7 Examples of Welcome Surveys for New Users
- Published:
- Updated: July 19, 2024
For products with multiple use cases, setting new users on the right, personalized user onboarding path is a major challenge.
A simple solution? New user welcome surveys.
With welcome surveys, product teams can learn more about their new users and set up a tailored, contextual path based on the specific use case that guides them to realize value quickly.
In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of welcome surveys, learn strategies for optimizing your welcome surveys for new users, and look at what we can learn from compelling welcome survey examples. We’ll also showcase how Whatfix DAP provides product teams with a no-code solution to create in-app welcome surveys and segmented product-led onboarding experiences.
What Is a Welcome Survey?
Welcome surveys are questionnaires shown to new users shortly after creating an account or signing up for a new service that prompts their user onboarding experience.
Welcome surveys are mutually beneficial to product teams and users. It enables you to understand users’ needs and provide a more personalized experience tailored to their use case. A welcome survey is an effective way to start your new user onboarding flow, creating a better experience for your users that allows them to achieve value with your product and reduce time-to-value.
Benefits of Using Welcome Surveys
Welcome surveys are a win-win for your team and users, which is why they’ve become the industry standard for most SaaS platforms. Let’s take a closer look at why welcome surveys are well worth the effort.
Having a welcome survey at the outset of your customer onboarding does the following:
- Sets new users on a personalized onboarding path: Asking new customers and users about their needs and use cases empowers product teams to build specific paths for their personas. This ensures new users achieve their “aha!” moment faster and drives user adoption.
- Immediately engages new users: Rather than beginning your onboarding flow with an overload of new information, welcome surveys allow users to actively answer questions related to their day-to-day work.
- Enables product teams to learn about their users: Product managers are always eager to learn more about their users, and using welcome surveys to gather information provides valuable insights to inform product-related decisions.
- Create more user-centric experiences that drive satisfaction: Use all the valuable user insights you collect with your welcome survey to deliver the exact, personalized experience that each customer needs. This will satisfy your customers and bring you closer to your business goals.
6 Best Practices for Creating New User Welcome Surveys
Welcome surveys for new users help promote personalized experiences that drive user adoption. Here are six best practices to empower product managers to create compelling user onboarding welcome surveys.
1. Understand the goal of your welcome survey
A welcome survey aims to kick off your onboarding with a perfectly tailored experience, but you and your team must also align on specific goals for your survey. A specific, measurable goal will help you decide which questions to ask and what to do with each user’s responses.
Here are a few questions that will help you determine your welcome survey’s goal(s):
- What could we learn about our users to help us understand our user base?
- What could we learn about each user that will help us deliver a tailored experience that meets each user’s unique needs?
- What are the different reasons why someone may be using our product?
- How might we measure the impact of our welcome survey?
Once you’ve defined your specific welcome survey goal(s), you can start building your first survey.
2. Ask questions that help your segment users
Your platform is likely dynamic enough that your user base has different user personas. Your welcome survey is a great way to determine each new user’s persona and their typical use cases.
When you learn this about each user from the start, you can personalize their experience by highlighting the features most relevant to their specific persona early in the onboarding flow so that users will perceive and receive value as quickly as possible.
Stay on top of how well each segment performs to continuously optimize your welcome survey and ensure that you’re asking the right questions to determine each new user’s specific needs.
PRO TIP
With Whatfix Product Analytics, implement a no-code event tracking system to measure user segment behavior from the welcome survey onwards and iterate accordingly. Identify your product’s “aha!” moment across various user personas and pinpoint areas in your new user funnel that are causing dropoffs.
3. Keep it short, simple, and concise
Creating a welcome survey requires a delicate balance between asking enough questions to deliver a highly personalized platform experience without forcing users to complete a long, laborious survey and, therefore, increasing the ever-important time-to-value (TTV) metric.
To do that, have these guidelines in mind as you draft your survey:
- Use simple language when writing your questions: Users should be able to scan the question and response choices quickly and still answer accurately.
- Only ask about what can influence the user experience: While it might be interesting to know a lot of context about your user base, you’re better off using user research methodology than trying to pack everything you’d like to know about your users in your welcome survey. Instead, focus on asking questions whose answers can reasonably impact the user experience.
- Your welcome survey won’t be your only opportunity to ask questions: Focus on what you need to know to optimize a user’s onboarding, but remember that you can always use additional survey tools to add in-app surveys later in the user journey. This means you don’t have to ask everything in your welcome survey.
PRO TIP
With Whatfix DAP, product teams can use pre-build templates to launch in-app welcome surveys that collect new users’ information. Use this data to trigger specific onboarding paths that guide new users via product tours, interactive walkthroughs, and task lists that help them quickly realize value in your product.
4. Gamify the survey
Conventional wisdom says surveys are boring, but you can change that reality by making your welcome survey fun. Gamifying your survey creates an enjoyable experience that users are likely to complete.
Here are a few strategies for adding elements of gamification to your welcome surveys:
- Use different UI elements that are fun and satisfying: Animate words and answer options, include illustrations according to your brand guidelines, or have other question formats for each question to change things up.
- Give users a sense of progress by rewarding them as they progress through your survey: Include an animated progress bar to motivate them to finish the survey.
- Offer user badges as they complete questions in your survey: If your platform doesn’t already have badge functionality on user profiles, you can serve a pop-up with a motivating badge for every few questions.
5. Incentivize completion
It’s always good practice to sweeten the deal and incentivize your users to complete your welcome survey. Incentives motivate users to continue and help give them that sense of accomplishment we’d like them to feel when they’re done.
Here are a few incentives that you may want to consider offering:
- Discount or coupon: Can you offer a specific percentage off their first month on the platform?
- Discount for a friend: People love sharing tools that they’re excited about with friends and colleagues, and giving a shareable promo code can be an effective incentive
- Enter to win: Give users who finish your welcome survey the chance to enter a time-bound contest, whereby the winner receives something worthwhile, like a gift card
6. Continuously refine your survey experience
Like most product initiatives, your welcome survey should be considered an iterative project. You should continuously monitor metrics like your survey completion rate and use product analytics software to ensure that the segmentation you’re using based on your welcome survey results in the user behavior and business results you’d like to see.
Don’t be afraid to change your survey to optimize results further. Be sure to A/B test significant changes to ensure that they have the intended effect.
Welcome Survey Questions to Ask New Users
The questions you ask in your new user welcome surveys should help you segment users into cohorts. This allows you to tailor the user onboarding experience to their needs and quickly show them how it can help them overcome their challenges.
That said, some themes appear across welcome surveys that you should potentially include in your short new user onboarding survey. These questions will mostly be multiple-choice answers, as you will know your product’s different use cases and how to phrase them.
Here are a few examples of welcome survey questions to ask that will help you segment your users into tailored onboarding flows.
- What is your job function?
- What is your role?
- What is your industry?
- Are you using our product for work or personal reasons?
- What do you hope to achieve with our product?
- Why are you signing up for our product?
- What features are you hoping to utilize first?
Best Welcome Survey Examples
Let’s explore a few examples of SaaS welcome surveys to see why they work and how you can apply lessons learned to your new user welcome surveys.
1. Wix
How you frame your welcome survey goes a long way in terms of a user’s motivation to complete it. In the Wix example above, they used a relatively short block of text to communicate all of the following:
- Answering these questions allows us to give you a personalized experience.
- There are a few questions, so don’t be nervous about the time commitment!
- As a brand, we’re committed to getting to know you and meet your needs.
Actionable takeaways: Craft brief, powerful messaging to motivate your users to complete your survey. Combining this with a strong value prop like personalization can have a real impact.
2. Stripo
Stripo’s welcome survey is strong because it’s short and sweet and uses survey best practices to ensure that the questions and answer choices are super clear to its users. Using clear, explanatory language helps ensure that you’re collecting reliable data from your users.
If users are confused about what each question and answer choice means, either because the text is long and complex or because the response options are too vague, you risk serving your users a personalized experience that doesn’t meet their needs.
Actionable takeaways:
- Write brief survey questions with a simple sentence structure
- Make each response choice explicit in its meaning (such as the last question in Stripo’s survey, where they used the response choice text to clarify what they mean when they say ‘experience in email production.’
- Brevity and using every opportunity for clarity will help you achieve the accuracy you need to serve your new users with an optimal experience.
3. Monday.com
Monday.com prompts new users with a task board shortly after you create an account, and their initial onboarding survey only asks you what they need to know to give you a relevant template. As you use the product more and more, they ask you additional questions, but the welcome survey is targeted toward bringing you to your first encounter with the platform’s value.
Monday.com also utilizes a simple and engaging UI. Clicking an answer choice is simple and fun, rather than a slog with a traditional drop-down menu.
Actionable takeaways:
- Keep your welcome survey brief by asking only the questions necessary to personalize a user’s first, most crucial value touchpoint on the platform. There will be more time to ask additional questions throughout the user journey.
- Make design choices geared toward engaging rather than traditional or outdated form-like UI.
- A targeted, engaging welcome survey will keep your users moving through it and on to getting value from your platform quickly.
4. SEMRush
You already know that having users drop off in your welcome survey is bad news for customer retention. If users encounter a question that they’re unsure how to answer, the chances of them giving up are much higher.
In their welcome survey, SEMRush gave users a way to indicate that either the answer choices don’t match their circumstances (Other) or that they aren’t sure what their answer is to the question (I don’t know).
Actionable takeaways: Always consider offering your users an ‘I don’t know’ option and an ‘Other’ option. Although you want to collect as much data as possible, giving these options creates a good balance between the opportunity for accurate data and discouraging drop-off among your less decisive or less typical users.
5. Shopify
Although Shopify’s welcome survey is short and sweet according to best practices, they still use a progress bar to help motivate their new users to keep going.
Since many surveys are structured so that users only see one question at a time, it makes sense to give your users a sense of progress as they go so that they don’t give up, making an incorrect assumption that the survey will take up too much time.
Actionable takeaways: Use a visual indicator, such as a progress bar, to let your users know how much of your welcome survey they’ve completed. Whether or not your survey is on the longer or shorter end of the spectrum, feeling as though they’re making progress will likely encourage them to continue at a higher rate than if they’re left in the dark.
6. Salesforce
In the Salesforce welcome survey, new users are asked for their highest priority today and assured that they won’t be limited to that option in the future.
This is smart because:
- It limits the user’s decision paralysis—they don’t have to decide what their priority is forever; they can quickly determine what they want to do right now and then move forward.
- It likely leads new users to the area of the platform that is top-of-mind for them right now, ultimately decreasing their TTV and giving a great first impression rather than overwhelming them with all of Salesforce’s bells and whistles.
Actionable takeaways: Use your welcome survey to find out what value your users had in mind when they created their account today rather than trying to understand all of the value they hope to get in the future. This will enable you to wow your new users with exactly what they’re looking for at this moment, improving the likelihood that they’ll keep coming back for more.
7. Zapier
Zapier’s welcome survey feels like a conversation because its key questions lead to more detailed questions on that topic. For example, if you indicate that your biggest priority is customer support, the next question in the survey will ask for details about your goal regarding customer support operations.
Doing so gives new users the feeling that Zapier is diving into the details of their exact needs, priming them to enter the platform and assuming that everything they see is related to their precise goals.
Actionable takeaways: Ask specific questions to give your new users the feeling that they won’t see the same thing in the platform that everyone with their job title will see. Asking about goals, as Zapier does in the above example, is a great way to do just that.
Once you draft your initial survey questions and have a plan for segmenting users and creating the ideal experience, you’re ready to create your welcome survey.
With Whatfix, creating, customizing, and launching in-app welcome surveys that provide user data to customize the new user onboarding experience is simple. Here’s how:
- Use the Whatfix Survey builder: Select the ‘Create Survey’ option in the Whatfix Survey Builder tool. You’ll have various customization options from here, and we’ll guide you to the finish line.
- Design the survey using templates: Choose from pre-designed templates or create a custom layout. Templates make the design process quick and easy. Use our no-code editor and custom CSS to match your survey design to your product’s branding.
- Customize questions with the Whatfix editor: Use the Whatfix editor to add and format questions, ensuring they align with your goals. Use various question types and formats to collect data on your new users.
- Set targeting rules: Define audience targeting rules using Whatfix’s segmentation capabilities to ensure the survey reaches the right users and personas.
- Integrate behavioral triggers: Set up behavioral triggers within Whatfix to deploy the survey at optimal times based on user actions. You’ll want to ensure that your survey appears in time for you to collect the relevant responses from users so that you can give them the correct journey based on your segmented user personas.
- Preview and test the survey: Use Whatfix’s testing feature to preview how the survey appears to different user segments. The look and feel of a survey is a big part of a user’s motivation to continue. When you use the Whatfix testing feature, you can experience the survey just as your users will and make any adjustments before you launch.
- Monitor real-time analytics: Utilize Whatfix Survey Analytics to monitor survey responses and participation rates in real-time. You’ll be able to check everything from what percent of users start and complete your welcome survey to how their participation influences behavior.
- Adapt welcome survey based on insights: Adjust the survey based on the aforementioned analysis to enhance its effectiveness and relevance. It’s not enough to monitor metrics; you should take what you learn to quickly and continuously iterate on your welcome survey, moving closer and closer to the optimal experience and your overall goals.
With the user insights collected during your welcome surveys, build contextual user onboarding flows that guide users to experience value quickly. With Whatfix, create guided product tours, interactive walkthroughs, and task lists that retain users, drive advanced feature adoption, and enable users to become power customers.
Ready to get started? Request a Whatfix demo today!
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