By now we are all well versed in watching sites’ explainer videos, those animated recordings that explain what your product does, its services, and why people should buy it. In other words, ‘how to’ videos. They seem to be almost everywhere and many companies embed them in their sites to explain what they do, in anticipation of boosted conversion rates and user acquisition. But ignorance is bliss, and in reality, most explainer videos won’t boost your conversion rate enough or make you more money. Why? Many consumers easily forget what they have just watched.
Lately, it’s all about being ahead of the trends and pushing boundaries to achieve the best possible user acquisition out there, to keep ‘the fish hooked’.
How? With user guided tours. These are sequences of pops-ups, visualized audio guides, or integrated optical instructions to help guide a viewer through various steps to carry out a task.
Why? User guided tours have gained a lot of recognition for being user-friendly and naturally directing users onsite in a personalized manner.
User guide tools are taking the online world by storm and are in high demand. There is a buffet of customer guided tools to choose from and it’s up to you get onboard. I’ve saved you the time and found 3 of the coolest solutions to guide users through your site:
Liven Up With Toonimo
To start off with, Toonimo is a user guidance tool that offers on-site user assistance via an on-page audiovisual layer. The platform combines real voice-over scripts with graphic elements, in order to guide and convert site visitors. The concept is that your site becomes an interactive audio-visual layer supporting users throughout their life-cycle on your website, focusing their attention and assisting them with personal website needs. Toonimo’s platform can be personalized to your visitors and reacts to their behavior on your site. The platform’s engine provides advanced rule-based targeting combining on-page parameters with users’ parameters for serving specific users and cases. Pricing depends on your site’s traffic, as there are different and customized plans.
Walk The Talk with Walkme
Walkme is a platform that produces visual hints for a website visitors so that they can easily travel around your site. As a product or brand owner you may feel pulled between sales and guiding your new customers through the first few steps, and all too often your visitors will fall between the gaps and get lost. Walkme’s user guide tool aims to hold the users hand and lets you add a step-by-step walk through for your site. They offer a series of walkthroughs, analytics, onboarding and surveys. These elements make up a powerful and comprehensive engagement tool. Customers can use a Firefox plugin to create the walkthroughs for their site, which can be published by adding a JavaScript to their home pages. Their sites will display a ‘button’ so that visitors can click on it which opens up an interactive overlay that navigates them through the site. Walkme is initially free for up to three basic walkthroughs, but any extras such as advanced analytics or engagement optimization comes at a cost. At the end of the day no matter how many walkthroughs you may adopt, the end result is an increase in revenue and decrease in bounce rates.
The Internet GPS- WalkHub
Although still in its Beta phase, Walkhub is another fully developed user guide tool which acts as a sites own personal ‘tour guide’ with help of walkthrough steps and widgets. Walkhub tutorials run on the top of your websites and they adapt to any changes and notifies you when something is wrong. Generally other tutorials just record a visual representation of your site, but WalkHub records interactions. This makes the Walkthroughs receptive to interactions happening on a site. The end result is a walkthrough that acts like a GPS for the internet, providing the user with just the right amount of product info whilst performing an action. So, what’s the damage? Recording and playing Walkthroughs is free, if you keep your Walkthroughs public. Costs come into play when you want to offer private sharing and unlimited automatic screenshot updates.
Which user guide tool have you tried out on your site? Chime in with other suggestions in the comment section below.