Whether you’re building a product in the early stages of startup or refining an already developed product at a larger company, there is a simple process that can help you improve your onboarding experience.
We’ve reduced customer churn at heyday from 8.5% to 3.3% just by changing our onboarding flow.
Here are the steps to follow, with examples from our own onboarding experience.
Customer churn has been reduced almost three times from 8.3% to 3.3%. Image Credits: heyday
Let users try your product without guidance
After a few months onboarding every new user through Zoom, my co-founder Samiur Rahman and I removed us from the process. We dumped users into our product with no demo, no product onboarding, and one educational email.
The result: a disaster. Engagement dropped and churn shot up.
Not all friction is bad. It’s worth adding friction to your process if it helps a user your aha! moment.
When we surveyed users to find out why they stopped using our product, they responded with something along the lines of, “I stopped because I didn’t see the benefit.”
Observe users to identify friction and aha! moments
Don’t wait to release your product. It’s ready to ship as soon as you can get feedback on it. Through observation, you learn what users really need to experience the value of your product.
I reintroduced myself into our onboarding flow through a Zoom conversation. This time, instead of taking users through the product, I sat still and watched them get started. I witnessed a lot of confusion, moderate frustration and a few smiles.
After about 20 observations, we identified the common roadblocks that got in the way of our users. We walked away with a list of goals for our future onboarding experience.
Checklist of goals for optimizing onboarding. Image Credits: heyday