How to Scale Onboarding for Growing User Bases
- Published:
- Updated: July 12, 2024
User onboarding is a critical phase in the customer lifecycle. It’s the first chance to showcase your product and users expect to realize value fast.
Ineffective user onboarding experiences cause friction for new users, resulting in high churn. The process only becomes more difficult as your user base grows. What worked for a small set of users with similar personas won’t work for fast-growing user communities with different use cases.
If your user onboarding strategy can’t scale with your users, the impact will be felt across core product adoption metrics, from high churn, low feature adoption, and the inability to convert freemium users to paid subscribers—all due to a leaky funnel and poorly designed new user journey not built for scale.
Building a user onboarding experience that scales starts with setting the right foundation. In this article, we explore how to build a user onboarding process that scales as your user base grows.
6 Steps to Scale Onboarding As Users Grow
What works for smaller groups of users won’t scale for large user bases. Here are six steps to help you design a user onboarding strategy that scales with your users:
1. Document the entire user onboarding journey
Your first step in creating a scalable customer onboarding strategy that outlines your entire new user journey. A typical user onboarding journey begins long before your user signs up for your platform and doesn’t end until they’ve fully adopted the tool and are retained as a customer.
A user onboarding journey usually follows these five phases:
- Awareness: The user becomes familiar with your brand, product, or offering.
- Consideration: The user compares your offering with competitors to see how it fulfills their needs.
- Decision: The user chooses to invest in your product or platform.
- Onboarding: The user begins using your product or platform.
- Adoption/Retention: The user reaches their “aha!” moment and finds value in your product or platform.
Although traditional user onboarding happens later in the process, the steps before and after are critical for identifying pain points and establishing expectations early on. You can improve your onboarding process by mapping the key touchpoints that happen early in interactions with a new user.
Go into depth when outlining your customer and user onboarding process, including the challenges, struggles, and issues new users might face when getting familiar with your product.
When outlining your user onboarding journey, start by documenting what that process looks like today—not where you hope it will be after improvements are made. You must have a clear picture of your existing user onboarding journey so that you can make the appropriate changes.
2. Identify areas of onboarding friction
Look at your user onboarding journey to identify friction points that slow new users down (or prevent them from moving forward wholly).
Start by identifying current areas of user friction, including areas where your customers or new users are currently struggling in your onboarding process. You can find this by:
- Using user behavior analytics. Analyze your platform usage analytics to identify where users have a high drop-off rate in your new user onboarding funnel.
- Tracking common support tickets. Identify patterns or recurring issues in customer support tickets or help communities that can identify new help content or in-app feature walkthroughs that enable new customers and users.
- Collecting end-user feedback. Ask new and existing users to provide feedback about their experience moving through your onboarding process.
Once you have your list of friction points, it’s time to find solutions. One of the easiest ways to deal with onboarding friction while maintaining a scalable process is to find opportunities to automate. Automating processes frees up your customer onboarding team’s time and eliminates bottlenecks.
Here are a few examples of onboarding friction points you can solve with customer onboarding automation:
- Swap in-person or live video training with recorded sessions. Keep onboarding processes moving by providing pre-recorded video training for common features and frequently asked questions. Reserve live sessions for complex or unique training needs.
- Offer self-help support options. Prioritize self-help support that allows new users to find the necessary solutions without hands-on help. Bonus points if you offer contextualized in-app support based on how users engage with your platform.
- Launch in-app guidance to overcome areas of user friction. In-app tutorials like product tours, interactive walkthroughs, checklists, and tooltips can be deployed to overcome friction in your new user journey, reducing time-to-value and defending against churn.
3. Create a tiered project list of all improvement ideas
Before making changes, you need to prioritize your user onboarding growth ideas. Create a tiered list of all your projects to help you determine where to focus your time and resources.
You can get started by categorizing all your new user experience ideas with the following criteria:
- High or low impact: Score projects based on their overall impact on your onboarding process.
- High or low barrier: Identify projects that will have a high impact that you can complete quickly and with minimal change or training to your team.
- High or low priority: Prioritize projects frequently requested by your user base or will make your product more competitive.
Now, identify which opportunities are those that will make the biggest impact and require the least amount of lift. The key tiers to look at are:
- High-impact, low-barrier, high-priority projects: These improvements will be the easiest to implement while significantly impacting your onboarding process.
- High-impact, high-barrier, high-priority projects: You may not be able to make these changes now, but it’s critical to start creating an implementation plan soon.
- High-impact, low-barrier, low-priority projects: Quick, easy changes that can improve the scalability of your onboarding process can go a long way, even if they’re not high-priority.
- Low-impact, low-barrier, high-priority projects: If a project is critical for staying relevant with your customers and easy to implement, it deserves your time and attention.
4. Build a roadmap of user onboarding improvement projects and ownership
Use your tiered project list to create an improvement roadmap for your new user onboarding flows. Your roadmap should outline the changes you plan to implement, when those changes will be made, and who will be involved in the process.
Your user onboarding product roadmap helps your team stay aligned and focused on a common goal. It shows a long-term vision and helps visualize improvement timelines for better planning and resource allocation.
5. Launch beta user onboarding tests and monitor activation and adoption
Offer a beta test of your new user onboarding experience to determine whether or not it meets new customer needs. Monitor user activation and feature adoption to measure success and identify new areas of improvement.
Test sandbox environments for beta testing. An IT sandbox environment allows you to create a dedicated testing space isolated from your existing onboarding process. Directing beta users to your onboarding sandbox lets you play around with your process while mitigating risks.
Conduct A/B tests, launching certain experiments to small groups of users to understand its impact without changing your entire user onboarding processes. Collect data to understand its impact on your core user onboarding metrics. If you see improvements, push these changes to the overall user onboarding experience.
6. Continuously analyze user behavior and A/B test for onboarding improvements
Improvements to your onboarding process should be a continuous cycle. Even when you have a process you’re comfortable with, look for new opportunities to improve.
Product analytics can reveal new gaps in your onboarding process that must be resolved by tracking custom user events. Identify the most frictionless paths for users to experience their “aha!” moment with your product and nudge them down these paths. Identify where users are dropping off in your new user onboarding completion funnel to understand where improvement opportunities exist.
Collect end-user feedback with in-app surveys throughout your new user experiences and continue to implement changes based on the insights you collect. A/B testing is a great way to measure the success of small changes and process iterations. When building scalable processes, even little changes can make a big impact.
8 Tips for Scaling Your User Onboarding Program
Here are eight best practices to enable product managers, customer success teams, and startups to build a customer and user onboarding program that can scale with your user base.
1. Invest in a digital adoption platform to create and analyze user onboarding experiences
The right tech stack will have the most significant impact on scaling your user onboarding program. Investing in a digital adoption platform (DAP) will allow you to streamline onboarding, even as your customer base grows, without needing development support to create, launch, test, and analyze in-app onboarding experiences.
With Whatfix DAP, product managers are enabled with a no-code editor to create in-app guided experiences, tailored to different roles and use cases. With Whatfix, you can:
- Create product-led onboarding experiences. Design and launch personalized, in-app product tours and interactive walkthroughs to offer hands-on onboarding guidance at scale.
- Assign task lists and to-dos. Instruct new users to complete required tasks like updating their profile information, setting up their first dashboard, or using core features with new user checklists. This gamifies the user onboarding and provides a guide for new users to follow to realize value quickly.
- Deliver self-help support. With Self Help, users can find answers and help content to issues and challenges on their own time. Integrate your knowledge base, FAQs, training content, and onboarding experiences into your Self Help center, allowing users to search for any issue they face. Self Help entries can include embedded videos, links to third-party content, or trigger an in-app guided Flow.
- Identify areas of opportunity. Built-in user analytics and feedback loops help you stay on top of your onboarding process, allowing product managers and customer success teams to make data-driven continuous improvements to their user onboarding experiences.
2. Build contextual IF/THEN onboarding paths for different user cohorts
Contextual onboarding paths provide in-the-moment support when users interact with different features or platform pages. Building IF/THEN workflows helps deliver personalized onboarding paths at scale.
Breaking users into relevant cohorts allows you to focus on in-app tutorials and prioritize training materials that deliver the most value. Each user segment can learn how to use the features or pages that matter most to their needs and roles, helping them reach their “aha!” moment faster.
With Whatfix DAP, segment your user onboarding flows and create personalized experiences for each use case and persona. You can take this one step further with AutoTranslation, which automatically translates your in-app content and user onboarding flows into 80+ languages depending on where your users are located.
3. Be proactive, not reactive
Staying one step ahead of your users can help them stay focused on the onboarding process and minimize friction. If you can meet their needs early or solve problems quickly, they’re less likely to drop off in the middle of the onboarding process.
Here are a few ways you can be proactive when building a customer onboarding process that scales:
- Deliver moment-of-need support. Offering in-app help via contextual FAQs or user documentation, and in-app guidance can help new users find solutions to problems they may experience during onboarding. Fast solutions can eliminate roadblocks and keep them moving forward.
- Offer multi-channel touchpoints. Connect with new users on multiple channels, such as in-app and through email, to offer new tips, resources, and action plans. Look for ways to nudge new users back to the onboarding process.
- Ask for feedback. Automate collecting feedback from new users rather than waiting for them to offer insights. Being proactive about feedback loops can give you more data to work with so you can continue to improve your onboarding process.
4. Don’t overwhelm new users and take a phased approach to onboarding
Giving new users too many workflows or modules to work through can overwhelm them to the point of giving up—and even if they make it through it all, the chances they will remember everything are slim.
Create a scalable onboarding process by breaking it down into phases. Consider a three-phase user onbparding approach:
- Phase 1: Primary onboarding: The onboarding steps at this phase should focus on helping the user reach their “aha!” moment. This includes everything from introductory product tours to “getting started” checklists and interactive workflows to learn how to use key features.
- Phase 2: Secondary onboarding: After new users have reached initial value, the secondary onboarding phase drives product stickiness by showcasing advanced features and use cases. Onboarding tasks at this phase help improve user productivity to get more from your platform and drive user adoption.
- Phase 3: Ongoing onboarding: This phase turns happy users into product advocates and builds loyal customers. It offers advanced tutorials for underutilized features, recorded webinars of customers finding new ways to drive value from your tool, and keeping users updated on new features with product update announcements. This keeps users engaged and showcases your commitment to building products that drive user value. Ultimately, this leads to account expansions and upsell opportunities.
5. Use a variety of in-app onboarding experiences and training documentation types
In-app guidance delivers a low-touch way to onboard new customers. However, because users all learn and engage differently, offering a variety of in-app onboarding experiences can help support more users.
Types of in-app onboarding UX elements and experiences to consider include:
- Product tours: A product tour directs users through platform features and UI elements by prompting them via a welcome screen on their first visit.
- Interactive walkthroughs: Interactive walkthroughs offer step-by-step instructions on core features and use cases.
- User onboarding checklists: A user onboarding checklist provides users with a list of in-app tasks to complete to help them realize value earlier.
- Tooltips: UI tooltips, like in-app messages, overlay contextual notes, or advice when a user interacts with a particular page element.
- Pop-ups: Use pop-ups to communicate new features or product updates, new webinars, and any relevant user information or help content.
6. Provide self-service support and guided assistance experiences post-onboarding
Continue to deliver support after the onboarding process is complete. Self-service help options and guided experiences help users troubleshoot issues quickly and discover new ways to use your platform.
Guided post-onboarding experiences help showcase new features, provide product refreshers and reminders, and provide quick onboarding experiences after an interface update or change. These ongoing onboarding opportunities help free up customer support representatives to focus on more complex tasks and responsibilities.
With a DAP like Whatfix, product teams can enable users with in-app support via Self Help. Self Help integrates with your knowledge base, FAQs, technical support, and in-app tutorials – allowing users to search for any contextual issue they’re facing, right in your app’s UI.
7. Analyze user onboarding flows and take an agile data-driven approach for constant improvemnet
As your user base grows, onboarding needs are bound to change. Being able to adjust your onboarding experiences quickly and flows to accommodate your users will make scaling easier.
Think of your onboarding process as a collaborative experience with your users. Look for gaps they may be slipping through and add new content and flows to close those holes.
Make it easier to stay agile using a digital adoption platform like Whatfix to create in-app guidance and flows. When you don’t need to depend on skilled coding and complex systems to create great in-app onboarding experiences, you can continue to build on and improve your training workflows as your user base develops.
With Whatfix, utilize Guidance Analytics to understand how users consume in-app content and interact with tutorials and guidance. Use this to make data-driven decisions on improving user onboarding flows that drive users to realize value faster.
8. Collect user feedback on your onboarding flows
Collecting feedback during and after your onboarding process enables you to identify issues new users might be experiencing. Different types of polls and surveys ensure you’re collecting various feedback to improve the onboarding experience continuously.
Try including a mix of:
- Open-ended surveys
- 1-10 scale surveys
- Yes/no surveys
- Likely/unlikely surveys
Offer surveys immediately after onboarding and in incremental periods after onboarding is complete. For example, a one-week and 30-day follow-up survey can help you discover issues or complications that came up as the user became more familiar with your product.
With Whatfix DAP, quickly create and launch in-app surveys to collect onboarding-specific feedback to understand qualitative feedback from users.
With Whatfix, empower your customer onboarding team and product managers with a no-code editor to create, launch, test, and optimize your user onboarding flows.
Enable your users via guided onboarding experiences and in-app tutorials tailored to their persona and use case. Analyze onboarding completion rate and user adoption with Whatfix Analytics to take an agile, continuous improvement approach to scale your user onboarding.
With Whatfix, you can:
- Build contextual user onboarding experiences with Tours, Task Lists, and Flows
- Provide continuous in-app training to drive advanced feature adoption with Flows, Smart Tips, and Beacons
- Drive new feature adoption with Pop-Ups and Flows
- Provide in-app support with Self Help
- Analyze user behavior and product usage data to improve your user onboarding flows
- Collect user onboarding feedback with in-app Surveys
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