Continuous User Onboarding for SaaS

What happens when an onboarding process of a user is complete?

When they have done all the tasks in the onboarding checklist and have reached their Aha moment? Should it stop there?

Especially for SaaS businesses, no way!

User onboarding must be an ongoing task for SaaS in order to increase retention and eliminate churn. Which brings us to the question:

What is Continuous User Onboarding?

Continuous User Onboarding refers to not ending the onboarding of a user after their initial "Aha!" moment, but to continue it throughout their lifetime.

After your users are successfully onboard for the first time and they become a fan of your product, they will not stay there. The great relationship they have with your business will diminish over time.

This is where continuous user onboarding rushes to your help. By onboarding your users, again and again, you keep them at their success status as a fan.

The aim is to assist the users repeatedly to find new value within your offering. A successful onboarding experience helps users advance further by revealing what is more beneficial for them.

Promoting new features for an existing user is a great example, herewith you will be able to encourage them to achieve more with your product.

Why Should Your Onboarding Be Non-Stop?

Onboarding is not a task that can be accomplished just with a pretty-looking interface design or an interactive product walkthrough.

You need to be there for your users each time they are in need and put forward the next cool feature to increase the value of your product.

Your onboarding should never stop mainly because of one single reason: to increase the Customer Lifetime Value.

With an increased CLV comes revenue and growth, which is the main purpose of every business. An increase in the Customer Lifetime Value can be seen via changes in 4 other metrics.

Increase Product Adoption

As your customers reach success through onboarding, they will increasingly enjoy the experience you offer.

Each time they complete a task, they will like your product more.

Also, as they learn your product well and add it to their arsenals, your product will be indispensable in their lives.

Therefore, non-stop onboarding after the initial onboarding process will boost your product adoption rate.

Improve Your Retention Rates

Keeping your users happy and constantly onboard will help you in your journey to retain your existing users as well.

As your users adopt your product and achieve success with it without experiencing errors or examples of bad UX, they will come back for more!

Force Upsells and Expansions

How can you earn even more from a single customer?

By selling them more of what you have!

In order to acquire a considerable amount of increase in revenue by upsells and expansion, you have to sell more than the product your users have already bought/subscribed to.

If you keep successfully onboarding users, they won't hesitate to buy more products and features from you.

Eliminate Churn

%91 percent of customers will churn rather than trying to fix their problems with your business.

They will choose the easy-way-out strategy over telling their problems to you and awaiting a fix. This is highly dangerous for SaaS businesses as not being able to decrease churn can be the start of the end for you.

The best is to act before your users churn. You can always evaluate the data from users' onboarding processes and come up with a solution to the problems they are experiencing or improve your onboarding process overall.

How Continuous User Onboarding Can Be Applied to a SaaS

So now we know what it means to onboard users continuously and why you should adopt such a method, we need to learn how.

I have come up with 3 ways to apply continuous user onboarding to your SaaS business right now:

1- Be there when they need you

First of all, you have to be there when they need you!

a- when they want to reach out to you for help

So a user of yours is stuck with your product, doesn't know what to do and requests help.

This is the biggest chance to onboard a user once again. They are far from the path to customer success they need to be on and you need to onboard them again into this path.

What you should do in this case is; offering the self-help center you have developed and the interactive guides you have created using UserGuiding!

UserGuiding is a code-free product walkthrough software that helps you improve your UX with a wide variety of user onboarding elements.

b- when they don't know they need you, but they do

The other case is, you might be sure of the stage of their journey your users will struggle in and help them once they get to that stage.

Some of the good user onboarding or CRM tools help you establish action-based processes so that you can keep contacting the user at the right place and time throughout the user lifecycle.

In these cases, you can identify and fix the pain points of the users related to the product or you can make sure what they need is with them when they need it.

2- Highlight features and updates

Highlighting a new feature or the latest update is a must-do for all SaaS and other businesses.

To increase user engagement and improve feature adoption, you have to set guides or checklists that help users explore the brand new iteration of your new product.

3- Offer valuable content

Along with helping your users explore the value of your product over and over again, you can try to provide them with additional value.

This value may range from an article related to your audience's interests to a detailed guide on how they can use your product or service more efficiently.

With the extra valuable content that you have offered to your users, your users will love your brand even more and establish a bond of trust with your company.