Segmenting Onboarding Messages: How to Send Targeted Messages for SaaS [+ Examples]

Are you struggling with segmenting onboarding messages for your customers?

Not all of your customers have the same jobs to be done or are in the same stage of the customer journey. This makes it crucial to segment customers based on their common characteristics and personalize the experience for each segment.

So let’s check out some ways of segmenting onboarding messages to tailor product communication to individual needs.

TL;DR

• Segmenting onboarding messages involves filtering and grouping customers based on specific attributes and sending contextual, personalized messages to each segment.
• Here are the ways you can segment onboarding messages to personalize the customer experience:

1. Segmenting new users helps you send relevant, customized in-app messages.
2. Analyzing feature usage helps you identify features with high/low engagement and provide in-app guidance to improve feature engagement.
3. Contextual secondary onboarding lets you onboard active users onto secondary features and drives continuous value.
4. Tracking product milestones, such as user activation and adoption, lets you see how customers advance in the user journey.
5. Webinars help boost feature adoption and re-engage customers by highlighting important features and finding improvement areas.
6. Segmenting power users lets you collect feedback on what they love the most about your product and what they want you to improve.

• You can send onboarding messages at each stage of the customer journey using welcome surveys, interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, checklists, modals, webinars, and customer surveys.
• Userpilot allows advanced customer segmentation and lets you use a variety of onboarding tools to personalize user experience. You can also create multiple types of microsurveys to collect customer feedback.

What is segmenting onboarding messages?

Segmenting onboarding messages refers to segmenting users based on specific attributes and sending contextual and personalized onboarding messages to each segment. Such attributes include user role, company, content engagement, web sessions, and more.

You can send in-app messages in multiple UI elements such as tooltips, checklists, modals, banners, etc.

Why should you segment customers to send in-app messages?

Segmenting customers allows you to make data-driven decisions and create customized, relevant in-app messages. There are three core benefits of achieving this.

• Deliver personalized in-app experience: You can personalize the onboarding process to each customer’s needs and boost customer retention. Personalizing the in-app experience would make everything feel custom, bespoke, and, most importantly, value-laden for customers.
• Provide relevant and contextual guidance: By segmenting customers, you can design product marketing relevant to each use case and offer contextual in-app guides to each user segment. You can directly target customer pain points across the entire user journey.
• Increase conversion rates and drive business growth: When you personalize the user experience, it shortens the time to value, i.e., the time it takes users to see value in your product and justify their investment in it. This drives trial-to-paid conversion rates and helps your revenue grow.

How to use segmentation to deliver a personalized customer onboarding experience?

Customer segmentation enables you to understand a broad set of customer needs and make specific decisions based on the data about each customer. Now let’s see how you can leverage segmentation to personalize their experiences.

Segment new users and deliver personalized onboarding messages

The personalization process can begin as soon as users enter the signup process. You can incorporate a welcome survey in the signup flow to collect basic data on new users. Moreover, you can gather feedback on their initial experience with your product.

You should use all the collected data to segment new users based on their jobs to be done and product use cases. This will let you tailor your onboarding messages.

For example, you can create a checklist that would guide each new user segment to the activation point faster and let them see their progress toward the activation milestone.

Analyze feature usage to trigger in-app guidance

Analyzing feature usage lets you understand the extent to which each user segment uses your features, especially the core ones.

You can identify features with high engagement and send customer surveys to know what users love about these features.

You can also pay special attention to features with low engagement. By segmenting disengaged users based on several criteria, you can collect feedback on their pain points and trigger in-app guidance to drive customer engagement and prevent churn.

For example, users with incomplete checklists and fewer than 10 web sessions may find it difficult to use a feature. Thus, you can build an interactive walkthrough to offer step-by-step visual guidance on its usage.

Use secondary contextual onboarding to showcase product value

Secondary onboarding is where you onboard your activated customers onto the secondary features and convert them into power users and brand advocates.

You can segment customers with high-level product usage and introduce them to new/advanced features in this stage. Contextual onboarding helps users learn about key features when it’s the most relevant to their use case. Therefore, it drives consistent value over time and helps achieve customer success.

Moreover, personalizing the secondary onboarding process converts active users into loyal customers who are more likely to spread positive word-of-mouth and boost business growth.

Track customer product milestones to prompt feature discovery

Goals represent product milestones such as user activation or product adoption. Therefore, you can use goals to see how users advance in the customer journey and segment them based on specific goal completion.

For instance, if customers reach product adoption, you can send customized in-app messages to prompt feature discovery.

Rather than just sending feature announcements, you can use in-app guides like tooltips to provide users with contextual guidance as they interact with new or advanced features. You can drive feature engagement for these features and boost user retention.

As shown below, you can use a tooltip that appears when customers hover over a specific UI element and remind them of a feature’s usefulness.

Track in-app engagement to drive advanced feature adoption

Tracking feature usage helps you analyze feature engagement levels. If you find features with low engagement, you can not only trigger contextual in-app guidance but also send webinar invitations.

Webinars can be very effective tools for your re-engagement strategy. There are multiple possible reasons for not using a feature, and customer satisfaction surveys can help you understand those reasons. You can then filter customers accordingly before inviting them to a webinar.

Contextual webinars ensure that the content discussed is relevant to each user who attends. They also support one-on-one interactions that help you reassure customers and address all their issues.

Segment power users to collect customer feedback

Power users are your best users. They subscribe to your pro plan and are your advocates and loyal customers. Therefore, they can offer the best insights into all the strong aspects of your product or service.

You should segment power users and trigger customer satisfaction surveys for them. Their feedback will help you measure customer loyalty and act on the insights to close the feedback loop.

For instance, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey lets you ask users how likely they are to recommend your product to others. The NPS score acts as a measure of customer loyalty and satisfaction. Users give their answers on a scale of 1 to 10. Your power users, or promoters, are the ones who give a rating of 9 or 10.

You should also add a qualitative follow-up question to each customer satisfaction survey to know exactly what power users love about your product and what improvements they want to see. Acting on the feedback accordingly can also help improve user experiences for other customers.

The image below shows how Userpilot lets you configure your audience for in-app surveys.

Examples of using segmenting messages for different phases of the customer onboarding process

Now that you know how segmenting onboarding messages helps you personalize the onboarding process, let’s check out some examples of these messages for different stages of the process.

Use welcome surveys to collect new user segmentation data

You can incorporate a welcome survey into the onboarding screen, i.e., the first screen that users see after launching your app for the first time.

Welcome surveys not only greet new customers warmly but also ask them about their needs, jobs to be done, user roles, company size, etc. Thus, customer data from welcome surveys act as the starting point for customer segmentation.

Moreover, welcome surveys set positive user expectations right off the bat – because it shows you care about their needs.

Use interactive walkthroughs to shorten time to value

Interactive walkthroughs provide step-by-step guides on how to use a feature of your product. They are much more efficient than product tours, which dump a lot of information in one go.

By ensuring users complete one step before moving on to the next, walkthroughs save a lot of hassle in trying to figure out usage. Thus, it also shortens the time to value and increases the user activation rate.

Furthermore, walkthroughs effectively familiarize customers with secondary features during the secondary onboarding stage. They can even display optional yet attractive add-ons, which users may then decide to purchase.

Trigger tooltips to offer contextual guidance

Tooltips are small sections of text designed to illustrate how one specific element or feature of your product works. They usually appear when customers hover over that particular element or a little ‘i’ icon next to the element.

Therefore, tooltips offer contextual guidance as customers interact with a feature. They also enable advanced feature discovery during secondary onboarding.

You can connect multiple tooltips inside your onboarding flow to build an interactive walkthrough and increase customer engagement.

Here’s an example of a tooltip that guides users on creating in-app surveys.

Use onboarding checklists to drive user adoption

Onboarding checklists list all the key activities users need to complete to get a job done. For instance, checklists are useful in guiding users through the events leading to the activation point.

Checklists can be used this way to help users reach other product milestones. It ensures that customers get continuous value from your product as they move forward. Thus, it increases conversion rates and drives product adoption.

Furthermore, you can add a progress bar to checklists so that users can see how far they’ve progressed toward a milestone. This serves as a motivation for going forward in the customer journey.

Send webinar invitations to help users adopt new and advanced features

Webinars are very effective when it comes to driving the adoption of new and advanced features. When a group of customers shows poor engagement for a feature, you can send webinar invitations to talk about things to improve and reassure them. This helps to build loyalty and reduce churn.

In addition, you can use webinars to announce new features, talk about their use cases, and even give information on product updates.

Use a modal to drive the user to upgrade when they reach their account limit

Modals allow you to send in-app upgrade messages while customers are using a particular feature. This increases the chances of conversion.

You can also use modals as a tactic to improve freemium to premium conversion rates. In the example below, the modal is triggered as users reach the usage limit to remind them that they have to upgrade to access unlimited events.

Therefore, modals also help increase your monthly recurring revenue by encouraging users to invest in higher-tiered subscription plans.

Trigger surveys across the customer journey

You should send in-app microsurveys at different touchpoints across the customer journey to collect customer feedback.

You can send general surveys across the journey. For instance, NPS surveys are used to gauge the overall user sentiment about your product and can be sent at any suitable touchpoint.

However, these surveys can also be interaction-based and show up right after a customer has completed an event. For example, you can send a customer experience survey after an interaction with the customer support team to know whether users have any complaints.

How to segment your user base for targeted messaging with Userpilot?

Userpilot is a code-free, product growth platform that offers many functionalities to support multiple aspects of your business. Here’s how Userpilot helps you send targeted messages to customers.

Userpilot enables advanced segmentation based on several attributes like user ID, company role, content engagement, NPS score, features & events, etc. This lets you segment customers for multiple purposes, including sending customized in-app messages.

Userpilot allows you to create and trigger different in-app messages such as feature announcements, in-app guidance, webinar invitations, and more.

By using segmentation, you can send these messages to only the relevant group of customers. For example, you can offer personalized in-app guides to new users to help them reach the activation milestone faster.

You can insert in-app messages into UI elements like tooltips, modals, checklists, interactive walkthroughs, welcome screens, slideouts, etc.

Surveys are also a type of in-app message. Userpilot lets you create various in-app surveys, such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) survey.

You can then analyze customer feedback and use the actionable insights to enhance onboarding experiences.

Therefore, Userpilot helps to drive user adoption and retention by segmenting onboarding messages. As users renew their subscriptions regularly, your customer lifetime value and revenue will also increase.

Conclusion

Segmentation is critical to customizing your user onboarding process and increasing conversion rates, customer retention, and loyalty. Using a powerful tool like Userpilot is efficient for segmenting onboarding messages and personalizing the customer experience.

Want to get started with customer segmentation and personalized onboarding? Book a Userpilot demo and achieve product-led growth.