What is Appcues?
Appcues is a user onboarding and engagement platform designed to help businesses educate new users, create product tours, and guide users in adopting new features. It serves as an experience layer that enables the creation of stunning, in-app content to support users in maximizing the value of a product.
Key Features and Functionality
Flows
Appcues allows users to design and implement “flows,” which are sequences of in-app messages and interactions. These flows are used to create product tours and other in-app communications. The Appcues Builder, a Chrome extension, enables teams to build and edit flows directly on top of their product, ensuring contextually relevant user experiences. However, the number of flows available is restricted based on the subscription plan.
Checklists
Checklists are a feature available in the higher-tier plans, such as the Enterprise plan. They enable users to direct others to specific URLs or launch pre-created flows. However, checklist tasks have limited settings, such as directing users to URLs or launching flows, with no option to create dummy tasks or trigger custom JavaScript functions. Additionally, personalization options for checklists are limited.
NPS Surveys
Appcues includes Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to measure customer loyalty. Users can edit survey questions, segment the audience, and adjust the survey frequency. While collecting NPS data is straightforward, analyzing responses is more challenging, as it requires downloading a CSV report. Advanced NPS analytics are not fully supported within the platform.
Events Explorer
The Events Explorer is a feature that allows users to view, validate, and visualize events (user interactions with features or flows) in one place. This tool helps in understanding overall feature usage without the need for custom coding. The number of events tracked is limited by the subscription plan, with the Essential plan including only 10 events.
Segmentation
Appcues offers customer segmentation, allowing businesses to divide their customer base into different cohorts based on various criteria such as user properties, language, flow interaction, checklist status, and predefined segments (Evaluators, Beginners, Regulars, Champions). However, the number of user segments included in the Essentials plan is limited to five, necessitating an upgrade for more comprehensive segmentation.
Integrations and Analytics
Appcues integrates with various tools like CRM systems, data warehouses, Heap, Hubspot, and Segment. These integrations enable the sending of behavioral cohorts and data for deeper analysis. The platform also provides analytics to track product usage, user engagement, and the performance of cross-channel messages, helping businesses understand how their experiences drive results.
No-Code Builder and Studio
Appcues features a no-code builder that allows anyone on the team to design and edit in-app experiences without needing engineering support. The Appcues Studio is the central hub for managing all experiences, settings, data review, event tracking, and more. It includes tools for managing flows, pins, NPS surveys, checklists, goals, themes, audiences, and events explorer.
Personalized and Branded Experiences
Appcues enables the creation of personalized, branded messages and experiences that engage users. Users can select events to track and build in-app experiences, emails, and push notifications tailored to specific user behaviors or attributes. The platform supports various content types, including images and embedded videos.
Conclusion
In summary, Appcues is a powerful tool for enhancing user onboarding, feature adoption, and overall user engagement through its intuitive no-code platform, comprehensive analytics, and seamless integrations with other business tools.