What is user onboarding?

User onboarding is the process of educating new users on how to best realize the product value and achieve their goals successfully.

We can divide user onboarding into three stages:

1. Primary onboarding: The phase from signup to activation, also called minimum viable onboarding, whose goal is for users to realize value or experience an “aha” moment as quickly as possible and start using key features.
2. Secondary onboarding: The process of driving user stickiness, where you take users from using the core features to making the most out of your product.
3. Tertiary onboarding: The stage where you retain happy customers, drive expansion revenue through upselling, and turn power users into advocates.

Why is user onboarding important?

Here, we’ll highlight the main advantages of user onboarding based on our experience working with SaaS companies.

Improving the activation rate

“User onboarding has a direct impact on user activation. When you think about it, this is one of the very first touchpoints your users have with your product. If they don’t have a good time here, they’ll likely leave, never to return.” Yi Lin Pei, Director of Product Marketing at teach:able

Our data also shows that building effective onboarding flows helps improve activation rates. Here are some results our clients have achieved:

• The Room increased new user activation by 75% with an onboarding flow consisting of a driven action.
• Attention Insight improved user activation by 47% with an onboarding flow consisting of interactive walkthroughs.
• Kontentino increased new user activation by 10% with an onboarding flow consisting of an interactive walkthrough and checklist.

Increasing trial-to-paid conversion rate

“If your users don’t activate, they won’t experience value from your product and will churn within the first few weeks of signing up. This will directly affect your trial-to-paid conversion rate.” Yi Lin Pei, Director of Product Marketing at teach:able

But when you create great onboarding, you increase conversions—case in point: Sked Social tripled conversions after they added one of the most popular onboarding elements—a checklist.

Achieving higher MRR

User activation rate also has the highest correlation with MRR growth—data shows that 25% increase in user activation results in a 34% increase in MRR, so if you improve onboarding and get users to activate, you also improve one of the most important business metrics.

For example, our client Kommunicate.io used Userpilot to improve onboarding and increased product adoption by 4% and the feature usage by 3%.

While these percentages may seem small, they significantly contribute to MRR growth. In the words of Parth Shrivastava, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Kommunicate.io:

“It’s a substantial increase for us as well – even if it’s just a 5% increase – it then translates into a 2-3% increase in revenue, which has a substantial impact on our MRR.”

Reducing support costs

Effective onboarding minimizes the need for customer support and lets them focus on more complex tasks. In fact, our client RecruitNow saved whopping 1,000+ customer training hours a year by improving their onboarding process and localizing their support resources.

In the words of Bouwe Metz, Senior Customer Manager at RecruitNow:

“Userpilot helps us reduce a lot of 1:1 onboarding calls. We never had such a high rate of trained people getting live on the first day.”

What are the essential elements of a successful user onboarding strategy?

Now, you’ve heard us mention checklists, interactive walkthroughs, etc. It’s time to talk about the key elements of a successful user onboarding process:

• Sign-up forms
• Welcome screens
• Onboarding checklists
• Interactive walkthroughs
• Tooltips
• Banners
• Onboarding surveys
• Celebration modals
• Self-service resource centers

Let’s explore them in more detail. Plus, we’ll share some data from our SaaS onboarding report for which we analyzed onboarding flows of over 100 tools.

Sign-up forms

The sign-up form is often the first interaction a user has with your product, which sets the tone for the entire onboarding process.

Nearly 79% of the tools we tested have a friction-based sign-up flow, with two main friction points:

• Requiring email confirmation before letting users access the tool.
• Requiring a credit card in the sign-up flow.

How do you reduce friction here? Keep it simple and ask only for essential information to encourage users to complete the form and minimize drop-offs.

For example, we only ask for a work email, first and last name, and password. You can always request additional details later in the onboarding journey.

Did you notice the SSO (single sign-on) option? It is another way of reducing friction by allowing users to sign up and log in using their Google Accounts, which 54% of analyzed companies implemented.

Welcome screens

Welcome screens are the first thing users see when they log into the product, so they are a great opportunity to give users a warm welcome. Based on our data, 66% of companies use them as part of their user onboarding.

Apart from the welcome message, you can also use the welcome screen to launch a microsurvey to collect more details about your users so you can personalize their onboarding experience—this is something that 45% of the companies we analyzed do.

What kind of information should you collect?

It depends on the product, but it’s a good idea to find out about their company role and their JTBDs. Again, resist the temptation to ask about anything that isn’t absolutely essential not to discourage your users and slow their activation.

Onboarding checklists

Don’t you just love ticking items off your to-do list? That small dopamine hit we get from completing tasks makes user onboarding checklists a great way to encourage users to complete key actions.

Effective checklists are usually simple and include a small number of easily achievable tasks. They often give users a headstart by adding a task they’ve already completed, like creating an account, and include elements of gamification, like progress bars and badges.

According to our data, 44% of companies use checklists, but only 30% use progress bars.

Interactive walkthroughs

Interactive walkthroughs guide users to perform key actions step by step, where the next step shows only after users have successfully completed the previous one.

 

Only 29% of companies use interactive walkthroughs, while a surprising 36% don’t have any in-app guidance, so this is a huge opportunity to stand out.

Tooltips

A tooltip is a text box that contains information about a feature and usually prompts engagement with a call to action (CTA). They are not as disruptive as some of the other UI patterns and provide contextual guidance to drive feature adoption.

You can use tooltips for user onboarding either as a part of interactive walkthroughs or on their own. For example, you can trigger them to drive user engagement with a particular feature. Teams also use them to announce new features and drive upsells.

Banners

Banners are small in-app notification bars that appear either at the bottom or top of the screen.

They are a great way to share urgent information and important announcements in a non-intrusive way. That’s as long as you add that cross in the corner that allows users to dismiss them easily.

It’s also a good practice to keep your banner copy short and stick to a couple of CTA buttons only.

Onboarding surveys

Onboarding surveys are simple questionnaires used to collect customer feedback and requests. Product teams use them to collect both quantitative data, like , CSAT and PMF scores, or qualitative insights.

There are two main reasons to include surveys in your onboarding process.

First, you want to make sure that your customers are getting the best experience possible. If your product doesn’t live up to users’ expectations, feedback insights allow you to rectify any issues.

New users’ feedback is also incredibly valuable because they bring a fresh perspective on the product. They may be able to point out things that you weren’t aware of before or suggest ways to improve your product.

Celebration modals

Celebration modals are UI elements that appear when the user reaches an important activation milestone.

They often include elements of gamification and use emotional design principles to reward users for their efforts. They also inject a bit of fun into the onboarding process, and most importantly keep users engaged and motivated.

Self-service resource centers

According to research, 88% of US respondents stated that they expect companies to have a self-service support portal.

Self-service resource centers allow users to access the help they need without leaving the app and more importantly, without contacting human agents. They are available 24/7 and apart from text, they can include visuals and videos to make them more engaging.

Best practices for creating a good user onboarding experience

What do excellent user onboarding experiences have in common? Let’s look at a few user onboarding best practices:

Segment users to personalize their onboarding experience

For users to reach activation quickly and easily, we need to personalize the onboarding journey to their needs. This is to avoid unnecessary steps and not overload users with either irrelevant or excessive information.

How do you achieve this? The answer is user segmentation.

With Userpilot, you can segment users based on:

• User data (browser language, device type, last seen, number of web sessions, plan, role, etc.)
• Company data (number of people, country, industry, plan, stage, etc.)
• Events (users who have performed a specific action), etc.

Also, Userpilot allows you to segment users based on their welcome survey responses. For example, you could ask users about their roles or goals and provide different onboarding flows based on the answers.

Replace product tours with interactive walkthroughs

We are a big proponent of using interactive walkthroughs over product tours that are more linear and just point out the elements and steps you need to take. How many times have you just kept clicking ‘Next’ without even reading?

On the other hand, interactive walkthroughs let you actively engage with the tool, which makes learning more engaging and effective.

And they work—Attention Insight improved user activation by 47% after implementing interactive walkthroughs created with Userpilot!

Use multiple UI onboarding patterns

All the different UI onboarding patterns have their unique strengths and limitations, which make them suitable for some tasks more than others.

If you’re announcing a small improvement, a banner or a tooltip might be the best tool for the job. For big announcements, like a completely new feature that’s going to make your rivals quake in their boots, go big and choose a modal.

Ideally, use a range of different UI patterns at different stages and in different places, so that users don’t miss the update. If you see that engagement is down, adapt to the situation and use different patterns.

A/B test different in-app onboarding experiences

A/B testing is an easy way to test which in-app experiences drive the best results. For example, let’s say you want to test if an onboarding flow will drive users to reach a specific goal.

A/B testing tools like Userpilot allow you to set up your flow, define the goal (e.g., for users to invite teammates), and analyze the results of the hypothesis.

Help users discover relevant features with contextual tooltips

To drive feature discovery and adoption, use contextual tooltips.

Let’s imagine that your users are not engaging with a feature that you think could improve their experience. Or you’ve just released new functionality that your users have requested.

With a tooltip, you can attract your user’s attention to the feature without interfering with their experience. Even better, you can trigger them at the moment when your users might need the feature the most. Such contextuality is the key to their effectiveness.

Offer in-app help to assist new users

In-app help is all the contextual tips and guidance that your users get while interacting with the product.

They help new users get familiar with the product functionality and UI and receive answers to the questions they might have. When users face barriers or get stuck, in-app help assists them in moving in the right direction.

In this way, they make the experience of using a new product less overwhelming and help them get the best value out of it. You can provide in-app help in various forms. This could be a help button that takes them to the support chat or the resource center.

When designing and developing your in-app help, make them engaging. Don’t rely on text only. Add images and gifs to help users connect the dots.

Better yet, embed videos. These could be short mini-tutorials or slightly more extensive demos. You can record such videos yourself or generate them with AI tools like Synthesia.

Prompt contextual upsells to turn first-time users into advocates

Controversial as it may sound, upselling serves both the company and the customers.

For your business, this means greater customer loyalty and retention and higher MRR. For users, it’s a chance to get access to functionality that will help them achieve their goals more easily. That’s often at a discounted price.

Contextual prompts are one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive upsells.

That’s because they give users a chance to upgrade to a better plan at the exact moment they experience the need. For example, an upsell modal can pop up at the moment when users have exhausted their free allowance.

Analyze user behavior to improve your onboarding process

Collecting customer behavior data can help you make more informed decisions when designing your user onboarding processes.

Userpilot allows you to automatically capture key user interactions like clicks, text inputs, and form submissions, which you can then visualize on trends, funnels, paths, and retention analytics reports.

For example, you can track the user journey to see how your users are moving from one activation point to the other. If they drop off or slow down in a particular place, they may be encountering friction, so that’s where you should focus.

Collect feedback to gain deeper understanding of users

Collecting user feedback helps you not only improve the user onboarding experience but the product as a whole.

When collecting feedback, make sure to diversify it. For example, don’t focus just on the quantitative scores but ask follow-up questions to collect qualitative insights as well.

Userpilot serves as a customer feedback tool by letting you choose between various survey templates or creating your own survey, customizing and localizing it, and extracting insights.

Collecting the feedback is just a start though. Everything depends on what you do with the feedback. Make sure to act on the feedback and close the feedback loop. It doesn’t mean realizing every customer’s wish, but analyzing it and acknowledging their input.

User onboarding examples

We’ve now discussed the best onboarding practices, so why don’t we look at a few successful user onboarding case studies to see what they implemented?

Sked Social tripled their conversions

Here is how our client Sked Social, a social media management tool, onboards its users. Firstly, you are presented with a pop-up modal, which allows you to choose between booking a one-on-one call to walk you through the first task of adding your account and following the onboarding sequence.

Once you’ve connected your first social account, an onboarding checklist opens up in the main dashboard. Notice how it includes a progress bar, checks off the first task you already completed, and includes only four tasks not to overwhelm users.

Clicking on a checklist task directs you to the relevant page, e.g., the upload page with a slideout that asks you to create your first post.

Once you’ve completed all the tasks from the checklist, you are shown a celebratory modal. This approach worked like a charm—users who completed the checklist were three times more likely to become a paying customer!

The Room increased new user activation by 75%

The Room helps connect workers with employers across the globe, but their users weren’t uploading CVs after signing up, which is their key activation point.

With Userpilot, they built a user onboarding flow with a “driven action,” which is a UI pattern that pushes users to learn by doing. The flow kept triggering for any user that hasn’t uploaded their CV.

This simple action helped The Room increase CV uploads by 75% after only 10 days.

Groupize gamified their user onboarding process

Groupize, an events management platform, used Userpilot to develop G.G., an innovative gamified onboarding assistant, that got them a nomination for the Skift Idea Awards 2022. G.G. stands for Groupize Guide, which is like a professional event planner you can ask for advice anytime.

She offers help through onboarding tours, step-by-step checklists, etc.

Another cool thing users can do is trigger guided tours of each individual page from the resource center.

Not only did they got nominated for an award, but they saw a significant difference in the number of support tickets, saving their CS team’s time to focus on more complex issues.

Essential user onboarding metrics to track your onboarding success

Do you want to know how you stack up against industry peers? 👀 If yes, you’re in for a treat because we gathered first-party data on key user onboarding metrics from 547 SaaS companies across 7 industries.

We’ll go over them quickly, but if you want to learn more, you can read the full product metrics report.

User activation rate

User activation rate is the percentage of users who performed a key action that signifies they have gained value from the product.

To calculate it, divide the number of activated users by the number of new sign-ups over a given period. Then, multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage.

The average user activation rate is 37.5%. Check out how you stack up here:

Onboarding checklist completion rate

This metric measures how many users complete all tasks from your onboarding checklist in percentages. To calculate onboarding checklist completion rate, divide the number of new users who finished the checklist by the number of users who started it and multiply the result by 100.

Based on our data, the overall average is 19.2%.

Time to value

Time to value measures how quickly users gain value from your product. To calculate it, you need to define what gaining value means (for example, creating a first project) and measure the time it takes users between a sign-up and the event you have chosen.

Overall average TTV is 1 day, 12 hours, and 23 minutes.

Core feature adoption rate

This is a percentage of users who actively use the key features. To calculate it, divide the number of feature monthly active users by the number of log-ins and multiply the result by 100.

The average core feature adoption rate is 24.5%.

1-month retention rate

The 1-month retention rate measures the percentage of users who continue to use your product after one month. Calculate it by dividing the number of users who return to your product after one month by the number of users who signed up a month ago and multiplying the result by 100.

The average 1-month retention rate is 46.9%.

Best user onboarding tools for SaaS companies

To deliver an outstanding user onboarding experience, you need a decent tool or two. Let’s have a look at some best onboarding tools that are currently available on the market.

Userpilot – the complete user onboarding software for product teams

Userpilot is a 3-in-1 product growth tool that lets you engage users, gather feedback, and track how they behave.

Here is how it can help you improve onboarding:

• Company and user segmentation – you can use a range of criteria like demographics, user behavior, or survey results to group your users and personalize onboarding for each of them.

• Multiple user onboarding UI patterns – without coding, you can create highly customized tooltips, modals, slideouts, driven actions, banners, hotspots, resource centers, and checklists. Each of them can be used individually or combined into a personalized onboarding experience.

• Analytics – you can automatically track user clicks, text inputs, and form submissions, view session recordings (coming soon!), create analytics reports, track key metrics in dashboards, and do A/B testing.

• Feedback – you can create in-app surveys, trigger them for specific segments, choose from various templates and customize them to your liking, localize them, and analyze results.

Here’s what Leyre Iniguez, a Customer Experience Lead at Cuvama likes about Userpilot:

Pendo – for employee and user onboarding needs

Pendo is another digital adoption platform that is best known for its analytics.

Unlike Userpilot, you can use it also for employee onboarding.

Pendo’s key features include:

• Product tours – called guides in Pendo, are mostly linear and tooltip-based.
• UI patterns – include Lightbox, Banner, Tooltips, Polls, and Walkthroughs. You can create them using templates and a WYSIWYG editor, however, to fully customize them you need to know how to code and there is only manual localization.
• Checklists – these are only available through the resource center.
• Resource center – basic resource center to which you cannot add surveys. There are only basic checklists within it and you can’t customize its look.
• In-depth analytics – allow you to analyze user behavior and product engagement in great detail. However, you can’t visualize reports in different ways.

Here is why Leyre, Cuvama’s Customer Experience Lead, switched from Pendo to Userpilot:

Appcues – for creating mobile user onboarding experiences

Appcues is a no-code user onboarding tool that allows product and customer success managers to drive product engagement.

The key features include:

• UI patterns – you can create modals, slideouts, tooltips, and hotspots with their code-free editor, but the customization options are very limited.
• Product tours – with Appcues flows, you can easily build linear tours that take users through different aspects of the product step-by-step.
• Checklists – although they have limited customization options, you can still use them effectively to guide users toward activation. However, features such as checklists are only available in the more expensive plans starting at $800/mo+.
• User segmentation – to group users based on their properties as well as flows, events, and interactions.

See why Arjoon, The Room’s Senior Product Manager, switched from Appcues to Userpilot:

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap! 😅

Now you have two options:

1. Keep doing things the way you always have.
2. Book a free demo so we can discuss your specific needs and how you can apply the tips from this article.