Acquiring new customers is not enough. You must nurture relationships and help them use your product or service easily. Here comes user onboarding.
A user onboarding process is a set of activities for a new customer to start using a SaaS product. The process should be easy to follow, covering everything from signing up to using the product’s advanced features. Experts can avoid mistakes by breaking down complicated systems into steps when using checklists. Checklists are particularly useful in user onboarding, as they help users navigate the process more efficiently.
With a user onboarding checklist, new users can complete and enjoy the setup tasks required to get their product up and running.
Are you interested in improving the user onboarding experience for your customers? Keep reading.
While it might seem like a small task, customer onboarding is a vital part of every SaaS business. It can help you get new customers hooked on your product and keep them returning for more. It also sets the stage for long-term retention and engagement.
So what exactly is a user onboarding checklist?
A user onboarding checklist is a list of actions that must be completed by a new user for them to become fully engaged. A user onboarding checklist can include:
- Creating an account
- Installing their software and starting to use it
- Even logging in for the first time
As part of your user onboarding, you should set up these checklists to ensure that they do everything correctly and that they are not missing anything. By doing this, you can ensure that your users get the best possible experience from your product. The checklist must be designed specifically for your product, as there may be minor differences between multiple SaaS products.
In addition to a detailed checklist, you should consider adding visual aids like tutorials and manuals to help guide users through the process. You can also include automated email or in-app notifications to keep users updated on their progress throughout their first few days. This can help reduce confusion and build trust with your users.
One of the most critical tasks for any business is onboarding new users. This is crucial because it signals to new users that your product is legitimate, valuable, and trustworthy. It also shows that you care about their needs and are willing to go out of your way to make them feel welcome.
In addition, onboarding helps you create a better user experience by ensuring new users have everything they need to start immediately. If you don’t take the time to set up account settings and add social media accounts and other basic preferences, you’re likely to frustrate your new users right away.
This can lead them to leave your site in frustration and never return. Therefore, every business must be proactive in onboarding new users from the very start.
A proper user onboarding process is essential for successful SaaS businesses.
If you don’t have one, you will likely face several issues. One of the main ones is that your users won’t be able to get started with your product as quickly as they could if you provided them with step-by-step instructions.
Another problem you might encounter is that your customers who struggling to navigate your site will have trouble figuring out how to navigate it, which means they’ll get lost and frustrated. Last but not least, you’re likely to miss out on some valuable leads who would otherwise sign up for your service if they had a clear path to follow.
It is crucial because it determines how long people will stick around.
Like many other processes, you can automate user onboarding with technological advancement. Let’s explore how you can do it.
How to automate user onboarding with Eyelet?
Eyelet helps you improve user onboarding processes and experiences without any programming skills. With Eyelet, you can easily create user onboarding guides that reduce the needed time for product adoption time by 61%. Its features do not only help new users – as you can also design step-by-step support guides that will lead to 70% less of support tickets from existing customers.
Eyelet improves how people interact with your product, as it helps you explain your product value to users. With product tours and checklists, you can educate users on all product features and show the best way to use them.
Eyelet also helps retain customers, reducing the churn rate by 80%. By letting you put tooltips and banners anywhere on the screen, Eyelet reminds your customers of the features most relevant to them and showcases your product’s value.
Eyelet also gathers valuable customer data that can give you insights into user behavior and if you need to adjust your approach.
Overall, Eyelet allows you to simplify the use of your complicated software and highlight the best features of your product. Try it now.
Let’s explore what steps you should take to make a solid user onboarding checklist.
Decide which actions are most important for your company
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To create a good user onboarding checklist, you must first detect which actions are the most important for your users.
For example, you must install the free Chrome extension when using Eyelet. Installing an extension represents necessary step users of Eyelet have to take.
Let’s say you own project management software designed to help managers and team members of any company to coordinate deadlines and assignments. Once they sign up and create an account, managers must add team members and individual projects. They also have to assign tasks to team members.
All of these are necessary steps they need to take if they want to use your software efficiently. In addition to defining crucial steps, you must also determine the order of the steps within the onboarding checklist so it is clear which action precedes others.
Decide on the order of steps in your process
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The usage of your product can require having an account, or if it is not free like Eyelet, your users must pay for a subscription first. If you do not have a free trial, users first have to pay you, and then they can follow the next steps on their onboarding checklist.
We will use the previous example of project management software. These are the steps a manager has to take, in this particular order, to get the program up and running:
- Make an account
- Pay for a premium account
- Set up the company’s profile, add a logo, organizational structure or similar
- Send team members invitations to join the platform
- Add individual projects
- Describe tasks and add deadlines
- Assign particular team members specific tasks
The team members’ checklist will look a bit different:
- Accept an invitation to join the platform
- Set up their profile, add a profile picture or similar
- Accept tasks
A comprehensible user onboarding checklist implies that you write text for all steps straightforwardly. Writing clearly is necessary for a smooth customer onboarding process.
Write out the exact text for each step of your process
Image source: Notion
Once you have decided on the steps you should point out in the user onboarding checklist and their order, you should write the exact text for each step of the onboarding process.
The text should be precise enough and easily understandable. You can put short text on the user onboarding checklist, for example, Make an account. If customers need additional information, you can provide them with longer text that will further explain each step.
The whole customer onboarding process should be enjoyable, and onboarding checklists should not be communicated just with words but also visually. Let’s explore this further.
Draw the screens that users will see during each step of the process
Image source: amyjokim.com
Sometimes you must put yourself in someone else’s shoes to understand their perspective. Your product’s features or steps a customer should take to enjoy them might seem obvious to you. For your customers, that is usually not the case.
Everything you make as a part of your product has to be done with customer-centric goals in mind.
Understanding the customer’s perspective is essential for a good onboarding experience and an excellent onboarding checklist. To make solid onboarding checklists, companies must draw the screens that users will see during each process step.
It would also be precious to test those screens and see if everything is clear to someone not so knowledgeable about your product. User tests can inform you if further adjustments are needed.
As the customer onboarding process needs to be visually pleasing, too, your checklist must comprise animations that will confirm what steps the users have completed.
Determine which animation confirms which step has been completed
Image source: Dropbox
Due to the fastness of life, many customers do not pay attention to words as much as animations and pictures. Every graphic you use within your customer onboarding process and as a part of your customer onboarding checklist needs to be immaculate.
For example, suppose a necessary step your customers should take is to install a Chrome extension. In that case, you should provide them with an animation that shows they successfully did it.
The animation should also point out the next step they should take. You can also provide customers with a progress bar showing them how many steps they should take and which of those steps represent more complex tasks.
Eyelet is not an efficient tool just because it lets you easily design customer onboarding checklists, while all you have to do is install a Chrome extension. It also can collect data that can give you valuable insights if you need to change something or if your user onboarding checklist benefits customers.
Let’s dive more deeply into that.
Review and adjust based on user feedback
Image source: Reve Chat
The customer onboarding experience is an essential part of their whole experience that can impact your revenue and customer churn rate. It can also affect the customers’ willingness to recommend your product to others.
With Eyelet, you can easily design in-app surveys that can gather customer feedback based on which you can adjust your strategy.
Customers can tell you if your user onboarding process is not straightforward enough. You can improve the user onboarding checklist and simplify the process based on their feedback. With an improved setup process, new customers can all go through the same positive experience.
The data you gather does not have to be related only to onboarding tasks and experience but can give insights into overall user engagement and buyer persona. Once you know your customer base, you will learn how to help users better and offer them a great experience.
To sum things up
In this article, we showed the importance of having a solid and easy-to-follow user onboarding checklist. We explained that user onboarding checklists represent the necessary steps a customer takes to enjoy your product or service.
Having user onboarding checklists improves the overall customer onboarding experience and leaves you with no confused or unhappy customers. It will also build trust between you and your users.
We defined the necessary steps you have to take to create a great user onboarding checklist:
- Decide which actions are most important for your company, i.e., decide which steps users have to take
- Decide on the order of steps in your process
- Write out the exact text for each step of your process
- Draw the screens that users will see during each step of the process
- Determine which animation confirms which action has been completed
- Review and adjust based on user feedback
Lastly, we presented Eyelet as a tool that allows you to create user onboarding checklists without coding skills.
Eyelet works as an extension for Chrome, so it is super easy to use and install. It can significantly reduce the time needed for product adoption up to three times! In addition, with it, you can send in-app notifications informing your users about new features you introduced.
With Eyelet and its efficiently designed user onboarding checklists, you will also reduce customer service costs by up to 75%. With a great checklist, not many customers will have additional questions or be unsatisfied with your product.
Aside from helping your users, with Eyelet, you can also create step-by-step guides for your employees and reduce training costs. Try it now.
