Onboarding

A brand new 120 page guide dedicated to helping founders to understand how to design for successful onboarding.

Do you measure your product’s time to utility? If not, you should. The best products reward users as quickly as possible after installation and account creation. But it’s easy to forget about this and as a result, watch conversion rates from download/install-to-active fall.

As we get to the end of 2016, I’m in many conversations about 2016 performance and 2017 budgets. While 2016 isn’t over yet, most SaaS companies know how things are going to end up within a few percentage points. As a result, their focus on 2017 is an extrapolation from how they have been doing in 2016, typically building on month over month activity.

Intercom on Onboarding features nine chapters of the most valuable lessons we’ve learned onboarding tens of thousands of customers. Simple and straightforward advice on getting your customers to that “ah-ha!” moment, and making sure they never look back.

‘Customer Onboarding’ is an umbrella term that’s often used to describe the entire process that users go through when they start their journey as a customer of your product or service. The onboarding experience can define the ongoing relationship your customer has with the product. In other words: It’s critical.

Customer onboarding for B2B SaaS can take a variety of different forms with a variety of different content. But there are some grounding principles and key tactics that you should definitely consider incorporating into your own user onboarding process.

They wade through the data looking for easy tweaks, hoping that changing a red button green, or adding words like “Free” and “Now” to landing page headlines will add another 0.01% to their funnel. At best this Fisher-Price psychology gets them a few quick wins, at worst they spin their wheels for weeks simply pushing complexity around from one screen to another, all in the hope of growing sign-ups.

A UX designer by trade, he is regularly publishing detailed onboarding teardowns of everything from productivity tools like Asana and Trello to Ashley Madison and the Hillary 2016 campaign app. You might also recognize Samuel’s name from our new book, Intercom on Onboarding, for which he was a guest contributor. He’s written his own book on the topic too.

When you’re building your own onboarding, it’s helpful to familiarize yourself with some onboarding best practices – how other companies are signing new users up, how they’re demonstrating progress to the user, etc.

Customer onboarding has come up a lot lately, which is great since having a poor onboarding experience for your customers can pretty much kill your growth… if not your business.

You got people to sign up for your free SaaS trial – great! Trouble is, a significant percentage of users sign up for the trial, log in once, and never come back. You might as well have burned the money it took to acquire them.

The term gets thrown around a lot in the software world, but has varying definitions — even to people on the same team! Some say it’s teaching new users, others that it’s indistinguishable from user experience, while others imagine it to just be swipe screens or a quick product tour.