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Product-led user onboarding is a powerful way for SaaS businesses to scale trial conversion and retention.
Learn best practices from Userflow on how to build product-led onboarding.
Userflow co-founder Esben Friis-Jensen explains what product-led onboarding is, and why it is an effective tool for SaaS businesses.
Product-led onboarding is fit for the modern end-users, who wants to be able to self serve.
Product-led onboarding drives growth and retention by having users realize value via the product itself.
Through product-led onboarding, you can scale fast without hiring a lot of people.
The first part of building product-led onboarding is really to understand and align on what you want to achieve with building it. This ensures focus and gives a way to measure success.
Stay focused and keep things simple by not focusing on a ton of different goals.
To track if you are successful or not, it is important that your goals are tied to a metric.
The metric(s) for your goal should be tied to onboarding metrics, to track if onboarding is impacting the goal.
After knowing your goal you need to identify the key Aha moments for your product. Aha moments are the value realizations a user needs to experience for them to become and/or stay on as a customer.
A product typically has more than one Aha moment, and the Ahas might differentiate per user type.
A qualitative way to identify an Aha moment is to speak with customers who just bought.
Do a quantative analysis by using analytics tools, but don't overengineer it.
Product-led onboarding starts before the user actually signs up for your product, by attracting the user and setting the right expectations though the public facing marketing material and website.
To attract the right users, make sure you highlight the problem solved as clear as possible.
Show your actual product in screenshots, videos, or clickthrough demos.
Show your pricing transparently, so users know what price point to expect before signing up.
By giving your product away for free as a public demo, freemium or free trial, you can use Product-led onboarding to convert customers through the product experience. This is the essence of a product-led growth model.
Use a free option of your product combined with product-led onboarding to get customers.
You can decide to use a public click-through demo, freemium or free trial or all of them as the method.
For a complex product consider limiting functions in the free version to avoid information overload.
The first impression matters. Thus the first time a user signs into your product in either a free trial or post-purchase it is key to give them a warm welcome and drive them to a key Aha moment.
Welcoming your users to your platform with a message incl. a video or a question is a great way to start.
An in-app guide that drives the user to a key Aha moment gives them a great first experience.
Informational guides that highlights all menu items can be boring. Make it action-driven instead.
Having an onboarding checklist creates a task-by-task structure for your users to learn about and engage with your product.
Each checklist task should ideally drive towards an accomplishment and Aha moment.
Make sure that your checklist tasks are action-driven to ensure engagement, show don't tell.
Lengthy checklists makes it harder for the user to complete and you might lose engagement.
Informational next, next, next onboarding tours can become boring for the end users. Instead try to make your tours/flows action-based and driven towards the Aha moments.
Make sure that your flows/tours are action-driven to ensure engagement, show don't tell.
State the action you want the user to take in a clear and concise way to avoid confusion.
Each flow/tour should ideally drive towards an accomplishment and Aha moment.
Unnecessary friction in your onboarding can lead to users leaving your product before experiencing the value. Therefore one should analyze the onboarding process and remove friction where you can.
Friction that adds no value should be completely removed. Analyze your onboarding in detail to discover this.
Some friction is needed to fully setup a product, but park it for later and ensure the user experience value first.
Some friction helps speed up the value realization for users, and can therefore stay.
You cannot retain users by just doing an initial onboarding. To keep them around you need to continue the onboarding for new or unused features and use cases, as well as new customer users joining a company.
If you have a B2B application, make sure new customer team members are properly onboarded.
Announce and guide to new larger features, and give friendly nudges to smaller or unused features.
Segment who you nudge via in-app or email to make the ongoing onboarding more personalized.
You can significantly reduce the need for support if you improve your onboarding, but there will still always be a need for supporting your users.
An in-app support widget and a knowledge base are great ways to allow customers to self-support.
Always have a possibility for your customers to reach a real human e.g. via a support chat.
Use the frequently asked support questions to improve your onboarding and product UX.
Try the most-loved user onboarding product on the market,
and see what everyone’s talking about.
No installation required - start building in your own app immediately. The first 14 days are on us.
