Product Led Growth (PLG) is all the rage right now.
Everyone is doing it.
It’s more cost-effective.
You don’t need a Sales team. Just open up the Flywheel and gooooo!
Now like almost all advice you hear - you’ve got to understand, split apart, and apply only what is useful for you and your business.
I’ll dive deeper into Sales Led Growth and the ideas around cost + efficiency another time.
For today, I wanted to snapshot a few lovely examples of great Onboarding Flows and scribble down what I see as trends that work well.
My thinking is, and I’m just making this up, that Product Led Growth is a lot like a day at the beach. It should be fun, easy, and so simple. Just bring your flip flops and dive in. The team designing an onboarding flow should be thinking in that way. Help make it a great day at the beach. Help the user “jump in” to the shimmering salty mediterranean ocean. Just don’t let them get stuck Sunburnt.
In part one, I’ll dive into the power of email and a few examples.
In part two, we can peak into In-App messaging and best practices like:
- Progress Bar
- Checklist
- And the right balance between giving space and pushing.
Email - It’s Your Direct Line
When your new user shows up at the beach. Lay out a chair, an umbrella, set the menu down so they can order a drink or something if they’re feeling peckish. You get the idea - your first email should make the user comfortable and tell them all they’ll need to know, then the rest of the emails should help them along the way, so they enjoy their day.
Notion
They’re a leader in PLG and for good reason. Notice the first email and then their entire cadence of (8) Emails dripped to the new user over 8 days.
Zoom
Surely, one of the biggest benefactors of the Covid & Remote work push - they saw rapid growth. But now in 2023, they’ve refreshed their Onboarding Flow and here’s a look at their welcome email and the body.
It's a nice balance of not overwhelming, but has 2-3 clear CTAs. And the subject line with your First Name and the Name of the Product - those sort of just make sense for the first email. I see some companies try to get cute here, but then the user has a hard time searching or finding it in the inbox. Sort of like losing your iphone at the beach, only to discover it’s wrapped up in your t-shirt!
I must just drop in here that many teams I talk with are starting to feel Zoom burn out. It’s not the branded experience that companies really want to use long-term, it was simply a catch-all when we had to have a way to all hop on. It’s not the ideal tool for a sales or customer success professional really to use when they run many meetings in a week and then need to spend hours inputting data into CRM or writing their email follow ups.
So I’ve been impressed with Salesroom and suggest trying it - as it simply replaces out Zoom and then is used to give prompts, alerts, and all sorts of help to the person Driving the meeting + AI writes a summary of each meeting instantly.
Fathom and Gong are also great conversational and recording tools in this space.
Another famous PLG example, they just make it easy and their platform can do so much, so they start by pointing you to accomplish X task, based on your Journey (your Persona).
The email is so pretty, it’s like a perfect slice of beach and a spotting two open chairs, you just plop down (click) and say ahhh.
HubSpot
When a company is so large, capable, and product-rich, the welcome email can start to get a bit crowded. Like a packed day in Rio.
I’m a fan of new tech, and this one Tome - has a nice mix of text in their emails and explaining. Their emails also include a nice GIF (how do you pronounce it?) and you can see I received 10 emails over about 25 days in my first month of using the tool. Some of the emails were product drips, and 1-2 were likely auto-generated from the Founder. There’s a play here for small teams and sales led teams to try multi-touch.