Contact us anytime to know more — Kuldeep K., Founder & CEO CISIN
First impressions matter immensely for new users just getting acquainted with your program or platform, making the customer retention journey an essential element in success.
Therefore, providing them with a satisfying customer journey should always be at the top of mind for you and all stakeholders in their success. This post offers practical solutions for improving SaaS onboarding, from getting started through customer onboarding.
Let's review these briefly here.
Why Is Saas Onboarding Important?
Perfecting SaaS onboarding experience solutions entails instructing newcomers through your program and showing off its features.
SaaS onboarding allows your existing customers to better use your product by providing a comprehensive knowledge base or showing them details they might otherwise overlook.
Your users must fully appreciate the essential value of your product and how it can aid their work, or else they could join the 80 percent of users who delete apps due to being unable to understand how best to utilize them.
If this fails, users will abandon it; that could include them joining those 80 per cent that deleted apps because they couldn't figure out how best to utilize them.
What Is A Saas Onboarding Strategy?
User onboarding is vital to product acceptance and feature activation, retention rates and growth. Consumer onboarding processes provide the foundation upon which consumers begin using your product or service, making potential customer onboarding processes essential to SaaS organizations and product strategies.
Onboarding new users to your SaaS organization is known as user onboarding. The goal should be to minimize friction as much as possible, giving users every reason they need for continued usage of your SaaS product and becoming active daily users.
Help customers discover your products and services quickly and encourage them to explore more by onboarding users with customized onboarding flows.
SaaS Onboarding Principles To Keep You On Track
Onboarding should be tailored specifically for each product - no universally applicable principles must be observed.
Maintain a basic set of guidelines to guarantee an effortless onboarding experience for new users and ensure their initial interactions are positive. They become eager to explore more about your product.
Clarity: Know Your Users' Pains, Drains And Gains
Your product's level of clarity sets it apart. Why do customers remain, and what can be done to simplify users' lives? To create SaaS onboarding strategies for user success the first step must be identifying your value offer and emphasizing its main features for potential users.
Once done, potential participants should receive appropriate notice that your program offers them benefits they might otherwise miss. If you want to understand your clients' demands, make sure:
- Problems that your clients need help solving with your product
- Drains: Difficulties encountered while performing tasks
- Gains: the benefits that users will derive from using your product/service can help them overcome the drains and pains caused by using it.
Your knowledge of these three factors will enable you to craft an onboarding process tailored specifically to meeting and satisfying customers' needs, from signup flows and product tours/guides/messaging within apps to in-app messaging and in-app messaging.
Transparency: Establish Expectations Upfront
Transparency should always be at the core of an onboarding experience for new users, who should understand precisely what to expect throughout.
Be clear and accurate in communicating the onboarding process to users, detailing each stage as it occurs and its length of time. According to our Benchmark Report, progress bars and checklists help users know where they have progressed and what remains.
Milestones can demonstrate progress and clarify your onboarding process for users.As you celebrate each one, keep them informed of the remaining phases they must complete.
Our onboarding tour is excellent because it includes an interactive progress indicator and asks suitable questions that interest users while tailoring the flow to various journeys.
Keep Your Brand Consistent
Consistency is also crucial when onboarding new employees and product tours, so ensure your onboarding sessions and product tours fit seamlessly within your branding guidelines.
Your consumers deserve an enjoyable onboarding process and experience when beginning with your product or service. Please provide them with a coherent onboarding journey for continuity across user journeys.
Onboarding flows don't need to be recreated either; SaaS consumers already recognize name conventions and user interface of onboarding flows, making your brand even more distinctive by not resorting to fancy names for well-known advanced features or going against industry standards - instead using language that matches up with what your customer feedback use but with your brand in mind.
Interactivity: Keep Users Engaged
Before, we suggested that your onboarding process be seamless; however, that's only partially accurate; in-service training sessions or checkpoints can provide interaction friction that keeps users motivated.
Customized onboarding can help create interactive friction. By segmenting users based on their professions and needs and providing an onboarding process tailored specifically to them, personalized onboarding creates meaningful user interactions.
Engagement is the key to reducing tour abandonment and ensuring users reap all of the benefits - not to mention sharing moments.
Guideline: Determine The Best Way To Assist Users
Before, we said your onboarding process must be seamless; that statement may have needed to be more accurate as interaction friction may serve to motivate users and keep your users motivated throughout.
Check-in points are vital in keeping users motivated during the onboarding process. Personalized onboarding can create interactive friction by categorizing users according to their jobs and needs and offering them an interactive onboarding process tailored to meet them.
High-Touch Onboarding
There is support available that ranges from minimal to high touch. An indirect onboarding approach gives users the autonomy they need to understand your complex product on their own quickly.
Essential to keep in mind is the fact that employees do not bear full responsibility for all aspects of onboarding; even low-touch onboarding requires some form of guidance - this might involve in-app lessons and knowledge bases, webinars, email welcome sequences or the product community, for instance.
Low-touch operations typically employ computerized and mechanized processes; tours, launchers and tooltips can serve as effective low-touch methods of offering self-service help.
Onboarding tour exemplifies how using short and easy stages can assist clients with using its product more successfully.
High-touch customer base care can be especially useful for developing Saas applications that involve numerous steps for signup or login, providing more personalized one-on-one interactions and product demonstrations, training sessions or tailored onboarding materials to users.
At your viable product launch, it is vitally important to strike a balance between low-touch and high-touch onboarding customer experiences to reduce customer churn.
Aim at providing both novice and expert user feedback with an experience they enjoy; this will ultimately reduce churn. One platform uses YouTube as an onboarding channel and pre-records product demos they share with new active users - providing an engaging yet pain-free onboarding experience for their newcomers.
Relevancy: Don't Overdo It
Relevance should also be carefully considered: user persona wants information they find appealing, so your goal should be to accelerate profitability as much as possible.
According to our research, onboarding tours that provide less product info may be daunting to new users and cause them to abandon the process altogether. Terms containing four phases or more had only 54% completion rates among participants who completed them all.
Segmented onboarding can help make this goal achievable. To guarantee advanced users complete your onboarding process fast and have "Aha." moments, keep each phase succinct and straightforward.
Accessibility: Provide An Equal User Experience To All
An integral aspect of a successful onboarding checklist and product experience lies within its accessibility principle, an essential UX design principle applicable across every part of product use.
An effective onboarding process ensures all user engagement can make the most out of your product features or service, including color contrast, font size, message placement, language options available through keyboard navigation and picture alt tags - these are all essential aspects that must be considered when designing one.
At its core, accessibility in product design means offering an enhanced product experience to more people than just onboarding alone.
By prioritizing inclusive methods in your plans and offering accessibility features to them, your target market could increase substantially.
Do Not Set And Forget
SaaS solutions don't tend to be one-and-done projects: keeping people engaged and educated throughout their stay with your product requires ongoing education efforts that begin at signup, progress through setup and guidance, and go well beyond it.
As new users arrive on board, it will be up to you to guide them toward features and tools which are most pertinent to them.
Track and collect product data to uncover opportunities for both users and your firm by way of feedback loops. Track what features and capabilities convince people to upgrade from a free trial period subscription service to a subscription.
What factors influence their decision process?
Conclusion
Creating a seamless user experience in SaaS solutions shows clients that you care not only about their purchasing decisions but also about ensuring their overall experience is fun and satisfactory.
Make the most of your user acquisition efforts, and take your time with them by sending prospects away immediately when they arrive, mainly if using the Framework, these guidelines will ensure a top-tier onboarding experience for you and your new employee(s).
