David Skok is a partner of Matrix Partners and a very early investor in SaaS products. He is also well-known in the SaaS startup circle. He found that the reason why users do not use the product is largely because they do not understand your products and services at all, and they cannot get the value of solving problems from them. When David Skok invested in SaaS products, he found that there are two situations that are most likely to cause user churn: First, it failed to successfully help new users get started. At the beginning, the product was not used at all.
Second, there was no internal advocate who pushed the company to buy the SaaS product.
For companies that make SaaS products, don’t wait until users stop using your product before doing anything. The product should allow users to experience the true value of the product when they log in for the first time.
And to achieve such value conversion, it is inseparable from the guidance of users and the emphasis on Onboarding and the implementation strategy.
What is Onboarding?
Onboarding originated from the HR industry, and refers to when new employees join the company, they quickly adapt to the new environment, so that they can start working and produce value.
When introduced to the SaaS field, the ideal Onboarding refers to a set of strategies for customer lifecycle management.
From new registered users entering the product quickly to get started, and obtaining product value to generate behavior (activation), thus paying (conversion), and then continuing to use it in depth (retention), to open (purchase) company products or (upgrade/additional purchase) packages, a system of continuous testing and guidance.
It is not just a guide for novices, but involves the entire customer life cycle.
This is because with the continuous growth of the business, the diversity of customer base roles, and the continuous iteration and expansion of products, there is no "completed" Onboarding user onboarding work for SaaS products. Even if we serve the most loyal and active customers, we need to continuously and actively guide them to see the value of the product.
Therefore, Onboarding is a continuous process of serving users/customers, it is not a project or a function.
It is a strategy that constantly adapts and adjusts as the product and business develop, and it needs to receive continuous attention. It does not just provide intuitive guidance on product functions, but truly helps users experience and perceive the value of the product; allowing them to adapt over time as the product and business develop.
The impact of onboarding on business
As early as 2007, Dave McClure (co-founder of 500Startups) created the "Pirate Metrics" to help the product succeed. It includes acquisition, activation, retention, recommendation and revenue, which is the AARRR model.
Over time, the order of these indicators has been controversial because companies have different rankings and attention to indicators at different stages. But among all pirate indicators, activation is the most important for retention and increasing revenue, and improving and creating an effective Onboarding strategy is a favorable choice to increase the activation rate.
In foreign countries, industry researchers have sorted out a strategic framework for User onboarding, called CARE. You can also think of this framework as an Onboarding system: it includes elements such as content, channels, rhythm, process, and interactive experience.
In this model, Onboarding is not just a bunch of SMS/email activities or a bunch of tooltips stuffed into the product during the user's product experience journey. In essence, it is a set of strategies for how to let users quickly discover the value of the product to reduce the possibility of their loss, loss, and leaving, and to promote them to continuously perceive the actual value and superior experience you can provide, so as to experience and rely on the product, and finally achieve paid behavior conversion.
Converting users from visitors to paying can be divided into three key stages:
Browsing users → first-time registered users
Before the user's initial trial registration, the user is "previewing" your product. The user's initial exposure and impression mostly come from marketing promotion (such as promotional pages, blog posts, social media).
At this conversion node, if you want to turn browsing users into first-time users, they need to clearly understand your product's core value proposition and the use cases that actually solve business scenarios, thereby promoting interest in the product experience.
First-time users → active users Once you let users use your product, the next task is to let them experience some unique value of the product in their initial experience. And convert first-time users into active users. This process is to understand the user group's expectations of the product and align these expectations with appropriate education and behavioral excitement.
At this stage, you can make good use of some dynamic UX modalities to guide; thus providing a highly focused in-product experience, providing relevant information when users actually need it, minimizing noise and avoiding distractions and intrusive pop-ups, which frustrate users more than educate them.
Once users know how to use your product, they will start to develop habits and become your loyal users.
Loyal users → paying users Loyal users do not necessarily convert to paying users. SaaS products generally provide free versions for use. It may take 1 year, 2 years, or even longer to go from free to paid...
However, the paid conversion rate will inevitably grow linearly with the user's usage time. The longer users use your product, the more likely they are to become paying users.
At this stage, how to make them constantly perceive the systemic value of the product is the key. The higher their perception of product value, the more willing they are to pay.
How do I get started with User Onboarding?
Step 1: Consider user personas and their concerns
Each user is a unique person with their own motivations, needs, and skills. It is still a valuable and important step to consider their mindset, characteristics, and real demands before they come into contact with your product.
You need to define different user personas for your product as much as possible and analyze how they can solve such problems:
What is the reason that prompts users to find your product?
How will they perceive the product? What kind of guided path experience do you want to give them?
What do they want to happen when they use your product?
Why don’t they choose the features you think are important? Or maybe they don’t use them at all?
What obstacles and challenges will they face during use?
…
Step 2: Sort out the user experience journey and design the first experience path
In this step, you can make a user path experience map. Try to think about what new users need to do with your product to reach the activation event, and sort them in chronological order/or the best experience path.
Common key guide events: For example, when a new user registers and tries the product, when the user moves from the login page to the welcome page in the product, what is the most direct value that the user gets from your product for the first time? What needs to be effectively promoted in these steps to encourage users to continue to activate?
Step 3: Formulate activation events and aha moments
Activation events and aha moments are essentially linked, but there are subtle differences.
In SaaS products, although the activation event is the first time the product delivers value to the user, the user's activation event does not necessarily reach the aha moment. Especially in SaaS products, it is necessary to consider the individual's Aha moment, the team's Aha moment, the purchase decision maker's Aha moment, and the paying customer's Aha moment
Use Slack as an example...
If I register as a user and find that it is good and easy to send messages to others using Slack, and the messages I sent receive replies quickly, I think it is very useful, then this may be my personal Aha moment.
After I found it useful, I invited everyone else in my team to join, and then we all communicated on Slack, and then found that it was really useful. Especially now that we are working remotely, through Slack, the whole team has greatly improved efficiency, which is the Aha moment of the team.
At this time, our team is still a free user and has not become a paid user. If the company finally decides to buy the paid version, it must be because the person who controls the financial power, maybe the CFO, maybe the CEO, found that one day they just used a paid function of Slack, or knew that Slack has a paid function that is better than our current experience and can greatly improve efficiency. Although it costs money, they think it is worth it, so this is the Aha moment of the purchase decision maker.
Finally, when they really bought the paid version of Slack, they spent $100 on each user. After the money was spent, the user's expectations at this time were different. He hoped that during the use process, he would really feel that your product is valuable to him and really help him improve efficiency. One day when I felt that the 100 yuan I bought for each seat was worth it, then this was my Aha moment as a paying customer.
So when we think about the activation events and Aha moments of SaaS products, it is more complicated than general To C products. We need to think about users of different roles. How to achieve the Aha moment in this process is very critical and important.
Build your first in-app onboarding process Now that you have considered the user's mindset, mapped their journey, and decided to track and optimize activation events, it's time to start building.
Step 4: Design the guidance mode and the logical rules for triggering guidance
Designing a guidance mode is an effective design solution to solve one or several types of problems. The guidance design mode can be divided into two categories based on whether it blocks the user's current behavior: modal guidance and non-modal guidance.
When choosing which mode to use, you need to weigh the applicable guidance mode based on the guided scenario, the guided user group, the user experience, and the flexibility of the guidance adjustment.
Secondly, in designing the logic rules for triggering guidance, I have sorted out a brief basic framework in actual combat, mainly considering the dimensions of user identification, triggering conditions, guidance mode, and triggering rules, and then weighing the triggering logic and rules. It should be added that when facing some special guidance scenarios, more consideration should be given to the preconditions for its triggering.
The logic rules for triggering guidance are the correct triggering time and effective guidance. In the past actual combat, I have reviewed and sorted out some guidance principles to avoid detours and pitfalls.
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While guiding, do not damage the user experience. Guidance that sacrifices the user experience is not worth doing.
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Appropriate scenarios, effective reach, and at the same time, take into account the differences in the experience paths of new and old users.
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Each group of guidance is decoupled, and each group of trigger conditions is as independent and flexible as possible.
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Systematically build a guidance mechanism, and design it comprehensively from the rule layer, style layer, trigger layer, and timeliness layer.
