Creating a great first introduction to your product is crucial for achieving high activation and conversion rates of new users. We launched Flows to help you take a product-led approach to your free trial & onboarding experience by allowing you to efficiently build, personalize & iterate content quickly.
Flows allow you to
Capture user intent by asking questions like 'What is the first thing you want to do with our platform?
Capture user information such as their role, team, or industry
Tailor each user's experience by how they answer signup questions. For example, if a user selects 'Industry = e-commerce,' you can then show related & relevant blogs, customer stories, or getting started steps on your product homepage.
Create a gated experience that doesn't let a user into your product but prompts them to book a demo or complete an essential action before they can be granted full access
Educate users about what product options are available and what value they can bring them.
This is one of our favorite use cases here at Candu and one we use for our free trial flow into our platform - ➡️ check out our flow here!
With Flows, you can create an experience that lives inside or outside your product's logged-in experience - it's up to you!
Check out our complete guide below on creating a new product-led onboarding experience.
Free Trial Flow Example
Let's start with a simple example! Based on our research, two of the most common questions product-led companies ask users when they are signing up for a free trial are:
"What would you like to do first in {product name}?" so that they can understand what feature set is most applicable and what kind of ROI they are looking for
"What is your role" or "Which department do you belong to" to again help with identifying what persona they are and what they most likely to care about
By creating a short flow before a user accesses your product, you can capture intent from new users so you can best set them up for success!
Gated Onboarding Flow Example
A gated onboarding flow can work well if you have a hybrid approach to convert new customers with product-led experiences and sales-led touches.
As an example, you can create a flow that:
Introduces a user to the value or solutions your product offers them
Allows them to select from different options so they can find what is most relevant to them
Showcases customer examples or success stories to build credibility
Has your critical call to action been to book a call or demo with someone on your team rather than enter the product straight away
Creating Onboarding Flows with Candu
You can use the 'Dynamic Flow' container in the Candu editor to create a Flow.
You can drag this container onto the Canvas and add content to your flow or drag in existing content to turn it into a Flow component.
Let's look at how we created the Free Trial Flow example above.
The initial Flow container hosts content in it, and each consecutive step has its content slide on the right-hand side.
You can create as many steps in your flow as you need and switch between them from the 'Component' view when a Flow container is selected to edit and amend the content you want to show for each step.
ℹ️ Please note that any content in the document that is not nested within the Flow container will appear for every step you create. An example in the above is the Need help? Get in touch text in the right-hand corner.
You can link Steps in your Flows by setting up interactions on cards or buttons to 'Go to a Flow Step.' You can choose to:
Go to a specific step
Go to the next step
Go to the previous step
You can then add an Interaction Label to track your events in analytics or use your events in Segmentation.
To make it quick for you to create content, we have added a 'Duplicate' option which is super helpful if you need a new step with the same layout but need to change the content!
You can also delete a step in your Flow from the right-hand toolbox menu, the hover toolbar option, or the delete option on your keyboard.
You can also reorder the steps if you need to by using the drag handlers on each Step:
✨ We have added a few templates under 'Templates > Flows' to help kickstart your flow creation!
Previewing your Flow
You can preview your Flow to ensure your step connections and interactions work as expected. You can do this in three different ways:
Previewing via the Chrome Extension - this will work like average content.
Using the 'Preview Flow' button in the editor
Using the 'View Flow Chart' option in the editor
Using the 'Share link' (top right of each content doc in the editor)
Preview Flow Button
The 'Preview Flow' button can be found when a Flow container is selected.
Once selected, you can interact with your Flow as if the content was embedded already!
View Flow Chart
This option provides a different style of preview to review your Flow and all of the Steps you have created. You can select 'View Flow Chart' when the Flow container is set in the editor.
This option will create a flow chart view so you can easily visualize your steps and which other steps they are connected to.
If you have any 'Back' buttons that navigate back to previous steps, this will also be indicated by the reverse arrows.
Share Link
The Share link allows you to generate a unique URL like this - https://app.candu.ai/share/4MbofDbWsWtMzn - which will enable you to preview your Candu content and share with any colleagues to get their thoughts and feedback (or show it off 😉 ).
Click Share > Set to Can view > Copy Link and paste the URL into a new Tab.
Saving User Progress
Candu Flows allow you to save a user's progress automatically as they navigate through the steps in your Flow.
Under Flow container > Component > Flow Settings, you can turn on 'Save user progress through Flow' if you want this option enabled.
If enabled, this means that if a user only makes it halfway through your flow, if they were to revisit the page your flow is on, they would start from where they left off rather than the beginning.
Using Flow Events in Segmentation
Every interaction event in your Flow can be used to create Segments of users so that you can show them personalized content based on their selected options.
Suppose a user should see different pieces of content based on what they have selected. In that case, you can create a Segment for each call to action (remember to add Interaction labels to your buttons/cards!). That way, once a user completes the final step of your flow, they will see personalized content in your product.
All events will appear when creating a new Segment under 'User Events.' The event will be the name of the Interaction Label you have given it.
For example, in this onboarding flow, we have four different options available, so we could create four different homepage versions based on which data source a user selects. So one Segment would be 'Segment Clicked':
And once a user falls into this segment, they could be shown this option on your homepage rather than a generic 'Set up your data source option:
We appreciate this can get complex, so feel free to reach out to us if you are building a complex flow and would like some support - we are happy to help!