Effective product onboarding is the key to reducing customer churn and driving business growth. It equips new users with the tools they need to succeed while easing the workload of your support team.

In this guide, we cover:

• What product onboarding is.
• Why it matters.
• How to build a successful onboarding process.
• Key best practices for product onboarding.

Product Onboarding for SaaS: A Quick Overview

• Product onboarding includes all actions taken to introduce trial users to your product and help them achieve success.
• User onboarding adapts these processes to specific user needs, enhancing the user experience and making onboarding more effective.
• An effective onboarding flow increases activation, boosts conversions, and improves retention while also reducing activation costs and minimizing customer churn.
• The onboarding funnel is divided into three stages: the first phase focuses on onboarding new users, the second phase drives engagement, and the third phase supports account expansion for existing users.
• A strong product onboarding strategy starts with identifying the target audience and developing user personas for the product.
• Next, determine key activation points, map the customer journey, and create tailored onboarding flows for each persona.
• Finally, assess your strategy, track key metrics, and refine the process to improve effectiveness.

Some of the best product onboarding practices include:

• Creating a strong first impression with a smooth & friction-free signup process and a thoughtfully designed welcome screen.
• Using contextual onboarding & interactive walkthroughs to guide users toward essential features they need and increase engagement.
• Track product engagement data to spot weaknesses in the onboarding process and make necessary improvements.
• Provide video tutorials, step-by-step guides, and in-app resource centers to educate users and support customer success.
• Gather customer feedback to understand their needs and pain points, then take action to address them.

What is Product Onboarding?

Product onboarding is the process of introducing new users and customers to your product or service. It involves guiding users on how the product works, showing them how to use core features to address their pain points, and how to navigate the interface effectively.

Product onboarding vs. user onboarding

Product onboarding refers to the systems that make a product more discoverable, especially during the user’s initial interaction with the product. User onboarding, however, focuses on applying those systems at the individual level to help users get the most out of the product.

Product onboarding is, thus, a discovery strategy for product features that aims to improve the overall product experience. Meanwhile, the user onboarding process aims to improve the user experience by helping users derive value from the product.

Why is Product Onboarding Important?

A well-structured product onboarding process benefits both SaaS companies and their customers in several ways:

1. The onboarding process accelerates user activation by helping new users quickly understand the product and experience its value.
2. Onboarding enhances customer retention, which in turn reduces customer acquisition costs.
3. Product onboarding increases revenue by improving the conversion rate from freemium to premium users.
4. Effective user onboarding enhances engagement by equipping users with all the knowledge needed to maximize the product’s value. Highly engaged users are less likely to churn.

Ultimately, product onboarding enables customers to navigate your product independently, reducing the need for support, increasing customer satisfaction, and fostering long-term loyalty.

Key Elements for Building Your Onboarding Process

Product onboarding is a continuous journey that starts at signup and evolves through different stages of the user experience.

In this section, we explore how onboarding needs, requirements, and processes change as users progress through their journey.

Primary Onboarding for New Users

At this primary onboarding stage, users have just signed up and need the best guidance to get started. The main objective is to help them quickly understand the product’s value and how it addresses their needs.

An effective onboarding flow should be simple, intuitive, and engaging. It should answer key customer questions, resolve concerns, and demonstrate why your product is the best solution for their pain points.

To streamline the process, use tooltips, empty states, and checklists to create an interactive onboarding experience that reduces the user’s time to value and smoothly guides users toward activation.

Keeping Active Users Engaged After Adoption

Onboarding is an ongoing process that goes beyond initial adoption. A well-designed customer onboarding experience should keep users engaged and actively using the product.

To increase product stickiness, secondary onboarding should introduce users to hidden features that enhance their experience and help them get more value from the product.

Leverage product analytics tools like Product Fruits to identify and segment users who haven’t adopted certain features, allowing you to guide them effectively.

Identify and segment users who have not yet explored a specific feature.

Use tooltips, popups, and in-app modals to guide them toward discovering and adopting the feature.

Expanding Accounts and Announcing New Features

In the final onboarding phase, you already have happy, active users who are using the product’s features correctly. Some may have even become power users, creating the perfect opportunity for the next goal in the customer onboarding process—account expansion.

Your tertiary onboarding efforts should focus on helping users unlock even more value from the product, ultimately increasing customer lifetime value.

One way to do this is by collecting feedback to find areas of improvement. You can request a feature from your power users, and add them to your product. If your power users need them to stay on board, your new users would appreciate your efforts too.

After developing new features, don’t leave your users guessing about the feature. Use new feature announcements to educate users on how to benefit from this new addition and simultaneously drive feature adoption.

Once you have power users, you can trigger upselling prompts in-app by showcasing what they will get with a higher plan.

How to Build a Successful Product Onboarding Strategy

Identify Your Target Audience

The foundation of a successful product onboarding strategy is understanding your ideal user. Start by answering the key question: “Who is my ideal customer?”

Consider their background, pain points, and goals. What challenges are they trying to solve? What are their jobs to be done (JTBD) with your product? Gaining clarity on these aspects will help tailor the onboarding experience to their needs.

Next, use this information to develop distinct user personas for your product. Each persona should represent a specific segment of your target audience, grouping users with similar goals, backgrounds, and challenges.

Define Activation Points for Each User Persona

Every user persona has a unique purpose for using your product. While some may rely on similar core features, others may require different functionalities to achieve their goals.

For users to become fully activated, each persona must engage with specific key features. Identify these essential features along with the touchpoints that help each persona successfully complete their Jobs to Be Done (JTBD).

Map & Visualize the Customer Journey

After determining customer touchpoints for each persona, it’s important to visualize the customer journey. This process helps uncover areas where the user experience can be improved and optimized.

To develop a customer journey map, begin by identifying the key phases in the user’s experience. Then, document the activities within those phases while noting the touchpoints, milestones, emotions, pain points, and solutions that drive activation and engagement.

Create Personalized Product Onboarding Flows for Each Persona

A user activation onboarding playbook outlines the goals, outcomes, experiences, and key touchpoints necessary for new users to find value and achieve success.

To be effective, the playbook should be tailored to each persona’s unique needs and objectives. It must specify the features users need to engage with and the UI elements that guide them toward activation.

A well-structured playbook provides a clear roadmap for onboarding, ensuring a seamless transition from signup to product adoption and advocacy, while also simplifying performance tracking.

Analyze and Improve

To improve your onboarding process, you must continuously analyze customer journeys and make necessary improvements.

Monitor product analytics data to understand how users interact with your product and pinpoint areas of friction in both the onboarding experience and overall user journey. Once identified, address these pain points to ensure a smooth onboarding process and reduce churn.

You can monitor everything from user engagement to customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics using Product Fruit’s advanced product analytics.

Focus on actionable insights within the data. For example, if multiple users encounter friction at the same point, it’s a clear signal to adjust your onboarding flow and improve clarity.

Best Practices for Effective Product Onboarding

The primary objective of customer onboarding is to help users become familiar with the product. Here are some best practices to ensure a smooth and effective product onboarding process.

Create a Frictionless Signup Experience

Your signup page is the first interaction users have with your product, making it crucial to create a simple and hassle-free process. Avoid lengthy registration forms—this isn’t the moment to ask for excessive details.

Keep the signup process quick and straightforward, ensuring users can get started with minimal effort.

Ask only for the minimum information needed to complete signup. If possible, integrate Single Sign-On (SSO) to allow users to register quickly without extra steps.

A great example is Miro, a whiteboarding platform that streamlines login by offering multiple SSO options. Miro ensures users can sign up effortlessly by providing integrations with platforms like Slack and Apple, catering to different user preferences.

Avoid distracting users with an email verification step during signup. Let them interact with the product first, increasing their engagement and appreciation before requesting confirmation.

Welcome New Customers with Welcome Screens

After signup, the welcome screen shapes a user’s first impression of your product. This is your chance to greet new customers and set the stage for a great experience.

Use a welcome survey to gather valuable insights about their goals and Jobs to Be Done (JTBDs), helping you tailor the onboarding process to their needs.

The social media scheduling platform Postify sets a great example with its welcome screen. Beyond greeting new users, it reinforces the product’s value and presents an automated survey to understand each user’s Jobs to Be Done (JTBDs).

Postify then uses these insights to segment users with similar JTBDs and personalize their onboarding experience, ensuring a more relevant and engaging journey.

Create Personalized and Contextual Product Onboarding

Provide personalized onboarding experiences that align with each user persona’s needs, helping them quickly find the features that matter most.

Use welcome screen data to segment new users, ensuring they receive an onboarding journey that matches their goals and expectations.

Each user segment should have a customized onboarding experience designed to address their specific pain points and guide them toward activation.

Leverage Micro Product Onboarding Checklists

A product onboarding checklist guides users through the essential steps needed for activation. By breaking down a potentially complex process into smaller, manageable tasks, it makes onboarding more intuitive. However, it’s important to implement it thoughtfully.

For example, avoid overwhelming users with a 10-step onboarding checklist that may discourage them. Instead, keep it focused on the 4-5 key steps necessary for activation, eliminating any unnecessary actions.

Also, pay attention to the wording of your checklist. Keep it clear and action-oriented, such as: “Make your first post.”

When designing multiple checklists, include a progress bar and mark completed actions to encourage users to complete the process.

Use Interactive Walkthroughs Instead of Product Tours

Traditional product tours tend to be lengthy, dull, and impersonal. They overwhelm users with too much information without encouraging meaningful interaction.

To make onboarding engaging and action-driven, replace product tours with interactive walkthroughs—structured, step-by-step guides that prompt users to take action after each step, ensuring a hands-on learning experience.

Monitor Product Engagement to Eliminate Friction

Monitoring product engagement metrics is key to assessing how effective your onboarding process is.

By tracking user interactions, you can uncover friction points, such as dead clicks or areas of confusion, and optimize the experience to keep users engaged.

Help Users Learn Your Product to Achieve Customer Success

A key aspect of user onboarding is educating customers on how to navigate and benefit from your product. This applies to both new and existing users.

When done right, customer education helps users get the most out of your product, speeds up onboarding, increases engagement, and strengthens retention.

A strong customer education strategy combines different learning methods. Start with a short onboarding video to introduce users to key features and product value.

Support this with feature-specific videos, in-app training tools like tooltips and modals, and resources such as a knowledge base and webinars to provide continuous guidance.

Collect and Act on User Feedback

Listening to users is key to customer success. Their feedback helps assess whether your product onboarding process is effective or needs refinement.

Collect user feedback to understand their onboarding experience firsthand.

For example, trigger an in-app survey after key interactions to gauge their experience. Pay close attention to responses, act on insights, and follow up to close the feedback loop and show users that their input matters.

Top Product Onboarding Tools for a Seamless product onboarding process

Designing an effective customer onboarding process doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With the right onboarding software, you can easily craft a smooth user experience and gather valuable onboarding data without the hassle.

Product Fruits – Best Budget-Friendly All-in-One Onboarding Tool

Product Fruits is a comprehensive product onboarding software that delivers features comparable to top onboarding tools while remaining cost-effective. It enables businesses to create personalized onboarding experiences, educate users, drive feature adoption, and analyze onboarding impact—all without coding.

What to Expect from Product Fruits:

• AI-powered product tours and interactive walkthroughs – Automate onboarding flows with AI-driven event tracking and copy generation.
• Hints, hotspots, and the Life Ring Button – Reduce support queries by offering in-context tutorials and help articles.
• In-app announcements – Keep users informed about product updates and drive feature adoption.
• Trigger custom events – Segment users in real-time and create tailored onboarding flows based on user interactions.
• In-app surveys and feedback widgets – Gather real-time user feedback and reduce churn by addressing pain points.
• No-code knowledge base – Provide users with instant access to product documentation and tutorials.

What Users Say About Product Fruits

Product Fruits is trusted by 100+ customers and has received strong testimonials on G2, with users praising its ease of use and customization options.

Product Fruits Pricing

Product Fruits offers affordable pricing compared to competitors, starting at $79/month. For enterprise users, pricing can be customized based on specific requirements. Visit the pricing page for more details.

Userpilot – Best for Cost-Effective Onboarding

Userpilot provides a powerful product adoption solution, allowing businesses to build customized, adaptable, and relevant onboarding journeys for users.

Built for SaaS products and customer success teams, Userpilot enhances the customer onboarding experience and drives user activation—all without requiring any code.

What to Expect from Userpilot:

• A no-code setup—your developer only needs to install a single JavaScript snippet and a Chrome extension for the visual builder.
• A wide range of UI patterns (modals, tooltips, slideouts, banners, hotspots) and in-app onboarding tools (checklists, microsurveys, etc.).
• A built-in NPS survey tool to gather and analyze user sentiment effectively.
• An event tracker to monitor single or combined actions like clicks, hovers, and form fills, providing insights into user interactions.
• Advanced product analytics to track in-app flows and identify where users may need guidance.
• Contextual onboarding through user segmentation based on identification data, engagement metrics, custom events, clicks, form interactions, feedback responses, and NPS scores.
• Build and deploy in-app resource centers that provide users with guides and video tutorials, allowing them to easily access helpful content.
• Enable users to search the knowledge base or contact support directly for quick assistance.

What Users Say About Userpilot

Userpilot holds an impressive 4.6-star rating on G2, with Training and Engagement Manager Melina K. praising it as a…

Userpilot Pricing

Userpilot offers three pricing plans:

• Starter – $249/month
• Growth – $749/month
• Enterprise – Custom pricing tailored to business needs

Appcues – Best for Engaging Mobile Users

Appcues simplifies customer onboarding for non-technical teams, offering tools to track product interactions, publish onboarding flows, announce new features, and launch surveys—all without coding.

Previously known for its onboarding templates, the platform phased out this feature in 2022 to remove template constraints, allowing teams to build more dynamic and personalized onboarding experiences.

What to Expect from Appcues:

• A user-friendly interface for creating in-app flows, enabling seamless product tours and in-app communications without coding.
• A WYSIWYG Chrome editor—just install the Chrome extension, choose a UI pattern, and customize it in real-time.
• Create onboarding checklists and prompt users to take action. However, this feature is not available in the Essentials plan and lacks some advanced capabilities compared to alternatives like Userpilot (e.g., it cannot trigger JS functions or include gamification elements).
• Tag UI elements and monitor engagement through the Events Explorer.
• Segment users dynamically based on behavior, properties, and custom event tracking for a more tailored experience.

What Users Say About Appcues

Appcues holds a 4.7-star rating on G2, with one user highlighting that it is…

Appcues Pricing

While Appcues offers robust onboarding features, it may not provide the best value for money compared to some alternatives. Pricing starts at $249 per month for 2,500 active users.

Here’s a breakdown of the pricing plans:

• Essentials – $249/month (Up to 3 user licenses)
• Growth – $879/month (Up to 10 user licenses)
• Enterprise – Custom pricing (Unlimited user licenses)

Pendo – Best for In-Depth Product and User Analytics

Pendo is a powerful customer onboarding and digital adoption platform, known for its advanced analytics and feedback collection features.

As one of the most comprehensive analytics tools on this list, Pendo is primarily built for enterprise users and is priced accordingly. It also provides guided onboarding flows that help businesses implement best practices across both web and mobile platforms.

What to Expect from Pendo:

• Create onboarding guides using pre-set templates or build custom flows from scratch with a WYSIWYG editor.
• Access a free version with limited features and basic analytics for smaller teams or startups.
• Design user onboarding experiences with elements like Lightboxes, Banners, Polls, Walkthroughs, and Tooltips—though full customization requires coding.
• Build checklists within the resource center, but they cannot function as standalone tools.
• Build mobile cusotmer onboarding flows that seamlessly work across Android and iOS devices.
• Gather user feedback through the feedback module, though it lacks satisfaction tracking and is not accessible to free-tier users.

What Users Say About Pendo

Pendo holds a 4.4-star rating on G2 and has been described as a…

Pendo Pricing

Pendo’s pricing is not publicly listed—you’ll need to request a quote for details on higher-tier plans.

However, some reviews suggest that pricing starts at $20,000–$25,000 per year for a single product, while the mid-tier package costs around $50,000 per year.

A key consideration with Pendo’s pricing is that different modules are billed separately, making the total cost highly variable.

• Pendo Free – Supports up to 500 MAU, for a single app, with basic functionality and analytics.
• Pendo Starter – $7,000/year, includes 2,000 MAU, supports multiple apps, and unlocks premium features like NPS—but lacks advanced analytics and integrations.
• Pendo Growth – Offers custom MAU, supports a single app, includes NPS, PES, a resource center, and enhanced support compared to lower-tier plans.
• Pendo Portfolio – Custom MAU, multi-app support, cross-journey reports, experimentation, and one free integration.
• Pendo Feedback – Separate module for feature request collection with custom pricing.
• Pendo Adopt – Employee onboarding module with custom pricing.

Conclusion

A well-executed product onboarding process is essential for ensuring customers succeed with your product. Effective onboarding enhances engagement, increases retention, and reduces churn.

Product Fruits is a top choice for building and managing onboarding flows, tracking product analytics, and gathering user feedback.

Book a demo today to see how Product Fruits can streamline your onboarding process and enhance the user experience.