What is user onboarding?

User onboarding is the process of guiding new users to understand how to fully leverage the product’s value and achieve their goals effectively.

User onboarding can be broken down into three key stages:

• Primary Onboarding: The phase from signup to activation, also known as minimum viable onboarding, focuses on helping users quickly realize value or have an “aha” moment by engaging with key features.
• Secondary Onboarding: This phase aims to increase user stickiness by guiding users from basic feature use to core, fully maximizing the potential of the product.
• Tertiary Onboarding: The final stage focuses on retaining satisfied customers, driving expansion revenue through upselling, and converting power users into brand advocates.

Why is user onboarding important?

In this section, we’ll discuss the key benefits of user onboarding, drawing from our experience with SaaS companies.

Improving Activation Rates

“User onboarding plays a crucial role in user activation. It’s one of the first touchpoints users have with your product. If this experience isn’t smooth and engaging, they’re likely to leave and never return.” – Yi Lin Pei, Director of Product Marketing at Teachable.

Boosting Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate

“If users don’t activate, they won’t realize the full value of your product, leading to churn within the first few weeks of signing up. This significantly impacts your trial-to-paid conversion rate.” – Yi Lin Pei, Director of Product Marketing at Teachable.

By improving your onboarding process, you can drive higher conversions. For instance, Sked Social saw a threefold increase in conversions after introducing a highly effective onboarding feature—a checklist.

Driving MRR Growth Through User Activation

User activation rate is strongly linked to MRR growth. Data shows that a 25% increase in user activation leads to a 34% boost in MRR. By improving your onboarding process and driving user activation, you directly enhance one of the most critical business metrics.

Lowering Support Costs

A well-designed onboarding process reduces the need for customer support, allowing teams to focus on more complex issues. For example, RecruitNow saved over 1,000 customer training hours annually by enhancing their onboarding and localizing their support resources.

How to measure user onboarding effectiveness?

Onboarding should be evaluated just like any other part of the user experience. Important factors to consider include how often specific onboarding guides are used, the completion rate of the onboarding process, and the time users take to finish it. These are crucial indicators of a successful onboarding experience. As effective onboarding is closely tied to customer satisfaction, conducting post-onboarding Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys can provide useful benchmarks. Similarly, using employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) surveys internally can help gauge internal satisfaction. The ultimate goal of onboarding is to speed up users’ proficiency with the product. Many companies track milestones related to features or frequency of usage to measure the success of onboarding.

Here are some important metrics to track when assessing onboarding effectiveness:

Product Engagement Score

The Product Engagement Score is a composite metric that combines stickiness, adoption, and growth, providing a comprehensive view of your product’s overall health. This score can help you determine whether your onboarding efforts are positively influencing product engagement.

Onboarding Completion Rates

Onboarding completion rates show how many users successfully finish the entire onboarding process. High completion rates suggest that users find the onboarding experience valuable and effective. You can further analyze cohorts of users who complete the onboarding flow to see if they achieve better outcomes compared to those who don’t, which can also indicate the effectiveness of your onboarding.

Post-Onboarding Retention Rates

Have your customer retention rates improved after launching your onboarding process? If so, it could be a sign that the extra guidance provided through onboarding helps users realize the product’s value, encouraging them to return over time. This is another strong indicator that your onboarding process is working.

What are the key elements of an Effective User Onboarding Strategy?

We’ve mentioned elements like checklists, interactive walkthroughs, and more. Now, let’s dive into the key components of an effective user onboarding process:

• Sign-up forms
• Welcome screens
• Interactive walkthroughs
• Tooltips
• Banners
• Onboarding surveys
• Onboarding checklists
• Celebration modals
• Self-service resource centers

Let’s explore these in detail, along with insights from our SaaS onboarding report, where we analyzed the onboarding flows of over 100 tools.

Sign-up Forms

The sign-up form is typically the first point of interaction users have with your product, making it crucial for setting the tone of the entire onboarding experience.

In our tests, nearly 79% of tools featured a friction-based sign-up process, with two key friction points:

• Requiring email confirmation before granting access to the tool.
• Asking for a credit card during the sign-up flow.

To reduce friction, keep the sign-up process simple by only asking for essential information. This helps encourage users to complete the form and lowers the chances of drop-offs.

For example, we only request a work email, first and last name, and password. You can always ask for more details later in the onboarding process.

Notice the Single Sign-On (SSO) option? It’s another way to reduce friction, as it allows users to sign up or log in using their Google accounts, a feature used by 54% of the companies we analyzed.

Welcome Screens

Welcome screens are the first thing users encounter when they log into the product, making them a great opportunity to greet users warmly. According to our data, 66% of companies include them in their user onboarding process.

In addition to the welcome message, you can use the welcome screen to launch a microsurvey. This helps you gather more details about users, allowing you to personalize their onboarding experience. 45% of the companies we analyzed use this approach.

What Information Should You Collect?

It depends on the product, but it’s helpful to ask about the user’s role within their company and their Jobs To Be Done (JTBDs). However, avoid asking for any information that isn’t essential, as it could discourage users and delay their activation.

Onboarding Checklists

Who doesn’t enjoy checking items off a to-do list? That sense of accomplishment helps make onboarding checklists a great way to motivate users to complete key actions.

Effective checklists are usually simple and consist of a few easy-to-complete tasks. They often help users get started by pre-adding tasks they’ve already completed, like creating an account, and include gamification elements such as progress bars and badges.

Our data shows that 44% of companies use checklists, but only 30% incorporate progress bars.

Interactive Walkthroughs

Interactive walkthroughs guide users through key actions step by step, revealing the next step only after the previous one is completed.

Only 29% of companies use interactive walkthroughs, while 36% don’t offer any in-app guidance. This presents a significant opportunity to stand out.

Tooltips

A tooltip is a text box that provides information about a feature, usually with a call to action (CTA) to encourage user engagement. They are less intrusive than other UI elements and offer contextual guidance to help users adopt features.

You can use tooltips during onboarding, either as part of interactive walkthroughs or independently. For instance, they can be triggered to increase engagement with specific features. Teams also use tooltips to announce new features and promote upsells.

Banners

Banners are small notification bars that appear at the top or bottom of the screen within the app. They are an effective way to share important information or announcements without being intrusive, as long as users can easily dismiss them with a close button.

It’s also a good idea to keep the banner text brief and include only a few call-to-action (CTA) buttons.

Onboarding Surveys

Onboarding surveys are simple questionnaires designed to gather customer feedback and requests. Product teams use these surveys to collect both quantitative data, such as CSAT and PMF scores, and qualitative insights.

There are two main reasons to include surveys in the onboarding process. First, they help ensure that users are having the best possible experience. If the product doesn’t meet their expectations, the feedback can help address and fix any issues.

Second, feedback from new users is especially valuable because they offer a fresh perspective. They might highlight areas that need improvement or suggest new ways to improve the product.

Celebration Modals

Celebration modals are UI elements that appear when a user achieves a key activation milestone. They often include gamification and emotional design principles to reward users for their progress. These modals add an element of fun to the onboarding process, keeping users engaged and motivated.

Self-Service Resource Centers

Research shows that 88% of US respondents expect companies to offer a self-service support portal.

Self-service resource centers enable users to find the help they need without leaving the app or reaching out to customer support. These centers are available 24/7 and can include text, visuals, and videos to make the information more engaging.

What is In-App User Onboarding?

User onboarding can take many forms, but more companies are adopting an in-app onboarding approach. This strategy delivers new user training and walkthroughs directly within the application. By doing so, companies can speed up the time it takes for users to realize the value of the product, providing contextual information as users navigate the app. This method also reduces the delays often caused by scheduling human-led onboarding sessions with customer success teams.

In-app onboarding allows for better personalization, guiding users to features that are most relevant to their role or specific needs.

For example, Verizon Connect used to rely on a manual onboarding process that involved training each customer through webinars. After switching to an in-app onboarding strategy, they automated the process and delivered training through in-app messages and tooltips. They also provided contextual guides based on the specific tasks users were trying to complete.

As companies increasingly adopt in-app guidance for the software they create, they’re also using it for the software they purchase for internal use. In-app user onboarding allows managers to tailor training for different individuals and roles. It ensures that the knowledge shared during training is always available to employees when needed, instead of being forgotten after just one onboarding session.

Best Practices for Building a Successful User Onboarding Process

What makes for excellent user onboarding experiences? Here are some key user onboarding best practices to consider:

Segment Users for a Personalized Onboarding Experience

To help users reach activation quickly and easily, it’s essential to personalize the onboarding journey to their specific needs. This prevents unnecessary steps and avoids overwhelming users with irrelevant or excessive information.

How can you achieve this? The key is user segmentation.

With Product Fruits, you can segment users based on:

• User data (browser language, device type, last seen, number of web sessions, plan, role, etc.)
• Company data (number of people, country, industry, plan, stage, etc.)
• Events (users who have completed a specific action), and more.

Additionally, Product Fruits allows you to segment users based on their responses to a welcome survey. For instance, you can ask users about their roles or goals and tailor the onboarding flow based on their answers.

Use Interactive Walkthroughs Instead of Product Tours

We strongly recommend using interactive walkthroughs instead of traditional product tours, which tend to be linear and simply highlight different elements and steps. How often have you clicked ‘Next’ repeatedly without actually reading the instructions?

Interactive walkthroughs, on the other hand, encourage users to actively engage with the tool, making the learning experience more immersive and effective.

And they deliver results—Attention Insight increased user activation by 47% after implementing interactive walkthroughs created with Product Fruits!

Leverage Multiple UI Onboarding Patterns

Different UI onboarding patterns have their own strengths and limitations, making them more suitable for specific tasks.

For minor updates, a banner or tooltip can be the best option. However, for major announcements—like a groundbreaking new feature that sets you apart from competitors—it’s better to go big with a modal.

The best approach is to use a mix of UI patterns at various stages and locations to ensure users don’t miss important updates. If engagement drops, adjust your strategy and experiment with different patterns to keep users engaged.

Optimize In-App Onboarding Experiences with A/B Testing

A/B testing is a simple yet effective way to determine which in-app onboarding experiences deliver the best results. For instance, if you want to test whether a specific onboarding flow helps users achieve a certain goal, A/B testing can provide valuable insights.

Tools like Product Fruits let you set up an onboarding flow, define a goal (such as encouraging users to invite teammates), and analyze the results to validate your hypothesis.

Enhance Feature Discovery with Contextual Tooltips

Contextual tooltips are a great way to drive feature discovery and adoption.

For example, if users aren’t engaging with a feature that could enhance their experience or if you’ve just launched a highly requested functionality, tooltips can help highlight it without disrupting the user’s workflow.

Even more effectively, tooltips can be triggered at the exact moment when users are most likely to need the feature. This contextual approach makes them a powerful tool for boosting engagement and adoption.

Provide In-App Assistance to Support New Users

In-app help consists of contextual tips and guidance that users receive while interacting with the product.

It helps new users become familiar with the product’s functionality and UI while also answering common questions. When users encounter challenges or get stuck, in-app assistance guides them in the right direction.

This makes the experience of using a new product less overwhelming and ensures users get the most value from it. In-app help can take different forms, such as a help button that directs users to support chat or a resource center.

When designing in-app help, make it engaging—don’t rely solely on text. Include images and GIFs to enhance understanding. Even better, embed videos such as short tutorials or more in-depth demos. These can be self-recorded or generated using AI tools like Synthesia.

Use Contextual Upsells to Convert First-Time Users into Advocates

While upselling can be seen as controversial, it benefits both the company and the users.

For businesses, it leads to stronger customer loyalty, improved retention, and higher MRR. For users, it provides access to features that help them reach their goals more efficiently—often at a discounted rate.

Contextual prompts are one of the simplest and most effective ways to encourage upsells. They offer users the opportunity to upgrade at the exact moment they recognize the need for additional functionality. For example, an upsell modal can appear when users reach the limit of their free plan, prompting them to upgrade seamlessly.

Analyze User Behavior to Optimize Your Onboarding Process

Collecting user behavior data allows you to make more informed decisions when designing your onboarding experience.

Product Fruits enables you to automatically track key user interactions, such as clicks, text inputs, and form submissions. You can then visualize this data through trends, funnels, paths, and retention analytics reports.

For instance, tracking the user journey helps you understand how users progress from one activation point to another. If they drop off or slow down at a specific step, it may indicate friction—highlighting areas where improvements are needed.

Gather User Feedback for a Deeper Understanding

Collecting user feedback not only enhances the onboarding experience but also helps improve the product overall.

To get well-rounded insights, diversify your feedback collection. Don’t rely solely on quantitative scores—ask follow-up questions to gather qualitative insights as well.

Product Fruits functions as a customer feedback tool, allowing you to choose from various survey templates or create custom surveys. You can personalize and localize surveys while extracting meaningful insights.

However, collecting feedback is just the first step. The real impact comes from acting on it. Closing the feedback loop doesn’t mean implementing every suggestion but rather analyzing responses, acknowledging user input, and making informed improvements.

User Onboarding Examples

Every onboarding experience is unique, but studying how other companies implement in-app onboarding can provide valuable insights. Here are three examples to inspire your own onboarding strategy.

1. ShippingEasy’s Approach to Fast and Effective Onboarding

ShippingEasy serves small independent online retailers who are often too busy managing incoming orders to spend time learning a new software tool. To ensure users quickly understand the platform’s value early in their journey, the team needed an efficient onboarding process.

To achieve this, ShippingEasy uses in-app guides to help users navigate essential tasks. For example, they implemented a series of tooltips to guide new users through setting up orders—an essential workflow that retailers must master.

2. MagHub Automates Onboarding to Save Time

MagHub’s customer success team was spending too much time training new users on basic workflows and product functionality. To improve efficiency, they needed a better approach to onboarding.

The team transformed their customer success instructions into a series of in-app guides. They started with a guided introduction to the application’s homepage, followed by a “quickstart checklist” that allowed users to choose additional workflows based on their role.

To ensure engagement, a reminder appears three days later, prompting users to complete the checklist if they haven’t done so. By automating these onboarding flows, MagHub significantly reduced the time their customer success team spent on onboarding—cutting it in half.

3. SignalPath Integrates Video for In-App Onboarding

SignalPath initially relied on a series of video tutorials stored in its learning management system (LMS) for user onboarding. However, this approach made it challenging for users to find the right video for their specific task. Additionally, leaving the app to access the LMS was both time-consuming and distracting.

To improve the experience, the team embedded these videos into in-app guides, allowing new users to access video walkthroughs while working within the application. They also use this approach to target users who are already engaging with certain areas of the app but may need a refresher on how to maximize its features.

Key User Onboarding Metrics to Measure Success

Curious about how your onboarding performance compares to industry peers? 👀 You’re in luck! We’ve collected first-party data on essential user onboarding metrics from 547 SaaS companies across seven industries.

We’ll provide a quick overview, but if you want to dive deeper, be sure to check out the full product metrics report.

User Activation Rate

User activation rate measures the percentage of users who complete a key action, indicating they have realized value from the product.

To calculate it, divide the number of activated users by the total number of new sign-ups within a specific period. Then, multiply by 100 to express it as a percentage.

The average user activation rate is 37.5%. See how your numbers compare here:

Onboarding Checklist Completion Rate

This metric tracks the percentage of users who complete all tasks in your onboarding checklist.

To calculate it, divide the number of users who finished the checklist by the number of users who started it, then multiply by 100 to get the percentage.

According to our data, the overall average onboarding checklist completion rate is 19.2%

Time to Value (TTV)

Time to value measures how quickly users experience value from your product. To calculate it, first define what “gaining value” means (e.g., creating a first project) and then measure the time it takes users to reach that event after signing up.

The average time to value (TTV) is 1 day, 12 hours, and 23 minutes.

Core Feature Adoption Rate

This metric tracks the percentage of users actively engaging with key product features.

To calculate it, divide the number of feature monthly active users by the total number of logins, then multiply by 100 to get the percentage.

The average core feature adoption rate is 24.5%.

1-Month Retention Rate

The 1-month retention rate indicates the percentage of users who continue using your product after one month.

To calculate it, divide the number of users who return after one month by the total number of users who signed up a month earlier, then multiply by 100.The average 1-month retention rate is 46.9%.

Top User Onboarding Tools for SaaS Companies

To create an exceptional user onboarding experience, having the right tools is essential. Let’s explore some of the best onboarding tools available on the market today.

Product Fruits – The All-in-One User Onboarding Platform

Product Fruits is a powerful user onboarding solution designed to help businesses engage users, collect feedback, and track user interactions seamlessly.

Here’s how Product Fruits enhances onboarding:

• Company and User Segmentation – Easily segment users based on demographics, behavior, or survey responses to deliver a personalized onboarding experience tailored to their needs.
• Comprehensive User Onboarding UI Patterns – Without any coding, create and customize tooltips, modals, slideouts, driven actions, banners, hotspots, resource centers, and checklists. These elements can be used individually or combined for a seamless onboarding flow.
• Analytics and Tracking – Automatically track key user interactions such as clicks, text inputs, and form submissions. Gain deeper insights through dashboards, analytics reports, and A/B testing.
• User Feedback Collection – Build and deploy in-app surveys, trigger them for specific user segments, select from various templates, customize and localize them, and analyze the results to improve the onboarding experience.

Userpilot – A Complete User Onboarding Solution for Product Teams

Userpilot is a 3-in-1 product growth platform that enables teams to engage users, collect feedback, and monitor user behavior.

Here’s how Userpilot enhances the onboarding experience:

• Company and User Segmentation – Segment users based on demographics, behavior, or survey responses to personalize their onboarding journey.
• Diverse User Onboarding UI Patterns – Without coding, create and customize tooltips, modals, slideouts, driven actions, banners, hotspots, resource centers, and checklists. These elements can be used individually or combined for a tailored onboarding experience.
• Analytics – Automatically track user interactions such as clicks, text inputs, and form submissions. Generate analytics reports, monitor key metrics through dashboards, conduct A/B testing, and soon, access session recordings.
• Feedback – Build in-app surveys, trigger them for specific user segments, select from various templates, customize them, localize content, and analyze survey results effectively.

Pendo – A Solution for Both Employee and User Onboarding

Pendo is a digital adoption platform primarily recognized for its strong analytics capabilities. Unlike Userpilot, Pendo can also be used for onboarding employees in addition to new users.

Key Features of Pendo:

• Product Tours – Known as “Guides” in Pendo, these are primarily linear and tooltip-based.
• UI Patterns – Includes Lightbox, Banners, Tooltips, Polls, and Walkthroughs. While templates and a WYSIWYG editor are available, full customization requires coding, and localization must be done manually.
• Checklists – Only accessible through the resource center.
• Resource Center – A basic resource hub where surveys cannot be added. It includes only simple checklists with limited customization options.
• In-Depth Analytics – Provides detailed insights into user behavior and product engagement. However, visualization options for reports are limited.

Appcues – A No-Code Solution for Mobile User Onboarding

Appcues is a no-code user onboarding platform designed to help product and customer success managers drive product engagement.

Key Features of Appcues:

• UI Patterns – Create modals, slideouts, tooltips, and hotspots using a code-free editor. However, customization options are quite limited.
• Product Tours – With Appcues Flows, you can build step-by-step linear tours to guide users through different product features.
• Checklists – While customization is limited, checklists can still be useful for guiding users toward activation. However, checklists and similar features are only available in premium plans, starting at $800/month.

User Segmentation – Group users based on their attributes, behaviors, flows, events, and interactions.