There are a whole host of areas product marketers need to master, with messaging and onboarding a couple specialties where there’s no room for mediocrity.
Not only is messaging your opportunity to present the value of your product or service to your customer, but it also serves as a window to establish a promise to your target market to establish expectations; brands need to have a distinguishable voice to set them apart from their competition.
After all, companies swimming against the currents are often the ones who make the most noise.
Similarly, the onboarding process plays an equally important role in the product marketing process. Not only does it convert leads into bonafide customers, but provides the platform for them to use the product to full effect.
It’s important to execute these areas particularly well, so we’ve popped together a list of tools fit for royalty.
Introducing awesome tools to add to your bejeweled PMM crown. 👑
On the lookout for the best PMM tools available? Great news, you can find over 200+ vetted and tested tools in our PMM Tech Stack.
Help Scout
Help Scout was designed to deliver great customer experiences and from messaging to reporting it’s packed with lots of features that do just that. Here are just a few:
• Send messages on things like announcements, onboarding info, and product feedback from any website, store, blog, or app.
• Reduce customer support volume with the Docs editor, where anyone can submit helpful content.
• Store conversations and activity from all your apps in one place so you’ve always got the full picture of every account.
Website: www.helpscout.com
Cost:
Appcues
Appcues is a product-led growth platform and companies who use it have seen some pretty remarkable feature adoption, user retention, and campaign response results.
Within the tool you can set-up personalized onboarding experiences, collect actionable insights (like NPS scores and qualitative feedback), deliver in-product announcements, and provide on-demand customer support.
Website: www.appcues.com
Cost: the price depends on how many monthly active users you have, but based on 5,000 you’d be looking at:
“We’re new to AppCues and we’re loving the journey so far. We are currently using AppCues on a couple of our custom web applications to drive new product and feature adoption and track some basic metrics.
“It’s intuitive to use and comes with the support of an excellent account and customer success team so you don’t feel alone in the in-app notification journeys. Now, creating welcome flows and in-app guides is as easy as dragging and dropping a module on the relevant page and hitting that ‘publish’ button. We love it.”
Angela Catalan, Director of Product Marketing at Nearmap
HubSpot
Hmm, where to start. It’s impossible to cover it all, but here’s a very high-level overview of some of HubSpot’s most popular features:
• Marketing: create landing pages, personalized paths, SEO-optimised content strategies, and drag-and-drop your way to smart and responsive templates.
• Sales: automate email campaigns and follow-ups, track deal statuses, and connect with your market via live chat.
• Service: bring all your communication channels together (inbox, live chat, forums, Facebook, and more) and create and monitor tickets.
Website: www.hubspot.com
Cost: They’ve got so many different products and packages, so it’d be a pretty hefty table for us to replicate, but you can find everything you need here: hubspot.com/pricing.
“Hubspot has transformed the way we do marketing. Previously, we used specific specialist tools for each activity and we would then have a painfully manual process trying to tie the data together to take learnings.
“Now with Hubspot as our central marketing system, we can quickly get insight on both the performance of a campaign and how it compares against other campaigns - all from one system.”
Rebecca Taylor, Product Marketing Manager at GatherContent
Whatfix
Whatfix helps your users work their way around your product self-sufficiently and you deliver great customer experiences with less manual input.
It lets you build step-by-step walkthroughs with zero coding, create segments, set-up condition-based walkthroughs, auto-generate various content types (like PDFs, videos, and slideshows), schedule alerts and announcements, and analyze how people use your product.
Website: www.whatfix.com
Cost: Not available online
Gainsight
Gainsight’s Product Experience Platform provides the tools needed to get a deeper understanding of user behavior, drive product adoption, and collect feedback. It achieves this by tracking users’ every movement (like clicks, logins, and email opens), identifying where people fall off critical tasks, guiding inactive users back to your product via email, and so much more.
It’s also got some great Customer Experience, Customer Success, Customer Data, and Revenue Optimisation products.
Website: www.gainsight.com
Cost: Not available online
Beamer
If you’re looking for a way to create and schedule things like news, updates, and special offers, this could well be your tool.
Beamer works as an embeddable widget or standalone page, accommodates text, images, videos, and gifs, comes with lots of segmentation options (like industry, location, and behavior), and sends push notifications even if someone’s not on your site. Sold? Well, it doesn’t stop there. You can also get feedback, analyze your results, customize your designs, and integrate it with other apps.
Website: www.getbeamer.com
Cost:
“One of the main reasons we chose Beamer is because they support a multi-lingual approach which is key to our go-to-market strategy, and we are now able to show our product advancement way better to our users.
“They don't feel like we're in a standstill anymore, it helps to create a better adoption of new features and we're currently seeing an increase in NPS and customer happiness again - not all of that can be directly linked to the implementation of Beamer of course, but it's one of the reasons for sure.”
Benny Waelput, Product Marketing Manager at Teamleader
Drift
Not into coding? Not a problem. Drift lets you build custom chatbot flows in minutes with no need for any coding, all so you can create personalized sales conversations and generate more qualified leads.
Website: www.drift.com
Cost:
“Drift’s top tier for ‘conversational marketing’ - i.e. chat. It has loads of options even at low tiers and having used it for years I’ve seen the growth.
"Success requires a Sales team that's excited about chat (you may have to pilot it first as an inbound tool) and I’d recommend working early on the routing rules to ensure visitors get a timely response and figuring out tagging so you can report on who's chatting.”
Alec Pinkham, Director of Product Marketing at AppNeta
WalkMe
WalkMe detangles SaaS platforms so users can confidently glide through their journey and your people can stay productive.
How? By automating repetitive tasks, workflows and chatbots, guiding customers through your product - step-by-step, contextually presenting users with relevant content based on things like their location, time, system and predicted behavior, and serving you with the info needed to drive future transformations - like which parts of your product are and aren’t being used.
Website: www.walkme.com
Cost: Not available online
Pendo
Pendo’s packed with tools to improve product adoption, customer loyalty, and team innovation. Its analytics feature provides insights into what users are doing throughout their journey, its surveys capture how they feel about their experience, its in-app walkthroughs and messages encourage engagement, and its feedback tool helps prioritize future releases.
Website: www.pendo.io
Cost: Not available online
“After using Pendo to design in-app support for existing users and immediate onboarding for new ones, we saw a steep increase in engagement and retention that translated into direct earnings since our customers paid us by user engagement.”
Tom Heys, Go-To-Market Consultant
Intercom
Intercom are the communication giants. Their chatbot and live chat features help qualify more leads, their targeted messages help onboard and activate more customers, and their inbox automation and self-service support ensure personalization on tap at scale.
Website: www.intercom.com
Cost: All prices are ‘from’.
"With so many integrations and customization options, Intercom is our go-to customer portal.
As a PMM, I use it to keep track of who left what on NPS and review sites. I also use information from customer conversations I've had here to send feature requests to our product team."
Lisa Kalner Williams, Product Marketing Director at Agorapulse
UserIQ
UserIQ helps you get under the skin of how your customers think to increase revenue, decrease churn, and drive continual improvement.
On-demand, virtual guided tours, segmented usage data, and real-time customer feedback tools are just a snapshot of what it’s got to address all three.
Website: www.useriq.com
Cost:
Chameleon
With surveys, tooltips, tours, and launchers, Chameleon improves product funnels by reaching out to the right people (with segmentation), at the right time (via triggers), in the right place.
Website: www.trychameleon.com
Cost:
Remember, we've barely skimmed the surface of the tools available to product marketers in this piece. Check out the PMM Tech Stack to discover a ton of reviewed and approve tools to implement in your practice.
