User onboarding is piling extra pressure on product leaders’ and managers’ shoulders.
And it’s a massive responsibility. According to thinkJar research, nearly 70% of customer churn could be stopped if issues were resolved during the initial engagement. But there are onboarding traps that ambush product leaders as they work to perfect this critical stage of their user’s journey.
Fortunately, you can increase retention and ignite more growth by simply avoiding the most common pitfalls plaguing the onboarding process. Wondering how? Read on to learn about four common onboarding mistakes and the best ways to avoid them.
Defining User Onboarding
User onboarding is the process you set up for users to help them start using your product. It’s critical to modern SaaS companies because it directly affects product-led growth. In order to retain users and increase profit, you need to deliver value as early and as often as possible, especially if you offer a free trial or freemium experience.
At the same time, user onboarding affects several parts of the business, including customer success. That’s why, more broadly, successful onboarding leans on a holistic approach, one that measures onboarding’s effect on long-term revenue, considers how user onboarding decisions affect customer success, and monitors onboarding’s impact on company goals.
Still, user onboarding may be more difficult to execute than you realize. According to a 2020 study by Wyzowl, more than 90% of customers say companies “could do better” at onboarding. Here are four common onboarding mistakes to avoid if you want to perfect your user onboarding efforts:
1. Misunderstanding Your User
One of the most critical keys to successful user onboarding is understanding your users. And without metrics, it’s easy to make assumptions and take the wrong actions.
If you want to understand your user, start by digging into key adoption metrics. After all, your most active users are getting the most value out of your product. By getting to know the behaviors of active users, you’ll start seeing what is sparking long-term contracts, upselling opportunities, and higher net dollar retention.
Want to understand users even more thoroughly? Crank up your product analytics efforts. When you look at behavior analysis, you’ll see how all of your users are engaging with your product and where they’re dropping off. You can also see who is taking what actions. That leads to hypersegmentation and lays out a clear direction for you to rely on as you make decisions.
2. Using Difficult or Unclear Login Processes
Many onboarding efforts fail because of a simple overlooked fact: If it’s difficult to log in, users are much more likely to give up. According to Statista, 25% of users ditch an app after using it just once. You can start to avoid login pitfalls by creating a clear login process and adding both support opportunities and educational materials, such as login tutorials.
Additionally, you can use in-product analytics to improve the user experience across the entire onboarding journey. For instance, by tracking login frequencies and engagement, it’s possible to identify the friction points that new users are running into. From there, you can drop in in-app engagements, product guides, and other support materials to eliminate friction and push your user onward.
3. Having Clunky or Missing Support Options
Too often, product leaders don’t work adequate support into the user onboarding process, and users feel like they’re left hanging. That can lead to frustration, lower engagement, and churn. What’s more, the less support you work into the user onboarding process, the more you will depend on your CS teams to fill in gaps.
The key to adding support is taking a proactive stance, predicting needs, and providing resources that are accessible. For instance, by adding bots, dialogues, and resource centers, you make it easy for users to answer their questions as they come across them without leaving your platform. Knowledge center bots can be contextual based upon the area of a platform the user is in, or even surface different support options based upon that user’s role.
4. Being Satisfied With a ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ User Onboarding Experience
One of the most common mistakes product leaders and managers make is being satisfied with positive results. Of course, you should celebrate wins, but it’s dangerous to settle for a good onboarding process.
Simply put, good isn’t good enough. After all, your team has spent hours of hard work acquiring the customer, and onboarding is your chance to push customers forward. If you settle for a good onboarding process, user behaviors and objectives may shift, and you’ll be left squandering that hard work.
Instead, you can constantly refine and improve your onboarding by diving into the data to begin personalizing user onboarding at scale. It allows you to think about how you can set different personas up on different paths to success, or how different industries may have different use cases that you want to expose in your product through guides.
Examine onboarding metrics to identify successes as well as the weak spots that are holding up users. From there, keep analyzing user behaviors, make adjustments, and use data to prove results. That way, your user onboarding experience will always be improving, and that will trigger long-term product-led growth.
Using In-Product Analytics To Master Onboarding
If you want to master user onboarding and catapult product growth, you’ll need easy access to deep in-product analytics. Gainsight PX lays out detailed product analytics in dashboards that are easy for you to use. Want to see how it works? Start a free Gainsight PX trial now.
