GoToWebinar used Appcues to onboard new users, invite users to beta, and migrate existing users to a new UI. Within 6 months, GoToWebinar increased its activation rate to 77%, improved its opt-in rate by 10x compared to emails, and reduced support load by providing contextual, on-demand guidance at scale. 

We reached out to Tanya Jacob, Senior Product Marketing Manager at GoToWebinar, to learn about her experience using Appcues.

About GoToWebinar

GoToWebinar is a simple, self-service webinar tool that makes it easy to host large-scale online events. The tool is offered by LogMeIn—one of the most renowned collaboration software providers in the world. It powers millions of webinars each year and was recently voted the leader in the webinar software category.

Improving activation with walkthroughs

As a product-led company, GoToWebinar’s acquisition strategy involves offering a 7-day free trial of their product. Tanya and her team wanted to make sure that new users achieved their desired value faster.  Scheduling a webinar is a key activation event in the GoToWebinar new user onboarding experience—so it was imperative for Tanya and her team to walk users through some key sequential actions to help them reach this important moment in their journey. 

“We wanted to ensure that our customers understand the multi-step webinar scheduling process. Appcues seemed to be a perfect choice for orienting new users to key features and functionality”
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– Tanya Jacob, Senior Product Marketing Manager, GoToWebinar

Tanya added native-looking hotspots to walk users through each critical step. This simple walkthrough helped draw users’ attention to the right page elements and reduce cognitive load.

The results exceeded Tanya and her team's expectations. Almost 77% of users who saw the walkthrough scheduled a webinar—an outstanding activation rate for GoToWebinar. 

“The results of the quick walkthrough we made were astonishing. Our users were quick to take the prescribed actions we were hoping for.”

Running in-app beta campaigns

In addition to onboarding new users, the product team at GoToWebinar also wanted to delight its power users by highlighting a new beta feature that had been high on their wishlist: charging for webinars. Tanya and her team wanted to give this user group exclusive early access. 

Their goal was to get hundreds of users to signup up for the early access program. In order to achieve this goal, Tanya and her team started by running an email campaign targeting thousands of users. However, the conversion rate for these emails was only 0.5%. Tanya knew that at this pace, it would be nearly impossible to get the desired number of beta users. 

So she decided to create an in-app campaign with an Appcues slideout. 

On the very first day of the in-app campaign, dozens of users signed up, with an overall 5% conversion rate—a 10x increase in conversion compared to email campaigns.

“The timing and placement of information play a critical role in conversion. Our in-app beta campaign was a huge success. As the results show, running targeted beta campaigns with Appcues is a no-brainer” 

Seeing the success of the first campaign, the team has continued using this approach to invite customers to similar programs.  

Migrating users to new UI 

When GoToWebinar rolled out a new UI, the product team wanted to make sure that users had a smooth transition to the new interface. Their goal was to ensure adoption of the new UI, while heading off users’ concerns regarding the transition in order to minimize support calls.

Tanya and her team used Appcues to create 5 walkthroughs that they hoped would alleviate support load and provide on-demand assistance to migrated users. These walkthroughs were accessible at all times through the Quick Tips widget in the profile menu.  

The result?

“We migrated thousands of users to the new UI but we did not see a spike in our support calls. Much of the credit goes to the Quick Tips widget and walkthroughs we created with Appcues.”

Despite the influx of thousands of users to the new interface, the volume of support calls regarding the UI remained the same. Almost 84% of the users who were migrated to the new UI saw the quick tips link. And out of those who saw the quick tips tooltip, 40% saw the Quick Tips menu and accessed the information they were looking for. 

Since Appcues provides detailed reporting on all flows, Tanya and her team could easily see the trends for specific customer issues and iterate accordingly. The team is planning to expand on Quick Tips and walkthroughs due to the success they’ve seen and the amount of visits made by customers to resolve their technical queries on their own.

“We know that we have just scratched the surface. There’s a lot more we are planning to do with Appcues.  We are very happy with the tool and several of our other business units are now looking to get on the Appcues train as well."

Want to learn more? Find out how Appcues can help you improve your activation rate, increase campaign opt-in, and reduce support burden through contextual, targeted in-app communication.