Carl: Hello and welcome to the SaaS growth podcast. I'm your host Carl Anderson. This week, we're going to do a micro- episode about SaaS onboarding., why it's important and one simple technique you should be using to boost your onboarding experience.
I run a SaaS onboarding consultancy, so I spend a lot of time talking to founders and industry leaders about onboarding. and the different techniques that are effective in SaaS applications.
Onboarding is something a lot of founders struggle with, and if done poorly it can seriously impact your churn and your customer retention rates. I really enjoyed something Geoff Roberts from Outseta said to me: "Improving onboarding will improve every other part of your marketing funnel". He's completely right.
The issue with your funnel leaking during onboarding is you're losing highly qualified leads. So these are people who have found your product, have a problem they think your product can solve, and take an action to solve that problem . Like they're on the hook. The worst thing you can do is lose them because you didn't support them enough during that critical onboarding period.
The question I get from founders is "what makes a good onboarding experience. It's a nuanced question, with no one size answer. But at a basic level, onboarding is about teaching your application to your user and delivering on the marketing promise that you made on your landing page.
So I think we're a lot of founders fall over is they forget that even though someone has signed up and it's using their application, they don't trust you yet. They don't fully believe that you're able to follow through on your promise. And it's your job to show them that you aren't full of shit as quickly as you can.
So the secret of good onboarding it's to deliver value as quickly as possible. The difficulty here is that you also have to meet users exactly where they are in that moment. Good onboarding follows what users wanted to do anyway.
For instance, in an email marketing platform, the very first thing a user wants to do is to get new subscribers, or to import existing subscribers depending on how they got there. It would be a mistake to make "send a first email" an early part of your onboarding flow.
Another difficulty I see from a lot of founders is trying to balance self-discovery by the user, and having a very light touch onboarding versus a highly guided onboarding, which takes them through every part of the application.
When it comes to learning, typically self-driven is the gold standard. If you're able to get your user to discover something themselves, that will stick in their mind much better than if you told them about it.
That being said, onboarding should also be as brainless as possible. It should be very hard for someone to make a mistake and fall out of your onboarding flow and be left without support.
Typically the best approach is a combination of the two where you provide guidance about the actions that a user should perform while also giving them space to discover how to do that themselves. One flaw of a very highly guided approach is often they provide new flows to perform common actions that are not a typical flow for your application, which essentially means, you miss the opportunity to teach the users the correct way of doing things in the application once they become more established.
So now down to the technique I promised to teach you inside the intro.
As part of my SaaS consultancy, I perform a lot of onboarding audits and I do see the same mistakes cropping up over and over again, and the one I think is the most overlooked in terms of value is contextual links inside your application. So something about self discovery is that users do occasionally need help, and it's very common for companies to provide a knowledge base with lots of support articles to help users through their journey.
Where they fall down as they don't link to these knowledge based articles from within the application. And the goal of onboarding is to make it as brainless as possible.
If we think about the experience of a user who is confused in the case where these links are not provided. The problem is the amount of added friction.. So a user may not fully know how to articulate the problem that their experiencing right now, or how to unpick it in a way that makes sense to them.
So you're relying on a user to solve a problem that they may not accurately be able to describe, and independently go and find all the information they need to make sense of it. You hope that they go to your knowledge base and find a relevant article, which may not be easily discoverable, or they go onto Google and you rely on SEO to provide the solution to their problem for them.
In both these cases, you are ceding control to external forces that you don't have any influence over.
The thing is these articles exist. You've written them. You put the time in. And all you need to do is create a link, and add it into your application so that when a user is confused, they are able to find the article that you've already prepared to help them.
These links are very low costs, have very little screen real estate dedicated to them. And in cases where users don't need them, it's completely fine for them to ignore and move on, right. It has no negative impact on your applications experience. And only a positive impact on your onboarding experience when people need the help.
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the SaaS growth podcast. It has been a short one. I hope you found the insights on SaaS onboarding valuable and actionable. Remember, a great onboarding experience can make a significant difference in your SaaS business success. Stay tuned for more value episodes coming your way, and more interviews with very interesting founders.
So again, I've been your host, Carl Anderson, and you can see me at carlanderson.xyz to book your own SaaS onboarding audit.
Thanks again for listening. See you next week.
Carl Anderson
