B2B SaaS Onboarding: A Guide to Improving Customer Retention

There are three major parts to building a successful SaaS business. First, you need to build a product your customers need. Then, you need to find potential clients and turn them into actual customers.

Once you’ve successfully convinced the customers to sign up, though, there’s one final step — keeping them. Or, customer retention.

As simple as it may sound, customer retention involves more than just having the right product. Sure, that’s a great first step, but it’s just… not enough.

Understanding how a technology works is even more crucial to keeping your customers than having all of the best features — which your customers can’t quite figure out.

To put it simply, people care more about your product’s outcomes than its features. Helping them achieve the right outcomes is the fastest way to reduce customer churn for your product.

In this article, we go over what customer onboarding is, why it is critical to the success of any B2B SaaS product, and how a good onboarding strategy can help you improve customer retention.

What is SaaS Onboarding?

SaaS onboarding, or customer onboarding, is the process of getting new customers familiar and comfortable with your product.

User onboarding is everything you do to ensure each user achieves their unique goals for using your app. It involves actively guiding the user towards finding value in your product.

To achieve its aim, user onboarding begins when the customer signs up. It also goes beyond the initial signup process to continuously ensure the user gets to the ‘aha moment’ sooner.

Why Customer Onboarding is Important

SaaS onboarding begins with the welcome package you present to your new clients immediately after they sign up for your product. The onboarding process benefits both your customers and your business.

First, it strikes at the heart of the most important thing for any customer — success. A good onboarding process should help the customer achieve their aim with your product.

It provides customers with the knowledge they need to seamlessly navigate your product, and helps them build trust in your business.

Building a trusting relationship with new clients has many benefits, including:

• Churn reduction: Customers who fully understand how your product helps them achieve their goals are less likely to leave you for a competitor.
• Decreased support requests: When you invest in properly informing new customers about your products, they’ll only reach out when they have critical issues to settle.
• Increased customer lifetime value: A happy customer will always stick with your product over the competition. They’re also more likely to purchase other products/services from you.
• Reduced customer acquisition cost: Happy customers are your biggest fans… and your biggest referral sources.

Qualities of an Effective Customer Onboarding Strategy

Before you begin building out your onboarding strategy, it’s important that you understand what you wish to achieve.

The goal of any customer onboarding strategy is to ensure customers find success with your product. To achieve this goal, your selected strategy should:

• Offer users a clear roadmap to success with your app
• Provide quality resources to help customers through sticking points
• Encourage customers to use your app more than once in the first few weeks
• Adapt to each user’s changing goals over time, and
• Make your product critical to the user’s business goals

To summarize, an effective user onboarding strategy identifies what “success” with your product means to each user, and helps them achieve it.

This strategy should eliminate the challenges inherent in building a new habit (adopting a new product) and keep motivation high.

Improve your SaaS Onboarding Process in 7 Steps

So far, we’ve considered the benefits of an effective onboarding system, as well as some high-level characteristics of an effective onboarding process.

But how can you create an effective user onboarding process for your SaaS product? Consider 7 practical steps you could take.

1. The Welcome Screen

The first screen a user sees when they first launch your app is the welcome screen. For most applications, this screen is used to further buttress the benefits of using the app.

While this may be nice, it’s important to remember that your users were already sold on your product before signing up.

For your welcome screen, you want to greet them warmly, encourage them to take the first step in fully setting up their account, and guide them to make the most of the app.

To effectively provide the guidance they need, it is advised that your welcome screen asks a few (not more than 3) questions to help you segment new users by their needs so you can tailor their experience.

2. Practice active user segmentation

Most SaaS products have multiple use cases and attract different kinds of user personas.

If your product is one of these, chances are you’ve already identified the different groups during your marketing segmentation. Now is not the time to stop.

Segmenting your users early on makes it easy for you to tailor their onboarding experience to their particular needs.

The final part of your welcome screen above should ask the new users what they hope to achieve with the app and/or what role they play in their organization.

Be sure to provide broad options that capture different user groups, and then prepare tailored insights and walkthroughs to help each group get the most out of your application.

3. Use interactive walkthroughs

The most important facet of any onboarding process is to get your users familiar with your product and help them get the most value from the product.

Rather than just telling new users what to do, show them. Give them hints on how to use the product, and direct them to use it themselves.

Completing one task should trigger a prompt with hints and contextual tips for the next task.

4. Take advantage of empty states

Data collection is a major feature of most SaaS applications. This is true, whether your application is actively processing data or simply helping users collect and/or organize data.

When a customer first opens your application, there will be features and columns without any data. Take advantage of these empty features to provide users with educational material.

Empty states should be filled with content that explains what the feature is and how it can be used — encouraging the user to try it out using a clear example.

For instance, a project management application could call on users to “enter your first task here”, or “create your first task group”.

5. Resource Center

You simply cannot satisfy all the user needs to know from the beginning. For a seamless onboarding process, you only need to go over the basics that’ll help users get the most out of the product.

Considering users may still run into issues, or may eventually require more out of the product than your onboarding provides, it’s important to provide them with an easy-to-reach resource center.

Your resource center or knowledge base should provide quick solutions to regular problems or challenges, and answer the most frequently asked questions by users.

Ensure that your resource center is easy to navigate. One way to help speed things up is by providing a search bar or chatbot to help users quickly find the answers they seek.

6. Use a checklist

Checklists are an effective part of any onboarding process as they show clearly what steps a user needs to take in order to make the most of the application.

For instance, a project management checklist could include ‘account creation and verification’, ‘setting up your first board’, ‘creating your first task group’, and ‘creating your first task’.

You could also add completing the interactive walkthrough to the checklist. In all, your goal should be to encourage the user to begin using the product as quickly as possible.

7. Keep onboarding progressive

Congratulations! You’ve successfully created an engaging activation process that has gotten new users to adopt your product quicker. Now, it’s time to ensure they stick around.

Your onboarding process should be progressive. Schedule routine check-ins to see whether users are having any issues, or to show them how they can get the most out of the app.

Send out congratulatory messages when users begin using a new feature, with more information on how they can get the best out of the feature.

And what about new releases? Don’t just inform users of the newly added features, be sure to show them how they can use it to improve their workflow with a quick tutorial.

Other SaaS Onboarding Elements

To help you further improve your onboarding process, let’s consider some specific elements that make up the onboarding process, and how you can improve them.

1. Signup process

Did you know? Your onboarding process begins the moment a user decides to sign up for your product. This is where you begin curating the first impression for the user.

Thus, it’s very important that your signup process is smooth and seamless. Keep it as simple as possible by ridding it of any unnecessary steps.

You can also begin collecting relevant data from users at this stage to help them get their accounts up and running off the bat.

Some best practices include:

• Keep it simple by collecting only absolutely necessary information
• Provide option for social signup buttons (Google, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn)
• If the signup requires multiple steps, encourage the user every step of the way by showing their progress
• If possible, remove the friction associated with immediate email verification

2. Welcome email

Your welcome mail is your first correspondence with your new customer. This is where you set the tone for your relationship. Be sure to keep it positive and warm.

For starters, you want to congratulate (and, thank!) them for signing up. You also want to use this opportunity to briefly reiterate the value of your app, and highlight the next steps.

Some best practices include:

• Thank them! They’ve just signed up for your product. Let them know how much you appreciate this.
• Again, keep it simple. Scale back all you want to say into the most essential bits. The rest can come later.
• Provide useful resources to help them successfully take the next steps.

3. Documentation

Documentation should be an integral part of your onboarding process. If all goes to plan, your users may not need it. But all hardly goes to plan, no?

When users are stuck, proper documentation in your resource center/knowledge base will limit their need to put a call across.

Some best practices include:

• Keep documentation accurate and up-to-date
• Structure your documentation around tasks or processes
• Include a search bar to help users locate help without having to go through the entire knowledge base

4. Tutorials and Walkthroughs

Product tours and walkthroughs should be integral to your in-app welcome messaging. This is where you give users an immediate taste of your application.

Tutorials can take many different shapes. It could be an interactive product tour that helps users get started as they learn the product, a short video explaining each major section, or small popups explaining unused features.

Some best practices include:

• Make product tours interactive so that users ‘do’ and not just ‘see’
• Make tutorials short and concise
• Make it possible for users to skip any walkthroughs/tutorials and return to them later

5. Onboarding and check-in calls

What better way to win the heart of your customer than through a personalized call? Whether this is a demo call at the beginning, or a check-in call later, it shows how much you care about them.

Calls are the single greatest way to learn all there is to learn about your customer, their desires, and their challenges. It’s also a great way to provide personalized help.

Some best practices include:

• Schedule a free demo call at the beginning, if your app has fairly complex features
• Time your check-in calls so that they’re neither too early (user has no feedback) nor too late (user has already made a decision to leave)
• Collate the data gotten during calls for future improvements

Final Thoughts

The goal of every business isn’t just to acquire new clients, but to keep them. Marketing helps you achieve the former, and effective onboarding is a critical part of achieving the latter.

An effective onboarding process leads the user to quickly see the long-term value of the product. Conversely, a single crack in your onboarding process could cause users to slip through and abandon the product.

When curating your onboarding process, be sure to consider your product and its peculiar complications. Also, give thought to the kinds of customers you’d be attracting and how best to serve them.

Finally, never stop improving. Learn your weak spots as you go along and improve on them with every iteration. Listen to the feedback from users. Always improve.