State of SaaS
Onboarding 2023
As we do every year, our team at Userpilot reviews the onboarding flows of over 100 SaaS Tools to uncover the trends, best practices of… you guessed it – user onboarding!
Read our 2023 report below to learn how your product compares to other SaaS companies and where we can take some inspiration.
Why should you read this report?
- To learn best practices & trends in SaaS onboarding at a glance
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To see what your competitors are doing
- To back your product decisions up with industry data & get internal buy-in from your execs
"User onboarding should be on top of mind of any person working with SaaS. Everything can be changed except the first impression - make sure to make it right!
That's why, we have discussed this topic back and forth with majority of our clients and there are some clearly visible trends coming in 2023
- The best SaaS products will offer personalized product just right after onboarding - it means that introduction survey or even your email domain, will help the product to navigate your situation and you will have it pre-set-up 1 minute after registration. Can you imagine how many pain points you kill and how much fatigue you take from the user?
- It also means that onboarding might get more complex, so it can start far before you become a customer and will come to an end right after you sign-up. In my opinion the most advanced companies will gather the data about the potential clients through different methods, from the very beginning of customer journey so the customers feels like home with the product.
- Lastly, I believe the winners will work on onboarding accessibility - I hope onboarding in the future will be tailored to the user needs / preferences - as for now, I have the feeling there is no market standard, and I believe 3-4 types of onboardings that user can choose from will be there soon - thinking about, it is present in many different industries nowadays.
Overall, given the market situation, you really don't want to lose the money you invested to convert your client, and it is likely to happen if your onboarding s****s - that's why make sure users can adopt your product smooth."
Download the Report Summary here:
Report Summary - SoSo 2023
The Importance of User Onboarding
"User onboarding is evolving to become more visually appealing and concise, with SaaS products transitioning away from overlay tutorials and aiming for shorter yet effective experiences."
- User onboarding has a direct impact on user activation. When you think about it, this is one of the very first touchpoints your users have with your product. If they don’t have a good time here, they’ll likely leave, never to return.
- If your users don’t activate, they won’t experience value from your product and will churn within the first few weeks of signing up. This will directly affect your trial-to-paid conversion rate.
- “Getting the right activation metrics right is key, which requires a deep understanding of the user onboarding journey in-app”
Yi Lin Pei
- Since user activation is the metric that has the highest correlation with revenue growth, not prioritizing it will have a negative impact on your Growth Rate.
"Next-gen onboarding will focus on creating shorter and more engaging experiences, implementing rewarded sharing (like Airtable and Notion), offering optional and replayable onboardings, making a wealth of content easily accessible, and providing ultra-personalization through templates, emails, and wizards"
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"The future of user onboarding lies in AI-driven, dynamic processes that learn, adapt, and guide users while being transparent about the learning mechanisms behind it, making AI an interesting and useful aspect for customers."
Free Trial vs. Freemium vs. Demo
- Nearly 41% offered a free account
Yes, there was an overlap – 15% of companies offered both basic plan free accounts, and free trials of higher-tier accounts and 1% more for some tools.
- Over 74% offered a free trial
Compared to 2022: only 43% offered a free trial!
- Only 4% of companies didn’t offer their prospects any “taste of the product” - and were demo-only
Compared to 7% last year.
"Self-serve experiences continue to gain momentum over sales-led ones, leading to a shift in the role of sales teams from closing contracts end-to-end to primarily supporting clients with onboarding and driving expansion revenue."
More and more companies are aware of Product Led Growth and are utilizing their product as the acquisition channel.
Frictionless Signup Flow
- Requiring only the name
- Not asking for the email confirmation or the credit card number before letting the user in
Typically, we encountered two friction points:
- Requiring email confirmation before letting the new signup into the tool
- Requiring a credit card in the signup flow
"In my experience as the CEO & Head of Growth at LTV, I find that using templates for onboarding is highly effective. It's also essential to give value to users before they sign up, which can encourage them to engage with your product. Moreover, I've observed that incentivizing activation and sharing during onboarding plays a crucial role in user adoption and growth."
Quick tips for reducing friction in your sign up flow:
- Avoid asking the user to confirm their email address before getting to see the dashboard. Even if you need that step for legal compliance/identity verification reasons, you can still show them around before allowing the users to perform any actions in your tool (e.g. sending an email campaign)
- Use a “confirm your email” announcement bar inside your app with a sniper-link to the confirmation email
- Same with asking your users additional questions in the signup flow - ask only the ones you immediately need to use to personalize their new user onboarding flow
- Use Single Sign-On (SSO) to make the signup process easier for your new users
"The best way to reduce friction? Use magic links. Not sure if convenient, fast, or a little annoying! In a way, it certainly makes sense and cuts down on trying to come up with a password/save something on 1pass"
Welcoming Your Users
How many SaaS products have welcome screens in 2023?
Welcome screens are a great way to segment your new users by Jobs-To-Be-Done. Knowing the goals your users want to achieve, and customizing the onboarding flows accordingly can be game-changing for the Time-To-Value. You will get them to accomplish their Job-To-Be-Done faster, reduce their time-to-value, and generally help them activate much sooner than if you drag them on a one size fits all 20-step-long product tour. It’s a win-win - your users will get value faster, and you will retain and convert more trial users.
"We are seeing that the onboarding flow is more based around the value that the users will get from the product including the newly introduced AI capabilitie, rather than the features. Hence, the onboarding focuses on experience, not explanations."
Karapet Gyumjibashyan
You can do this by asking your new users 1-2 questions about what they want to accomplish, or adding buttons that would allow them to “choose their own journey”:
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Microsurveys in the Welcome Flow
"It's crucial to ask questions that help understand users' needs and desires to provide them with a personalized onboarding experience. I also believe in using checklists to help users get started with the tool quickly and reach the value of the SaaS product faster. Additionally, offering free 1-to-1 onboarding sessions or calls can effectively assist users during the onboarding process."
- “One of the key trends in SaaS user onboarding will be personalizing onboarding based on user goals, such as asking what kind of videos they want to make, is gaining traction; however, companies need to further personalize the experience after collecting user preferences, rather than just gathering data.”
Lena Sesardic
Videos in the onboarding flow
Here are some best practices of using videos in your welcome flows:
- Use only short (< 1-2 minute clips)
- Don’t use video tutorials as a replacement for interactive walkthroughs that take users through the required actions first-hand - only use video to enhance them
- Use video whenever it makes more sense to show rather than tell
"SaaS companies will be increasingly utilizing videos over text documentation for tutorials. Some SaaS products eschew an onboarding tutorial with one video. The video walks through all parts of the product for the customer. Broadly this fits in the theme of preference of users to watch video tutorials over text documentation."
Onboarding Guides, Product Tours and Interactive Walkthroughs
Interactive walkthroughs, on the other hand, take users step by step to perform the key activation points, at their own pace. Sequences of the onboarding process show only after the users have successfully completed the previous steps.
Hint: this takes more effort to build, but is way more effective for onboarding users.
"Gamification and other psychological techniques focused on motivating users to get to their first activation points. Rewards, progress bars, checklists, teasers, confetti celebrations... It's simple, it's powerful and I'm a big fan of this trend."
Product Tours vs Interactive Walkthroughs
"We can't ignore the elephant in the room - GPT in all it's versions and OpenAI - and think whether there is a place for it in helping onboard users to SaaS products? Other than that, I would say that it's mostly about connecting everything together in one place - in-app onboarding process, access to knowledge base and customer support, reporting issues, requesting enhancements - give me everything in one place so I don't need to think where to go.
Another trend I started seeing more is Continuous Onboarding - the revealing of new functionality as I am more familiar with the product. This makes the initial onboarding simpler as the product is less busy, and the more I use it, the more features are revealed."
- Interactive Walkthroughs 29%
- Product Tours 35%
- Nothing 36%
This shows there’s still a big opportunity for your SaaS tools to stand out by simply providing a great onboarding experience.
Learning by doing is better than front-loading information: that’s why, whenever possible, opt for interactive walkthroughs instead of product tours.
Onboarding Optimizations
- Checklists and
Progress Bars
An onboarding checklist not only lists all the key activation points your new user should reach to get value out of your product, but it also pushes the users to complete these tasks by employing the endowed progress phenomenon and Zeigarnik effect (relying on our human urge to complete unfinished tasks).
Make sure you have 1-2 elements on the checklist already “ticked off” (for examples: “created account”, “confirmed email”) to foster that endowed progress effect.
"Onboarding is more than just checklists. It needs to be personalized to each user. Not one size fits all kind of onboarding with the same boring checklists. Also onboarding should just be a guesswork personalization.
You need to know your audience and their needs and tailor it accordingly. I'm seeing more and more companies moving away from checklists and adopting personalization in their onboarding efforts. I wouldn't recommend to just move away from checklists altogether. But it would be nice to add some personalization so the user feels that special attention and connection with the tool."
Sanjana Murali
Final thoughts
(Really, we’ve hard on collecting all this data so we’d love to hear your thoughts!) Lucky #7 will win a surprise gift from us!
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