Effective SaaS onboarding is vital if your company is going to survive and thrive in the increasingly competitive SaaS market. An efficient and effective SaaS onboarding process shapes customers’ first impressions of your product while ensuring their success with using it – and hopefully winning their long-term loyalty.
What is SaaS onboarding?
Successful onboarding for SaaS includes an effective SaaS onboarding strategy that quickly shows new users how to use your product’s most important features. By ensuring that new users experience some quick wins, you improve the chances that they’ll see the benefits of your product, adopt it, and become long-term subscribers.
A solid onboarding for SaaS users includes a SaaS onboarding checklist or roadmap along with comprehensive support tools like these:
- A product tour
- Intro to main features and functionality
- Videos
- Tutorials
- User guides, FAQs, and other documentation
First impressions matter, and the main objective of the SaaS onboarding process is to ensure that new users quickly see the value of your product and how it makes their lives easier. This generally requires a multi-channel approach focused on teaching new users how to get the most out of their investment.
Why is onboarding for SaaS so important?
To put it simply, your company’s SaaS onboarding process is the customer’s first experience with your company after they exit the sales funnel and become a paying customer. It’s the bedrock of your future business relationship. Regardless of how good your company’s pre-sales support is, onboarding is your company’s make-it-or-break-it moment. Your company’s success or failure hinges on its ability to get new users up to speed with its products quickly and without hassle.
Over 90% of customers feel that companies could improve the onboarding process for new customers and 86% say they’d be more likely to stay with a company that invests in onboarding that makes them feel welcome while educating them about how to use their new product. With statistics like these, investing in an effective SaaS onboarding process has the potential to all but guarantee your company’s long-term success while driving revenue for years to come. Effective onboarding for SaaS customers is a low-hanging fruit that could set your company apart from its competition.
10 Best Practices for an Effective SaaS Onboarding Process
Think of your company’s SaaS onboarding process as an extension of the sales process and an opportunity to build a relationship with each new customer. Without an effective onboarding strategy, your company is essentially burning money. All of the budget your company spends on customer acquisition is down the drain if you can’t retain your customers – and a less-than-stellar onboarding process can significantly increase support costs.
Here are ten best practices for developing an effective onboarding process that will improve your company’s chances of turning new customers into lifetime users.
1. Give users a warm welcome
You’ve closed the sale. Now it’s time to make sure your customers know they’ve made the right choice. This is your chance to build a connection. Make them feel welcome by sincerely thanking them for choosing your product, and make sure to showcase your company’s passion for helping them achieve their goals. A very short video featuring a strategic choice of employees can be an excellent tool for building rapport by making the experience more personal and giving users a peek behind the curtain, letting them see – and hear from – the people responsible for creating the product they’ve just bought.
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2. Understand new users’ needs
We're big proponents of using SaaS customer journey maps because customer journey maps can be instrumental in understanding your customer’s needs so that you can give them the best possible onboarding experience.
Asking questions like these, which may also be part of your sales strategy, can help distill your customers’ needs into an onboarding process that will make them wonder how they ever managed without your product:
- Who is your typical customer and why do they need your software?
- What pain points are they trying to address?
- What tasks do they need to complete using your software?
- What would cause them to stop using your software or look for an alternative?
- Why do customers typically churn?
3. Invest in great video content
Well-produced onboarding video content is often a very wise investment. Consider these video-related statistics from Wyzowl’s 2020 survey, which looked into customers’ opinions of companies’ onboarding processes:
- 74% have watched a video to better understand how to use a new app or website
- 65% said that videos are their favorite way to get to know how to use a new product or service
- 97% think that videos are an effective tool for welcoming and educating new customers
- 69% said that more video content could improve the onboarding process
Showing is often better than telling, so show your customers how to get the most out of their new software.
4. Don’t confuse marketing with onboarding
Customers who have started onboarding for SaaS have already done their research, made a decision, and bought your software. They already have a good idea of its features, so stop trying to sell your product. Instead, focus on how each feature can benefit them by improving efficiency or otherwise making their lives easier.
When developing your onboarding process, continue to ask yourself, “Is this content addressing my customers’ needs and concerns, and is it reinforcing the software’s value while demonstrating how they can use it to ease their pain points?” Every step of the onboarding process is an opportunity to reinforce that the customer has made the right choice – unfortunately, that also comes with the risk of doing the opposite.
5. Make progress tangible
Fitness and learning apps do it, and so should you! People like to see progress and know that they’re doing the right thing. Especially when they’re in uncharted territory – like learning a new piece of software and unfamiliar workflows.
Giving users a linear SaaS onboarding process and letting them know where they stand is helpful, motivating, and likely to keep them engaged. This can be done as a status bar that shows the percentage of onboarding steps completed or level of software mastery – or as a SaaS onboarding checklist that gives users a clear set of instructions and the satisfaction of checking off each task as they complete it. These quick incremental wins can give users a serotonin boost, which can help hardwire product loyalty into their brains.
6. Use visual cues to guide users through the process
New users often find new software intimidating. Status bars and checklists can help, but visual cues offer an extra level of support – think of them as “training wheels.”
Examples of effective visual cues include:
- Task-based product tours – These can be used to guide new users through essential workflows or tasks, providing visual instructions on how to complete critical tasks in the software while giving them some immediate hands-on experience with the software.
- Tooltips – One of the most common types of tooltip uses mouseovers to display important instructions or other information that users need to know in order to become familiar with the product’s UI and complete their current onboarding task.
- Product hotspots – These on-demand support elements offer contextual support that can guide new users in activating certain software features that might otherwise be confusing or missed altogether. Product hotspots can help users learn by doing to help them quickly gain mastery of how to use the software to its fullest potential while completing key tasks.
In-software directions – These describe how to use the software to complete a specific task, and include calls to action that guide users through their first time completing the task.
7. Consider customizing the onboarding process by user segment
Don’t assume that all of your users need the same level of onboarding support. Customers come with many different levels of software proficiency. Developing user personas can help you identify your core segments and their varying needs for onboarding support. When you understand your main user segments, you can begin to identify their onboarding needs, define their goals, and develop the onboarding flows that are most likely to provide the support they need. By doing this, you avoid potentially frustrating highly technical users by overexplaining – or alienating neophytes by leaving them feeling lost and confused.
To avoid jumping to conclusions, create an onboarding survey to identify each user’s segment, and provide self-service tools to help miscategorized users choose a more appropriate onboarding track. Even better, provide a description at the end of the onboarding survey explaining the onboarding track that’s been identified as the best fit and allow users to self-select a different track.
8. Keep user goals at top of mind
A common mistake that companies make when developing their onboarding for SaaS users is that they try to cover every product feature. As part of the customer segmentation process described in tip #7, always design with user goals in mind. The goal of your onboarding flow is to get each user up to speed as quickly as possible while highlighting how your software benefits them. Therefore, always design the onboarding process with their goals in mind so that they can experience a quick win without confusion and without getting lost in the details. New SaaS customers need to walk before they can run, so give them the right information and support at the right times by telling them what they need to know when they need to know it.
9. Make it easy to get help
Every screen of your SaaS onboarding software flow should clearly indicate how to get more help. If you’re using customized onboarding flows, give users an easy way to dial up or down the level of guidance they’re receiving. Otherwise, make it easy to access self-service tools like knowledge bases or to contact support via live chat. Everything about the onboarding process needs to be as easy as possible – especially when things might be going off track.
10. Ask for feedback and adapt your onboarding process accordingly
New customer cancellations and poor renewal rates could be a clue that your onboarding process isn’t up to scratch. Don’t let it come to that. Use your SaaS onboarding software as a tool to ask users what they think of the process while it’s still fresh in their minds. Asking a few key questions at the end of the process could head problems at the pass by telling you exactly where your process is lacking so that you can make the appropriate changes and reverse attrition before it becomes a runaway train.
Additionally, tracking metrics like the average number of logins to onboarding completion, how frequently each onboarding feature is used, percentage of users who abandon the onboarding process, and average time to complete the onboarding process can provide useful data-driven insights into how well your SaaS onboarding and any improvements are working.
Track SaaS Onboarding Metrics Using a Dashboard
Tracking the right metrics can help ensure that you’re delivering the right onboarding experience to new users. The four we’ve suggested in tip #10 are a solid place to start. You might also choose to track broader metrics, like these 10 important SaaS KPIs, which we believe could benefit all SaaS companies.
Plecto’s real-time dashboards make it easy to get an on-demand overview of your SaaS onboarding metrics. By keeping a close eye on these important metrics, you can make ongoing adjustments, which will hopefully reduce churn and help you gain users’ lifetime loyalty. Check out this article for 10 tips to reduce churn and improve customer retention.
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