Everyone is different, and people have individual needs and perspectives. That’s why personalization is so important.
If you’re into the SaaS industry, you’ve probably heard how important it is to personalize your services and products to your customers. It’s no secret that it has a direct impact on the revenue of your business. According to Glady, 59% of customers value personalization over speed in customer service. Also, 63% of customers consider the onboarding period when deciding to subscribe to a service or purchase a product. Interesting, huh?
Personalizing your product experiences is more than just writing specific messages or adapting your marketing strategy. Personalizing means ensuring that you understand each user’s journey toward reaching their goals and how you can make their way more successful and help them reach their goals more quickly and efficiently. So, how can you personalize your SaaS onboarding experience? What exactly does personalized onboarding entail?
Continue reading to find out the answers to all these questions and more, including:
- What is personalized onboarding?
- Why should you personalize onboarding in SaaS?
- How to personalize your SaaS onboarding experience
- Use the right platform
- Why it’s Important to personalize your SaaS onboarding
Ready? Let’s go!
What is Personalized Onboarding?
Each user has different needs and purposes, so every onboarding experience should be unique. A personalized onboarding process ensures that you cover all relevant bases when onboarding new users. You should guide each user directly to the key actions they need in order to understand the product’s value right away.
Every experience depends on the nature of your product, its features, your customer base, and the industry. Regardless of all these factors, personalized onboarding should effectively communicate your product offerings to new and existing users.
To successfully tailor your onboarding experience, you first need to understand the needs of each customer, what they’re looking to solve with your product or service, how much they’re willing to pay, or what they expect from your company. The more you know about your customers, the more tailored your onboarding experience will be. Think about it, the main purpose of personalized onboarding is to empower users independently so they can make the most of your product.
Now that you understand personalized onboarding, let’s look at why it’s so important.
Why should you Personalize Onboarding in SaaS?
Personalization has become extremely important lately, and every SaaS industry strives to provide customers with an experience tailored to their needs and wants.
A personalized onboarding experience is an excellent way to make users feel understood and cared about by a company. It’s a way to provide contextual, relevant, and tailored support and guidance. That’s why high-quality, tailored onboarding is crucial to achieving customer satisfaction. But let’s get to the point. The main benefits of implementing personalized onboarding in SaaS are as follows:
1. Personalization achieves deeper relationships with customers
Did you enjoy the Spotify Wrapped this year? It has been one of the most widely shared marketing campaigns globally, and it’s a clear example of personalization.
Helping users feel part of a brand or company and tailoring every message you have with them builds strong customer-company relationships. Consider this, a sense of ownership and delight could make the difference between loyal customers and churned customers.
2. Personalized Onboarding increases activation and retention rates
Did you know that personalized onboarding increases activation and retention rates? And that improving the activation rate of your business by just 25% can result in a 34% lift in monthly recurring revenue (MRR)? Crazy right?
For SaaS companies, personalization is crucial since customers come from many industries with different motivations and goals. With it, you’ll ensure your customers will stay longer with you and that you’ll increase customer satisfaction and retention.
3. Good for your branding
What’s best for your branding than good reviews and satisfied customers? When a user feels part of a brand and enjoys using it, you’ve achieved your branding goals. Personalized experiences can help you reach the level of customer success you’ve always wanted.
4. Best Growth Hack
A personalized onboarding experience can be the best growth hack for your SaaS company. For the ones you don’t know, a growth hacker is a professional who uses strategies to help businesses acquire and retain customers.
When customers are happy and have had an excellent experience, they stick around, improving your activation, engagement, and expansion rates.
We know this is a lot of information, and you’ve probably wondered how to do it and where to start. No worries; it’s time to get down to business and explain how to personalize your SaaS onboarding experience successfully.
How to Personalize your SaaS Onboarding Experience
Personalizing your onboarding experience isn’t as easy as ABC. We’ve collected different information about the most common steps to follow with some examples. Let’s get started.
Data data data!
One of the first things to do when personalizing your customer experience is to collect the necessary data. When you sprinkle some of this data throughout the initial user experience, your users will feel more connected to your product, which starts off the relationship on the right foot.
To personalize the onboarding experience, create a welcome page that addresses users by name. Also, ask the user questions such as, how many employees does your company have? Which industry do you work in? This data can be used to customize and simplify the onboarding process for each user.
User Segmentation
Segmenting users based on their data or actions is another great way to personalize the onboarding process.
You can activate new users earlier and reduce early abandonment by tailoring their experience to their needs. Product segmentation is an excellent approach for feature-rich products that cover a variety of uses and help users get started in the right direction.
Here is an example of how Airbnb does it:
Outside of the app: emails
Did you know personalized emails generate six times more transaction rates than non-personalized ones?
Onboarding personalized and automated emails can be a great way to welcome new users and bring back inactive users. Additionally, they’re much more effective than traditional email marketing campaigns. There are different types of personalized emails:
Personalized Welcome emails
The first email with a new customer is crucial. If we look at some data, welcome emails have an average of 91.43% open rate. Pretty impressive.
It’s the first communication you’ll have with your customers, so make sure it’s tailored to their needs, and it communicates all they need to know to start using your product or service.
Personalized Re-Engagement emails
You’ve probably received emails saying, “We miss you” or “It’s been a while since…”. These are re-engagement campaigns.
These emails are a great way to re-engage users and encourage them to complete a key activation task. If you automate this task, the email will be sent automatically to those who have started, but have not completed, the process.
Personalized Follow-Up Emails
Follow-up emails bring users to the next step of your sales funnel. For instance, for paying users, you might advise them to switch to annual billing instead of monthly. For freemium users, you should encourage them to upgrade to a paid account.
In general, when creating personalized emails, no matter what your goals are, ensure you include a clear call to action and incorporate some of your brand’s personality.
Use the right Platform
There are many different platforms to create personalized onboarding, but the best all-in-one solution that offers everything you need to improve your product and service at a continual rate is Product Success Platforms.
Acustomer-centric, product-led platform uses the product to optimize all areas of the customer lifecycle. It offers a variety of tools and features to analyze user data, including downloads, customer feedback surveys, behavioral event tracking, engagement, and product flows.
PSPs then use this data to build, segment and optimize customer experience via onboarding processes and engagement campaigns. Additionally, these platforms provide omnichannel, proactive support to maintain a top-quality level of customer care.
If you want to continue learning about PSPs, check out our article: What is a PSP (Product Success Platform)? And discover FROGED, the best product success platform to boost your customer engagement and satisfaction and help you personalize your onboarding processes.
Why Personalized Onboarding is so Important for Your SaaS
Onboarding your users personally means understanding their needs and helping them succeed as soon as possible. When you tailor the user experience to each individual, you can increase product activation and satisfaction and reduce time to value.
To do so, start by collecting the needed information, segmenting it, and sending personalized emails to create customized experiences. Afterward, you’ll achieve a deeper relationship with your customers, increase activation rates and improve your branding.
Are you ready? Start today by booking a demo with FROGED to learn more about how to personalize the onboarding experience of your SaaS and discover our onboarding features.