🧠 How to build an awesome SaaS onboarding flow

Hey all, Charlie here! 👋

Today we’re talking about at onboarding.

First impressions matter - so ensuring your customer’s first few steps with your product are legendary should be a top priority.

Plus, it’s rare that a customer will fully grasp what your product can do for them from just your landing page - there’s likely plenty of value they are still unaware of even after signing up.

This week in IdeaHub…

• Tailored onboarding: Allow customers to choose their first product experiences based on their specific use-case

• Product tours: Show your customers how to get started using your product

• Onboarding checklists: Ensure your customers have everything they need to start succeeding from day one

PLUS - the 3 best tools to start building a rock-solid onboarding process this weekend.

Let’s jump in… ⬇️

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1. Tailored onboarding

It could be the case that your user base will be made up of segments of customers using your product in different ways.

By giving new customers an option to choose their preferred path through your onboarding process, you make it more personal to their specific needs which can greatly decrease the chances of them churning.

HubSpot is an awesome example to learn from when you’re considering how to approach any product feature, but for onboarding in particular - they do a great job.

Take a look at how HubSpot asked me about my use case before letting me into the platform when I signed up this week:

Then, I was asked how I would like to get started, ensuring I only go through the onboarding steps that matter the most to me.

I chose to get started with HubSpot’s sales tools:

This not only personalises my experience, but it allows HubSpot to collect more data on me, something they will no doubt use to analyse my behaviours and suggest new products.

2. Product tours

A product tour is a way of showing your customers around your product just after they complete the signup process. This can help you convey the purpose of your product and help your customers start using it to its full potential from day one.

You know your product better than your customers ever could, so this is your opportunity to show them its power!

Here’s the tour I got in HubSpot after I chose to set up sales tools:

(link to video)

Here are the key takeaways if you just want the TLDR:

• I was guided through a worked example of using HubSpot that relates to the reason I choose when tailoring my onboarding experience - to track new leads.

• I was shown how HubSpot integrates with my existing processes, like sending emails to new leads - something that I might find difficult to visualise just from a sales page.

• The tour featured my personal details, including the company name I set up as part of the signup flow. This naturally led to a more engaging experience.

While this is all relevant to HubSpot’s particular features, the core strategies are relevant to your products too. It’s all about conveying your product’s mission.

Filling in this template will help you define the story to tell to your customers during your tour:

“My customers struggle with ____ and use my product to solve it by __. Without features _, ____ and __, my product would be useless and without setting up __ first, my customers would struggle to get started.”_

3. Onboarding checklists

Lastly, when your customers enter your platform, consider adding an onboarding checklist to gain better control over their first few steps.

Even if a customer doesn’t feel that all the steps are necessary for them right away, having a checklist gives them the first place to look for how-to’s and guides when they want to try out a new feature.

Here’s the checklist I got in HubSpot after my product tour:

This is successful for a number of reasons:

• The checklist is split into sections making it seem more palatable

• I’m told up front how long each section will take to complete

• I’m incentivised to setup my key account data like my contacts and teammates first, which without, I would struggle to use HubSpot

• I’m able to track my progress through the completion bar at the top of the checklist

The best tools for onboarding

Obviously, HubSpot’s onboarding flow is super-optimised from experience with their many thousands of customers!

But really, if you break it down like we have today, and implement the 3 strategies above, you can create a really good starting point.

What’s more, it doesn’t need to be difficult nowadays - so there is no excuse!

There’s plenty of options that allow you to get started without writing any code if you're happy to pay for an onboarding-as-a-service platform:

• UserGuiding
  ✅ Support for tailored onboarding, tours and checklists
  👨‍💻 No code required
  ❌ Expensive…

• ProductFruits
  ✅ Cheaper than other full-service platforms
  👨‍💻 No code required
  ❌ Not as many integrations

• Dopt
  ✅ Start for free!
  👨‍💻 Some code required
  ❌ Missing some features

If you’re bootstrapping and are happy to write a bit of code yourself, then I’d go for Dopt.

You will miss some features that the bigger platforms offer, but with excellent JavaScript SDKs and documentation, you can easily get started in a weekend.

You’ll want to read this…

• How to tailor onboarding with Dopt - A guide from the makers of Dopt on how to create a tailored experience

• How onboarding reduces churn - Neil Patel writes about the importance of churn and how onboarding is essential to keeping it under control

That's all for this time!

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Hey! Charlie here 👋, thanks for reading this article! I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new.

Each week I send out discussions like this to over 350 tech peeps interested in building their own software products.

Being a Product Manager in B2B SaaS, I built a lot of software and share my lessons learned that you can apply to your own building journey.

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