Onboard your users from Day 0 and multiply your retention!

Clément Hurstel
September 30, 2024

Imagine this: you’ve just signed up for a new service that promises to revolutionize your workflow. Excitement fills the air—until you log in and face a confusing interface, lack of guidance, and frustration kicks in. Before long, you're doubting your decision and searching for alternatives.

This is an all-too-common scenario for SaaS users. It shows why onboarding is not just an optional part of the user journey—it’s vital to a product’s success. A smooth onboarding process can turn those first impressions into lasting customer relationships. As a SaaS business, you might have the most innovative product, but if your customers aren’t shown how to use it effectively from day one, they may never experience its full value.

The Joyjet "brothers in arms" helps businesses to design personalized, data-driven, and flexible onboarding flows that adapt to each user’s needs, ensuring better retention and feature adoption​.

Let's explore how to streamline this crucial onboarding phase and start retention from Day 0.

1. Sequential Learning Experience

Onboarding is not a single event, but a dynamic and continuous process that unfolds over time, guiding users from their first interaction with a product to a stage where they can fully leverage its value. 

So, It is designed to move users through a series of stages, each building on the previous one. It starts with introducing the product’s core features, and gradually, as users become more familiar, it dives into advanced functionalities. This phased progression ensures that users don’t get overwhelmed at the start and can gradually gain mastery over the product.

For example, many SaaS platforms use product tours, checklists, and interactive tutorials as part of their onboarding flow to help users explore different features in a structured manner. This flow-based approach allows users to learn at their own pace while ensuring that they are guided through the necessary steps.

Onboarding user with checklists
 Checklists help your new users get started and enjoy the value of your app.
Tours give an overview of what to be known by your users

2. User Journey Adaptation

As users engage with your product, their needs evolve. The onboarding flow should adapt based on their actions, providing relevant information when needed. Our team integrates tools like Frigade that allow businesses to create personalized onboarding flows that adjust based on user behavior and preferences.This makes onboarding dynamic rather than static, enhancing the user’s experience.

3. Milestone-Driven Progress

Onboarding often involves reaching key milestones such as setting up an account, completing a first task, or using an advanced feature. These milestones are steps in the onboarding flow, each representing a small victory for the user. By breaking down the onboarding process into smaller, achievable goals, users feel a sense of progress and accomplishment, which increases engagement and retention.

4. Continuous Optimization

Onboarding doesn’t end after the initial setup. As new features are added or as user needs evolve, the onboarding flow must continue to educate users. Data-driven optimization tools allow companies to measure how effective their onboarding flows are and make adjustments based on where users drop off or get stuck​. This constant feedback loop ensures that the onboarding process improves over time, keeping it relevant and effective.

NPS are key to measure and understand adoption of new features

5. Retention and Activation Focus

The ultimate goal of onboarding is to activate users, helping them realize the value of your product so they stick around long-term. The flow helps users move from being new to feeling proficient, reducing the likelihood of churn. It’s not just about showing users features; it’s about guiding them through a journey of discovery that turns them into loyal customers.

6. The cool things

Joyjet implements tools that include dashboards that let you target audience and trigger specific onboarding scenarios and features. So, you can think also in sequential scenarios, or focus user of feature A on feature B.By partnering with Joyjet, you’re not just improving your onboarding—you’re setting your users up for long-term success, helping them unlock the full potential of your product from the moment they sign up.

Joyjet Edge  

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