How Third Bridge Achieved a 15% CTA Uplift with In-App Messaging

Third Bridge, a research company that helps investors make the best investment decisions, struggled with guiding users to effectively utilize their content platform.

Email communications were frequently ignored or poorly timed, especially ineffective for onboarding. High-touch onboarding sessions weren’t scalable for their growing user base. Most concerning, they lacked the tools to onboard new users inside the app, target customers with high churn risk, and encourage user activity.

Third Bridge turned to Userpilot’s in-app messaging features to address these challenges. By implementing a strategic approach that delivered communications directly within the platform when users were actively engaged, they increased CTA clicks by 10–15%.

Challenge

Third Bridge needed a more effective way to communicate with users directly within their expert platform. Traditional channels like email were falling short, and they lacked the visibility to understand how users interacted with the product.

“Email can be a tired and challenging form of communication. And sometimes clients switch off from it.”

This problem revolved around solving four key challenges:

• Communicating with users in-product rather than relying on email or calls: Good timing is essential for product updates, new feature releases, or issues like outages. And the best time to reach out is when the user is on the app, not when they check their email during a break.
• Reducing churn: Third Bridge’s team needs to meet churn goals to prevent as many investment clients from cancelling. To do this, they require a tool like Userpilot to target at-risk customers who haven’t logged in for 3–6 months or have low login frequency.
• Improving onboarding for new customers: Third Bridge didn’t have an onboarding process built into their platform, which results in more churn as the business grows. To solve this, the team needs to implement product adoption strategies to turn new users into active, loyal customers.

Solution

Third Bridge had been managing their user insights with a fragmented tech stack: using Fullstory for session replays and Twilio for analytics, among other tools. Recognizing the inefficiency, they began consolidating their technology solutions.

“We’re really trying to use as few products as possible. And now that our product and UX team have also seen Userpilot’s features, we’re considering using it for more use cases,” explains Dean Lindsay.

Userpilot emerged as their comprehensive solution, offering not just in-app messaging but also session replays, product analytics, and mobile app engagement capabilities, all in one platform. This consolidation streamlined their workflow while expanding their user engagement toolkit.

With Userpilot as their central platform, Dean and the Third Bridge team implemented strategic improvements to their in-app communications and user behavior tracking:

1. Feature announcements and onboarding

Third Bridge’s main use case for Userpilot is in-app messaging. So to engage users with the platform, they created in-app flows for introducing new features and addressing system outages.

Plus, they’re now implementing an onboarding process that includes walkthroughs, checklists for new users, and in-app support:

“We’re currently using flows and working closely with our account manager to create a structured plan for onboarding new customers. Mobile is another big focus for us this year, so we’re excited to tap into Userpilot’s mobile features as part of that strategy.”

For instance, Dean set up a flow to trigger a new feature announcement for their AI search feature. This announcement lets users choose whether to get started with a tour or skip.

Third Bridge is announcing the AI search feature with Userpilot.

If the user decides to try out the new feature, then the walkthrough will guide the user throughout the feature step by step, allowing them to interact with it in the process and experience its value.

Third Bridge’s tour triggers when the user hits continue.

This makes it possible for users to realize the value of a feature right when it’s fresh, instead of having to wait for them to take the initiative.

2. Staging environment for faster approvals

According to Dean, one of the best practices he learned with Userpilot is to test during the staging phase.

For context, Userpilot’s staging environment allows Third Bridge’s team to preview and test the flows before going live.

This not only helps them find potential issues before publishing a flow, but it’s especially useful to get the approval from stakeholders faster, as Dean mentions:

“Being able to share a realistic, interactive version of a flow makes it so much easier to get internal approvals. Sometimes static slides can be a little bit stiff, but when you show the flow on-site, there’s nothing better than that.”

So instead of showing an idea on stale presentations that might not even get buy-in, the staging can show the product exactly as it’s going to be.

3. Engagement insights with analytics

Although Third Bridge already uses tools like Twilio for analytics, Dean mentions that Userpilot has been particularly valuable to expand their visibility on product usage and engagement metrics, too.

“Userpilot changed our visibility on product usage while providing the mechanisms to communicate with users in a more strategic way outside of email.”

For this reason, the team is now looking into implementing performance reports that show essential metrics like CTA clicks, flow completion rates, feature adoption, and activation rate. This way, they‘ll be able to test different messaging approaches and learn what resonates with users without consuming engineering resources.

These three solutions led Dean to see that their in-app CTAs were getting 15% more clicks. Which leads us to:

Results

Even though Third Bridge’s team has only used a fraction of Userpilot’s features, they’ve already seen tangible results.

Here’s what has improved in their business:

• 15% increase in CTA clicks: Third Bridge’s content platform has many areas where it nudges the user to learn more. With Userpilot’s in-app tooltips, users’ responses to these “learn more” CTAs increased by 15%, which means users are engaging more and getting value from the platform.

“We’ve seen a 10–15% increase in CTA engagement. The weekly performance reports make it easy to track key metrics and see what’s working.”

• Improved visibility into user behavior: Even though Third Bridge uses another tool for analytics, Userpilot brought tremendous value to them for tracking user engagement and coming up with data-driven engagement strategies.

“Userpilot has given us visibility into client usage metrics that we simply didn’t have before — especially at the engagement level. On top of that, the platform is incredibly intuitive and easy to use, which is exactly what I need. I don’t want complexity.”

• Faster internal approvals and collaboration: As I mentioned, Userpilot’s staging feature allows Dean to show exactly how a flow works in the product to stakeholders before going live. This inevitably leads to faster implementation, easier approval, and fewer back-and-forths with stakeholders.

“The biggest tip I’d give is to use staging to share with stakeholders. It’s a much easier and quicker way to get approval.”

• Shifted communication strategy from email to timely, relevant in-app messaging: Third Bridge used to rely on email, calls, and meetings to communicate with clients on issues, announcements, and questions. Now, they can reach users right when they’re using their platform, which is the best moment to motivate them to engage with the product.

“Email can be a tired and often ineffective way to communicate — people tend to tune it out. But a well-timed in-app message, delivered when someone is logged in, is a much easier and more effective way to share information and drive action.”

Thanks to these results, Third Bridge now plans to expand its product strategies to include personalization, A/B testing, and mobile engagement. For example, segmenting communications based on asset class and personas, such as tailoring messages for private equity researchers, hedge fund owners, and so on.

How can you leverage Userpilot for effective in-app engagement?

Any person without technical expertise can use Userpilot engagement features. Beyond simple in-app messaging, you’ll deliver contextually perfect communications that respond to real-time user behavior, anticipate customer needs, and provide support precisely when it matters most.

Here’s what you can build with it:

• Interactive walkthroughs: Use different UI patterns such as modals, tooltips, and hotspots to handhold users throughout your features step by step. This way, users learn your product by using it rather than having to read a help guide.

This is what an interactive walkthrough looks like with Userpilot.

• UI patterns: Make custom tooltips, modals, and banners to fit your product’s aesthetics.

Editing a tooltip with Userpilot.

• Onboarding checklists: Besides building in-app walkthroughs, you can also add checklists inside your product so users can successfully achieve activation.

Creating a custom onboarding checklist with Userpilot.

• Resource center: Build a custom in-app knowledge base to provide easy access to resources like help docs, FAQs, videos, or access chat support, all without leaving your app.

Designing an in-app resource center with Userpilot.

• Granular segmentation: Group your users based on useful characteristics such as in-app events, survey responses, funnel stage, company size, and more.

Using Userpilot to segment users who completed onboarding.

“Userpilot is an incredibly intuitive and capable product that provides deep insights into your customers. It allows you to message and engage with them in a highly personalized and segmented way. With its strong mobile features alongside the web app, it’s become an invaluable tool for us.”

👉🏻 Do you like the idea of building a more engaging user experience without coding? Then book a demo with Userpilot and see how you can trigger in-app messages like Third Bridge!