I thought it would be useful to create a document on using Parle for the first time and during the first week.
Parle requires some actions on your side to get the most value, but once they’re implemented, the benefits you can gain are substantial.
Day one
Well, you can look around a bit, but there’s not much interesting to see when you’re just creating your account.
Until you embed the script into your app and start identifying your users, Parle isn’t going to be that impressive.
So, the first task you might want to do is just add the embed script to your application. You can add it to a staging environment if you prefer to test-run Parle’s capabilities; that’s fine. Just know that users created in a staging environment will also be there when you move to production.
note: Creating a staging / test Parle product is in the works; in fact, it’s already there, but we don’t have UI for it yet. Reach out if you’d like us to create you a test environment.
In our getting started documentation, you can find how to embed your Parle script and identify your users.
Users will start appearing in your dashboard as soon as you identify them.
Click on the users to see their profile; there are also company profiles.
If you used tags during user identification, you’ll see them in the user’s profile.
Custom fields require being created before you can start seeing them in the user’s profile.
That would be the next step for today’s tasks. Think about one or two custom fields you’d want to track and create them in the Audience / Custom fields tab.
One popular field is the MRR or some kind of monetary representation for this user. Another one can be the count of an important entity in your application. If your application was a project management SaaS, you could have their number of active projects in a custom field.
Day two and three
Cool, users are flowing into Parle! It’s time to create your first automation.
Like we’ve said multiple times already, the most common first automation people create is an onboarding sequence.
Maybe you already have such a sequence, maybe you’re sending emails manually and copy/pasting the email body. Or maybe you want to start sending emails to new users of your product.
No matter the case, you’ll first need to create the emails in Parle.
But wait, before you start, I’d encourage you to think a little bit about the automation sequence, the emails, and maybe conditions that you’d want to use in this workflow.
Let’s take Parle for instance. Our onboarding automation workflow starts with a nudge and an email to welcome the new user.
Then there’s a 3-day delay and a condition to check if the user created a workflow. There are two different emails from there, and so on.
It’s easier to design your workflow on a piece of paper, and I’m not kidding. It’s really worth it to think of these before creating the workflow itself.
Once you’ve thought about the sequence, you may create your emails, nudges, overlays, etc. — everything you’ll need for this workflow to work — and then create the workflow itself.
The most important question about any new automation is what’s the trigger event that will start this workflow. For onboarding, Parle already has an internal event for new users, so every time you identify a new user, all workflows having this event as a trigger will start for this new user.
Take your time and create your workflow and test it. You can start this onboarding workflow by identifying a new user or going to an existing user’s profile and manually starting an automation for them.
If you’ve added delay actions, well, there’s no workaround for them—you’ll need to wait.
PRO TIP: Since it’s easy to change the time delay in a workflow action, you may set the time to 1h (one hour) instead of 2 days, for instance. It will then be quicker for you to test an entire workflow.
Day four and five
What about product usage? Sure, onboarding sequences are nice, but that’s not really where Parle shines. In fact, the next step in your Parle integration is to track important actions your users are completing in your product.
Refer to the getting started documentation to start tracking users’ events.
This will unlock the product usage graph, showing you the frequency and popularity of your important product actions, as well as enabling you to create product usage criteria and add them as conditions in your workflows.
Imagine you’ve launched a new feature last month and you’d like to create an automation workflow that will send proper communication to users based on if they’ve used that feature at least 3 times in the last 30 days.
Well, that’s the kind of precision your workflows can have once you start tracking user events.
You may create criteria in the Product usage section.
Tracking user behavior will require adding some calls to our API for actions occurring in your backend and calling the track function for client-side actions. Refer to the getting started documentation for examples.
Day six
At this time, you probably noticed the health score all users have in your Audience section.
You can configure some aspects of this scoring calculation in the Settings tab.
The most important setting to match your product usage is the number of days without an active session a user reaches before they’re considered slipping.
Parle will use this number of days and detect if the user is churning.
Your users’ scores are calculated each day, and we keep a monthly history of their evolution so you can draw conclusions on important dates or when something is changing in your product. Did that affect your user base’s global score?
We’re working on having cohort comparison. Let us know how you’d want to use these scores; we’re actively developing reporting and analyzing charts.
Day seven
You’ve done enough; you deserve a break. You only need to deploy your implementation to production. Make sure to subscribe to a paid plan to increase the number of emails sent per month and active tracked users.