Why Your Business Needs an Interactive Product Tour in 2024

When users encounter a brand new product, they try to understand how to use it by themselves before asking for help.

If they can figure out the value of the product, it is a big win for the business. This is where an interactive product tour helps you.

Successful companies are getting used to offer interactive product tours to retain new users and improve feature adoption and product adoption. They choose to explain the system and the functionality in an interactive way rather than expecting users to understand them by chance.

In this article, we will explain:

  • what a product tour is,
  • why you need one right now,
  • how a quality product tour is created,
  • and the use cases of interactive product tours.

If you are experiencing low product adoption and conversion rates and you don’t have an interactive user manual yet, you should definitely try integrating one.

And if you already have one, you must consider making some changes soon.

What is a product tour?

People enjoy discovering an experience by themselves, like a little child’s first experience with the world.

Product tours offer a safe environment to ensure people discover your product in the most efficient way. It is best if you accompany a little kid for their first experience rather than leaving them all alone in the middle of the world, right?

Product tours aim to improve the comprehension of your product. It enables you to walk the first tour with your users so that you can give them step-by-step instructions. This is an excellent opportunity to reveal the real value of your product and in the meantime increase user engagement.

It is not a one-time thing to leave behind after you gain the user. You can make use of a product tour to increase the rates of feature adoption and the advantage your users take from your product quickly. This connects users with your product because there are various alternatives, and people are trying to avoid a waste of time.

what is an interactive product tour

Do you need an interactive product tour?

A product tour is critical to motivating people to use and keep using your product. Through your guidance, every single user can experience their Aha moment.

These moments are a great start for a long-term relationship with your users.

The product tour requires a little more than just a clear design and a bit of detail. You may think that the value of your product is so obvious that everybody can grasp it at the first encounter.

Do not ignore the possibility of losing potential customers just because they couldn’t figure out how to use it for their own needs.  

Even the most straightforward steps to use your product may seem complicated to many people who are not tech-savvy. So, help them when they feel lost. Also, act proactively and never let them feel lost about your product.

And you need an interactive product tour today because people like exploring products by themselves, and they don’t want your help.

According to a survey, 67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative.

That’s not all!

91% of customers would use an online knowledge base, if available. They also like to see tailor-made guides, which makes interactive tours a great option. If you show them how to improve their experience, your chances of keeping your users are incredibly high.

do you need an interactive product tour

How to Create Interactive Product Tours

Now there aren’t that many requirements to consider when creating an interactive product tour.

It has to be interactive

… and it has to show your product.

When you have considered these 2 points when creating your product tour, you’ll have what you need.

But creating a great product tour that instantly increases your retention and conversion rates, is a much harder task.

We have gathered the top 5 tips for more engaging product tours in this article.

And since interactive product tours are part of the user onboarding process, it wouldn’t be a waste to check out our articles 15 Essential Tips for Better User Onboarding and How to Structure a Successful User Onboarding Experience.

What you choose to create a product tour with is a big question. The whole creation process changes according to your choice between going in-source to create the product tour or working with 3rd-party tools during the process.

Here’s how:

In-source

When going in-source to creating your own interactive product tour, you give up a lot of resources, but gain massive freedom.

Your product tour can be fully customizable to your liking and it could be exclusive to your product.

But you would have to sacrifice hours and hours of coding, designing, and maintaining in order to gain this freedom.

3rd-Party Tools

3rd-party tools, on the other hand, are a great solution to your interactive product tour needs. Most 3rd-party user onboarding software offer a wide variety of user onboarding elements with no required coding skills.

These tools, such as UserGuiding, provide you with various features such as NPS surveys, feature highlights, in-product messages, interactive help-centers, and detailed analytics along with interactive product tours.

UserGuiding

These tools usually don’t require any technical knowledge to use, and you don’t have to invest hours into the product to create a product tour because it only takes you minutes to obtain a significant creation.

You can click here to start your free trial today with UserGuiding and see how easy it is to create product tours for yourself!

Use Cases of Interactive Product Tours

There are various places to make use of product tours for your product.

Let’s discuss each of these options briefly.

1. Introducing a product

Product tours offer excellent help when you are looking for an impressive and fruitful way to introduce your product. You can design a product tour to take your users to a guided introduction. 

Through product tours, you can explain the features of your product and the ways to use them. Tell them about every button, every field, and every detail regarding your product on your tours.

This way, users won’t feel intimidated by your product, even if they’re not tech-savvy, because it’ll feel like they have the support they’re looking for right next to them, just digital.

2. Onboarding new users and new employees

Have you earned new users? That’s great news! You can use product tours to onboard new users. In this way, they can quickly comprehend the functions of your product and figure out the real value of it. 

You can have loyal users if you can offer a full understanding of your product. Make sure that you paid enough attention to the user onboarding process. 

Also, you can train the employees that will help you grow your business using interactive product tours. The better they know about the product, the better they can assist and lead your customers.

3. Managing changes 

You might have provided employee training, but your product is probably evolving and changing. So you will need to revise and update the knowledge of your employees for the best change management.

Change management covers not only your employees but also your users. Your users would like to know what the upgrades mean to them. Help them understand new features that will add value to their experience with your product.

4. Self-service help-centers

FAQ pages are useful but not as efficient as your users are looking for. Product tours are here to enrich your customer services. Answer the questions of your users interactively. 

The research shows that customers prefer knowledge bases over all other self-service channels. Interactive self-service user help enables you to share more specific information, which means you can give more efficient services with your user help department. 


Frequently Asked Questions


📈 How can Interactive Product Tours help my business?

Interactive Product Tours enable users to understand products by themselves, increase retention and conversion while decreasing tickets.


⏳ How long does it take to create an Interactive Product Tour?

It takes you minutes to create an interactive product tour if you are using a 3rd-party user onboarding tool, much longer than that if you are not.


❓ Which products need an Interactive Product Tour?

Unless it is an extremely simple one-button product, every product needs an interactive product tour to improve its UX.

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Alican Bektas

Alican Bektas

Alican is the Product Manager of UserGuiding, a code-free product walkthrough software that helps teams scale user onboarding and boost user engagement.