the button “Actions” to direct users to their help documentation and help them learn more about the latest changes. He also ensured users could acknowledge the update and close the announcement using a “Dismiss.” This created a better user experience without stopping users in their tracks.
Unlike the product adoption platforms Joran had used before, with Chameleon, Joran found it easy to build engaging patterns that attracted users’ attention without looking disconnected from their interface.
Before, it didn’t feel like we could impress our users with our new features, but now, we see an increase in engagement because it’s so easy to add videos, or images, our custom fonts, and just a clear CTA.
👇 Explore this interactive demo on how to achieve a native style with Chameleon.
Personalized self-serve onboarding ‘truly is the way’
Seeing how easy it was to start seeing results with Chameleon, Foleon next aimed to increase their activation rate. First, they mapped their user’s journey, what they had built, and all the possible places their users may need help. To find the right areas for guidance, they ran user interviews, conducted some in-app experiments, and referenced industry best practices, like Chameleon’s Benchmarks Report.
The data from their user interviews told a clear story, new signups just wanted to experiment, and only wanted help when blocked. Having a self-serve option, where users could pick what to explore and when, was the clear answer for Joran.
As we are a content designer tool - we found people just want to try out things. And the “just-in-time” messages actually block them from doing that, even if it’s something quick in the bottom corner. That’s something we learned really quickly by looking at the engagement rate.
Joran created a series of Walkthroughs that introduce users to the Foleon platform and help them get started. He then created different onboarding Checklists based on the user’s role. The Checklist also has a “Welcome State” so users can easily understand what they’ll find there.
👇 Explore an interactive demo and learn to create an onboarding Checklist with Chameleon.
Each task in the Checklist launches a Walkthrough or a help resource that guides users through their first steps with Foleon. Since these Checklists are personalized to their roles, “admins”, “designers” and “publishers” all get to see different tasks that are relevant to them. Joran accomplished this by using Chameleon Segments to set specific sub-audiences for each task based on users' roles.
Joran uses HubSpot to send data to Chameleon and leverage properties like the user’s role or stage. He creates dynamic audiences there, syncs his lists to Chameleon, and then includes them when creating the onboarding Segments.
The Tours inside the Checklist are highly contextual and concise, pointing to a clear on-page element in the Foleon dashboard that users can further interact with. After building almost 40 Tours with Chameleon, Joran is still finding learnings to optimize their onboarding experience. He noticed that if the Tour communicated a concept instead of a clear next step, users would not engage with it.
That's something that we've learned and that's why we're shifting away from the just-in-time pop-ups. Even when they're highly contextual and even with a “Smart Delay”, it can be a blocker to users. Because of that, we believe that self-serve is the way.
💡 Chameleon Tip: The “Smart Delay” is an on-page Trigger that waits for users to pause activity before displaying an in-app. This helps create a better user experience, without interfering with users’ flows.
Joran noticed how users’ choices are affected by not only the copy of a task but also its position in the Checklist. Tasks that were higher on the Checklist received more engagement, and users did not always complete all of them.
Our users don’t want to learn concepts, they want to explore and learn by doing. We don't care about users necessarily interacting with the Launcher, we just want them to use our platform. There are so many different ways for them to learn, and this is just one piece of the puzzle.
Joran improved the title of each task and ensured the most important ones were always up top. Once users get used to the Foleon dashboard, they shouldn’t feel the need to complete all the tasks but feel confident about continuing to use the platform. Now, his onboarding Walkthroughs have between 71% and 99% completion rates and are seen by hundreds of users.
Today the entire Foleon team can confidently turn to Joran to tackle any new in-app communication need. With Chameleon, Joran has the space and visibility to experiment and continue to improve their user onboarding. Here’s Joran’s most recent experiment, and how he’s keeping his team in sync on the results.
Embeddable Banners + Microsurveys = an in-app auto-renewal program
A big pain point for the Customer Success team at Foleon was not being able to connect with users who were approaching the end of their subscriptions. Joran started to build an auto-renewal program that would gradually remind users of the time left on their subscription using a series of Banners.
When users have 90 days remaining on their subscription, they’ll see the first Banner as a casual reminder. Next, 60 days before, users get a similar Banner, but with a slightly different tone. Finally, 15 days before, another Banner shows up to users, but with a different styling and a clear message that signals urgency.
👇 Explore an interactive demo to learn how to create in-line Banners.
When users click the CTA button, a Microsurvey pops up asking them how they’d like to connect with the Foleon team (via emails, phone, video call, etc). Users just have to pick a method, take the task off their minds, and the Foleon team follows up.
Again, Joran uses HubSpot to sync dynamic audiences to Chameleon and target the right users in the right subscription stages. It’s also easy for him to ensure the follow-up Banners display to users who previously engaged with the first Banner by using the segmentation filter in Chameleon and including users who have “seen/completed” a specific Banner.
The segmentation in Chameleon is very powerful, but combined with the HubSpot sync it’s now an essential component for me.
👇 Explore an interactive demo of Chameleon’s Segmentation.
Foleon also uses NPS and rating Microsurveys. They evaluate the user experience post-onboarding and measure users’ satisfaction with the Foleon app. Joran uses Chameleon’s Slack integration to send the answers from all these Microsurveys to a dedicated channel. This enabled the entire Foleon team to have better visibility over users’ needs and incorporate their feedback to further improve the user experience.
We have a channel “Voice of the Customer” and it creates a lot of visibility for the user. Normally leadership and other people in the organization who wouldn't necessarily speak to customers would never see that.
How Joran keeps his entire team aligned around in-app efforts
Their most important metric for knowing their users are getting set up successfully sometimes called a ‘north star activation metric’, is ‘time to publish a design’. Joran uses the “Engagement Index” in Chameleon to track the overall engagement of their patterns and understand where he needs to optimize. Syncing Chameleon data to Mixpanel helps Joran understand what actions users perform after engaging with his in-app patterns.
Joran also uses A/B Testing to create Tour Variants so he can learn how optimizations or tests impact engagement. He analyzes the results of each experiment in the Chameleon Dashboard and can easily compare results before making changes.
It’s really easy for me to create a Tour variation and then in a really easy way report on A/B Testing. Which makes it much more accessible to me, who’s not the analyst type to do some testing and make sure that it’s validated.
👇 Explore an interactive demo of A/B Testing in Chameleon.
How does everyone keep up with what Joran is doing? Once a month he hosts a demo for the entire Marketing team, where he shares an overview of his efforts with Chameleon: what he is currently testing, any experiments he’s running, the latest results to the various Microsurveys they have, or feedback on their onboarding flow. He also talks about the reasons behind each experiment or optimization, and why they picked a specific design or configuration.
Keeping the entire team aligned around efforts and acting on insights has eased the work for Product Managers and growth leaders at Foleon. Joran showed them early on that having Chameleon means they could avoid adding tasks on their developers’ plates, and reduce the time needed to go live from days (at best) to minutes.
Now that we adopted Chameleon, product managers and product owners think way less about in-app education of new features as something that they need to build natively.
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