5 ways to improve Your SaaS Onboarding Experience

22 Sep 2021 • Strategy & Business Design

Providing a successful SaaS onboarding experience is one of the best ways to ensure new users stick around after their trial period for your product is over. Onboarding is also an essential process when it comes to product-led growth as it’s effective in increasing retention rates and decreasing churn. Indeed, research shows that companies with a defined onboarding process have a 66% greater chance of retaining users than those without one.

But how exactly do you stand out in the crowd and sweep your users off their feet with your product onboarding experience? Keep reading to find out, as in this blog we’ll share five tips on how to perk up your SaaS onboarding process and skyrocket those sales rates.

1. Invest in an outstanding first impression

The onboarding process is a very important step in any SaaS customer’s journey as it serves as the first impression for your product. One of the most influential factors on whether new users continue using your SaaS product is their first-time user experience (FTUX). If the FTUX leaves the user cold, your onboarding process is likely doomed to fail from the start.

2. Provide tutorials

If the onboarding experience is well-designed, your customers will be more likely to keep using the software, purchase the paid version and recommend it to others. One way to increase the onboarding success rate is by providing user tutorials, which can help reduce support tickets as well as decrease your onboarding time. You can also send emails that contain step-by-step video tutorials and reports on product usage to give the user a better onboarding experience and show them how they can become successful with your SaaS product.

3. Implement user onboarding tactics that create value

One way to bake more value into your onboarding experience is to send out promotions with discounts or coupons at a proper time during a user’s trial period. But remember, value is not always about money and profit. When you can present highly relevant benefits that genuinely meet the unique needs of your target market, value-oriented onboarding works best. Similarly, you mustn’t use value-oriented onboarding as an excuse to promise large benefits without actually delivering them. Make sure your shoftware delivers on any bold promises it makes. Otherwise, your value-oriented onboarding process could backfire spectacularly. It’s also a good idea to avoid listing irrelevant or minor benefits that don’t provide your users with exactly what they’re looking for.

On the other hand, if your app’s benefits are obvious and it has unique features, technical functionalities, or specialized gesture controls, using function-oriented onboarding is likely your best option for making an effective first impression and increasing retention.

4. Use data-driven insights for future onboarding improvements

One reason your users are churning or cancelling their subscriptions might be that you have been onboarding them based on false assumptions. That is why you should always base all your onboarding-related decisions on user data. With onboarding software or SaaS tools like Pendo, you can track your onboarding tactics and contact metrics, as well as reflect any changes based on the collected data. By implementing data-based adjustments to your onboarding process, you’ll be able to increase customer satisfaction and retention rates, which will result in a win for your SaaS business.

5. Expand the time horizon of your SaaS onboarding process

SaaS onboarding does not end when the trial period is over. In reality, it runs throughout the user’s relationship with your company. People cannot learn everything they need to know about your new product and its value in one day. Yet too many organizations think about onboarding as something that only occurs on Day One. That is where they make a mistake. The more complex your business, the more time you must devote to customer education to ensure your users get the most out of your software. Remember: your user is here to use your product, not to get caught up in filling endless forms.

If all of this sounds intimidating and you need help enacting these principles, let us know! Our team of experts are here to partner with you to create a stellar plan that drives sales by considering how your users think.