The activation and retention phases are critical to being able to retain your visitors and make them active users of your SaaS product.
Having only the first of these two phases optimized, however, is not enough.
If you can get visitors to sign up for a free trial of your digital service, you must then focus on getting them to constantly interact with it.
In fact, a significant percentage of users who register will access the restricted area of the site once and never return.
It is therefore necessary to contain this percentage otherwise you would only risk burning all the budget allocated to acquisition marketing channels.
Among the many reasons for abandoning a site are the following:
- the user does not understand how to use the product
- the user has misunderstood what the functionality of the service is
- the user cannot get to the main area of the product quickly (or is not taken to it frequently)
- the user does not understand the value and usefulness of the service
Therefore, in the end, the user ... leaves.
Part of the problem may be leaving it alone to its own devices in discovering how to interact with the SaaS application or creating a bad user experience path.
The best way to solve the situation and greatly decrease the dropout rate is based on designing simple, goal-directed onboarding.
What is Customer Onboarding?
Customer Onboarding is the process by which a website visitor is guided from the initial moment of receiving the first welcome email through all subsequent steps on the website to interact with the service and learn how to effectively use its core features.
The primary goal of this process is to turn visitors into active and loyal users of the SaaS platform.
Statistically, 40-60% of users who sign up for a free trial of a service will use it once and never return. Customer Onboarding is precisely to minimize this risk as much as possible.
Why is Funnel Analysis essential?
A definitely important aspect of being able to constitute a valid onboarding process lies in monitoring the behavior of users when they first interact with the SaaS app.
This is Funnel Analysis, the analysis of the steps and conversion rates between the steps a user must take to successfully complete a task within the digital product.
To implement this general tracking, you can make use of one of the following tools: Mixpanel or Heap Analytics.
Although the former is more popular, the latter also turns out to be very interesting and useful. Therefore, it is recommended that you try both and then choose the one that is more functional and suitable for your needs.
During this analysis, it is suggested that the following questions be answered:
-What are the main actions you want users to perform within the service?
-What intermediate steps does the user need to take to interact with a core feature of the app?
-At what stages does significant dropout occur in user sessions?
-In these stages, what are the behaviors of those who leave and what are those who continue along the funnel?
The answers to these questions will certainly come in handy when planning Customer Onboarding.
Also, following the third question, if you notice consistent abandonment rates during the onboarding experience, an additional tip is to initiate usability tests.
To do this, one can make use of Usertesting or Youeye, services that allow one to collect this type of information from various qualified users.
Why is it necessary to push users toward their AHA moment?
The best method to avoid very significant dropouts lies in quickly leading visitors to their AHA moment, the moment when loyal users fall in love with the product and remain active over time.
Sean Ellis, the man who coined the term Growth Hacking, cited the example of Twitter in one of his presentations, when it was revealed that once a user started following 30 other accounts, they would remain active forever.
As a result of this discovery, Twitter's development team integrated into onboarding the main step that advised (forced) users to follow other people with similar interests or other famous brand accounts. It is not hard to guess what the exact number of new profiles to follow was: 30.
Customer Onboarding: conclusions
If you believe that by simply getting the user to sign up for your SaaS app, they will immediately start using it to the fullest, you are making a big mistake in judgment.
This article addressed the topic of Customer Onboarding, which is critical to increasing the retention and engagement rate in one's digital service, making the majority of users into satisfied, active and loyal customers over time.
To achieve this goal, one must perform an excellent funnel analysis and identify the best way to put users in front of their AHA moment.
Gerardo Forliano