## Onboarding: How to Engage, Retain, and Delight Users

Imagine this scenario: A user signs up for your product, tries to figure out how to use it, but realizes that mastering it in just a few minutes isn’t feasible. Frustrated, they leave and forget about your product, even though it could have easily helped them achieve many of their goals. It’s disappointing: the user remains dissatisfied, and you miss out on acquiring a new client and revenue.

Onboarding helps quickly demonstrate the value of your product, teach users how to use it, and retain them. In this article, we’ll discuss how to develop effective onboarding and the tools that are suitable for it. We’ll showcase numerous examples and explore the main trends.

# What is Onboarding

Onboarding is the automated introduction of a user to your product. The goal of onboarding is to showcase the product’s value, helping the user achieve their “first success” as quickly as possible. This, in turn, increases the company’s revenue and other desired business metrics.

# Why Onboarding is Important

Consider the following statistics:

• 74% of customers are ready to switch to competitors if they encounter difficulties during the onboarding process—whether they can’t figure out how to use the product or fail to quickly perceive its value.
• 63% of users state that onboarding is one of the critical factors in their purchase decision.
• 50% of users return products or discontinue services because they don’t understand how to use them.
• Acquiring new customers is 5-25 times more expensive than working with existing users.

A well-thought-out onboarding process that shows you care about your customers’ success will help you:

• Attract them
• Make them loyal
• Turn them into brand advocates

## How Onboarding Affects Company Profitability

Effective onboarding reduces churn rates and increases customer satisfaction levels. Marketers drive quality traffic to the website, identify customer pain points to create conversion-driven offers, companies spend money on advertising and research, and users sign up but soon leave. Why? Because often, we’re so inspired and passionate about our product that we want to showcase all features and benefits at once. However, this overwhelms the client, leading to their departure.

Onboarding allows you to guide the client gently, leading them to their first success, gradually explaining the product’s benefits, and teaching them how to use it. The client will be satisfied with your service if they can easily understand how it works and solve their problem with minimal effort.

## Increasing the Number of Customers

If a client achieves their goals with your product and feels that you help them navigate it, they will recommend you to friends and business partners. According to data from the Edelman Trust Barometer, 84% of decision-makers in B2B purchase based on recommendations.

## Faster Activation in the Product

Clients are ready to use all the tools for their business if they understand how to set them up and what they will receive in the end. Therefore, the goal of onboarding is to sequentially and as simply as possible explain how to connect and configure the product’s tools.

Imagine you’re visiting a website, already looking forward to setting up the service, and during a meeting with the manager, you want to showcase how you’ve found a fantastic solution. But then you see nine fields to fill out, followed by phone and email confirmations and additional information in the personal account. This would deter anyone.

# What is Needed to Develop Effective Onboarding

To create successful onboarding, gather information about your users, business sector, competitors, and align this with the company’s goals and success metrics:

1. Define Onboarding Goals

   • Do not create onboarding just because it’s trendy or because all your competitors have it. Understand why you need it and what it will bring to the company. Set SMART goals. If your product already has onboarding and you want to improve it, determine what each enhancement will achieve and the metrics to measure it.
   • Example of a non-SMART goal: Increase conversion to payment.
   • Example of a SMART goal: Increase conversion to payment after the trial period by 15% by February 2022.
   • Why is the second goal better? It is:
     • Specific
     • Measurable
     • Achievable
     • Relevant
     • Time-bound

2. Study Your Business Sector and Competitors

   • Choose the top three competitors or any companies that impress you with their customer service and onboarding. Analyze what you like and why. Observe what and how these companies are evolving—collect ideas.
   • Focus on:
     • What tools they use for onboarding
     • The sequence in which they provide access to service tools
     • The format of information delivery: text, video, images, GIFs
     • How they communicate with users—tone of voice

3. Gather User Pain Points with Your Team

   • Before starting onboarding development, gather the problems your users face. Support teams, sales teams, and customer success can help.
   • Create a shared chat in a messenger, like Slack. Collect frequently encountered user issues that lead to churn or reduce trial period payment conversion. Organize this information in a table or diagram in Miro, Excel, or any other convenient tool. Consider how to solve each pain point with onboarding. Start by implementing solutions that will quickly help you achieve your goal and require fewer resources.

4. Identify Stages Where Users Face Product Issues

   • Use analytics tools (e.g., Fullstory) to track the user’s journey within the dashboard: event funnels and heatmaps. Determine where users encounter difficulties, frequently drop off, or contact support. Pay attention to where their cursor is when they face a problem. Likely, this is where they expect to see prompts—consider placing tooltips or links to helpful articles from your knowledge base.

5. Conduct Research and Communicate with Users

   • Product research goals:
     • What constitutes success for the user
     • What product value needs to be demonstrated first
     • How and when the user realizes the product is beneficial and wants to continue using it
   • Qualitative methods include in-depth interviews, feedback analysis, corridor tests, usability tests. They help study consumer characteristics, behavior, and attitudes toward the company or product. For example, through a series of in-depth interviews, you can generate hypotheses about what constitutes success for the user.
   • Quantitative methods include surveys, questionnaires, data analytics. These rely on statistically significant data. For instance, on a representative sample of users, you can test hypotheses generated from qualitative research or advertising tests. The goal is to obtain statistically credible information to make changes to the product.

6. Determine Onboarding Effectiveness Metrics

   • To understand how effectively you are activating users in the product, track key metric indicators that reflect actual user behavior in your service.
   • Suitable metrics for evaluating onboarding:
     • Churn rate
     • Lifetime Value (LTV) – the profit a user brings over their entire time using the product
     • Customer retention rate
     • Net Promoter Score (NPS)

# How Many Onboarding Scenarios are Needed

Once you’ve completed preparation:

• Defined goals and metrics
• Studied users and the value they expect from the product
• Reviewed competitors, collected user pain points, and ideas for onboarding

What’s next? Decide whether you will have a single onboarding scenario for all users or multiple scenarios for different segments.

Personalized scenarios help users reach success faster. For example, whether the decision to implement your product is initiated by:

• CEOs
• Marketers
• Customer Support Leaders
• Sales Department Heads

# Onboarding Trends

More companies are utilizing onboarding and hiring specialists in this field because it presents an opportunity for exponential growth in revenue and other business metrics. Let’s explore important trends in onboarding that you can implement in your company.

According to Userpilot, 90% of B2B companies and 80% of B2C companies use onboarding. Over the past year, this figure has increased by an average of 13%.

## Personalization and Hyper-Personalization

There is a trend towards personalization in onboarding in both B2B and B2C companies. For instance, 71% of B2B companies and 81% of B2C companies use personalization. Over the past year, this percentage has grown by 13% on average.

Companies are striving for a data-driven approach. Every user click, every message they read is valuable data that will help personalize onboarding scenarios for different segments, expedite product introduction, and demonstrate its value.

## Expanded Onboarding

Onboarding is not just what the user sees in the product after registration. In reality, you onboard the user on every page of the website where you explain the product and demonstrate its value. Convey the value of your product wherever appropriate, keeping user interest warm.

## Registration Through Third-Party Services

Despite high conversion rates for registration via Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, and other accounts, only 20% of services implement this option. Don’t be like the remaining 80%—implement this feature.

## Accessible and Clear Product Information

Clients need comprehensive information about the product and are willing to seek it themselves. Therefore, 85% of companies are investing in product academies: knowledge bases, FAQs, help widgets (tooltips or other prompts), and chatbots on the website. Start doing this as well.

## Simplified Registration

This involves eliminating endless fields in registration forms, numerous informational screens, and additional actions before the user can access the product dashboard. In 2021, 74% of SaaS companies recognized that this complexity hinders users from perceiving the product’s value and simplified registration and onboarding. Compared to 2020, the percentage of such companies doubled.

## Just Imagine…

You visit a site, excited to start setting up the service, but soon during a meeting with the manager, you find nine fields to fill out, followed by phone and email confirmations, and additional personal account information. This would drive anyone crazy.

# Incorporating SEO Keywords with Co-Founder Ai

At Co-Founder Ai, we understand the critical role that effective onboarding plays in the success of startups and the satisfaction of investors such as private equity companies and venture capital firms. By implementing personalized onboarding scenarios, startup engines can better engage users, leading to higher Lifetime Value (LTV) and increased appeal to angel investors and venture capital investors.

Our platform leverages data-driven insights to tailor the onboarding experience, ensuring that private equity firms and VC companies recognize the potential of your startups. With Co-Founder Ai, ycombinator companies and others can streamline their onboarding processes, making them more attractive to investment opportunities and enhancing their positions in the competitive landscape of venture capital business.

Whether you’re looking to start a startup, attract equity investors, or connect with networks like 500 Startups and Techstars, effective onboarding is the foundation of user retention and business growth. Let Co-Founder Ai assist you in crafting onboarding experiences that resonate with your audience and meet the high standards of private capital firms and venture capital companies.

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For more information about how Co-Founder Ai can enhance your onboarding process and attract top-tier investors, visit Co-Founder Ai.