Why is the onboarding experience crucial for B2B SaaS companies? (with many inspiring examples and statistics)

A well-designed onboarding experience can truly boost your business. Onboarding is a crucial yet often overlooked step in the process of Early-Stage Products.

Onboarding is seen by many as an introduction to “how to use a tool,” but in fact, User Onboarding is much more than that. It determines how quickly your prospects will understand and adapt to the value of your product, which is crucial for product success.

What is onboarding?

I like this simple yet, in my view, the exhaustive definition of onboarding that I’ve found on Intercom’s blog:

“User onboarding is the process of introducing new users to your product and helping them get the most out of it.” (Intercom)

Norman Nielsen Group distinguishes 3 Onboarding Components:

Feature Promotion — Shows users what your product can do

Here, Intercom introduces its users to different types of features they propose.

Customization — Customization of experience with the use of user’s data

A very good product customization practice is asking users about their goals. That lets us determine their Job To Be Done.

Collecting marketing data can also be a good idea, although we must be careful that it does not become too long because our users may abandon the onboarding form. We must remember that most of them use our product to perform some task, and if the user onboarding is too long and the questions are not related or helpful, they may be a little irritated.

Instructions — Instructions on how to use the user’s interface

In general, we should avoid using instructions. If our users have a problem using our tool, we should instead think about redesigning and simplifying the different features we propose.

Why is user onboarding crucial for B2B startups?

Good onboarding is key to a product’s success. A well-designed onboarding can decrease acquisition costs, help retain customers, and increase revenue. Let me show you how onboarding can affect a few of the AARRR metrics (What are AARRR Metrics?) : Acquisition, Retention, and Revenue.

Acquisition

How can well-designed onboarding decrease our customer acquisition cost? (CAC)

To answer this question, let me present your acquisition from our user’s perspective:

Good onboarding can empower our prospects and create a feeling of “hope” that they can solve their problems and perform better. When they start to use your product, users want to make a “better self.” We must understand their motivation to know what “better self” means for your user. We need to understand their Job To Be Done (JTBD). We will lead the users from point A (start) to point B (their JTBD) in the shortest time possible.

“A successful first touchpoint helps people visualize a product in the context of their situation, helps users experience and adopt the value of a product.”

— Ramli John “Product-led onboarding”

At the same time, our users are usually “lazy.” If the first experience is not very user-friendly and they struggle to understand the value of our product, they will leave us looking for another solution.

Typeform shows the value of their product by letting us play with a form(their product) that explains and shows why we should choose their solution.

Customers should be able to sign up for our product and test it easily.

Calendly opted for Single Sign-On (SSO), which speeds up the registration process and allows users to connect their calendars to Calendly quickly.

While setting up an Intercom account, we can easily access our mailbox to confirm our email. It is an important step in the acquisition process, as almost 30% of confirmation emails are unopened.

Retention

How good onboarding experience can decrease churn?

Great onboarding is also needed to retain customers and decrease churn.

Retention is an extremely important step in our flow, because “Acquiring new customers is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones.” (Hubspot)

Yet, user onboarding to the product is overlooked as

“55% of people say they’ve returned a product because they didn’t understand how to use it.” (Hubspot)

According to Userpilot, the main reason and leading cause (26%) of user churn is poor onboarding. So, how can we improve these numbers for our product?

The first thing we can do is to determine our metrics.

To determine the success of retention, we have to define the metrics we should follow to decide if our users will come back regularly to use our product. What behavior will indicate that the user will adapt our product to his workflow?

The best way to figure out these statistics is to analyze our current customer base and answer the question: what number will indicate that our users will keep using our product?

For example, in Mailchimp, they can say that they’ve observed that when users send X or more email campaigns, they usually keep coming back. In Typeform, they will say that if someone has created X forms, they continue to use our product. This specific number is called The Tipping Point.

Once our Tipping Point is defined, we can send our user different prompts that will encourage him to use our product.

Monday focuses on users creating their first task. It looks like their metrics for this specific type of user are the number of created tasks.

If you’d like to know more, I advise you to read Ramli John’s book “Product-Led Onboarding,” where the author explains in detail the methodology that allows you to define and measure metrics that can be indicators of success for your product.

Revenue

Once our users understand and adapt to the value of our product, we can show them how they can do their job even better. If we know their JTBD well, we should use different prompts and motivate them to use the “higher value” of our product. Once we understand their biggest pain and what they want to gain by using our product, we can propose an onboarding that allows them to do their job more effectively.

Key Elements of Successful User Onboarding

To make user onboarding work, we need to know how to do it well. Below, I present a few characteristics of good user onboarding:

1. Good onboarding is contextual.

“As soon as we removed unnecessary info and directed focus of our onboarding process to our Chrome extension, where most of UserGuiding’s value lies, we’ve seen our conversion rates almost double.”

— Ramli John “Product-led onboarding”

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, good onboarding helps users understand and guides them toward their goal (JBTD). That’s why users should be onboarded at the right moment.

To understand what the “right moment” means to our users, we should formalize user journeys for different user segments based on our research and assign and test different messages that we send to them at different steps of their flow.

We should avoid messages that require them to remember and messages that aren’t relevant to the user. We should also avoid trying to convert new users too quickly without letting them try out our product.

2. Good onboarding is as short as possible.

Once we know what job our users are trying to do better, we can help them. Our onboarding should consist of only the necessary information that will make our user successful in this job.

“Marketo found that a few non-essential fields in the signup process increased their cost per lead up to 25%.”

— Ramli John “Product-led onboarding”

Good onboarding shows the value of a product as soon as possible.

Good onboarding should focus on showing value as soon as possible. Onboarding shouldn’t start when users sign up for our product; it should begin much earlier.

If our product is sales-led, we should start onboarding during the sales or marketing process. Marketing, sales, and product should work together to provide an excellent onboarding experience.

In the case of hybrid onboarding (sales and product-led) and product-led onboarding, onboarding should start with a first touchpoint with our product, which is usually our landing page. However, our users’ first touchpoint can be a page found through the browser or in a social media post.

An excellent example of a quick connection to our value can be the possibility of exploring our product without having to register:

Circula allows users to experience the product’s value even before they sign up. By clicking on “View product demo,” we are taken on a guided tour to explore the app’s value firsthand.

We should remember to present the product’s value and avoid overpromising, as it can backfire.

3. Good onboarding focuses on doing and not just learning.

This rule is derived from the general UX principle — doing is better than learning.

If you want to teach your users how to use your product and what it does, try to do it contextually (see point 1). For example, you can give your users a list of tasks to complete so that instead of just memorizing, they will learn by doing.

Calendly provides you with a list of tasks to set up your account and set up the first meeting.

If your product is complex and you have no choice but to give your users a large amount of information, remember to give them control over their actions. Make learning optional and provide different sources of knowledge.

4. Good onboarding gives users control.

Remember that your users are different. Some will try to explore your application, and some will want to understand everything at first sight. Also, the amount of information they possess may vary. For that reason, you should always let your users decide if they need help or not. Allow them to skip the learning and ensure that your users always know where to find all the necessary information.

Toggl allows users to choose whether they want to be guided or explore themselves. It also lets users know where to resume onboarding if they get stuck.

Practical examples

Customization

Customization is one category of onboarding. When designing our onboarding, we should focus on essential fields. If the questions we ask are unimportant to us or our users, we should move them to settings or remove them. Customizing some interface characteristics like color or font should be optional in most cases, especially in the case of B2B applications.

Hubspot uses the onboarding process to define and discover different segments of their users.

They also propose customization of templates by asking us different questions. The interface changes as we choose other options so we can see the template in real-time.

Hubspot personalizes your onboarding experience based on your answers.

Monday also customizes your experience by asking you about your focus.

Mails

While onboarding our users, we must guide them through the process and beyond. Emails can be a very powerful tool for a few reasons:

• Welcome emails have some of the highest open rates of 50%, on average. In other words, they’re 86% more effective than standard email campaigns. (Campaign Monitor)
• It is easy to analyze their performance thanks to the different available tools.
• They are external (they exist outside of our product), which means that we can reach our users anytime and prompt them to return to our product.

Companies often send us a sequence of emails a few times a day, every day, or every few days after acquisition to introduce us to their product and give us useful tips or tasks to complete setting up our account.

Monday encourages us to come back to their product by sending us resources and giving us tasks to do. Monday asks us many questions when we set up our account, so the emails we receive are customized based on the answers we’ve provided during registration.

Product tours

Product tours can increase user retention rates by 10–30%. (Intercom)

Product tours are one of the most popular examples of onboarding. Many platforms let their users take a guided tour without the necessity of logging in, and some will take you to the guided tour once you are signed up to give us more personalized experience.

On Personio’s website, we can take a product tour without logging in. When we are done with our tour, they encourage us to contact them by displaying testimonials and a high number of customers.

Videos

“Statistics show that viewers tend to retain 95% of the information from a video compared to the 10% they remember from reading.” (Userpilot)

Videos are a great medium to onboard new users. We can use them internally, inside our application, or externally, for example, in our knowledge base or a welcome email. Most companies share the video with their users at the beginning of their journey as a quick introduction to their product.

A short onboarding video on Pipedrive’s website introduces us to all available sources of help.

Pipedrive communicates with its users through videos at many steps of their journeys. Here, we can see a video that introduces their learning platform. All these videos give the user experience a nice, personal touch.

Monday uses videos in their knowledge base. On the left, we can see introduction videos for different types of users, and on the right, we can see video tutorials that explain different functionalities.

Communities

Many companies are creating their communities. Building a community can include

• Providing Community Experts who are there to help users if they encounter some issues
• Creating separate categories for groups of questions that fall in the same category
• Creating and sharing online and offline events and webinars
• Adding elements of gamification (badges, boards of leaders, etc.)
• And many more

Below, I present communities created by Pipedrive and Intercom. Also, check out the communities of Calendly, Monday, or Typeform to find some inspiring examples.

Use of dummy data

A good idea can be to add some dummy data instead of empty states. This way, our users can play around to see how our product will behave “in real life.”

Intercom presents various features with dummy data (different “examples”).

Documentation and help

Exhaustive documentation and the possibility of asking for help are must-haves for B2B SaaS companies. Both documentation and help should be easy to find, and our users should know where to find them from day one.

Monday offers in-app help for their users

Dovetail provides all documentation and help in one place.

List of tasks

An excellent idea for implementing the rule “doing instead of learning” is providing our user with a list of tasks. This way, we can also give our users control over what they need help with and what they can do by themselves.

Calendly shares a list of tasks necessary to complete the onboarding process.

Webinars and events

Webinars can be a good idea to create a community and give our users a deeper dive into our product. It also gives us the possibility of reaching our audience outside of our application, for example through LinkedIn or other social media platforms.

Dovetail uses webinars to share case studies, promote new features, and educate users.

Typeform proposes different events and webinars, saves them online, and lets their users rewatch, comment, and discuss them.

Certifications

Some companies let their users complete certifications. Certifications are a good idea for companies that have reached a certain level of reputation.

Hubspot proposes free certifications in 5 languages for different segments of their users.

Customer experience

Something specific for B2B startups can be presenting their product from the users’ and customers’ points of view.

When onboarding to Zendesk, we can see the demo from the consumer’s point of view.

Summary

I hope I’ve convinced you of the importance of well-crafted user onboarding. I’ve presented just a few examples of how B2B SaaS companies handle their onboarding. To learn more, I encourage you to explore different products, especially those I mentioned in the examples, as they handle their user onboarding in an inspiring way.