The purpose of onboarding is to educate users on how to utilize the product to the maximum, which eventually increases the chances for them to get the value of the product quicker and adopt it in a shorter time span.
An effective onboarding process is crucial as it provides new users with confidence in the product's ability to solve their specific problems. This will eventually improve user adoption, and more than all of that, it gives a sense that the company cares about their customers to guide.
Without a well-structured onboarding process, users may become lost in misconceptions, which could lead to incorrect assumptions about the product's capabilities and ultimately lead to churn. Even after undergoing product demos during the sales phase, a proper onboarding process is necessary to maximize the benefits of the product.
Effective onboarding is crucial for any SaaS product as it enables customers to immediately recognize its value and maintain it over an extended period. Remember, only retention is the real revenue for any product.
To create an effective onboarding experience, the first and foremost crucial step is to spot whom we are going to serve and derive the respective user personas. User personas are semi-fictional representations of specific target audiences, which are created from deep research and analysis. Without knowing about the intended target audience, it’s impossible to craft a successful onboarding experience. Creating these persona databases helps every stakeholder understand the user behavior, needs, and motivations. Identify key attributes of your target users, such as demographics, background, goals, motivations, challenges, pain points, and their preferred communication channels, etc. With these things in place, it's time to start preparing for the onboarding measures.
The next crucial step is to map the user's journeys. This requires listing down the flow from product discovery to becoming a highly engaged user. Create an outline of the key stages of the onboarding process that users require, such as product sign-up, welcome call, and product walkthrough, and ensure they receive continuous support through training and resources such as webinars, FAQs, and knowledge bases. It’s helpful to create flowcharts that illustrate the complete buyer journey by highlighting the key touch points. This aids in better understanding the user's emotions and needs, thereby emphasizing specific stages in the onboarding journey.
Setting up the right goals and objectives can increase the probability of achieving a successful onboarding experience. Ensure that the onboarding goals are contributing to the overall business objectives. Fixing clear onboarding goals can provide the right direction, minimize unnecessary effort, and enhance customer satisfaction.
To fix the right goals, first assess your current onboarding process and envision the desired state. Here are some examples of how to set the onboarding goals:
To execute this successfully, you must have a deep understanding of what success means for your customers. It may be the first successful transaction made through your product. This differs across various products and user personas. Identify your success factor and align your onboarding goals with the outcomes that are most important to your customers.
First impressions last longer than you think. In the digital realm, the initial experience users have with a product is so crucial. People's first experience with the product will determine the overall success or failure. An intuitive user interface in the product is crucial for delivering an engaging and memorable experience to the users. Some of the key principles to keep in mind to create an intuitive user interface are simplicity, consistent design, progressive disclosure, visual hierarchy, and iterating with user feedback.
Creating user-friendly interfaces is not a one-time job, and it needs an everlasting commitment to deliver seamless onboarding and product experiences. To achieve this, it is crucial to have a deep understanding of your users, strive to personalize their experience through data, and educate them gradually without overwhelming them with feature sets. That will set the foundation for the long-lasting relationship with the user.
Personalization. You hear it everywhere nowadays. But the real personalization is not about just adding the first name in the messages you’re sending. It’s all about crafting the wholesome experience that is so relevant to your target audience segment. Most individuals perceive their best onboarding experience as one that is highly personalized, with each element tailored specifically for them. It makes them feel special, more engaged, and increases retention and activation rates. To do the personalization effectively, the first step is to collect as much data from the users and segment your audience based on factors like behavior, background, etc. Analyze each segment’s user journey and leverage the collected data at the right moments throughout the onboarding.
Users always don’t want to feel like getting lost and search for clues to navigate through the options in the menu. That's where interactive tutorials come in handy to guide users through the initial setup process and keep the onboarding process simple and enjoyable. Interactive walkthroughs are essentially popup guides within the app, which instruct users on how to navigate and complete tasks by simply clicking on the automated popups as they progress. Various emerging products offer this interactive tutorial module, which you can simply use to create a delightful navigation experience for your users. It’s one of the best scalable onboarding techniques that everyone should implement to guide their users using their product itself.
Highlighting key features is more than just displaying any of the 5-8 features set for all users. It’s all about communicating the right features that matter to that user segment. This is essentially a continuation of the personalization process, where it is crucial to identify the target users and understand the goals they aim to achieve with the product. Gather and maintain this data as the primary goal, then emphasize the three to five features that assist them in accomplishing their tasks. Additionally, you can emphasize the features that your power users and highly retained users utilize. Incorporate gamification elements to enhance the fun and excitement of this process.
On any day, one user will not use all the features listed inside the product, or at least they will use it at a bare minimum. That’s why clearly communicating the product’s value proposition is essential in the onboarding process to keep your users engaged in the product. Clearly articulate the tasks your target user segment needs to complete to progress from point A to point B. Identify the features that are directly relevant to their needs and demonstrate how these features can assist them in solving their problems. To communicate this, you can use walkthroughs or in-app messaging features. This way, communicating the core value proposition using a personalized approach helps users realize the exact value that they are going to witness from your product.
Prior understanding of user pain points helps a lot in avoiding dissatisfaction and making necessary improvements that users want. Broadly speaking, the pain points are generally classified into financial, productivity, process, and support pain points. You should find out what your user segment's exact pain points are in any of the above categories, and tailor the onboarding experience to support their needs. Conducting in-app surveys can assist in gathering a substantial number of responses, allowing for easy analysis and categorization of pain points specific to each user segment. By doing this rightly, one can easily craft a perfect onboarding experience by delivering relevant features and guidance that can accurately fit in with the unique needs of different user segments.
Delivering a seamless onboarding experience is not an easy task, especially if you've got a new customer lineup to cater to immediately. Establishing a streamlined flow of onboarding journeys is crucial for executing the onboarding workflow at scale. Following are some of the common best practices to set up a streamlined onboarding process. Remember, this execution requires healthy collaboration between both the vendor and customers.
With this approach, it is possible to build a streamlined onboarding process that guarantees the best, personalized experience for every customer.
The SaaS onboarding experience is all about welcoming and engaging guidance between individuals in the vendor team and the customer team. But if you are eliminating the automation or self-service part, then you are losing a huge value upfront for your customer success team.
Leveraging automation or self-service portals involves equipping users with the necessary resources and tools to initiate their own product usage, without the need for intervention from the vendor's team. Various tools such as digital sales rooms, interactive walkthroughs, and product tool tips are available to help users set up and begin using the product features. One of the best ways to maximize the self-service option is by utilizing digital sales rooms, which provide your customers with a single portal filled with valuable information and self-guided steps.
Apart from this, there are various other automation capabilities, like automated email sequences and automated task nudging, where users are instructed to complete the required action on time to keep them on track in the product journey.
Responsive customer support at the right time is critical to delivering enhanced user satisfaction. Always ensure to offer multi-channel support for your customers instead of inclining towards just one channel. Utilize live chat and email support to handle initial queries, as well as call support to address complex issues. For high-value customers, dedicated onboarding specialists are required to provide them with personalized support by walking them through the process and engaging regularly via scheduled check-ins to assess progress and collect feedback.
On top of that, always analyze user needs and deliver proactive support by conducting onboarding webinars, where users can consume at their own pace to address certain issues. Establish support features inside the product via a strong knowledge base and help center access throughout the product interface, where users can instantly navigate without the need for a representative.
Onboarding doesn’t end just after a new customer’s arrival and guiding them in the initial setup process. To improve every user's retention and continued relationship with the product, user education should be ongoing at all times. It doesn’t mean that you should always overwhelm your users by throwing some random content about some feature or asking them for a call or webinar.
To ensure ongoing training and education for the users, two things are paramount: microlearning and progressive disclosure. No one wants to learn about all the features hidden inside the product. By considering the users’ natural flow and journey, vendors should incorporate personalized microlearning modules through short in-app tutorials, weekly email sequences, and scheduled check-ins. As the user progresses through the application, the features should be gradually released one by one based on their priorities so that users can learn effortlessly, which dramatically improves satisfaction and retention.
This is the final stage of the onboarding loop. If you simply follow the above processes and steps without taking into account the real-world experiences of your users, the outcome could be disastrous. Regular communication and user feedback collection are necessary to refine the user experience and ensure that onboarding efforts are correctly serving users in a delightful way.
To make it happen, allow your users to share their thoughts and suggestions by providing them with an intuitive and effortless way to share the feedback. You can accomplish this by implementing in-app surveys, including feedback buttons in the UI flow, or encouraging them through weekly email surveys. Once completed, properly acknowledge, collect, and actively listen to each piece of feedback. To extract more qualitative insights, one can directly conduct user interviews and usability tests to gain a detailed understanding of the onboarding experiences. Establish a feedback loop chain to process and inform users about the utilization and value of their feedback in the onboarding process.
Tracking the user behavior in the onboarding journey and collecting data is a fundamental aspect that anyone should follow today to deliver an enhanced user experience. The more data you collect, the more insights you can gain about your users, which in turn enhances your ability to create personalized onboarding journeys. With the help of user feedback, tracking their interactions, and time spent on every step, one can easily study what the user needs and where they face difficulties in using the product.
You can segment users based on demographics, background, and engagement levels with the help of data analytics. This level of segmentation allows us to craft tailored onboarding experiences that are far better than a common onboarding journey. Additionally, real-time user data enables us to promptly address user issues. Overall, leveraging data analytics is an essential factor today for any product to properly craft their SaaS onboarding journey and continuously improve their process with dynamic user needs and preferences.
To achieve a successful onboarding experience with every customer, it is essential to measure the impact using the appropriate onboarding metrics.
User onboarding metrics help to get an eagle-eye view of the overall onboarding efforts made. By following the right metrics, one can easily understand their customer’s flow and what actions lead to positive engagement and activation. It helps to spot what’s happening between the initial sign-up and turning out to be loyal advocates. In addition, by measuring the appropriate metrics, we can identify areas of friction and promptly address them to ensure a smooth onboarding journey for users.
Here are the key onboarding metrics to measure:
Total number of days for the user to start independently using the product. This is a kind of NorthStar metric to evaluate the overall onboarding efforts.
This metric measures how much time it takes for the user to experience the value in real-time after onboarding. This is one of the most important metrics for any product's success; the longer it takes, the more likely users will churn.
It represents the percentage of users who consistently use a particular feature. You can calculate this by dividing the number of users who consistently use a specific feature by the total number of users using the product.
This metric defines the percentage of users who complete the onboarding process. The higher completion rate clearly indicates that users are highly engaged and find the onboarding process to be informative.
The retention rate is simply how many users consistently use the product on a daily basis after onboarding. High retention rates clearly indicate that users found their value in the onboarding phase and started using the product in the right way to solve their problems.
The frequency of usage, or engagement rate, indicates how actively users are using the product after onboarding.
Churn refers to the number of users who discontinue using the product after a specific period. This phenomenon may occur primarily when users fail to derive sufficient value from the product, potentially due to a suboptimal onboarding process or a product that fails to address their specific pain points.
Users often raise support requests when they don’t adequately get their solutions and value from the onboarding process. The low number of support requests raised by users directly correlates with the quality of the onboarding process.
User behavior analysis is a significant process that involves analyzing the user interactions inside the product to identify their pain points and needs to make improvements. Regular assessments of user behavior and adoption rate will help to easily identify where users are struggling and why they are churning. Data can assist in pinpointing the root cause promptly, enabling us to make appropriate product decisions that enhance usability. It doesn't stop there; it also aids in forecasting and predicting the performance of the product, taking into account the interactions that have occurred thus far.
To track user behavior, analyze how users navigate by tracking clicks and exit points, and highlight the areas where they drop off. Additionally, measure other engagement metrics that monitor their interaction with various onboarding elements such as tool tips and progress indicators. This will demonstrate the connection between these elements and the user's flow.
Adoption rates can be tracked as initial feature usage and ongoing engagement. Initial feature usage is simply how users can quickly adapt to the top features after onboarding. Ongoing engagement data reveals where the users are regularly using the key features and how they are progressively exploring other features. All these data indicate whether the onboarding process helped the users in the expected way or not. Based on this, you can improvise and make changes in the existing onboarding process to rightly address the issues and users’ needs.
As mentioned earlier, the onboarding process remains incomplete without collecting user feedback and making the necessary changes over time. On any given day, SaaS users are dynamic, and their needs and priorities change based on various situations and business objectives. Make sure your onboarding process fundamentally aligns with their needs and priorities.
To effectively implement this, it is crucial to maintain regular communication and collect feedback from users. Gather feedback from multiple touch points, centralize the data, and analyze. This approach will provide valuable insights into the users' preferences and frustrations with the product. By implementing this feedback-driven approach, your onboarding process will remain user-centric and automatically evolve based on user priorities, resulting in high retention and engagement for your product.
It's best to dive into some of the most successful real-world product onboarding experiences to understand how we can apply these best practices to our own onboarding efforts.
All of us know that Canva is one of the prominent platforms in the design industry today. Everyone uses Canva for a variety of purposes. One of the key factors contributing to this success is their robust onboarding process, which enables users to specify their unique needs. Based on these needs, the tool automatically selects the appropriate module to fulfill their tasks.
Notion has become a significant tool in today's world, replacing not only documents and word processing, but also serving as a personal go-to tool for storing and organizing various types of information in daily life. Notion's expanding features cater to a multitude of use-cases and possibilities, making it challenging to communicate all these aspects in a single onboarding process. What notion did to tackle this problem was, with the help of interactive walkthrough, they allow users to choose their path and let them learn at their own pace what interests them to proceed with.
This is a classic example of effectively using videos for onboarding. Jotform provides a clear overview of how to create forms by guiding users through the process step by step. The opening intro sequence lets users know that this video is a part of Jotform’s quick tip series that helps users to onboard on their own. Subsequently, it provides a comprehensive walkthrough of each step, including signing up, using templates, themes, and other features. More importantly, humans performed all the above steps, rather than relying solely on an AI voiceover in the background. This replicates the experience of users engaging in a one-on-one conversation with an executive. This is how you can also use help-guide videos to serve your audience.
Each of the aforementioned onboarding experiences was unique, featuring a variety of content formats and implementation methods. What we can learn from these examples is not to replicate the exact same experience with our own product, but rather to grasp the essence of these exceptional onboarding experiences. All those processes are so fluid and simple. They don’t bombard new users with all the amazing features they have. Their goal is to create a clear path that allows users to quickly understand the value of using their services. The consolidated lessons from the case studies are as follows:
Depending on your user goals and the complexity of your product offering, you can leverage a variety of methods. We have compiled a list of onboarding best practices from successful companies.
It is common to find that users resist switching to a product at times, even if it creates better value for them. Most people prefer familiar products over making a change. Some people may have a predetermined mindset on what your product is and how it should work. This is true in most cases, if they were already using a competitor's product in your industry niche. Because of this mindset, they may express resistance to adopting the new products. There is a high likelihood that users will pose questions and make comparisons with competitor products.
Only the customer success executives, with their strong knowledge and persuasive responses, can effectively address this type of resistance and skepticism. Train them to understand the product's ins and outs, unique benefits, competitive advantages, and so on. Delivering appropriate and convincing answers to their questions based on this foundational knowledge will instill a sense of conviction in them to try the product. Gradually, we can overcome this resistance by providing them with enjoyable onboarding experiences, leading to their eventual adoption of the new product.
Dealing with technical issues is one of the other common challenges in onboarding. Technical issues can arise due to integration problems or usability and performance issues. In the first step, identify the specific issue that is hindering users' adoption. Once you've identified the issue, you can resolve it by providing users with easily navigable training and resources. Creating detailed technical documentation, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides can heavily support encountering complex technical issues. In addition, it is crucial to clearly communicate the security measures and compliance to ensure users feel secure about their data. With comprehensive training and support, organizations can help users easily overcome these barriers during onboarding.
The user needs and preferences are constantly evolving today, and especially the B2B buyers' journey is so dynamic. To ensure that the onboarding process remains relevant to customers, it is essential to adapt to changing needs. To stay relevant with your target audience, always conduct regular user research by doing surveys, interviews, and user behavior analysis. Segment your audiences and analyze how each user segment’s behavior and preferences vary. Collect user feedback and implement it appropriately to improve your onboarding experience. Data analytics enables the visualization of user journeys, making it easy to identify areas of interest and friction among users. By implementing this data-driven iteration method, organizations can always stay relevant and deliver memorable onboarding experiences to their users.
Organizations are already looking for new ways to improve their onboarding experience. Given the widespread adoption of AI in various industries, there is significant potential for leveraging AI in the onboarding process. Some of the prominent areas where onboarding is taking a huge leap are automation, hyperpersonalization, AI product tour videos, advanced gamification, etc.
Automation:
The power of automation has risen, and businesses are focusing more on using automation capabilities to deliver a seamless onboarding experience. Automation triggers enable the process of nurturing from sign-up to drop-off, reducing the need for manual effort and resources.
Hyper personalization:
Personalization at scale is the hot thing right now. With advanced tools and enriched data available, hyperpersonalization at scale will be easily achievable soon. It will help to handle context-based onboarding and offer guidance that is so relevant to the user segment and their onboarding journey stage.
AI product tour videos:
Organizations have already started implementing AI-driven product tour videos in their knowledge base sections. With the power of natural language processing combined with AI voiceovers, the AI-driven videos look more natural and enable anyone to create their knowledge base videos with their favorite voice in a jiffy.
Advanced gamification:
Gamification is always critical in the onboarding process. However, many organizations have yet to effectively utilize gamification for the benefit of their users. We will normalize gamifying elements, allowing users to select their avatars during signup and earn badges based on their journey's onboarding milestones. Rewarding users based on their actions inside the product will encourage them to learn and try out new features.
To stay relevant to emerging trends, one should embrace technological developments and continuously refine their methodologies to meet changing needs. AI and automation are going to be here forever; leveraging those things can easily streamline the onboarding process with reduced time and manual effort. Get inspiration from the top players who are nailing their customer onboarding. Without being open to experimentation and improvising through iterations, no one can level up their existing onboarding process. So, it's best to keep the users' expectations at the forefront and orchestrate the onboarding efforts with the help of AI, automation, and data to cope with future developments.
SaaS onboarding is all about providing value and support to the users with empathy. Keep this at the center and orchestrate all your onboarding efforts with the help of relevant tools and technologies.
