Raise your hand if this sounds like you.
You collect awesome insights from your customers on bugs, usage and favorite features. Then, you pass that feedback on to your product team who starts hammering away at fixes and upgrades. Finally, you fire off a blog post (and hopefully, email) with a rundown on all the latest updates. Done, right?
Hold on a minute. Have you really shown your customers how to make the most of those upgrades? More importantly, have you presented your new features in a way that makes your customer feel like they literally can’t wait to try them out?
You owe it to your customer to help them get the absolute most out of your product by using marketing visuals that actually show them why your updates are awesome and how to use them in real life.
Use GIFs to Illustrate Multi-Step Actions
You know we love annotated screenshots just as much as—well, probably more than—the next guy, but when it comes to showing your customer how to use a new feature that involves more than a couple dropdowns and/or clicks, nothing beats a solid GIF. ????
Ask your product or CS team for a GIF showcasing your new feature in action. Since product updates are usually a monthly affair, consider making it a rule that for any feature involving more than 2 or 3 steps, they’ll set you up with a shiny new GIF to show it off. (Creating GIFs in CouldApp is insanely quick and easy so don’t worry, it’s not a massive request.)
Ask Power Users for Help
You probably have more than a few customers who LOVE your product. These customers would be outright flattered if you asked them for their pro tips on how to get awesome results from using it.
And consequently, combining social proof and high-value content is GREAT marketing. ????
In some cases, the customers that requested the upgrade are the perfect ones to show how it works in a real world setting. Check in with your CS reps or account managers to see if you can use the customer’s own videos, GIFs or screenshots to illustrate the change.
Worried about sharing something private? No problem. In Zight (formerly CloudApp) you can easily blur confidential info and highlight or annotate only the parts your reader need to see.
Play Up the End Benefits
Too many feature updates are written as if the only person reading them is already a power user (or worse, a member of your product team ????). But what if one of your best clients wants to share the love and forward your email to a friend?
When writing the blog and email content to announce your feature updates, always stay focused on what’s really in it for the user. Do they just want a “seamless mobile experience” or do they want to “get more done, even when they’re on the go”?
And please, don’t make your customers (and potential customers!) guess. Use annotations and real world visuals to draw their eyes directly to your latest benefit-packed upgrades, so they can see with crystal clarity how awesome it is to be your customer. ????
Are your feature updates announcements in need of an upgrade? Drop us a comment and we’ll see how we can help!