It was March 2021, and Zach, the CTO of GrowFlow, was searching for a solution to a problem.
GrowFlow is an all-in-one business management and compliance solution for cannabis wholesalers and retailers. GrowFlow allows cannabis businesses to streamline their operations in areas such as inventory, point of sale, and analytics.
GrowFlow also allows its clients to fulfill state reporting laws, and as part of this service, Zach needed to display an announcement for his Oklahoma users to remind them of a key regulatory deadline in late April.
But Zach’s engineering team was busy building their solution, and he didn’t want to pull them away from their tasks just to create a one-off announcement for a subset of users.
For a less urgent situation, GrowFlow would have used Intercom for the announcement, but now something more prominent was necessary. In addition, all Oklahoma users needed to complete a training session by the end of April, so GrowFlow had to cut through the noise and make sure that they were signed up.
To do this, the GrowFlow team wanted a simple but noticeable announcement bar that would indicate the number of days remaining for Oklahoma users to complete the mandatory training. The goal was to drive urgency, provide users with a link to learn more, and give them a place to sign up. The team also needed the ability to customize the announcement depending on GrowFlow product type.
Candu’s Announcements Help GrowFlow Keep Users in Compliance
As it happened, Candu had launched dismissible announcement templates (see here for our own announcement!) around the same time, and so began a budding partnership. GrowFlow designer Jenny jumped in immediately to build an announcement bar that was eye-catching and on-brand.
The GrowFlow team decided to allow users to dismiss the announcement for 24 hours but would not permanently remove it until they had completed their compliance training. By sending data to Candu about user training status, GrowFlow could target their announcements for relevant users; for others, the UI stayed the same.
How to Create Your Own Announcements
The announcement bar template works best with a clear call to action. Keep it simple, and use the style guide and strategic visual elements to make the content pop. Be sure to only use announcements for essential or high-priority items so that you’re not bombarding users with them.
You’ll also need to decide how the announcement will function:
- Do you want it to follow users across pages, or only appear on a specific page?
- Do you want to make it dismissible so that users can remove it from the page themselves by x-ing out, or will they need to complete a specific action before it disappears?
- Is this announcement relevant for all users, or only for a certain subset? For example, if the action can only be completed by admins, don’t share it with everyone.
Candu’s segmentation functions can be used to personalize announcements so that users stay focused on the most important actions and updates — the ones that will help them succeed.
You can also build more subtle announcements into your product for less pressing matters that might still be of interest to users. For instance, if you have a new product release that certain users have been asking about, you can add a dismissible card to a single page to help users find that content without interrupting their workflow.
Interested in learning more about GrowFlow’s compliance and business solution? Check it out here.
Need help getting started with Candu’s announcement templates? Get started free.
