A good user onboarding process is the key to the success of your SaaS company. You cannot expect user retention if their first impression of your UI is not good.
Product teams devote a significant amount of time, effort, and research to developing innovative solutions that address critical user demands. Many people download or otherwise interact with the new product because they are excited about it. However, only a small percentage of interested downloaders become active users.
As per a survey, 46% of customers are more likely to invest further in a product or a service, if they experience positive user onboarding . In contrast, the onboarding process is an afterthought for most product-based companies.
Customer expectations are evolving, resulting in a greater knowledge of user onboarding best practices. Clients want corporations to assist them in being successful with their services as quickly as possible; if they do not, they will move their money elsewhere.
The benefits of utilizing your service or product should be continually emphasized to users in the ideal user onboarding process. Users should obtain a fast summary of your product, including its essential features, as well as a demonstration of how it will benefit their own enterprises. Users should be encouraged to learn more at the end.
In this article, we will talk about the seven best user onboarding practices. You may use these tips to enhance the user onboarding process of your firm.
7 Best User Onboarding Practices
1. Frictionless
What is the first time a user interacts with your product?
It isn’t when they log in for the first time, as you might think. In reality, the first engagement occurs when a consumer registers up for a free trial of your service. Initial impressions matter a lot in life, as they do in most circumstances.
The remainder of the product experience will be explained to prospective customers during the sign-up process. It sets the standard for the rest of the chapter. When it comes to sign-up processes, we’ve discovered a pattern. The most profitable SaaS companies make it as simple as possible to sign up.
They don’t make you fill out long papers or input your credit card information, which makes the onboarding process more difficult. Instead, they extract the most critical information, the information that users truly require, and provide fast access to the product.
Previously, Airbnb required consumers to sign up before they could use their service. Airbnb’s astute employees soon understood that this was discouraging potential customers.
They have now rearranged the user onboarding flow to optimize the customer experience.
You can go to their website and immediately begin using their software to search for accommodations. There is no need to register. This indicates that you should begin using the product as soon as feasible. It delivers value right away, so you quickly realize you cannot live without it.
Frictionless registration procedures are ideal for simpler SaaS solutions where the goal is to get the user in as soon as feasible. As a rule of thumb, consider even a minute amount of friction and whether it is truly necessary. If it is not, think about eliminating the friction.
2. Build a roadmap
You’ll have to help customers comprehend why they need to utilize your solution by guiding them through the process. Give them a walkthrough of what their customer experience will be like. This will also aid in the organization and prioritization of your content.
To begin, you will need a clear idea of the user of your service. Address the below questions to create a realistic user persona:
- What are your user’s needs?
- What is their motivation?
- What are their long and short-term goals?
- Do some users need more detailed information about your product?
A customer’s journey is divided into three stages: knowledge, appraisal, and conversion. At each level, stay in contact with your client. If done right, you may succeed in acquiring leads at each of these stages.
3. Offer a compelling utility
Another excellent practice in user onboarding is to deliver a fast victory as early as feasible in the onboarding process.
The goal is to provide as much value to your users as possible. The more utility your new customers acquire, the more probable they are to stick with your brand and embrace its services. This results in increased user retention and, as a result, more people who rely on your solution to make their lives simpler.
You’ve probably heard of the Aha! Moment if you’ve been around SaaS long enough. This is the point at which your new customers recognize the worth of your product.
For Facebook, their aha moment was that users who added seven friends in 10 days were more likely to stick around than those who did not. They used this knowledge, leveraged it, and brought more and more users to their aha moment. This is one of the primary reasons behind their immense success.
4. Offer to send push notifications at the right time
Sending users to push notifications can be an effective approach to encourage them to complete the onboarding process. However, the timing of your approach for notification authorization poses a danger when requesting users for approval to send notifications. This will have a direct impact on the number of people who agree and those who refuse.
You must wait until the consumer understands why the product provides specific benefits and how the service will assist the user in becoming a better form of themselves. This might be difficult logically if your product requires the use of alerts to function properly, as is the case with building chat apps. There isn’t always a method to avoid or postpone the request to deliver notifications.
5. Make onboarding simple
Each step of the onboarding process should be simple enough that the user has no excuse to not complete it. Analyze locations that could cause friction to make onboarding as easy as feasible.
The beginning is an area that many businesses overlook. Where does a visitor sign up for an account and log in? Is it required for them to form a new profile, or can they simply log in using their social media credentials?
Appcues’ guide on SaaS onboarding best practices gives you several practical examples of how companies these days perfect their onboarding process and retain customers. It talks about how Notion onboards and retains users with a task-based and interactive product tour.
Despite the fact that you desire info from your consumers, you must make this introductory inquiry brief or you risk dismissing potential clients. No one wants to waste time filling out a big form merely to look at your product. Make sure you don’t lose a potential customer before they’ve even had an opportunity to try your product. Keep everything to a bare minimum.
6. Speak the language your client speaks
The user onboarding procedure will go much more efficiently if you speak in their language. What you’re communicating not only sticks in the user’s memory faster, but it also resonates with them on a more emotional and personal level. However, we are not just speaking about words here. We are also talking about the substance of your customer onboarding funnel as a whole.
Use simple phrase forms, visuals, sounds, videos, and interactions to elicit an emotional reaction from the user, no matter how minor. If your app is quirky, lines like ‘may the force be with you’ or ‘you shall not pass’ can be appropriate. Wordplays of well-known phrases can sometimes be very effective in igniting interest. That takes us to the significance of individuality!
7. Don’t forget to follow-up
You will need to be cautious with this suggestion and use it sparingly. Not all induction processes offer enough data to necessitate sending emails or notifications to the customer, as we witnessed with WhatsApp’s rapid user onboarding experience. However, if your solution is sophisticated, you might want to consider providing users with a method to learn more.
Offer to send emails with brief and visual tutorials on lesser aspects that didn’t really make the final cut of the onboarding funnel as a complimentary side of the client onboarding. Additionally, YouTube demonstrations are an excellent approach to demonstrate how to use a product. They can provide detailed information without overburdening the initial onboarding process.
Finally, do not send emails to people who haven’t completed the onboarding process. Inundating users’ inboxes with notifications can backfire, causing them to uninstall the app out of frustration.
Wrapping Up 7 Best User Onboarding Practices
When it comes to customer retention, your user onboarding process can make a huge impact. It’s not a promise that your business will be profitable in the long run, but skimping on this crucial stage ensures that it will wind up in the garbage can of your users.
The finest apps and websites control the industry in part because of their outstanding onboarding experiences, which help users become addicted right away.
Depending on the sort of product, each user onboarding flow is unique, but there is always an effective technique to entice consumers in. We hope the best practices and examples have sparked some ideas for your next user onboarding project.
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