Somewhere along the way, your business might notice a higher churn rate. User onboarding is an essential factor, when trying to be successful.

Even though there may be multiple causes driving such negative results, ultimately, it is because your users do not understand the benefits and features of the product or service you offer. 

This means that you did not implement a good onboarding strategy, which is the process through which you guide users to explore and learn how to use your product.

When you fail to start or improve such a strategy, you’ll face high abandon rates, followed by critical reviews and a bad reputation. In order to avoid this and help you along the way, we have listed in this article some of the best ways to make user onboarding simple and easy and the most relevant mistakes to avoid.

Let’s get right to the point. 

What is user onboarding?

User onboarding refers to the process of guiding new users to understand your product or service and make them discover its true value.

The onboarding process starts when a potential customer signs up for your product and continues through their first realization of how it benefits them.

 

 

Why is user onboarding important?

The onboarding process is extremely important since it allows your customers to understand how your product works and can benefit them. 

In the absence of such a process, and as a result not teaching your users how to properly use your product, you will see an increased rate of user abandonment, revenue churn, and negative reviews.

A good user onboarding, on the other hand, will allow you to enjoy the following relevant benefits.

Better customer satisfaction and engagement

The more consumers know about your product or service and its main features, the more likely they are to use it often, possibly daily.

In turn, you’ll experience an increase in customer satisfaction and engagement, which leads to better visibility and authority in your field.

Improved retention rate

The more consumers understand how to use your product, and the more benefits they see from using it, the less likely they are to abandon it. As a result, your retention rate will improve, contributing to higher sales and revenues.

Happier customers and brand loyalty

A consumer who is not capable of understanding the functionality and benefits of your product will be unsatisfied and go elsewhere.

On the other hand, if you let consumers know and appreciate your product, it will make them happy and satisfied, which will possibly lead to increased brand loyalty, giving your company a secure revenue stream for years to come.

7 ways to make user onboarding simple and easy

Following are the seven best ways to make user onboarding simple and quick. 

• Use a user onboarding tool

Implementing a user onboarding tool is clearly one of the best ways to simplify and ease the onboarding process.

If you know what is an onboarding tool, then you know how powerful it can be to help you teach your new users about your product while they’re using it for the first time.

As an example, you can target your flows based on user behavior and attributes to deliver a more relevant and timely onboarding experience.

Additionally, it will enable you to deploy a combination of full-product tutorials, modals, and less-intrusive tooltips and hotspots to get users engaged with your product and help them realize its value.

• Welcome new customers with guides and tutorials

By educating users from the beginning, you’re more likely to convince them to stay and spend more time using your product or service. You can do this by creating guides and tutorial videos that you can send to your users after they sign up or subscribe, whether it is a free trial or a paid subscription.

In these guides and video tutorials, you should discuss the first steps and actions that beginners need to take in order to use your product correctly. Furthermore, they should provide an overview of all the features that your product offers.

• Inform users about what to expect

The first thing you need to keep in mind when presenting your product and guiding your users through getting to know it is honesty. Making false promises or creating false expectations will make users lose trust in your product, your business, or your brand in general. 

Therefore, if you want to avoid this, make sure to always be honest about your product’s characteristics, and perhaps list all the pluses and minuses. 

Additionally, it is a good idea to indicate to whom this product will be most appropriate and to whom it will be less suitable.

• Create product tours to point out the features

Even though guides and video tutorials can be helpful for users to learn about your product, it may be difficult for them to both learn and use your product at the same time.

This explains why creating product tours could be extremely useful. 

The tours tend to show users step-by-step how to perform some actions or achieve some results. 

Then they will be able to use it more easily. Meanwhile, you’ll offer a memorable and impressive experience that will create a positive first impression in your users’ minds. 

• Interview and survey your users to find out why they’re using your product and what they expect

A regular survey and interview with users and customers will allow you to always improve your user onboarding strategy and make it simple and easy for users.

Perhaps you could ask why their company or profession needs your product or service, and what they hope to achieve by using it.

As a result, you can customize the onboarding process to be easier and simpler for different types of customers.

• Gamify your user onboarding

In addition to product tours, gamifying the user onboarding experience can make the onboarding experience easier and simpler.

As an example, you might want to create highly immersive learning experiences through VR-based gamified learning environments or employ gaming elements, such as leaderboards, points tables, and badges, to motivate a competitive spirit among new hires.

As a result, you will be able to provide your users with a memorable and relevant experience that they will remember and recommend to others.

• Reduce the number of steps in your onboarding

Even though you might be tempted to provide a detailed onboarding process, that could prove to be boring to your users, to the point where they will be discouraged from going through it thoroughly.

Without the onboarding process, they will not understand how to use and benefit from your product, so they will abandon it and leave.

To avoid this from happening, it would be a good idea to keep your onboarding process short and concise so as not to annoy users.

5 user onboarding mistakes to avoid

Having learned what you need to do to make user onboarding easy and simple, it’s also a good idea to know what not to do.

We have outlined below five mistakes you should absolutely avoid during user onboarding.

• Do not overpromise

When you are onboarding users, one of the first mistakes to avoid is making exaggerated or untrue promises about the features or results your product will provide.

Basically, once users use it, and see what you promised doesn’t correspond to reality, they will feel betrayed and will lose trust in your company.

Obviously, this will result in them leaving your product and never coming back.

Hence, do not overpromise, and describe your products in terms of their true benefits, without inventing.

• Do not abandon users after they went through onboarding

The onboarding process is only the beginning of the customer journey. As a result, after onboarding users, you shouldn’t abandon them.

As customers become experts in using and benefiting from your product, the onboarding process should go over and over again.

It’s still a good idea to provide training and onboarding even if that happens, for example when you add new features that they’re unfamiliar with.

• Not helping and supporting users the right way

User onboarding is more than just articles and videos. Your customers might actually need additional help in understanding your products and solving their doubts or issues.

If this occurs, you must be ready to provide additional assistance and support to users.

Only then can you ensure that your new hires are happy, and you can onboard them in the right way.

• Not measuring your onboarding properly

By not measuring your onboarding, you will never know whether it is effective or not. Thus, you will not be able to know if you need to improve or change anything.

The best way to prevent such a situation is to measure regularly all of the metrics directly related to your onboarding process, such as retention rate, churn rate, engagement rate, and so on.

• Do not onboard users like they’re customers

The onboarding process is geared towards new users who have no idea how your product works or all its features.

Thus, you should never make the mistake of treating your users like experienced customers.

When it comes to the user onboarding process, don’t take anything for granted, and make sure to include all the necessary steps and information, even if they seem very basic or elementary to you.

Conclusions on User Onboarding

As you may have gathered from reading this blog post, user onboarding is critical to the success of your product, service or business in general. We have listed some of the most effective ways to make user onboarding simple and easy, along with some of the most common mistakes to avoid.

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post. Hopefully, you found it informative and helpful. 

If you want to read more, check out this article about generating an unlimited amount of leads for your business.

Author

Flavia Silipo is a skilled SEO copywriter and digital marketing specialist with over two years of experience. You can find her on LinkedIn.