It is critical to educate people in order to retain them and convert prospects into loyal customers.
Too frequently, customers abandon a product or service because they do not completely comprehend all of its features and/or how to use it to their benefit.
As you can expect, this bad tendency may have a massive impact on your brand’s reputation and company continuity.
To avoid this, many businesses are introducing onboarding strategies that will assist consumers to develop confidence in the products or services you provide and use them to their maximum potential.
Continue reading if you want to take the same route. In this post, we’ll show you how to make the onboarding process for your new users as smooth and pleasant as possible.
Let’s get right to it.
What is user onboarding?
The process of teaching consumers about your product or service is known as user onboarding. The approach will allow them to become familiar with your product, gain trust in it, and reap its full benefits.
Why it is important to develop a user onboarding strategy?
There are several reasons that explain why developing a user onboarding strategy for your company is important. Some of the more significant ones are listed here.
1. Reduce churn rate
One of the first advantages of establishing a user onboarding strategy is the ability to retain users and, as a result, minimize churn.
Customers’ dissatisfaction often rises when they do not grasp how to use a product or service and so profit from it. This causes clients to abandon your goods and even complain about them.
As you can imagine, this will set in motion a chain reaction that will destroy your brand’s reputation.
Instead, an onboarding process may accompany and teach clients about the use of your product, making them feel at ease and happy.
2. Improve brand loyalty
Users will recognize how to use your product and feel happier if you execute the correct user onboarding strategy.
The more satisfied your customers are with your product, the more likely they are to return and purchase or subscribe again.
Furthermore, they will be more open to sharing their opinion about your product or service with their friends and family, as well as submit favorable reviews, which will help brand loyalty and overall reputation.
As a result, your firm will have a steady stream of revenue and a positive brand image.
3. Lower customer support service
If people do not understand how to use your product or face issues while doing so, one of two things can happen: they can either abandon it and stop using it, costing you a client, or they can contact the customer support service you provide.
The latter instance may not be a concern if it only affects a few users. Things alter dramatically when hundreds or thousands of users are involved.
If this occurs, you will need to recruit additional staff to handle each request, while failing to respond or taking too long to respond to user demands may jeopardize your reputation and cause you to lose sales.
The most effective method to avoid this is to design a successful user onboarding plan that eliminates any potential questions or difficulties that users may experience.
How to develop a winning user onboarding strategy
What actions should you follow to create a successful user onboarding strategy? Where should you begin in terms of structure? In this part, we’ve listed some of the most important points to consider and measures to be undertaken.
1. Identify the critical action points for your platform
First and foremost, you should identify the important action points of your platform or product.
It is meant for critical points to be instances when users may have difficulties taking the next step or grasping a certain capacity, or activities they must perform in order to benefit.
To find these points, retrace your steps as if you were a new user. Begin with registration and progress through all of the actions customers may take when using your product or service.
Take notes when you come across crucial issues, since addressing these in your onboarding strategy will be vital to its success and efficacy.
2. Identify your target audience
When creating a user onboarding strategy, it’s also a good idea to figure out who your target audience is.
You might create your strategy based on some qualities and the average relevance of some aspects in comparison to others.
Understanding if your audience is mostly made up of young people or elderly individuals, for example, can allow you to tailor your onboarding process accordingly. When it comes to technology, older folks may require more details, whereas younger people may be more intuitive and capable of doing particular things quickly.
3. Choose the right onboarding model
There are several kinds of onboarding models. These offer varying degrees of support, and you may select the one that is best for your company based on the complexity of your product, your target audience, and so on.
Here’s a list of the most popular onboarding models:
- Self-service onboarding. This onboarding model is simple as it involves creating a simple tutorial or guide, and then users will be responsible for going through it and learning about your product. If you have a product that is not overly difficult and is simple to understand, this model is the ideal option.
- Low-touch onboarding. This onboarding model includes more onboarding features than self-service. These aspects include app-based product tours, checklists, interactive guidelines, and more in-depth tutorials.
- High-touch onboarding. This onboarding strategy is ideal for complicated products or systems that are difficult to grasp or learn. This strategy provides a tailored one-to-one customer experience through one-on-one conversations and meetings.
4. Analyze, iterate, and improve
Above all, a user onboarding plan isn’t something you should do and then ignore.
It’s critical to keep track of the outcomes you’re getting with your current strategy and whether you need to make any changes.
Return rates, churn rates, engagement levels, and other indicators may be used to assess the efficiency of your onboarding process.
User onboarding: best practices
There are several strategies to ensure that your users have a good onboarding experience. Some of the best practices are listed below.
1. Inform them about what to expect
Making people aware of what to expect from your product is one of the first and most critical things you should do.
To put it another way, you shouldn’t overpromise or lie about who it’s for.
Users will feel misled if you do so, and they will be disappointed with your product or service, leaving it and never returning.
Instead, be open and honest about your product’s capabilities, who it could benefit from, and all the results or benefits people might get from using it.
2. Welcome users
You should not forget about users who have signed up for your service or purchased your product.
Instead, now is the moment to begin teaching them and ensuring that they are comfortable utilizing your product.
You may do this by including an introduction video in your welcome email that gives a brief summary of your product and its most important features.
In addition to the video, you may want to include relevant links that take consumers to FAQ sections, blog articles, e-books, and other information that will help them understand and learn more about the product.
3. Provide new users with informative content
You may generate educational content to distribute to consumers to ensure that they are aware of all of your product’s functions and features.
This might be in the form of articles, videos, a product tour, or any other format you think is best for explaining your products.
Then you can send them through email or post them on your website so that people may access them from the start or whenever they need to answer questions or resolve difficulties that may arise while using your product or service.
4. Give users the chance to go through product guide tours
In some cases, based on the complexity of the product, articles and guides might not be enough for users to understand it.
This explains why many businesses design and offer interactive product tours to their customers.
These allow users to investigate any feature of your product, as well as how to use and benefit from it.
This way, you may eliminate any question or doubt that users may have, as well as anything else that could lead to discontent.
5. Building client trust with Okta and Okta’s competitors’ software
Using Okta and Okta’s competitors’ software is another approach to improve your users’ onboarding experience.
This software enables safe web application adoption and manages the user authentication procedure.
Manually onboarding and offboarding users may not be feasible for your IT team.
Furthermore, this sort of software automates procedures, allowing you to smoothly assign the appropriate apps to the appropriate users and revoke access depending on triggers from HR systems, IT resources, and other sources.
Conclusions
User onboarding has become an essential practice that should be implemented in any business, of any dimension, and operating in any type of business.
As seen throughout this article, a user onboarding process can bring your company a lot of benefits, including improved loyalty and decreased customer support costs.
Also, we listed three top practices for implementing a successful user onboarding strategy right away. Following them will help you benefit and start seeing positive results within a short time.
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post. Hopefully, you found it informative and helpful.
If you want to read more, please check out this article about shortly vs lengthy onboarding process.
Author
Flavia Silipo is a skilled SEO copywriter and digital marketing specialist with over two years of experience. You can find her on LinkedIn.
