User onboarding plays a vital role in product growth, particularly in the realm of SaaS. Welcoming users into your world should excite them, turning them into lifelong customers. A great user onboarding process happens via a delightful and exciting onboarding process.
The intent of this blog is not to provide 3-4 tips for onboarding but to delve into the aspect of users, not customers. Implementing an onboarding procedure is something that must be part of the core product development right from the beginning. Creating a structured plan and implementing this will take weeks to complete. This will be much more relevant for SaaS products. Here are a few examples of what we are doing for a customer while building the product:
Before we delve further, what do we actually mean by 'On-boarding'?
Help users become better at using the product.
Help users become better at what the product enables them to do.
If your answer is 1, you need to go back and check your strategy. User onboarding has only one motive: to focus on creating an experience for users on what your product enables them to do..
Account Confirmation
Quite many products require email confirmation to be completed before using the product. This raises the question, "What will be gained by forcing email confirmation immediately?" We're not discounting the confirmation process, but a user not being able to see the value in the product immediately after sign-up might actually be a distraction. It's like going to a movie theater on the 10th floor and being told to go to the counter on the ground floor after reaching there—restricting users for email confirmation will be like going down to the counter from the 10th floor, an immediate distraction. If email confirmation is required, it's better to propose it to the user on the second login by displaying a banner inside the product, reminding them to activate the email.
Starting the Onboarding Process
Customer acquisition plays a critical role in the onboarding process, but many products are designed to have onboarding from the time a user enters the product. However, it should start from the point the user is exposed to your brand. User exposure to the brand captures the value gap the user is searching for.
Welcome Messages
Create a welcome message; it helps make your users feel like guests. Further, it's an opportunity to show the intent of the value the user will get from you and set a few expectations.
Product Tours
Product tours help users get on track faster and with a clear direction. Product tours should focus exactly on the areas where you create value and not just highlight the product features. Depending on the complexity of the product, it helps to capture the persona or the exact area of interest. The area of interest is differentiated by the complexity of the product. Capturing the area of interest will help you trigger the right kind of tour path. Remember, the area of interest is the value the user will see in your product; the rest of the product will work like an add-on.
Capture user area of interest to trigger the exact pathway of the product tour, not just the features.
Progress Bar & Checklists
It aligns with the human tendency to know how much more is left to complete the onboarding and helps the user complete the process. A great way to make the user feel that they are on their way to the product.
Run a checklist during onboarding. Checklists add a lot of value and create an emotional attachment to the user. There is a twin benefit of using a checklist: it provides users an overview of the steps they need to complete (gets used to a few nomenclatures) and also lets them know how many steps they have to complete. Finally, remember an uncompleted checklist will imprint a sense of tendency to have them completed and make them reach the goal.
Onboarding Tool Tips
These form the most vital part of the creation of value to the users. It acts as a mentor to the user and navigates them to the areas of their intent. Remember, we have captured the intent in Product Tours above.
Onboarding Tool Tips should focus on:
First-time users on how to use the product.
Experienced users on how to explore the areas of the product they have not used.
Creating Tool Tips by forcing the user to explore the whole product is not right. Users might be forced to navigate the product, but the possibility of gaining value from it is very low.
Empty States
Whenever the user logs in for the first time and until there is meaningful data, the software will be boring. One way to address this is by managing empty states. Empty states guide the users on what to do to have valuable and meaningful data in the application.
Drip Onboarding
It makes sense to create a sequence of drip emails based on the behavior of the user in the software. An example to trigger an engagement is 'Based on usage'—an email is triggered to the user on the activities that can be performed further. This will help the user understand the additional value that can be created and also encourage them to explore the product further.
For example, send an email to the user once they create their first invoice. The email can have a CTA, which can help the user in scheduling the 'automation of invoice creation and email dispatch' to the customers.
In this way, you will be triggering continuous engagement with the user and also reminding them about the other values that can be derived from the product.
Here is an example that gets triggered when a user creates their first 'Service Contract.'
1st CTA tells them they can invite Michel to access the Service Contract Online and have a transparent view of all the records—the user comes to know they can create a CX with transparency.
2nd CTA tells them they can create watchers for the contracts so that designated staff can track the contracts on their behalf—the user comes to know their staff can track contracts without actually buying additional licenses of the product.
These are just a few examples, while there is much more to do for an 'Onboarding' procedure for the users.
Conclusion
User onboarding experience can make a big difference when it comes to retention. Of course, it does not guarantee user conversions, but improper onboarding will lead the users to dump the product. Many of the successful products have great onboarding experiences. Every product and its onboarding flow differ based on complexity and user persona, but the most vital part here is the onboarding flow has to be well-integrated into the core product.
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