Keap used in-app announcements to increase feature adoption by 10x

Based in Chandler, Arizona, Keap provides the leading sales and marketing platform for small businesses. Its web-based solution helps small businesses automatically market to get more customers, grow sales and save time. Todd Meyer is a product manager at Keap. “What’s different about us is that we are uniquely experienced in the small business space,” said Todd. “We know our customers really well. Pendo helps me look at customer usage patterns, see how different features are used, and how customers interact with different parts of the application.”

A unified platform for user analytics and guidance

The team at Keap understood the value of being able to understand and guide users in their application. “We were actually using several solutions before we moved to Pendo. We had commercial solutions both for measuring product usage and for delivering guides in our application,” said Todd. “The search started because we were struggling with our analytics solution. We were able to capture a lot of data, but it was really hard to see the data in a way that was actionable. We were also encountering performance issues. Half the queries I would run would timeout before they completed.”

“We came across Pendo as an alternative, but we were skeptical about performance – we figured that no tool would really be able to handle capturing data from all our users. We were able to talk to engineering, and we did a lot of testing before we went live, but overall Pendo’s been great from a performance perspective since we rolled it out.”

Seeing how Pendo brings together analytics and in-app guides was a big differentiator. “The fact that Pendo knows who you’re serving the guides to is really powerful. You don’t ever want to over-message people in the application. With Pendo we can get really specific with our guide targeting. It was pretty clear that we didn’t need two separate products to do this anymore.”

New insights into feature and customer usage

“Before we had Pendo, other than big features, we didn’t really have a good way to keep track of how a new feature was being used,” said Todd. “We’d put out an enhancement, and really couldn’t see what the adoption rate was. With Pendo, we could really easily see not only what the adoption rate was, but who the specific customers were that had used the feature.”

“In a few cases, we were seeing that we had lower than expected usage. Our hypothesis was that it was a discoverability issue – people just weren’t finding the feature. With Pendo, it was really quick and easy to put a guide out there targeted to all the customers who hadn’t adopted the feature. Just a simple guide can have a huge effect. I think in some cases we saw a 1000% increase in feature usage in a week after we pushed out the guide.”

“Our application is really broad, and we have a lot of different types of users,” said Todd, “Before Pendo, we had a hard time really understanding which users were using which parts of the application. Now we have a really clear picture of our different users, and what a healthy or unhealthy customer profile looks like based on product usage. The Salesforce integration has been extremely valuable on this front as well. We have all of our customer data available for segmentation in Pendo.”

Product data across the organization

Pendo was initially acquired by the product team, but it has quickly spread across the organization at Keap. “We have a lot of different teams using the product now,” said Todd. “All of the PMs here use the product, as well as our usability team. They use Pendo to identify groups of customers with a common usage characteristic. They develop these cohorts to recruit for user testing, and reach out for additional feedback.”

“Our designers also use Pendo for design research. If they are looking to redesign a page they can see what features are used, and which aren’t. That way they know what is important to keep in the new page, and what can be removed, or at least de-prioritized in the user experience.”

Todd continues, “We also have a customer marketing team. They use Pendo for notifications and customer outreach in the application like letting them know about upcoming events that we’re running. We run live webinars for our customers and were struggling to drive attendance. Promoting them in the application was much more effective than other channels. When we started promoting them in-app we saw a large jump in attendance.”

“We also have a customer experience team that’s part of our support organization. They collect a lot of user feedback from customers and use guides to serve them to customers in the application. They will either embed a short survey directly in a guide or link out to a separate page for more lengthy surveys. Last quarter we began testing our NPS surveys in the application as well. We really get a lot of use from Pendo across our teams.”