How Recollective Reached 20x More Users With In-App Messaging

Tiana Nguyen

Associate Product Manager at Recollective

Recollective provides qualitative research software for market research agencies and enterprises, enabling them to run studies and long-term communities with features spanning study building, moderation, and in-platform analysis.

The Challenge: When Versatility Becomes Overwhelming

Supporting everything from quick studies to complex, multi-year research communities, Recollective faced a growing challenge: helping customers navigate a platform rich with capabilities.

"Because we're so adaptable and offer so much, it can be very overwhelming to a new user," explains Tiana, Associate Product Manager at Recollective. "The question is: how do we let our customers know whenever there's something new on our platform, on top of everything else that we already offer? And how can we ensure they even know where to find it?"

The Email Problem: Nobody Reads

Before Jimo, Recollective relied entirely on email updates and a dedicated release notes webpage. The results were discouraging:

Email engagement was limited and inconsistent
Feature announcements disappeared into inboxes, marked as read or deleted
Critical updates took weeks to reach users (if they reached them at all)

"I don't blame them — I do that too," Tiana admits. "I always get those product updates from different platforms and just mark them as read or throw them out."

Feedback primarily came through support and sales conversations, so the team sought a more direct way to understand how users were responding to new features in real time.

Why Jimo: Contextual Guidance Without the Interruption

Recollective needed an in-app messaging solution that could:

Deliver updates where users actually work (inside the platform, not in their inbox)
Provide contextual guidance for complex features
Gather immediate feedback on new releases
Track engagement to understand what resonates with users

"A lot of our customers are going on to our platform to do a job," Tiana explains. "It's a fine balance of: how do we present this update without interrupting what they're doing? Because customers see this thing pop up and they're like, 'Get out of the way. I need to go do something.'"

Jimo's contextual tooltips, modals, and tours offered exactly what Recollective needed — guidance that appears at the right moment, in the right place, without blocking the user's workflow.

The Implementation: From Trial and Error to Smooth Adoption

Tiana became Recollective's Jimo expert through hands-on experimentation. Using Jimo's sandbox environment, she tested different message types to find what worked best for their users.

What They Use Most

1. Tooltips

"The ones I gravitate towards most are the tooltip ones. They're usually more applicable because we want to point out new features or new elements on the page to draw people's attention to them."

2. Post-Feature Satisfaction Surveys
Short surveys trigger after users engage with a feature (typically after 5+ uses), providing immediate feedback on what's working — and what's not.

3. Goal Tracking

"That was definitely a piece we didn't have before. It gave us a peek into how many customers are actually interested in using this feature after we introduce it. Now it's something I use every single time."

The Learning Curve

Tiana discovered that shorter is better. Early multi-step tours saw massive drop-off after the first few steps.

"We figured out that there was a huge drop-off, especially after the first couple of steps. So we had to figure out that sweet spot — restructuring tours to fit into fewer steps so they're more likely to go through the entire thing instead of skipping over it."

The solution: Let users explore on their own, with tooltips highlighting key points of interest rather than hand-holding through every step.

The Results: Immediate Impact Across the Board

20x Increase in User Reach

Before Jimo: Less than 100 product update alert subscribers
After Jimo: Over 2,000 users reached in just a few months (during off-season)

"We reached over 2,000 users, which is a huge improvement compared to what we had before," Tiana says. "And this was throughout the summer, which is usually our off-season. I would call that a win."

Immediate Feedback Loop

One of Jimo's biggest wins came from an unexpected source: negative feedback.

After releasing a redesigned branching logic workflow, Recollective deployed a satisfaction survey. The next day, the team received unexpected feedback: "It's not working, fix this!"

But when the team tested the feature, everything worked fine. Confused, they dug deeper using Jimo's survey tracking to identify which users submitted responses and from which sites.

The discovery: Users were selecting the wrong preview option. The feature worked perfectly, the UX just needed adjustment.

"This was feedback that we wouldn't have gotten without Jimo," Tiana explains. "Or at the very least, we probably would have heard about it later through our support team. But with Jimo, we got the feedback right away and were able to address it in a timely manner."

After the initial wave of confusion, positive feedback rolled in: "This is so great. I didn't know I needed this before. This is life-changing."

Better Feature Adoption

Goal tracking revealed which features resonated with users and which needed more visibility. Instead of guessing, Recollective now has hard data on feature interest and engagement.

What's Next: Expanding the Jimo Playbook

Recollective is exploring new ways to leverage Jimo:

Onboarding Checklists

"We've been trying to find a way to improve the onboarding experience because there can be many steps involved during project setup. Providing a checklist like 'What do I need to do before I launch my research study?' would be really great."

Arcade Integration

"I'm really excited about the Arcade integration. We already use Arcades as walkthroughs for our newest features. It'd be great if we could combine the checklist with Arcades — like, 'Next, you need to configure this setting,' and then an Arcade walks them through the steps."

Platform-Wide Feedback

Currently, Recollective gathers feedback feature-by-feature. The next step is using Jimo to collect broader insights on the overall platform experience.

The Bottom Line

For platforms with complex features and diverse use cases, email simply doesn't cut it anymore. Recollective proved that contextual, in-app messaging delivers 20x the reach of traditional email updates, and provides the immediate feedback loop product teams need to iterate quickly.

"Jimo was an additional step we added to our go-to-market preparation for every new release," Tiana says. "But it's also a very necessary one that we were lacking before."