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User onboarding is the process that prevents people from perceiving, experiencing and adopting the value of the product to improve their lives. This process determines whether a customer continues to use your product or leaves after several months or even days.
Why user onboarding is so important
Excellent user onboarding isn’t just about properly teaching people how to use your product. This process should also offer a warm welcome and make your customers feel valued.
Good customer onboarding feeds new users with well-designed content, helps them understand how to use your product successfully, and reveals its value. All of this can also enable you to increase your retention rate and lower your customer acquisition costs.
Related: 3 ways to improve your customer’s onboarding process
Four Signs You’re Having Bad User Onboarding
Here is a list of reasons that indicate that your customers may experience difficulties during the onboarding process:
- Users do not fill out sign-up forms.
- Users complete the registration process, but never use your product.
- Users do not upgrade their plans to paid plans.
- Users upgrade their plans to paid plans, but stop using your product after paying their first bill.
If any of these issues sound familiar to you, it’s critical to work on your onboarding process to prevent users from churning and show the value of your product. So, now that you know the problem, how can you fix it?
Related: Eight Customer Onboarding Practices You Should Eliminate Now
Three milestones to onboard new users and drive adoption
If you want customers to get used to your product faster, they need to go through the following stages:
1. The Moment of Value Perception (MVP)
It’s a moment when a user first introduces your product in the context of their real problem. For example, they can realize this while browsing your website, even before the signup process.
2. The moment of value realization (MVR)
Here, a customer must achieve the expected result by using the product for the first time in order to realize its value and put it into practice.
3. The moment of value adoption (MVA)
The last milestone refers to a period when a user regularly uses and integrates your product into their life.
Here’s an example of how we see the value path at stripo:
- MVP: a user realizes that Stripo is an email design platform that allows them to create emails faster and easier.
- MVR: a user creates, edits and exports a single email.
- MVA: a user comes back to design more emails (90% of customers who stay with us after the MVP and MVR phases).
The EUREKA framework for your seamless user onboarding
Now that you know about an excellent user onboarding process, it’s time to figure out how to give your audience the perfect first impression. You can get it done by following these six simple steps:
1. Estimulate your team
A collaborative approach allows you to provide users with an exceptional experience, highlight the value of your product, and show them how to use it properly. That’s why it’s crucial to set up an onboarding team with the following units:
- Product unit to briefly guide new users through the product and help them recognize its value as quickly as possible.
- Marketing department to deliver educational content to re-engage inactive users and motivate them to move to the next stage of your onboarding process.
- Customer Success Unit to collect feedback and improve the onboarding experience.
- Sales unit to build long-term relationships with new users and provide custom demos based on data collected by the marketing and product departments.
Related: Long-term customer loyalty starts (or ends) with your earliest interactions
2. Uunderstand the expected results of your users
If you want your users to have a flawless onboarding experience, it’s vital to find out why they decided to try your product and what problems they want to solve by using it. Show customers the value of your product during the onboarding process.
3. Rdefine success criteria for onboarding
Now you need to decide how you will evaluate the success of your onboarding process. You can take advantage of the three milestones we mentioned earlier: MVP, MVR and MVA. Let’s take a look at how we refine onboarding success criteria based on Stripo’s experience:
- MVP (Value Perception): Our new user realizes that this email design platform can help them speed up and automate the production process.
- MVR (Value Realization): The user designs their first email and exports it to their favorite ESP.
- MVA (Value Acceptance): The user comes back to create more emails and upgrade their plane to a paid one to get more export options, collaboration tools, and a wider variety of templates.
4. Evalue and improve your onboarding journey
It is essential to review the journey of new users to identify and eliminate unnecessary steps. Your job is to determine the minimum number of actions users need to take to realize the value of your product.
It is essential to measure conversion rates at each stage of the buyer journey and motivate your new customers to move from one stage to the next. Don’t forget to track user behavior on your website as it is impossible to track your progress without analyzing data.
5. Kmany new customers involved
Now is the time to provide new customers with educational and insightful content to help them adopt a new product and implement it into their routine. This content may include personalized product tours, push notifications, webinars, and onboarding emails with valuable resources.
6. Aapply the changes and repeat
User onboarding is a process that never ends. We recommend that you review the results regularly to identify and resolve any issues immediately. This way you can emphasize the value of the product much faster and keep your new users coming back for it repeatedly.
Related: How Customer Enablement Drives Product-Driven Growth