SaaS Customer Onboarding Best Practices

Every customer deserves an onboarding process to become familiar with your products or services. By familiarity, we do not mean showing them the pretty buttons and leaving them to figure out how to use them by themselves. Instead, your company should be ready to take them through the entire process – from the moment they sign up for your products to the moment they become regular customers. That’s why this article reveals the best SaaS customer onboarding practices for every SaaS business, so your customers don’t run away from signing up because of the overcomplicated process.

SaaS Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is crucial to every SaaS business. Unlike every other business where customers can find their route and adapt to the process with ease, a regular consumer on a SaaS website needs a tour guide to understand what they need from you and the reason why they are there.

A SaaS customer onboarding process gives them more than enough to stay on your website and get what they need. It can reduce the churn rate and turn new customers into loyal ones. In other words, your customer’s lifetime value increases while minimizing the rate at which customers leave when contacting your business for the first time.

However, if your company doesn’t implement the proper onboarding practices, you may not achieve the best results and lose customers at a quick rate. To avoid this scenario, here are some of the SaaS customer onboarding best practices for you.

Make the Sign-up Process Easy & Simple

Keeping the sign-up process easy and simple is the best way to engage your customers and give them a great experience. At this stage, you don’t need to overwhelm your customers by requesting too much information.

Instead, you can ask them for basic pieces of information that you need. It is okay to ask for certain information later if it is unlikely to affect a user’s first experience with your products.

The key thing is to ask for information that captivates their attention and draws them closer to your products. If the only piece of information you need at first is their email address and name, then incorporate this info in your sign-up field.

After they have gotten through part of the onboarding process and explored your website or mobile app, you can get more information about them.

After the sign-up process, you can’t just leave your customers hanging by directing them to the homepage or dashboard and expecting them to navigate the site by themselves.
It isn’t done that way.

Instead, provide a tour guide that will accompany your customers through their journey on your website.

You can do this by guiding them through a setup process that asks them what their goals are, showing them a video that summarizes what your site and product entail, sending them a personalized email, or utilizing product tour tools to enhance your customers’ journey and give them an amazing experience.

Find the “Aha!” Moment and Use Them to Guide Your SaaS Onboarding

The “Aha!” moment is the period when your customers have found the exact product or service that solves their problem or answers their questions. It occurs when a customer recognizes your product’s value and how it is beneficial to him.

With the “aha!” moment, a customer’s emotional response is positive and allows him to realize a new solution that contributes positively to his daily workflow. An example of the “aha!” moment includes finding the keyword research tool on Semrush or sending your first autoresponder email with MailChimp.

For SaaS applications, finding the “aha!” moment may take a longer period for many new customers. However, here are a few tips that can enable your customers to recognize their aha moment on your website or mobile app.

Personalize your Customer’s Journey

You can personalize your customer’s journey to relate to your products or services. Obtain some vital pieces of information (age, demographics, location, job title) to allow them to select their preferences or recommend some products related to their preferences.

Either way, they relate to your products and become guided through their aha moments. Next, you can reduce friction that slows down a customer’s amazing journey on your site. You can do this by wireframing a user’s flow map to understand the different paths your customers can take to achieve their goals.

Other processes include creating an onboarding flow to serve as a tour guide for new users, creating new features for your products, and more.

Data Analysis and Customer Engagement Tracking

Analyzing and testing the qualitative and quantitative data is critical to your onboarding strategy. Since you have to continuously optimize your onboarding flow, you will always find some improvements to make. You must analyze your data and track your customer engagement to determine the metrics that are working or not.

Here, you have to measure some metrics such as the monthly recurring revenue, annual growth rate, churn rate, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, customer health score, and more.
This qualitative and quantitative data allows you to understand your marketing performance.

For instance, you can use the churn rate to measure the number of customers that you lost within a definite period. Meanwhile, the customer lifetime value assesses the average amount of dollars a customer spent for your company.

As for the tracking of customer engagement, you can utilize the net promoter score to survey by asking your customers the rate at which they can recommend your products to others.

This tool allows you to measure your customers’ loyalty and also gives you feedback about your weaknesses. In addition, there are several key metrics you can track to improve customer satisfaction, including conversions, LTV to CAC ratios, activation rates, and customer engagement scores.

Conclusion

Every SaaS company doesn’t deserve to have an increased churn rate or struggle to acquire and retain potential customers. Implement these best onboarding practices to achieve the best results.