Your app can lose users en masse when product messaging is confusing. This sounds exaggerated, but it happens to most SaaS businesses—particularly in the more competitive sectors.
No one is sticking around to deal with confusing messaging. Your target customers want clear messaging that can act as the glue for adoption and retention.
So what does effective product messaging look like? We're exploring the keys behind successful product messaging and how you can deliver a compelling message every time.
Plus, we've researched and featured a couple of examples of effective messaging that other marketing teams are using.
A product messaging framework clarifies the value of your product consistently at every interaction a customer has with your website, ads, marketing messages, support chats, and your app as a whole.
You also use this framework to help your team understand what's ok (or not) to say internally and externally. This keeps everybody on the same page about what your product does, why it matters, and who your target audience is.
In a product-led growth model, having a messaging framework is important because your product drives adoption with your target audience. When misalignment occurs, you're more likely to turn your product into a game where each one of your departments focuses on something different.
This leaves your app dead. Users leave when the commitment doesn’t match reality. A messaging framework's main goal is always to provide clarity, creating a bond of trust with users. Added to this, you'll also be preventing confusion that leads to abandoning the onboarding process.
Let's see what goes into brilliant product messaging and how you can create product messaging that truly speaks to your target audience based on customer needs and pain points.
Critical messaging pillars will make it easier for your teams to write and stick to the product’s true narrative. Three fundamental elements to work on here:
You also need to strengthen your three core points with support elements to add more life to your messaging framework:
Here's a five-step framework for getting started with creating compelling product messaging:
First, you'll want to conduct a messaging audit based on what you already have. Look at your website, past emails, and support scripts to identify discrepancies, such as marketing saying something is “easy-peasy” to use while your product screams “tech overload.”
Then, bring together as many of your cross-functional stakeholders (product marketing, product, sales, and customer support). Together, you should agree on what the final shared objectives are so they'll start working together, not against each other.
Use product usage data and customer interviews to understand the real user perspective. Skip the data you don't need (like demographics) and segment based on what's most relevant for your product (like shopping behavior).
Go further and uncover their pains, their motivators, and their ideal outcomes. If you don't have these clearly listed or you don't fully understand them, you're not ready to work on your core messaging.
Once you're 100% sure you know your target audience, start ideating to find a concise value proposition that uses the actual language your customers do.
This will make it that much easier to develop a one liner and an elevator pitch you can reuse (for starters) on your website, emails, social media, and more.
Dealing with multiple personas? Map each of your messages to user personas and lifecycle stages. For example, new users will be most attracted by messaging that emphasizes ease of use, while pro users will need mentions of advanced workflows and add-ons.
Create a tiered system by starting with top-level value (e.g. Zoom's "Work happy with an AI-first work platform for human connection") then move to feature-level messaging (e.g. ClickUp's "Search every app, from one place.") and finally to in-app copy (e.g. Dropfiles' "Drop files here to upload").
This messaging then needs to match up across all customer touchpoints. That's with in-app onboarding, emails, push notifications, and more messaging pillars that can maintain a natural narrative.
Use A/B testing in product tours, modals, and tooltips to test options. Validate your theories through user feedback and retention metrics. When you find that a message creates greater stickiness, you have a winner. Keep a single document or shared hub, like a Notion page or Google Doc, with all your iterations for easy feedback and a closer look at how different variants performed historically.
Successful product messaging shouldn't be difficult to achieve. Here are some common mistakes product marketing teams make and how to avoid them for your own brand messaging framework:
Integrated messaging is the secret to user adoption and retention. When the in-app user experience doesn't match the email or push messages, it creates fragmented experiences that lead to user confusion and disengagement.
Consistency across channels improves the likelihood that users receive messages that are timely and relevant to them. The 1+1=3 effect, illustrated in the research by Sweeney and Danaher, indicates that in-product messaging combined with out-of-product messaging extends the impact and ultimately drives success.
For example, in-app messaging that promotes a feature followed by an email message about that feature drives significantly more in-app feature adoption than the in-app prompt alone.
SaaS companies need to use interconnected messaging to keep users engaged and help them see and achieve the product's long-term value. Appcues supports SaaS teams with multi-channel messaging to keep all users engaged, whether they're in-app, reading an email, or receiving a push message.
Let's explore a couple of product messaging examples from other SaaS companies:
Fullstory used Appcues to increase activation with personal, role-based messages. Fullstory positions itself as a behavioral data platform that transforms digital visits into actionable insights, helping tech leaders boost conversions, spot fraud, and delight users—all with a sleek, enterprise-ready vibe.
Fullstory’s emails are persona-driven and action-focused. Their Appcues-powered drip campaigns target roles like product managers with concise, branded messages and CTAs linking back to the app. Open rates hit 30%+ with click-throughs at 5.2%, crushing benchmarks.
Fullstory also uses Appcues Workflows for role-based onboarding—like nudging users to complete in-app checklists. For them, time-based nudges also drove a 14% activation boost for product managers.
Storyblok positions itself as a headless CMS that boosts efficiency for marketers and developers, emphasizing speed, control, and flexibility.
Storyblok’s emails focus on actionable value—like inviting users to webinars or sharing updates about new features. These stay concise as all messaging, regardless of channel, is tied back to the “make bigger, faster market impact” benefit.
On social platforms like X, they also push bold, marketer-centric messages, reinforcing their website’s promise of speed and autonomy:
Intercom frames itself as an AI-powered platform for support, sales, and engagement and currently highlights its AI agent, Fin, as the primary feature they want to promote:
In fact, to stay ahead of the AI game, they've been using emails for big announcements, education, and re-engagement for years. Here's an Intercom email from 2023 that anticipated their messaging shift:
You'll find a similar positioning within their onboarding:
As well as social posts:
Shopify opts for a bold, all-in-one promise for entrepreneurs, focusing on ease and scalability from day one to enterprise.
The very first in-app messages you get via the onboarding process also stay in tune with this promise of helping people sell more:
Social media hypes success stories (particularly omnipresent on YouTube) also reinforce their entrepreneurial empowerment efforts:
Litmus understood that the sooner users engaged with the product, the better for retention and growth.
They wanted users to find value in the product faster. So the team began to move away from nurture campaigns and focus instead on an omnichannel approach using in-app messaging.
With Appcues, they pursued two different strategies. They let go of generic email announcements and started using Appcues for in-app customization announcements:
They also used Appcues tooltips to highlight the value of each feature right in the product as opposed to being pulled away to navigate an email announcement:
After segmenting their product messaging, Litmus saw that 20% of non-users adopted the new feature. For the tooltip announcing the feature, Litmus observed that 62% of users who viewed the tooltip became active users.
This marked a 22X increase in adoption. In terms of the overall value in Litmus’ experiments, these initiatives led to an incredible increase of 2100% of feature adoption.
You don't work on product messaging before you've polished your product. Your product is the one that dictates your messaging.
Whenever you update your product or user expectations change, your messaging comes in to reflect those changes. Unchanging messaging leads to a disconnect between user expectations and user experience, creating confusion and churn.
User expectations are never static. As trends shift, competitors adjust their positioning and new customer needs arise. Maintaining a pulse on user sentiment allows your messaging to continue resonating with users, allowing for continued engagement.
Consistency across teams is critical in providing a cohesive experience for users. When marketing, product, and customer support teams are all giving users different messages, it creates friction in the user experience.
By keeping your messaging refreshed according to a messaging hierarchy, all teams will be aligned along the messaging map, providing clarity and building trust with users.
A/B tests, user feedback, and behavioral analytics give you the insight around the messaging that will resonate best with users. Refreshed messaging makes data-driven adjustments to drive engagement, improve adoption, and support retention.
Try Appcues for free to see how it can help you create and deliver consistent product messaging.
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