The Changing Game of Onboarding – do you have the right strategy?

A successful onboarding experience can be a true game-changer for your SaaS business. The rule of thumb for any onboarding process is to make it short, frictionless, and valuable. To ensure that users understand the core value of your product, your onboarding strategy should also include powerful onboarding tools in your product tech stack.

Onboarding refers to any process where new or existing users are introduced to a product or new features. In SaaS, this process can begin with a sign-up form or a visit to your Help Center site. The aim is to offer all users a positive experience throughout their customer journey. To do this, you’ll need to develop the right onboarding strategy which ensures that they have access to the information they need at the right place and at the right time.

This article covers:

• The Changing Game of Onboarding
• Why define an Onboarding Strategy?
• How to decide on the right Onboarding Strategy
• The 5 Best Tools for Onboarding

The Changing Game of Onboarding

In SaaS, onboarding is the process where you introduce new users to your product. By “introduce” we mean to explain the core value of your product. If you want your onboarding strategy to result in product success, you need to make sure to adapt to the changing game of onboarding.

You read it right. Onboarding isn’t just about your customers; it’s the ever-changing user behavior in SaaS. For example, whereas an onboarding email may have been enough 5 years ago, nowadays, users respond better to video content, especially when it comes to learning about a product. Other customers may require more interactive guidance, so they’ll be looking for a more humanized and personalized service.

Why define an Onboarding Strategy?

To put it simply, defining an onboarding strategy can result in product success. If you manage to communicate the value in a way that most users understand, users can reach the “aha moment” sooner and stick with your product long-term. These are the main reason to adopt an onboarding strategy in SaaS:

• Reduce time-to-value (TTV): You know the time it takes you to figure out how something works and why it’s useful for you? That’s TTV. If this experience is positive, then you’ll be reinforcing their decision to purchase your product above the rest of the SaaS tools out there. And we know there are many!

• Reduce churn: There could be two reasons why your customers churn: they don’t understand your product, or they don’t see how they could benefit from it. This is why an onboarding strategy needs to include your user types, so you can offer the right benefit to the right user.
• Gain power users: The more users understand how your product works, the more benefits they will see. This is the best recipe to create power users and gain customer loyalty. If you want to hit the right net promoter scores (NPS), you need to give power to the users.

How to decide on the right Onboarding Strategy

This is a toughie. This is why we’ve included six key questions to ask yourself, so you can make sure that the user experiences what they expect, at each stage.

• How frictionless is your onboarding? In general, the less friction encountered by users, the better. Cut back on unnecessary steps that only result in frustrating users. If they are new to the product, show them what they need to see to become an active user.
• How long does it take users to realize the value of your product? Help users reach their “aha” moment as soon as possible. Once you know what the user wants or needs, give them the shortcut and reduce the TTV.
• Can your product be explained without direct support? In an ideal world, there would be no support tickets. Help centers or FAQs sites are accessible to users 24/7. This way, they can learn more about your product in their own time.

• Should your product be explained in context? In-app guidance is a great way to offer contextualized explanations for users. As they journey through the product, a tooltip can offer immediate support in the relevant context.
• Do users need a personalized interactive experience?? A proper onboarding strategy in SaaS should be interactive and make them feel involved in that process. Behavioral segmentation also plays a key role here.

The 5 Best Tools for the right Onboarding Strategy

FROGED: Onboarding toolkit

FROGED’s Onboarding toolkit includes Product Flows and Behavioral Segmentation features.

Product Flows can help ease the onboarding process by offering more visual and dynamic walkthroughs of product functionality. You can also add tooltips and modals to Product Flows to provide learning in context. This is the best way to shorten TTV and create power users.

In-app messages or behavioral emails make it super easy to customize onboarding based on user interactions with the product. Through our WYSIWYG editor, you can create and launch campaigns based on user needs and help reduce churn.

Book a demo with us and discover in a personalized way everything your customer success needs.

WISTIA: Video Onboarding

Wistia is a video-hosting platform that’s suitable for any type of task, but you’ll find it particularly useful for onboarding users on your product. As a B2B company, Wistia can help your business, from sales to marketing, to create professional videos to promote or educate users on the core value of your product. 

You can also access the video analytics to figure out when users’ attention is decreasing or what types of users engage best with video content.

You can visit the WISTIA site to learn more about this product.

Vidgrid: Personalized Demos

VidGrid is also an interactive video platform that goes beyond recording, hosting, or distributing videos. If you want users to interact with your video content, this tool allows for a two-way conversation which can result in a more personalized onboarding and better overall experience.

Demonstration videos and screen recording reduce by 25%, on average, the time spent on the case. Don’t worry, in this scenario, the reduction is actually a good thing. This is their way to measure TTV; the time spent on a demo indicates the time it takes to resolve an issue or problem.

To learn more about personalized demos, visit the VidGrid official site

Google Forms: Customer Feedback

What if you had a tool that easily integrates with NPS or CSET? Say hi to Google! 

Google is known for the fact that it’s free, intuitive, and widely used! Oh, and it offers many apps that are easily integrated. Google Forms is a great way to collect customer feedback through a drag-and-drop survey builder. If you need a quick way to obtain NPS, Google Forms is a great alternative solution.

Choosing the right customer onboarding strategy

Choosing the right customer onboarding strategy it’s crucial for the customers to understand your product. 

Whether your aim is to introduce new users or update existing ones on new features, this is something that should be considered when developing an onboarding strategy. Don’t forget that the aim here is not to promote your product, but to help users understand its functionality.

Defining the right onboarding strategy can help shorten TTV, reduce churn, and create power users who eventually promote and refer your product to potential customers.. Easier said than done? Well, you’ll also need to add the right onboarding tools to your product tech stack to help you communicate this value according to the user preferences.

Don’t forget, that developing the right onboarding strategy is not a one-time thing. You’ll need to keep track of how your users develop, especially when it comes to learning about your products.