What happens when you don’t have an effective user onboarding strategy in place?
You spend thousands of dollars in acquiring new users
Lose those users
Repeat
When individuals think about expansion, they frequently focus on gaining more users.
If you’re creating a software product, though, your funnel is almost certainly leaking as soon as consumers click the ‘sign up’ icon.
If you’re still developing your service or have seen difficulty with retention, it’s probably time to start thinking about user onboarding.
User onboarding refers to the initial contact between your company and the users. It aims to help users understand your products or services and how they use them to achieve success. It involves practices and strategies which ensure that existing and prospective users will keep using your services.
That said, it’s essential for your users that they know how your products/services work to increase retention. Otherwise, costly business problems may arise. It’s pointless to sign up users if you don’t explain how they can get what you’ve claimed. Even the best customer reviews won’t keep them from leaving if they don’t know how to utilize your product.
This difficulty is compounded when you’re creating a SaaS product that you’ll use yourself. You’ll have ‘onboarded yourself’ and become a master in using your own product, with close to 100% utilization of your set of features.
One can’t emphasize this enough. If you’re designing a product that you use, you need to take a step back and consider your user onboarding from the viewpoint of a new user.
Additionally, consumers who have a good induction experience are up to 21% more inclined to pay for a mobile app. So, a great user onboarding is beneficial not just to your acquisition plan but also to your pocketbook.
In this article, we will give you five tips to ace your user onboarding game.
How to Create Successful User Onboarding? 5 Tips to Set Up a Strategy
You cannot overstate the importance of user onboarding. It can help your business in several ways.
For example, proper user onboarding can improve customer engagement and conversion rate by showing the real value of your products/services to your customers. It can also help educate users and boost customer retention.
With a well-designed user onboarding process, your current and prospective customers will feel they’re experts in using your products/services. Consequently, you can convince them to keep paying subscription fees for your easy-to-use products/services.
Onboarding can also minimize customer support costs.
Since the process involves providing valuable tips on how the customers can use it, you can reduce the resources your customer service team has to use in answering questions about using your products/services several times.
Therefore, you should know how to create a successful user onboarding process to maximize these benefits. Here are a few to help you offer your users a great onboarding experience.
- Design a flowchart
- Keep it simple
- Be unique
- Display progress
- Make it fun
Read on to know about the tips in detail.
1. Design a flowchart
Consider your user onboarding process as a flow.
You don’t have to go too technical here, but ensure you’re considering a simple linear path for your user onboarding from beginning to end.
Although determining the beginning and end of your product’s user onboarding is difficult, we recommend sketching out the entire path as best you can.
Before joining, a user may visit your site, look at your pricing page, fill out your sign-up form, and then go to the user onboarding flow of your product.
However, the step preceding that is sometimes overlooked: what compelled that individual to visit your homepage in the first place?
Determining the reason behind your website’s traffic appears to be more of a marketing chore. However, you must understand why people are contemplating your product in order to guarantee that your user onboarding does not offend or repel them away.
2. Keep it simple
You’ll have a lot better understanding of how to optimize your user onboarding flow when you’ve sketched it out. One of the first things to do is to see if there are any stages that don’t have to be completed during the first session.
An excellent question to ask is, “How can you get your new users to their “Wow” moment as soon as possible?”
It’s vital to remember that not every step is unnecessary. Some steps are crucial for the user’s understanding of the process. In fact, steps that involve action, on the other hand, can operate as ‘stepping stones’ blocks for a new user.
Observing real users walk through your onboarding is a terrific method to find out which steps are challenging for them.
You can provide a great user onboarding process with the help of digital experience monitoring (DEM).
It involves monitoring application/tool performance and functionality from the end user’s perspective. It provides insights and understanding about the user’s experience using their point of view.
With DEM, you can develop an effective user onboarding strategy, which is critical in finding and minimizing issues later on. Remember, you can use the data about end-user experience to fix problems and give your customers a great onboarding experience from beginning to end.
3. Be unique
Just as branding may help your brand stand out to your desired intended audience and entice them to sign up right away, it can also help them stay on board. Product teams can lose sight of the brand experience from time to time, and as a result, end up losing users.
After all, not everyone is adept at accomplishing goals; we want to enjoy the process. Most users want your software solutions to be like your favorite coworkers: extremely productive and stunningly bright, but also chill, hilarious, relatable, or any other term you can think of to describe your consumers.
Would MailChimp be as popular if the Freddie high five that displays after each new campaign is scheduled didn’t appear? No way.
In fact, going all-in on branding and bringing that brand to life right away is a top strategy for user onboarding. Quality isn’t simply about crossing something off your to-do list; it’s about unleashing your product’s full potential.
4. Display progress
One of the most difficult aspects of SaaS onboarding is persuading new users to complete a sequence of processes in order to reach a final stage. Since several steps are frequently required, you should preferably explain the number of steps as well as the ultimate aim to the end-user.
It’s vital to make the objective exciting and fulfilling – the value proposition you offer on your advertising site should preferably be repeated in whatever conclusion you’re attempting to push anyone to in your onboarding. You’re not just looking for someone to ‘use feature X’ – you want them to ‘be more successful’.
You should also aim to break down any major milestones into smaller, more practical steps that may be skipped over in order to show progress toward your final goal.
If you want to publish a novel, don’t set your goal to ‘publish a novel’ – set it to ‘form a sentence’, and then you might actually start to develop the first momentum that will lead you down the proper route.
5. Make it fun
Finally, games are entertaining. Consider how you might add fun and excitement to your user onboarding experience to make someone’s day a little brighter.
An amusing cartoon, a welcoming icon, and maybe some funny copy, when used judiciously, can bring joy to a new user’s face, encouraging them to not give up, to fight through, and to commit to testing out your product.
Wrapping Up
Now that we have come to the conclusion of this article, we hope that the aforementioned tips will help you create a ground-breaking user onboarding strategy. Remember, without an effective strategy, you will be lost in the maze of repetitive tasks without achieving any result.
So, pull up your socks and start improving your strategy today. If you have any questions, reach out to us via the comments.
Digital Web Services (DWS) is a leading IT company specializing in Software Development, Web Application Development, Website Designing, and Digital Marketing. Here are providing all kinds of services and solutions for the digital transformation of any business and website.
