Elevate User Engagement with Effective Onboarding Strategies

Any product owner who wants users who are satisfied with their product must focus a great deal on user onboarding. This is because user onboarding is the most important part of the user journey.

We emphasize a lot on User onboarding because we truly believe that all software deserves an exceptional onboarding experience. If your team has invested time in designing, developing, and selling your product why then mess it all up and risk losing users with a bad first impression?

The truth is, for any SaaS Company that is serious about growing, user onboarding should be a top priority for them. It doesn’t really matter if the onboarding experience is built in-house or with another tool but just as long as your needs are met and it does the work well.

And if it is a top priority for your business, then you shouldn't waste any more time in making sure that your product's onboarding experience is optimized ASAP.

Why Prioritize Better User Onboarding?

You might be asking already: Why User Onboarding? Why is it so important? What is the fuss all about?

We are not just making noise about User Onboarding. To let you understand why User Onboarding should be a top priority for you and your business, we have listed two major reasons below:

1. Better User Onboarding Helps You Get Ahead of the Competition.

Many companies when trying to keep pace with their competition, go in search of great onboarding tools. This is because the early stages of your product's user journey are high stakes for both your users and your business.

If you do not have effective onboarding, your users might have a very frustrating experience with your product. This can become an opportunity for competitors because these frustrated users would leave your product to search for a better product with simpler onboarding.

Poor onboarding experiences often lead to a high churn rate and low conversion because users leave before they are able to see the value in your product. This is why improving user onboarding should be something you should consider early instead of later.

However, there are many reasons why companies struggle to improve their user onboarding. This could be due to limited resources and lengthy development cycles. To help ease these challenges, they can make use of third-party tools.

Another reason is that many companies have limited knowledge about it and do not really know where to start.

We have tried to simplify the process and have listed some steps below to help you know how exactly you can go about better User Onboarding.

Steps To Design Better User Onboarding

Here are three steps to design an effective user onboarding experience:

• Identify Your Product’s Activation Metric:

  Activation occurs when users realize your product's value. In order for you to optimize your product's activation, you must be able to identify when this activation happens.

  This is done usually by mapping out the user journey backward. Take a look at current users who have turned into loyal customers and find out when the activation occurred for them. Analyze the behavior data to identify critical actions that retain users. You can also talk with your users through in-app surveys to find out for a fact and leverage the information to identify your product's activation metric.

• Design Onboarding Around Your Product’s Value:

  The moment when users first get to see your product's value is usually their ‘aha’ moment Your goal should be to prioritize getting users to this moment as quickly as they possibly can.

  You can do this by focusing your onboarding on value, and not on your product's features. Personalizing the experience based on the user-declared data can help to enhance your product's relevance to their need and in the process, speed up the onboarding process.

• Experiment, Analyze, and Iterate:

  Good UX requires constant experimentation and updates. It is usually never just done in one fell swoop! It requires frequent experimentation, analysis, and iteration.

  Have a plan to track your onboarding effectiveness and adjust as needed. This will help you to smoothen out the areas of friction to users and would also lessen the time it would take a user to reach their ‘aha’ moment thereby, enhancing user experience.

2. Reduce Churn With Good Onboarding

Good user onboarding leads to better retention rates, which compounds over time. Know this and know peace.

If you are able to work your onboarding process to be simple and non-frustrating for your users, allowing them to reach their value moment in your product faster, then be assured that you are well on your way to reducing your product's churn rate drastically.

Because the churn rate compounds over time, it becomes harder to recover from the longer you wait to address it. A positive early experience for your users can set the tone for long-term relationships with your product.

Solid Strategies for Churn Reduction

Here are some strategies for reducing your churn rate with good onboarding.

1. Cross-Functional Teams:

   They can help increase retention in the long term and reduce the churn rate. You can have squads that meet regularly to discuss customer value or have a team that is the customers' voice. However you choose to do it is fine but to make sure your cross-functional team is effective, establish several communication channels across various departments starting from the first user interaction.

2. Ongoing In-App Engagement:

   Onboarding should not end after the first session. It should be a continuous process because, over time, even regular users can interact with various features different from the ones they normally use. This will help reduce the churn rate and increase retention. Your goal is to make sure your users keep learning and continue to find value as they settle into a routine.

Strategies you can apply for ongoing engagement include:

• Avoid information overload: Introduce more advanced features gradually as your users explore your products on their own.

• Reduce support volume: Make use of tooltips to highlight self-service options.

• Reinforce product value: Collect data from the onboarding process to personalize communication with your users so that they are reminded of the value your product gives them.

• Cure feature blindness: Make use of targeted nudges to direct users to underused features.

• Create a feedback loop: Incorporate in-app user surveys within the product to get feedback.

Low-Code Tools Remain Essential for Onboarding

Developers are busy with various tasks ranging from creating new features to fixing bugs and may struggle to prioritize user onboarding.

Many companies complain that the reason for slow onboarding improvements is due to the heavy demand placed on their engineers and developers. This issue doesn't get resolved over time because as the product grows, the demands increase as well.

Making use of low-code tools allows non-technical teams to create and adjust in-app experiences without having to burden the developers. These tools enable your nontechnical team to make ongoing updates as user needs thus allowing your product capabilities to evolve without having to wait for a developer.

Invest in Product-Led Growth

Now, do all of these require effort and collaboration among teams? Yes, it does. But the long-term benefits are unmatched.

Being able to optimize first-time user experience can lead to higher activation rates which means higher user adoption, and increased retention rates. It also encourages customer advocacy. These effects compound over time and lead to exponential growth for your product.

If you’ve delayed onboarding because it seems like an overwhelming process, it’s time to prioritize it now. You can improve your product’s user retention rate with just slight fixes here and there and make significant gains if you start early.

Ready to improve your onboarding experience? Give it a try for free!