Creating a successful SaaS onboarding: Best practices and strategies
SaaS onboarding, or Saas user onboarding, is when a SaaS company provides a new customer with documentation, tutorials, videos, or any other kind of help when using its software for the first time. We will outline the best practices and strategies to create a successful onboarding for your SaaS.
Your onboarding is the direct representation of your product and how obsessed you are with your SaaS.
Improving your product is the highest leverage thing you can do because every single person getting the product will directly benefit from it.
Focus on making the thing that you deliver that much better.
Improving sales and marketing is always temporary and needs to be changed regularly.
But the onboarding, once you got it optimized, it becomes a money monster.
There are no hacks
The biggest companies aren't doing the hacks because they don't have to.
There are no shortcuts or hacks for building a success SaaS onboarding.
What builds a business on the long-term is your ability to deliver on your promises.
And promises take a long time to compound.
The first "metric" of your onboarding that you should measure is: are you keeping up and reminding your new users of the promises you made on your website and marketing efforts?
Nobody measures stuff
You don't know what you never measure, but people don't think (and your competition either).
Chances are you've copied some parts of the onboarding based on your competition.
Which they've themselves copied from other products.
If you want to win, you should ask yourself "How do I know that?"
If you don't have data to support it and don't track it, then it doesn't exist.
The second aspect of your onboarding is to simply start measuring more data from your onboarding.
How can you make it easier?
How can you make it faster?
How can you make it more streamlined?
How can you make your onboarding so good that anybody can be successful with our SaaS?
Great onboarding creates 10x returns
Building a powerful onboarding is tough, but the outcome is 10-100x bigger.
You need to stay at your current SaaS level because your onboarding isn't good.
The goal right now is to get better, not maximize profit.
How can you make your onboarding so good no one wants to leave your SaaS?
Once you unlock that, your business won't stop growing.
How to build a killer onboarding
The key is to do the work no one is willing to do.
It's a battle of will than than intellect.
You need to figure out exactly what delivers the highest return for your customers.
And all of this comes from the inputs.
You need to have clear activation metrics, ideally at different moments on your product.
You want early activation metrics, the quick wins your customers can get to build up their momentum with your SaaS.
How can you do that? By doing a regression analysis.
Look at the cohort of customers that don't cancel their subscription.
What things or events occurred (which means you will have to look at a lot of variables) for those customers?
From those events, which ones haven't occurred for the customers that have cancelled their subscription?
Those events become your first guess at potential activation points.
Then, your goal is to drive your whole onboarding towards those activation points.
Then, you measure again (redo the first steps).
Your goal is to get the everyone through the most optimized onboarding experience that will guarantee people success.
Take the headache out of building your SaaS onboarding
Partner up with baobun.studio to think through your own onboarding experience and optimize it overtime to grow your revenue, reduce your churn rate, and keep your customers happier, longer.