10 most common use cases for DAPs

These are the most common needs for which companies hire DAPs, although not the only benefits:

1. User onboarding and activation

2. Trial conversion

3. Feature discovery and adoption

4. Self-serve support and reducing tickets

5. Reducing churn and increasing retention

6. Cross-selling and upselling

7. Getting customer feedback and input

8. Content promotion

9. Updating users with news and notifications

10. Change management

For each, below, we’ll explain the use case, key associated metrics, relevant DAP patterns to use, best practices, and examples of companies succeeding. Review the use cases relevant to you, or explore other ways that DAPs are used 🕵️‍♀️

User onboarding and activation

Effective user onboarding reduces the learning curve, increases engagement, and decreases the likelihood of churn. With onboarding, your goal is to set the stage for activation and ensure that users can quickly and successfully start using your product at its full potential. This might include opting in for a paid plan or performing key tasks that keep users engaged in the long run. 

Some key components include welcome announcements, guided walkthroughs, step-by-step instructions, and visual cues that indicate how far users have come in their onboarding process. Easy access to help centers, FAQs, or customer support is essential to help unblock users if they get confused or stuck. 

An effective onboarding process ensures that users find value in the product and will most likely continue to use it.

💡 Real-life case study from Foleon, a digital content creation platform, achieved a 99% completion rate for onboarding walkthroughs available via self-serve checklists. 

Trial conversion

Trial conversion is when users using a product or service for free during a trial period decide to subscribe to a paid plan. The main goal of this phase is to demonstrate a product’s value and the different ways users can solve challenges by using this product. 

Successful trial conversion focuses on communicating a product’s unique benefits from the start, highlighting the features that improve users’ flows, tailoring communication based on users’ intent and behavior, and active engagement during the trial period through emails, notifications, or in-app messages. 

To improve trial conversion, look to identify the patterns and milestones that indicate a user's likelihood of converting to a paid plan and maximize communication around those.

💡 Real-life case study from The Motley Fool, a financial services company, achieved a 9% increase in free trial conversion over 45 days using product tours to onboard new premium members and educate them on key features. 

Feature discovery and adoption

Feature discovery and adoption refer to users becoming aware of new or existing features within a product and starting to use the newly discovered functionalities. Effective feature discovery ensures that users are informed about all the functionalities available to them, which leads to higher engagement and usage.

Feature adoption is the basis of healthy product usage and adoption as it translates into active users who pursue new ways to improve their workflows and solve their challenges.

A few components of driving feature discovery and awareness include timely in-app announcements that announce availability or nudge users to discover unexplored features, interactive tutorials or contextual tooltips that offer insight as users navigate a product, easily accessible help resources and guides, or recommendations based on user preferences and usage patterns.

💡 Real-life case study from Vitally, a customer success and productivity software, combines in-app tours and banners with AI-powered search to drive feature adoption and connect users with help guides in their app.

Self-serve support and reducing tickets

Self-serve support is the backbone of effectively reducing incoming support tickets at scale. The standard way to unblock users used to be through a dedicated agent/team that provided answers. With a DAP, you can implement low-touch support that ensures users can access help without contacting support teams. 

This ensures that repetitive and simple queries will have visible answers and empowers customers to resolve their issues independently, which can significantly lower the volume of incoming support requests.

To implement self-serve support in your product, you can display help menus or checklists that clearly communicate the availability of help resources, enable a CMD+K search pattern that users can access anywhere, use tooltips to inform users of specific functionalities, or leverage your existing support tools to engage users in your app through chats.  

💡 Real-life case study from AvidXchange, an accounts payable automation software company, leveraged tours, and other in-app messages to deflect 20,000 tickets over 12 months. 

Reducing churn and increasing retention

Churn reduction involves strategies and practices to retain and prevent users from discontinuing product use. Customer retention is keeping existing customers engaged, satisfied, and loyal. This focuses on continuously delivering value to users and, most often, fostering a culture prioritizing user satisfaction. 

Some of the levers to reduce churn and increase retention are providing ongoing value to users via product updates and valuable content, personalizing the user experience based on preferences, enabling continuous education that helps users maximize the product’s value, messages of appreciation or milestone celebrations, and sharing special offers or perks. 

💡 Real-life case study from Mixpanel, a product analytics software, used product tours to announce new features and product updates, which resulted in a 4% increase in customer retention and a 3x increase in their Net Promoter Score. 

Cross-selling and upselling

These two strategies aim to increase the revenue generated from existing users by encouraging them to purchase additional products/services or upgrade their plans. Cross-selling involves recommending complementary features/services to users based on their usage and interests. This, in turn, should add more value to the purchase and enhance the overall experience. 

Through upsells, we encourage users to purchase higher-end services or upgrade their existing plan to a more expensive one with more features and services. The goal is to offer a superior option and increase user satisfaction. 

Some efficient levers of driving in-app cross-sell and upsell are upgrade nudges tailored by plan, product usage, or needs, personalized reminders that highlight the benefits of joining higher-tier plans or maintaining existing services, invitations to unlock new features or advanced functionalities, and sharing special offers.

💡 Real-life case study from Chili Piper, a Demand Conversion Platform used in-app banners to generate $150K+ ARR from upsells in a few weeks. 

Getting customer feedback and input

This use case includes engaging users in-app to solicit and capture opinions, insights, suggestions, or other data without requiring users to leave the application. This makes the feedback/data collection process much more efficient, as it asks for participation when users are already engaged and more willing to partake. 

These enable users to: share opinions on particular features or the overall product experience, submit ideas or feature requests, opt-in to beta programs or exclusive events, report bugs or issues, share feedback on upcoming features, and more. Product teams leverage these insights to prioritize easier and better understand where users miss functionalities. 

Various in-app surveys are available on the DAP market: rating, NPS, input, or muti-button that can be targeted at specific users and triggered as users perform specific actions or engage with features. 

💡 Real-life case study from Fivetran, a data integration software, used in-app surveys to reduce friction and improve their product launches and is now effectively incorporating user feedback into product decisions.

Content promotion

This refers to the strategic placement or promotion of content that enhances users’ workflows and drives user engagement and increases usage. Content promotion can include sharing blog or help articles, or how-to guides that educate users on specific features, or promoting dedicated events. 

Content promotion works best when it targets the users who are most likely to find value or engage with your content and don’t disrupt current workflows. Recent trends show that users prefer embedded patterns in these cases.

Some key content or event promotion components are displaying personalized invitations to relevant events (based on user’s data and needs), using banners or embedded carousels to promote popular content or recent news, and sharing exclusive content based on users’ demographics or needs.  

💡 Real-life case study from AvidXchange, an accounts payable automation software company, used product tours for webinar promotion and increased registrations by 3x!

Updating users with news and notifications

This implies announcing major product changes or notifying users of changes or settings that need their attention, often to continue using the product efficiently. Communicating company-wide news to users helps maintain a stronger bond and ensures continued trust, even with news that does not mean a change in usage for the users. 

Notifying users about account settings that ensure successful usage is a low-effort and high-reward practice. This ensures users are informed and can act upon your directions if necessary. 

In both cases, the preferred methods are non-intrusive announcements that do not interrupt users but help them acknowledge a successful/ unsuccessful action, a new status, a started process, or a setting awaiting configuration.    

Change management

A change in UI or ways of operating requires explicit user education and guidance, especially for power users with various workflows. In this case, combining a feedback collection method (surveys, interviews) with step-by-step walkthroughs or lightboxes is often preferred to help users get accustomed to the changes faster. This ensures users will not feel confused and possibly drop off when dealing with new flows or modes of operations. 

The key elements of announcing product changes are early teasers that announce upcoming changes, options for users to test and share feedback on new or upcoming product updates, prototype testing, and walkthroughs that guide users through changes. 

💡 Real-life case study from Degreed, a learning platform, achieved a 280% increase in beta platform opt-ins and actionable feedback when they launched a new product design to 50,000 users with product tours and surveys.