5 examples of great user onboarding experiences

User onboarding is a big hype in the last 10 years. It may seem complex to many, however when done right, it is a rewarding upgrade on top of your SaaS platform to reduce churn and increase user delight.

The reason is simple: most users never get comfortable with your product or understand its real value. They click around, without understanding how the product works. If you cannot make them feel the real value, they tend to live in under 60 seconds.

In this post, we are going to present successful examples of SaaS onboarding sequences that you can use as inspiration for the onboarding program in your application.

What is SaaS user onboarding?

SaaS user onboarding is the process of helping a new user get set up and understand the value of the offering. User onboarding experiences are all the interactions that a user has with your SaaS product onboarding at the beginning of their user journey. Starting from the signup flow, you’ll generally have a welcome screen and some initial experiences/interactions.

Why is SaaS user onboarding important?

• SaaS user onboarding is a great way to increase customer satisfaction. It is a means to show your users you truly care about their success, and that you are willing to train them.
• A proper onboarding helps user peak their interest in your product and engage with their tasks, minimizing the learning curve.
• It turns prospects into dedicated users that bring more revenue through purchasing upgrades and referrals.

What are some of the user onboarding mistakes?

Unfortunately not all products are created equal. Researches show that 40% of SaaS products don't include a welcome screen during onboarding. However, a welcome screen is relaxing - just like a hostess at a restaurant - and helps greet the customer on arrival.

In the same way, a welcome screen greets new users and directs them to click on a key action inside your SaaS app. This key action is the first event within the onboarding process that helps a user realize the value of your product.

A welcome screen helps guide new users through the onboarding process and enables them to take the first key action that will help them realize the value of your product.

What you can ask during the first welcome screen can be as follows:

• Customer roles & responsibilities
• Company name and how big the company is
• Tour guide showing the most important features
• Tour guide showing how to complete a specific task
• Whether a specific extension would be installed or not

Another important mistake is not taking personalization into consideration. While we research SaaS products, we see that most of them get the target segment / vertical information, however never use this data within the application.

For example, if you get the company type and you are an analytics company, you can always fill in the product demo with relevant data (e.g game related events for a gaming organization) .

Last but not least, always include milestones (or task completion) within the application. This is sometimes a game changer for many SaaS apps as they require several task to be completed for the app to be fully utilized.

5 SaaS companies with great user onboarding experiences

Below, we're going to list 10 emerging SaaS companies that have a great user onboarding experience. You may want to ask us why we focus on user onboarding experience, and the answer is simple.

The product starts with UX. Most of the time it is the single point of failure and churn. Customers get engaged if the software helps them clearly understand and experience the value they'll get from the product.

In a happy scenario, this will mean they start using it successfully, but more importantly, it'll give them a reason to be sticky in your product, and use it again and again.

Let's start with the list.

Producter, a product management suite

Producter is a new kid on the block. They make a producter manager's life easy by managing sprints and tasks, collecting feedback to make informed decisions, managing tasks, building a roadmap and making sure your changelog is seen by your users.

When you first login to Producter, the service presents you with a great welcome page with animated GIFs. Step by step, with a few questions, you are presented with Producter's top features with corresponding screenshots (which we felt like unnecessary, as the fonts are barely readable). However, the overall look and feel and the way you are welcomed is positive.

Decktopus, a presentation suite

Desktopus is a viable alternative to PowerPoint with visually attractive slides and a robust template library.

What we like with Desktopus is that this tool is dedicated to building very simple presentations in a short amount of time with the help of templates. If you are dependent on PowerPoint, Google Slides and any other presentation tools and you don't want a bloaty interface, then Desktopus is a great choice.

When we logged into Desktopus, we were presented with a tour guide which was visually appealing and had animated illustrations instead of simple icons and drawings. This has put Desktopus apart from other competitors.

You can also build a similar design in your app by embedding lightweight, great looking and scalable animations. For this, you can use Lottie or a similar environment.

Flowla, a sales assets platform

Sales is a team sport! However, with all the documents, links and Youtube videos, sales pitches can be very time-consuming to share with the customer.

Well, until Flowla. Flowla is a good example of how sales assets can be shared with the client effectively. We call it a "shared hub for the sales team", where all customer-facing materials live in one place.

It works simple: You upload all sales assets to Flowla, and arrange them in a way that can be easily reused or updated. This way, you can turn best-performing flows into templates any teammate can use.

Robomotion, a robotic process automation tool

Ever wish you could just create a robot to tackle all your boring, repetitive tasks, like collecting data and entering user info?

Imagine if there were intuitive and accessible robotic process automation (RPA) bots that could rescue you from dry, error-prone manual tasks.

While many cloud automation tools only work with applications that have an API, Robomotion can automate custom web or desktop applications.

Available for Mac, Linux, and Windows, these robots can log in to a custom web portal, navigate through menus, export data to process, and email a report.

What Robomotion folks built is a set of templates that can be used to streamline the onboarding process of the user. This helps the firstcomer to easily start with a repetitive task of his/her liking.

Juphy, a social media conversation tool

Have you ever dreamt of building an all-in-one social communication channel as your userbase grows? Juphy does exactly that - it connects Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Whatsapp,  Linkedin, Google Play Store and iOS App Store into one place.

With a single click, you can quickly respond to all comments, direct messages, ads comments, and reviews through Juphy's dashboard.

What we liked about Juphy user onboarding is they immediately present a popup during the first launch, which is a very personal touch with the photo of your customer success manager.

You can also talk to your teammates over Juphy to deliver the fastest solution to your customers on all communication platforms.

The company has more than 300 reviews on G2 with a 4.8/5 score and trusted by more than 2,000+ SMB’s, customer success teams and smart social media managers.

Final thoughts

The list is not done with these SaaS products. This is just a small set of the most popular SaaS products used across different areas of the business. Each product has its own purpose that aims to help start-up companies grow faster and scale higher.