Can a bad meet-cute turn into a fairytale romance? 

This happens only in romcoms, I am afraid. In real life, first impressions matter a great deal. And for users looking around the free trial or basic plan of your SaaS product, it matters A LOT. Their first impression is determined by how good the user onboarding experience is. If that doesn’t hit the spot, you’re in trouble.

Studies show that without effective onboarding, you can lose up to 75%¹ of new users in their very first week. The good news is that if you get this right, you can improve customer lifetime value by a whopping 500% and improve the chances of conversion by 80%!

Look at your own conversion funnel to see how you fare in the onboarding department. Chances are, there’s room for improvement. Here is a 10-point framework that focuses on leveraging data to optimize your user onboarding process and reduce churn. 

1. Define what onboarding success looks like.

What are your goals from the onboarding process? Define clear objectives and map them to the metrics that you will track to measure progress. For instance, account activation timeline, feature adoption milestones, daily/weekly active users, engagement, time to Aha moment, and so on. We recommend having no more than 5 objectives. Any more and it will be hard to keep your focus.

2. Segment your users and personalize your process.

Next, segment your users based on characteristics such as industry, company size, or usage patterns. Each will have unique needs and preferences, which will surface when you do this segmentation.

You must tailor the onboarding experience (e.g. messaging, feature recommendations, etc) to these different user groups. This sounds like a lot of work but personalizing the onboarding experience will definitely pay off.

Pinterest does this very well, with a personalization system that displays popular content based on users’ preferred interest, language or region.  Or consider the mindfulness app Calm, that begins with just one question: what are your goals for using the app? From there, it takes the user to a ‘For you’ section, rich with content that supports the goal they entered.

3. Use tools & analytics to glean user behavior data.

Perfecting your onboarding content is an iterative process and your best source of insights is how users react to your current onboarding journey.  

• Heat Maps can help you analyze how users behave during the onboarding process—the sections they view the most, the links they go after, etc. 
• Session Replay tools help you observe how users interact with your app—for instance, how much time they spend on each section, where they seem to get frustrated, etc. 
• Funnel Analytics will help you follow and measure the user’s journey through the various stages of your onboarding process. 

All this information can tell you what’s working or not. Treat them as inputs to design the next version of your onboarding experience. 

4. Find out what makes your product sticky. 

You can learn a great deal from your most important customers—the champions. By observing how they behaved during their onboarding process and identifying what caught their attention (or didn’t), you can create a playbook that could help you turn more early users into customers.

Create user journey maps to visualize the steps that your converted users and champions took during their onboarding process. Use cohort analysis and product analytics to identify their early, critical actions and see how strongly these actions correlate with long-term retention. This will help you figure out what makes your product sticky. Once you have the answers, bring it to the foreground of your onboarding experience. 

5. Identify points of friction in your onboarding flow. 

Where are users stumbling or dropping off during their onboarding journey? Observe these bottlenecks and tweak your experience to either remove them or offer guidance through help text, interactive bot support, or handy tool-tips. Optimizing this part of the journey will make your product experience more intuitive and increase adoption. 

6. Get users to their ‘aha’ moment faster. 

This is the moment when everything just clicks for your user. A bulb goes off and they feel a frisson of excitement because this amazing product has just made their life easier! An onboarding experience that doesn’t get new users to their first aha moment as soon as possible, has basically failed its job. 

The key to finding the aha moment is, again, to map backwards. Do 1:1 calls with happy customers to understand why they love your product. Failing that, observe data from your successful, retained users to find out what sets them apart from the folks who churned. And of course, incorporate what you learn into your onboarding experience for new users.

7. Analyze data from your customer-facing teams. 

Your customer success, support, and sales teams are sitting on a goldmine of information about user pain points. Use text mining to sift through all this unstructured customer support data to unearth insights. And of course, the good, old-fashioned way: just ask the folks who have an ear to the ground. A good mix of quantitative and empirical data is just what you need to understand your customers.

8. Adopt different approaches for free trial vs paying customers.

Tailor your user onboarding process depending on who is at the other end of it. A free trial user is merely exploring your product, with your competitors are just one tab away. They don’t have the time or the will to explore every feature —they are looking for easy, early wins. Give them just that: show them only the core of your value proposition, and keep them engaged with nifty progress indicators. 

On the other hand, a customer who has paid up is fully invested in understanding the maximum potential of your product and getting their money’s worth. Show them the full monty version. This will be key to retaining them and turning them into champions.

9. Use predictive analytics and machine learning. 

What will your users need next? Understanding the evolving nature of user needs is very important to retaining your customers. And you can bet that your competitors are doing it at this very moment. 

This is where the power of analytics really comes into its own. Consider building a predictive analytics model trained on all the data you’ve gathered from surveys, heat maps, even social media communities, to anticipate what your users need. These models can also be trained to identify potential upsell opportunities and recommend personalized onboarding paths. 

10. Implement A/B Testing, experiment, and iterate.

So you’ve gathered behavior data, analyzed it, and made tweaks to your onboarding experience. What’s next? Testing and more testing! 

Implement A/B testing to measure different onboarding strategies, messaging, and features. Get down to brass tacks. Videos or UI overlays? How many onboarding steps? What kind of progress indicator? Randomly assign your users to different onboarding variations and measure the impact on key metrics, to find your most optimal version. 

The only thing left to say is that you’re never going to be quite done with this process. There will always be a better, smarter, more intuitive way to onboard users—and if you don’t find it, your competitor will. The only real certainty is that you will always have to experiment and iterate. As someone wise said, when you accept the endless nature of things, life becomes beautiful.

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