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 and onboarding experience by allowing you to efficiently build, personalize, and iterate content quickly.

This is one of our favorite use cases here at Candu, and we use it for our free trial flow into our platform—see an example signup 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.

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:

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!

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:

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:

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:

You can preview your Flow to ensure your step connections and interactions work as expected. You can do this in three different ways:

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!