Few things beat the thrill of securing a new customer.
The hours spent fine-tuning your Marketing campaigns, patiently nudging new leads along the sales funnel, the weeks and weeks of “Can you call me back another time?”… all worth it when you see the user finally sign-up for your SaaS product.
But the work doesn’t stop there. In fact, the next step is crucial to whether that user is still a customer in three months, nine months, and beyond.
If you provide your new users with a successful Onboarding experience, you can win clients for life. But, give them a poor first impression, and you might never recover from it.
Nothing churns faster than a poor onboarding experience. Actually, 75% of new users drop off within their first week. And keep in mind that 40-60% of free-trial users will try your product once and never return. So once they’re gone, they’re gone.
This is why it’s so crucial to find the right onboarding software for your SaaS business.
A good onboarding platform will expertly guide new users to activate the key features of your product. Features that will bring them the most value or solve their biggest business problem, all in the quickest time possible. They are also known as ‘moments of wow’.
An example onboarding series might look like this:
Day 1 – Send a Welcome message immediately after the user signs up. Congratulate them for making the right decision. Then, introduce the user to the Customer Success team, who will be helping them get set up.
Day 1 – Send tutorial information to assist users in basic steps. For example, editing their profile or adding a team member.
Day 2 – Send tutorial information or video walkthroughs to help users activate key features of your product.
Day 5 – Send a check-in and Calendly link to book a free training session.
Day 7 – For activated users, send a congratulatory validation message to reiterate the progress they have made.
For non-activated users, notify them of the value they are missing out on and perhaps re-send a training invitation.
What is the best Onboarding platform for your SaaS business?
GoSquared
Thanks to GoSquared’s clever segmentation features, you can identify and group your new users into what we call Smart Groups.
You can construct Smart Groups from a near-infinite number of filters, so you can really drill down into specific customer segments.
For example, you could define users according to their country of origin or company position. Or according to which Marketing channel they arrived from. With custom event filtering, you could add more nuanced segmentation, such as whether or not the user has received a demo from one of your Sales team yet, and filter them according to this status.
Having set up your groups, you’re ready to trigger awesome, automated Sequences to onboard the users. Because the segments and automations are so finely targeted, your customers will feel that sense of personal touch and attention, even once you’re operating at scale.
With GoSquared’s Smart Group & Automation platform, you can replicate the features of a dedicated product-tour platform, but without the cost of another software! Early-stage plans start at just $49/month – giving you all the tools you need to grow & retain your client base.
HelpHero
HelpHero is a dedicated product-tour platform. Product tours can help guide users to key activation features and nurture new clients into super users.
HelpHero provides visually-pleasing tours, with a bonus of no-code skills required. Instead of taking up engineering time, anyone on your team can create & edit tours.
HelpHero’s pricing starts at $55/month for up to 1,000 monthly active users.
AppCues
AppCues offer a similar product-tour focused solution to user-onboarding, with an added ability to fire NPS surveys to clients during their journey. It also provides user segmentation, so you can ensure your product tours are directed at the right clients.
AppCues’ pricing starts at a robust $299/month for up to 2,500 monthly active users. For this reason, it’s more of an Enterprise or Corporate level option.
Userpilot
Userpilot also offers tailored onboarding experiences through its ‘Persona’ functionality. This allows you to group users according to defined characteristics. Userpilot also offers the ability to track users’ progress against set goals, giving you an informed understanding of well your onboarding process is performing.
Similar to AppCues, the pricing packages start at $249/month for up to 2,500 MAUs.
Intercom
Intercom provides a powerful multi-option solution for user onboarding. In addition to in-app tours, you can also set email messages. This is particularly useful for any segments of your user base who require re-engagement. As they may not have been active on your platform for some time, sending email messaging can help coax them back to your product.
All that functionality does come at a cost. Intercom’s pricing system scales rapidly, which can put it out of price range for small to medium size businesses after the initial early-stage grace period. We wrote a comparison post on the best Intercom alternatives for this very reason.
How do you pick?
Finding the right onboarding software for your SaaS business will primarily be defined by your product maturity and budget. But whatever you do, make sure you implement something! In hyper-competitive markets, users have an endless list of competitor options. And with monthly subscription models, churn is an ever-present risk. But through successful onboarding experiences, you can ensure your users experience high value from your product from Day one. This increases the likelihood that they develop into super-users, embedding your product within their processes and remaining clients of your SaaS product for years to come.
