The Best Ideas for User Onboarding In 2022

Featured article by Nadica Metuleva

User onboarding refers to the first impressions your customers have when they interact and use your product or service. With this process, you have come to a point where people are taking action and making purchases. Still, how this goes will determine if they have a good or bad experience. If you make it good, chances are you’ll have a new returning customer. If not, you will have lost them after the first purchase.

Why you need to work on user onboarding

Acquiring new customers and convincing them to make their first purchase costs 5 times more than retaining the ones you have. Investing time and effort into the user onboarding process is a sure way to save some money. Moreover, it’s a great opportunity to have a better word of mouth for your business and attract more leads. Statistics on user onboarding show that, on average, 68% of new customers come from current customers.

Let’s say that you have an amazing product to offer. You spent a lot on making and advertising it, but people don’t seem to come back for more. You get complaints from people who expected something else from your product, who didn’t know how to use it, or didn’t like the support you offered.

This means that you have a bad user onboarding process. If that’s the case, it doesn’t matter how good of a product you have.

To improve this process and boost sales, you should definitely test some of the ideas below.

Amazing ideas for better user onboarding

Wyzowl’s research shows that 90% of customers think that brands could do a better job for the onboarding process. This means that we have a big room for improvement. Based on what worked in the last couple of years and is trending today, here are the best onboarding ideas to use in 2022.

Self-serve guides

Appcues, a trending tool for more efficient user onboarding lists Asana’s actionable guides as one of the best SaaS onboarding examples of today. They certainly have a point – Asana’s guides have tremendous success in encouraging retention and team adoption.

Asana is an already established project management software. Even so, many people are just starting to use such tools, so mastering the ways of working is not simple for them. This is why the brand decided to provide users with a self-serve guide. Instead of bothering them with pop-up tricks and guides, they provided an accessible guide that answers all product-related questions when the user needs answers.

If you have a similar product or service that needs some time to be understood and learned, this is a smart move right now.

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Asana’s guide is a simplified content hub where users can access video tutorials, live webinars, get instant tips on how to use the software, etc. Users can identify themselves as newbies on this SaaS tool or experts trying to help the team join them in using it. Based on their choice, Asana’s guide serves contextual and relevant help in real-time.

Most users find the drop-off feature highly challenging at the start. Asana has recognized this, which is why they provide templates, checklists, and step-by-step instructions for the same. Lastly, they even have live Q&A sessions every now and then, as well as self-paced courses to make onboarding as simple as possible.

Show, don’t tell

Product School lists some of the best onboarding strategies we can see today and they point out to the Mixpanel video onboarding tool. This company’s decision to use video to ease the onboarding process for users has shown tremendous results for them. If an average product tour has a completion rate of 60%, a quality video tour makes that number skip to 92%.

Knowing how popular videos are today, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. A high-quality, punchy, and short video that clearly explains to users how to use the product can make their purchase much simpler and more pleasurable.

An example of this, Mixpanel, has decided to add videos in their in-app announcements for new features. They use the Loom platform to demonstrate social proof and optimize the onboarding process.

Learn by doing

Practice does make perfect and, if you want people to like your product more, you need to give them the chance to do that. This is why free trials are so popular with users – they allow them to test and learn how to use a product before they make a purchase.

Grammarly has decided to include the “learn by doing” principle in the onboarding process for new users, too. In case you didn’t know this, Grammarly is an assistant tool for writing and editing. It scans the content to check its accuracy and effectiveness, rates the readability and clarity, and looks for plagiarism.

As one of the best-rated tools around, Grammarly has users from all over the world. To make it simpler for everyone to understand how the tool works, including new users or non-native English speakers, they take the “learn by doing” approach.

How does this work?

They start with a quick, simple, and very insightful product tour. Users can also access a demo of a sample document and see the tool in action. All of this makes for a visual and interactive experience, helping users to master the tool within minutes.

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Not only does Grammarly detect and point out errors, but they’ve also included tips and guides on how users can improve their writing. Their tooltip provides explanations for every marked issue.

Behavior and preference tracking

TLNT lists the many ways in which Netflix has optimized the onboarding process. Netflix is a great example of a behavior-based onboarding process. With a growing number of users, the company has gone a long way in making sure that onboarding is easy and simple for all.

One of the things that make Netflix great is the level of personalization offered. If you subscribe to it, you can create several users and Netflix will track the searches, preferences, and behaviors of each individual. Based on what customers watch from the start, the app will recommend similar things. This makes it easy to search through it, and even easier to find the thing you are interested in.

From the very beginning, users are asked to list a few of their favorite movies. Right after they sign in for the first time, Netflix has similar options ready for them.

Personalized onboarding with surveys

More and more companies attempt to personalize the user experience to make their onboarding more successful. Some of them use surveys for that purpose and the results are amazing.

Let’s start with HubSpot’s CRM. As soon as you sign up to use this free tool, you’ll be given some surveys to respond to. How you respond to the simple questions will tell the tool how to personalize your experience. HubSpot will request details about the company that you need the tool for, your role in it, your goals, etc. Based on the answers, the dashboard and online workspace are optimized and tailored to the need of the individual.

Next is Duolingo, one of the most popular tools for self-paced language learning. Right from the start, Duolingo will ask you some questions to personalize your experience. They’ll ask what you want to learn, how you prefer to learn languages, what level you are in, what you need the language for, etc.

Another good example is Flipboard, a tool that allows users to read newspapers digitally, but in a more traditional way i.e. by flipping the pages. Users will be asked to select their favorite topics straightaway, and Flipboard will continuously provide them with the latest and best stories about those topics.

Guided, interactive tours

Nick Afferty lists Notion as the best productivity tool you can use today. Part of the success of Notion over the years is due to its great onboarding process. Established in 2015, the company has achieved a lot. They help teams and individuals plan, write, and get organized.

To onboard new users, this brand offers a clear, guided tour that begins on the “Getting Started” page. Step-by-step, users learn the most important functions for creating and collaborating in the software. They can use templates to build pages for meetings, budgets, etc.

Another example of such an approach is Slack. Their colorful and yet, clean UX makes the onboarding process enjoyable for new users. As soon as they hop onto the site, the Slack bot reaches out to them and walks them through the product tour.

Wrapping up

Over time, brands have started putting a great deal of focus on onboarding for users. In the user-centered world of today, it is highly expected of you to make sure that users understand and can easily use your product from the get-go. If done right, strategies like the ones in this article can help you impress the people you successfully turned into leads, convince them to buy again, and spread the word around about your brand.