The Three SaaS Companies that Nailed Their User Onboarding

It’s critical for SaaS businesses to invest heavily in marketing and sales.

Why is that?

Because these two functions are crucial in bringing in new customers. A lot of SaaS businesses don’t finish this process properly. Companies struggle to get customers activated after they sign up (and many do not even get them signed up), but those that do succeed focus on user onboarding. 

The goal of user onboarding in a SaaS company is to show the users what value they can get out of using it. In other words, user onboarding lets your customers know what they should be doing with your product to get the most out of it.

If you get the initial phases of customer onboarding right, your customers are more likely to stay with your solution for a long time. A great user onboarding process will allow you to expand rapidly. Customers who are satisfied will help you build a reputation, which will in turn bring you new clients and increase your revenue. It’s true that not every company has the time or expertise to develop a good user onboarding process.

For a SaaS company, poor user onboarding means that all the time and effort invested in developing and marketing their products have been for naught. Thanks to the advent of user onboarding tools, you can avoid that scenario with relatively little effort on your part. You can create a seamless user onboarding experience for your users in order to demonstrate the value you provide them quickly.

In this article, we will examine the critical steps of a successful onboarding process and how Eyelet can assist you. We will then look at three SaaS user onboarding examples to see how they can have a significant impact on real businesses.

SaaS user onboarding is a process of helping new users quickly learn how to use the full potential of a SaaS product they just introduced to their toolkit.

A complete user onboarding processes take into account every situation your customer might come across. They are guided from the moment they sign up at your platform to the moment they begin to use your product on a regular basis to its full extent. Besides teaching your customers how to use your product, its purpose is to keep your customers engaged from day one and keep on providing them with a reason to continue using it.

It is important for both customers and SaaS to nail the initial interactions they have with one another. By learning how to use the product new users can get the idea of benefits for their business processes.

They can implement it really quickly and reap the rewards of new and useful software. On the other hand, SaaS companies need user onboarding tools in order to show customers their value as soon as possible so they can get their customers to keep using their services and grow their business. When customers quickly realize the value you provide, fewer new users will leave during the initial phase of use.

Instead, they are more likely to become loyal customers who are likely to expand on their use and purchase additional features you provide. If that doesn’t happen and your customers fail to grasp the value you provide them fast enough, your chances of getting them to stay decrease as well. Since today’s SaaS businesses lose around 10% of revenue to customers who stop doing business with them in the initial phases, making each of them stay will have a positive effect on your revenue.

Therefore, a well-developed user onboarding experience is a crucial step toward growing a SaaS business.

To conclude, a quality SaaS user onboarding experience is important because:

1. Customers can fully utilize SaaS features quickly
2. Customer loyalty increases 
3. Return on investment for companies increases
4. Resources spent on teaching each new customer how to use the software reduce

How to create a customer onboarding process?

Customer onboarding starts from registration and ends with the moment you are sure that your users are well-educated about the features and functionalities of your product. An excellent user onboarding experience demonstrates the purpose of your product, and the way your customers should use it, and covers the value it adds to the lives of those who learn to use it.

In order to achieve this, you should create a user onboarding process that covers the following steps, and make sure that they are well-developed:

1. Sign-up process
2. Welcome email
3. Initial log-in
4. Integrations and user data
5. Walkthrough tours
6. Follow-up emails

Sign-up process

The sign-up process is the initial step in every customer onboarding flow. Since it is the first one, it is hard to show potential customers the value it brings them. Close to 40% of customers that start using SaaS quit before passing this stage, making this phase the one where you can create a large positive difference for your business if you do it correctly.

Let’s assume that you did the targeting in the marketing phase of your sales cycle well and that people who really need your product decided to sign up on your platform. If you notice that your drop-off rate is high during or immediately after the sign-up phase, there might be something wrong with your sign-up process.

 

One of the common mistakes SaaS companies make in user onboarding is asking for too much information too soon.

 

To prevent customer loss, you should keep your sign-up process simple and short. Decide what information is essential to you and ask for only that in this phase. You don’t need more than the basics that will enable you to get the user set up and start using your product without obstacles.  You can obtain the rest in later stages. In cases where you do need a lot of information from the new user, split it into multiple pages.

That’s how you’ll create an illusion that less effort is needed to fill it in, and your conversion rates won’t have such a big drop. Connecting the sign-up form with social media or Google will impact conversion positively as well.

The software automatically fills all the information preserved by, for example, Google, into a simple sign-up form. All that is left for your new user to do is to click on the sign-up button at the end of the sign-up form.

Welcome email

When you get your customers through the sign-up page, the next step in a quality user onboarding experience is about welcoming them properly. A well-written follow-up email that explains how to start using your product right away is your goal here, but we’ll get there.

Since your new users decided to give you trust and start using your product, you should show gratitude to them and thank them for choosing your product. This will make them feel valued. Then, share the necessary information that will help them with their first steps using your product.

Provide them with answers to the most common questions, and create how-to tutorials and articles that will help in the beginning. The goal is to show them how easy it is to use your product and to include a CTA button to direct them to log in to their account and start using it. 

Initial log-in

After receiving an email with CTA and all the necessary information that helps them get started, your new users will log in and start really using your product for the first time. At this stage of the user onboarding process, you should guide them through the platform interface, and show them how to use its functions. For example, include a video tutorial or a product tour that takes customers through every step of the initial set-up process.

When your customers experience value with the initial steps of user onboarding, they’ll be interested in learning what else they can get from it. A clear overview of the setup process and a motivating copy that follows can do wonders. To achieve this, make sure that you create an easy-to-follow guide and clearly communicate how each of the steps your new users complete benefits them.

Integrations and user data

Most probably, your product is not the first one in your customer’s arsenal, which makes integration with other tools an important part of user onboarding. As your customers begin to adopt your product, they will need to integrate it with the other products they use. Besides that, in order to take the most advantage of your product, they will need to import their existing data.

To make this part of the user onboarding experience as efficient as possible, turn to automation. That’s how you’ll avoid mistakes that occur by transferring data by hand and shortening the integration time as much as possible. Also, if it’s applicable to your SaaS business, provide new users with several integration options. Not all of your customers will need to fully integrate all of the tools they are using with yours, so you should make it possible for them to opt out of full integration and take only the parts they need in this phase of user onboarding.

Since integration can be a challenging task, make sure you’re available for all the potential questions your customers might have. Even better – create a team that is specifically in charge of this part of the user onboarding experience. Having a dedicated user onboarding team is the best way to help your customers set up everything they need and successfully complete the integration.

Walkthrough tours

After you completed the setup and integration phase of the user onboarding flow, it is time to show them how to really use it. A product walkthrough is the easiest way to teach your customers how to use your product. It shows them a concrete example of the things you have in your knowledge base or FAQ section. This section should be optional, in case your customers already know how to use your product, and they should be able to come back to it afterward if they need to.

Follow-up emails

After your customers go through the initial process of user onboarding and get familiar with your product, the biggest part of the onboarding flow is complete. However, your support shouldn’t end here. Continue showing your customers what value they can expect from your product if they keep using it by sending regular follow-up emails. They should contain tips regarding particular features of your product and the updates you will make as time passes. 

Send short emails often in order to keep your users engaged and focus on one feature per email. That’s how you’ll have an excuse to extend user onboarding and communicate with them for a longer period and subtly nudge them to use your product. After some time, you can even share testimonials from your other customers. This is a good way to share the value you can bring to the rest of them. 

Note: Appearing in your customers’ inbox is good, but there’s more than that in it. Sending emails without any value won’t bring you the results you want, which is making customers continue using your products. Aim to understand their business needs and help complete them by providing information about your product that will help them fully understand it.

How to onboard customers with Eyelet?

Source: Eyelet

Online user onboarding tools can help new clients get up to speed efficiently. They provide a way for them to quickly learn about all the necessary procedures to efficiently use the new SaaS tool in their arsenal.

For a SaaS business, the quality of the user onboarding experience can make or break your business’s success. This is because your business success depends on how well you have educated your new users about what your product does and how it can help them. User onboarding tools such as Eyelet are your friend in this process.

Eyelet walks your new users through the product’s key features and teaches them how they can best use the features for their own needs. Besides education, user engagement is another key element that makes your customers want to use your product. With Eyelet, you’ll learn how to easily inform new users about interesting product features and how they can help them.

As more customers learn the benefits of your product, you should turn to scaling it up and increasing your revenue. Eyelet has taken care of this part as well by guiding you through the best scaling practices based on your business needs.

Eyelet makes the user onboarding easy by providing the following:

1. Ease of use. Whether you’re onboarding one new client or hundreds of them
2. Eyelet streamlines your user onboarding process and simplifies it – there are no complicated steps or challenging onboarding processes.
3. Automated processes and workflows that save you time and provide a quality experience for your users. 
4. Self-service features. With a FAQ section and customizable knowledge base, users get to know your company and go through the user onboarding process smoothly.

Top features:

• Product tour option, that highlights the critical product features Guide creation – possibility to add tooltips, hints, and banners anywhere on the screen Bot implementation –  creation and implementation of powerful bots in order to conduct surveys.
• Checklist creation – implementing checklists to make sure that all the steps from the user onboarding process are performed.
• Powerful analytics – the possibility to track user behavior with insights that help decision-making. It only takes a minute to install the Chrome extension and get started With Eyelet, it is easy to keep track of the documentation so the users don’t have to go through long paperwork processes. They will simply receive the tasks that they need to complete as a part of their onboarding process. 
• Besides that, the user onboarding flow becomes more interesting due to interactive guides and onboarding tours.

You can follow it all through an app as well.

Try it now and experience the benefits yourself.

SaaS User Onboarding Examples

Asana

Source: Asana

Asana is a popular web and mobile app that is designed to help teams track their work, and it has created a comprehensive user onboarding experience. Their user onboarding process starts from the moment a potential new user a website. It immediately prompts them to create a free account. After they fill in all the necessary information and verify their email address, it will redirect them to the website to begin the official part of the user onboarding flow.

Unlike many products, Asana greets its customers with both email and a video, to give their users a brief idea regarding what their product is about and how they can use it to their advantage. The initial emails are split into four parts that provide tips to teach users how to use product features, such as adding items to the tasks or editing them. By keeping the emails short they avoid spamming and manage to keep their customers interested.

The tutorials are an important part of Asana’s user onboarding experience. They come through emails to teach customers how to use Asana’s features and provide a clear call to action at the end of each of them. The emails are hard to ignore because they are filled with images and screenshots and followed by an interesting copy. 

In the beginning, the emails come more frequently in order to provide as much knowledge as possible to the customers, and later start coming more rarely, covering more advanced topics. This is a great way to continue providing value to the customers without spamming them throughout the whole user onboarding process. After more advanced features are covered, users have the opportunity to switch to a premium account, and Asana promotes it by offering a demo of Asana Premium while continuing to teach users how to use it.

The personal outreach from the sales team that comes in this phase of user onboarding flow makes customers feel valued, motivating them to buy the premium subscription at the same time. The resources page Asana has developed is useful as well, with a lot of guides that can help users to learn how to use the more complex features it provides.

Hubstaff

Source: Hubstaff

Hubstaff is another SaaS company that is a great example of a good user onboarding experience for all its new customers. It stands out from the competition due to a detailed support secton that helps users from different industries onboard quickly. Besides custom guides for different industries, Hubstaff has created guides for both owners and managers on one side, and the team members on the other.  Managers have a walkthrough through all the necessary steps to set it up and the features that Hubstaff provides to them in one place:

• Setting up the organization
• Setting up projects
• Integrations and tasks
• Organization settings configuration
• Team members invitation
• App download
• Setting up pay rates
• User limits
• Projects assignment
• Screenshot and activity

It presents the tools to see how much time the team spends on specific projects and tasks. Managers can also track the onboarding experience of their team members, with checkmarks that are connected to a member’s name when they complete a certain step. It has a similar concept for members as well, showing them the following in order to get started:

• Accepting an invitation
• Downloading the app
• Installing and signing in to the app
• Time tracking
• Preview of activities
• Preview of timesheets

Since business needs differ depending on the industry and the specific characteristics of each new business, Hubstaff has made the checklist customizable in order for every new customer to take the most of their user onboarding.

Zendesk

Source: Zendesk

Zendesk is an all-inclusive help desk software that is made for support teams. It is a system that provides regular updates and uses its user onboarding processes to show it. From the moment users sign up, they get access to business rules, documentation, and tutorials to help them set up. Connecting Zendesk to an email provider is one of the first steps in the user onboarding process, and guidance is provided throughout the phases:

• Installation of the add-in
• Set up the extension
• Configuration of the integration system

After connecting systems to the Zendesk account, its user onboarding flow guides you through the configuration basics like setting up agents, fields, macro sets, etc. After registration, the process is divided into three parts so the users can take the most advantage of the tool: Setting a support email – where users are guided through setting email channels for their support teams. Adding people – which demonstrates a streamlined process for onboarding support teams.  Macro creation – where Zendesk guides you through the creation of two types of macros, one for agents and one for program administrators. The power of Zendesk comes in the group onboarding option, which saves a lot of resources that companies would spend individually onboarding each new user. 

To conclude

User onboarding processes are more than simply teaching your customers how to use your SaaS. It represents the process of turning your new leads into long-term paid customers that see the inherent value of your product.  So, if you want to improve conversion rates and keep more customers onboard, turn to a user onboarding tool like Eyelet that will help you nail your user onboarding.

Try it now and see its benefits to your business from the next customer you onboard!

FAQ