Products that do not grow will die. And dead products don’t give good results (unless they turn into zombies 🧟). What’s worse, there is no “quick fix” or “one size fits all” guide to achieving the growth, engagement, and adoption your leaders expect.

To get people to use (and love) your product, you need personalized messaging that reaches users where they are, and conveys what they care about. But if you’ve been through this before, you know that improving product outcomes with personalization isn’t as simple as it sounds. In fact, it probably is nightmare material.

Be careful: Existing messaging tools are not built for product teams

The best product teams influence user behavior by delivering entitlement message on the right time on the right place. It’s hard to do, but it’s worth it. Personalized communications increase engagement, conversions, product adoption, and customer satisfaction.

Product teams have long used in-app guides to encourage specific actions. But with an average one-month user retention rate of 36%, you need to turn to channels outside of the product to engage the other two-thirds of users.

Product teams typically rely on a combination of marketing tools and disjointed product analytics to reach non-logged-in users. Unfortunately, this means relying on your marketing team and their email tools, which aren’t built to support product teams or their use cases. Personalizing messages based on in-app behavior, timing emails around aligned in-app communications, and measuring impact is never a nightmare.

3 real world personalized horror stories

Product teams have long struggled to reach users across multiple channels. To prove it, three leaders from Pendo have shared their own personalized trials and tribulations.

1. Conjure a tightly closed tool

Driving continuous improvement is a pillar of product success. And to do this, you need qualitative and quantitative data, in one place, working together. Michelle Grupinski, principal product adoption manager at Pendo, was tasked with driving adoption across a 33-user base million. With so many users across B2B and B2C use cases, there was no way to deliver a personalized experience.

To improve product yield, Grupinski became more granular. He focused the first seven days of the B2C trial by promoting three different features. Grupinski used Pendo and third-party email solutions to build a coordinated messaging journey, and it “scaled [her] CRAZY.”

After weeks of hard work and using various tools, this messaging journey failed to increase conversions. And the worst part? Because the analysis of its products and messaging tools was done behind closed doors, Grupinski didn’t have the ability to understand what went wrong. 💔

2. Behavioral data is missing

Traditional email tools allow you to personalize touchpoints based on user metadata, such as geography and time zone. But what if you could tailor communications based on behavioral categories like work to be done, pain points, products in use, or even features adopted? This level of segmentation helps you deliver the right message to the right users, every time. Unfortunately, this process is manual, isolated, and error-prone.

Nichole Mace, Pendo’s SVP of product, has BIG plans for personalized user onboarding with beautifully crafted emails. His team was ready to launch this movement after months of hard work, but made a surprising discovery: The fields and behavioral triggers necessary to build communication were missing 😱. To fix it and launch the email, a team of developers is needed two months. Good grief.

3. Alignment of application incoming and outgoing messages

There is always users who do not use the product regularly (or not at all). To reach them, product teams must use email. But aligning in-app communications with out-of-app channels is time-consuming and complex.

Erica Akroyd, director of customer education at Pendo, and her team looked to improve onboarding success in their apps with a touch of email. After introducing personalized emails to user personas and use cases, his team saw user retention increase by nearly 300% in the second week—almost 4x the base average.

The only problem? The process combined three different tools and a staggered manual workflow, making iteration impossible. (Notice the theme yet?) Akroyd’s team knew they needed an easier way to reach users who weren’t logged in by combining email with behavioral data.

No tricks, just a treat: Product personalization is here

As in any good horror story, the hero is here to save the day: Pendo Orchestrate, the newest addition to the Pendo One platform. With Orchestrate, you can manage your app’s inbound and outbound channels in one place, personalize messages automatically with AI, and correlate interactions with in-app behavior.

The Pendo Orchestra is most powerful for three use cases:

1. New user orientation: Create a personalized cross-channel welcome experience that will get users to rate faster.
2. Feature adoption: From announcing new features to capturing users who have abandoned workflows, ensuring customers don’t add value.
3. User retention: Connect with inactive users outside of your app to re-engage their interest and draw them back—before they get cold.

Built for product results and powered by user behavior, this is the key to eliminating the personalization nightmare. Read more about Orchestrate, straight from the team that built it.

Ready to get started with personalized user engagement, both inside and outside the app? Take a self-guided tour, or request a demo to get started.