Any customer onboarding process starts from the time a customer signs up for your SaaS product till the time the customer gets familiarized with it.
Onboarding plays a crucial role in the way future relationships with customers unfold. In fact, the onboarding process can be a major determinant in the growth of your business.
Onboarding is not just about uploading a few tutorials and sending some welcome emails, there’s much more to it. If you’re offering a free trial, then the onboarding process should urge your customers to consistently use your SaaS product, get familiarized with it, and pay for the long-term plan.
If you see lowered trial-to-paid conversions or lowered product engagement, then you must consider optimizing your customer onboarding process. In this guide, let’s look at some simple yet effective strategies to help you improve customer onboarding for your SaaS business.
1. Start With The Signup Process
Yes, customer onboarding begins after a customer signs up for your product. But, you must begin by optimizing your signup process to ensure a smooth transition into the onboarding process. In fact, studies show that 74% of customers will switch brands if they find the purchasing process to be too difficult.
Here are a few things to keep in mind for improving your onboarding process:
- Optimize your landing pages with the right messaging that urges the users to sign up while giving them an overview of what to expect.
- Keep your sign-up forms simple and short. Do not ask for unnecessary questions and difficult CAPTCHAs that can turn your customers frustrated right from the time they sign up.
- Add abundant social proof to your landing page to assure your customers that they are making the right decision.
2. Optimize your Onboarding Email Sequence
The onboarding email sequence plays a key role in pushing your customers to familiarize themselves with your SaaS product. Without a good onboarding email sequence, your customers are likely to procrastinate or forget about your product, ultimately leading them to churn.
You can start with a good welcome email that gets your customers excited about using your product while not being too overwhelming. Do not overcomplicate the welcome email by bombarding the customers with too much information. Simply get them intrigued and end with a simple call to action to start using your product. You can also provide some resources to get them started with the onboarding process.
For the upcoming emails in the onboarding sequence, you can send a series of emails that urge them to take one step at a time while getting more and more comfortable with the product.
3. Offer a Thorough Knowledge Base
Your customers are likely to have a good onboarding experience when they get comfortable with your product. If your customers are clueless about your product and its features even after a few days of onboarding, there is definitely room for improvement in the knowledge base that you are offering.
Therefore, having in-depth, user-friendly software documentation is crucial to design a smooth onboarding experience for your customers.
Be it video tutorials, start-up guides, technical documentation, or FAQs - you should make all the necessary product-related information easily accessible to your customers.
You should let the customer know about the documentation through the onboarding emails or through in-app messaging. Ensure that your documentation is easy to understand and beginner-friendly. Try not to overwhelm the customer with too much information at once.
4. Design SaaS Product Tours
A customer who is an absolute beginner to your SaaS product would be clueless after the first login. It will definitely take time and effort for the customer to get a hand on your product and its features. For making this process easier, you can design product tours for your customers.
A survey by Wyzowl reveals that more than 55% of customers have returned a product because they didn’t understand how to use it. Product tours can help you combat this as they do not require your customers to spend a lot of time watching long video demo tutorials.
Product tours are also a great way of increasing customer engagement as it helps them try out different features of your SaaS product and get the most use out of it. You can take the help of tools that help you design product walkthroughs for customers after their first login.
5. Offer Proactive Customer Support
Offering proactive customer support is also vital for having a smooth and satisfactory onboarding process. You should try to have a proactive approach rather than a reactive one. A proactive approach refers to customer support where you actively reach out to costumes to gather feedback and offer resolutions to any problems they are facing,
Offer easy in-app messaging options or chatbots to help your customers reach out to you without much hassle. You can also gather feedback from customers via email or in-app to identify any bottlenecks they may be facing right from the start.
6. Focus on the Core Features First
Overwhelming your customers with dozens of features right from the beginning is not the best idea. Though you’d want your customers to use all the features that you offer, do not overcomplicate the onboarding process by introducing all your SaaS product features right away.
Instead, try to focus on the core features first. Ease your customers into using your core features to get the most out of the onboarding experience.
By the end of the onboarding process, they would be entirely comfortable with all your core features. Post this, they’ll automatically discover other features, and this will lead to better product engagement.
7. Personalize the Onboarding Process
Not every customer has the same goals and objectives of signing up for your SaaS product. Each customer of yours may have different use cases.
Some customers may just sign up for the free trial to test the waters. Some may be much more invested and determined to go beyond the free trial. So offering the same onboarding process for every customer is definitely not justified.
Offering a more personalized onboarding experience will help you get more engagement and trial to paid conversions. You can do so by designing different onboarding processes for different customer segments.
Right from the email drip sequence, the product tours, the core features to focus on, to the documentation - you can tailor all these to fit each customer segment’s specific needs.
Start Optimizing your SaaS Customer Onboarding Processes
Customer onboarding is an important process that determines the growth or downfall of any SaaS business. A strong, positive first impression will ensure that you kick off the customer journey with the right step ahead.
Start working on the strategies provided in the guide to make sure that you start your customer relationships on a strong note, encourage increased product engagement, and reduce customer churn.