Product Onboarding

What is Product Onboarding?

Think of product onboarding as the warm welcome your new users get when they first interact with your product. It’s the initial journey you guide them through, making sure they feel at home, understand the lay of the land, and know how to navigate all the cool features you’ve built for them. 

The journey through product onboarding starts the moment they sign up (either to buy or just to try) and continues until they’re confidently using your product. The goal? To make sure they’ve quickly spotted the value of your product and are sold on the idea of using it more!

It’s a bold (and foolish) Product Team who would let their new users land in their product and leave them entirely to their own devices to work out what’s what. Even the most user-friendly software products can benefit from some extra care and attention being paid to that first visit. 

Product onboarding is about guiding your users towards success – both for themselves (whatever task they want to get done or feeling they want to have) and for your business (having them buy and continue to pay for your product). That guidance requires signposts, tutorials, hints, tips, rewards, reminders, and gentle nudges. 

Product onboarding is about leaving less to chance. It’s about doing everything you can to make that initial experience of your product as smooth and as rewarding as you possibly can for your new users. 

Why is Product Onboarding Important?

If you get product onboarding wrong, it’s very hard to recover from. 

You’ve heard the expression “first impressions count” right? And the adage that you never get a second chance to make a first impression? Well, that’s why product onboarding is so important. 

The art of product onboarding is about crafting the best possible first experience with your product. If that first impression is poor, then you’ve blown it. People are busy, attention spans are short – if your product didn’t impress right away, then the chances of that user coming back for a second go are slim. 

That first product onboarding journey sets the stage for the user’s entire experience with your product. So, you need to make sure you get off on the right foot. If you nail the product onboarding then you’ve started off down the path towards higher customer satisfaction, reduced churn, higher retention, increased usage and more revenue. 

One of the main goals of product onboarding is to help new users understand the value your product can bring for them. It’s about quickly demonstrating how it can solve their problems and meet their needs. If, after initially using your product, someone comes away without any clear sense of how it benefits them, then why would they want to come back? 

So, in short, product onboarding is one of the most important aspects of any product strategy. Without a successful product onboarding process, you’re going to struggle to convert any prospective customers to paying users. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is as a whole, if the onboarding journey is lacking then no one will ever stick around long enough to find that out. 

Product Onboarding vs User/Customer Onboarding

Product onboarding isn’t the only type of onboarding you might have heard of. So what are those other types and how do they differ from product onboarding? 

You’ve probably heard the term customer onboarding or user onboarding during your Product Management travels. You can think of product onboarding as a subset of this broader, more general user onboarding. 

It might be useful to think of product onboarding as product-led onboarding. It represents one of the ways you can onboard users – namely from within the actual product itself. But it’s not the only way. 

You see, onboarding customers often encompasses more than just introducing users to your product’s features and functionality. All round customer onboarding can include (especially in the B2B world) introducing them to their Customer Success point of contact, setting up regular account management meetings, capturing their goals and KPIs, possibly even sending them some sort of physical welcome pack!  

Therefore, where user onboarding refers to the general principle of getting your customer successfully established with your product and company, product onboarding specifically refers to the onboarding journey that your users experience within the product itself. 

Product onboarding focuses on the experience in-app that forms part of the overall customer onboarding. 

Here’s another way to think of this division…

Self-service Onboarding vs White Glove Onboarding

Product onboarding falls into the first of these two categories. Let us explain…

Self-service onboarding is how you onboard your new users without having to have a human touch-point. You are setting up your onboarding flow in such a way that a new user can work through it all by themselves.

There is no need for a customer to be in direct contact with anyone on your team, because you’ve done the work upfront to clearly signpost what they need to do and help them find their own way. If they get stuck, they have easy access to resources like tutorials, FAQs, and interactive guides. 

It’s cost-effective and scalable, ideal for products with a large user base, where servicing them all with hands-on human interaction just isn’t practical or profitable. 

Product onboarding, although not the only way of handling self-service onboarding, is the most common component of this approach. And certainly, even when resources sit outside of the product itself (on a help center website, for example), the links to navigate to that content will often need to be within the product. 

White Glove Onboarding, on the other hand, is about providing a high-touch, personalized experience. This is where you have a dedicated team assisting users through every step, offering tailored guidance and support. 

This method of onboarding is often used for highly complex or high-value products where personalized assistance can significantly enhance user experience and success rates. Or where the customer is large, complex and paying a significant amount of money!

Product-led Onboarding

Product onboarding refers to when the onboarding is led by the product itself rather than Customer Teams or email marketing. This Product-led onboarding involves embedding onboarding elements directly within the product, such as interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, and in-app messaging. 

Your users can learn by doing, aided by contextual guidance exactly when they need it. Another advantage of this approach is that it allows users to immediately apply what they learn in a real context, rather than having to remember things they’ve been shown on a call or read in a help article. 

The Different Types of Product Onboarding

So now you’re clear on what is product onboarding as opposed to more general, potentially high-touch customer onboarding, are there any nuances and different approaches to product onboarding? 

Yep. 

Annotated Onboarding

Annotated onboarding uses on-screen annotations to highlight important features and explain their functionalities. These annotations can be static or interactive, providing users with immediate insights into how different parts of the product work.

Here you are clearly signposting important buttons, modals, features and actions so you can be confident the user has seen and understood them. It’s a great way of ensuring that nothing gets missed. Often you’d add some explanatory copy, making it clear what this is and why they should care about it. 

Delivered through: Tool tips, guide notes.

Embedded Onboarding

With embedded onboarding you are adding more in-depth help resources into the in-product experience. This approach incorporates how-to content into the product’s interface, meaning you’re not pulling the user away from the product to learn more. 

You might embed videos, tutorials, or help sections that users can access without leaving the product. It’s designed to be intuitive and non-intrusive, allowing users to learn at their own pace.

Delivered through: Slide outs, modals, popups and banners.

Dedicated Onboarding

Finally, dedicated onboarding involves gathering data from the user at the start, and customizing their onboarding experience accordingly. This approach can be implemented through deep and complex personalization, right through to simple A/B paths. But what’s important is that you are capturing some data to help you understand the user’s motivation and then sending them towards the onboarding journey that is most relevant. 

This approach is useful if you have multiple use cases for your product, or a range of different user personas who are likely to interact with your product in different ways. It can also be useful if it’s hard to show-off the value of your product without having some data from the user. 

Asking questions at the start, and presenting a few fields to be filled in, can be a quick way of ensuring what the user sees next will actually mean something to them and demonstrate what the product can do for them. 

Delivered through: Signup flows, welcome pages, forms and fields, checklists, questions. 

What Types of Products Need Product Onboarding?

Alright, so let’s explore which products really need that extra helping hand to make sure users get the most out of them. Spoiler alert: pretty much all products can benefit from some form of product onboarding! But there are some that absolutely thrive with a bit of guided introduction.

SaaS (Software as a Service) products

SaaS products typically work under a subscription model, and in order for people to keep paying over the long term, these products need to be packed with features and always innovating. That can make them fairly complicated with a ton of functionality and capabilities for a new user to discover. 

So with large platform products that release new features regularly, clever product onboarding can make the difference between new users getting overwhelmed and completely lost, to realizing the value and breadth of tools and capabilities a SaaS product has to offer, right away.

Technical or niche products 

When products cater to very specific industries or tasks they often require a bit more knowledge to use effectively. Think of it like learning to play a musical instrument – you need some lessons to get started. 

Detailed understanding and training are key here, and a solid onboarding process ensures users can hit the ground running. It’s all about giving them the confidence to dive deep into the product and make it work for their unique needs. 

B2B products

Both of the above products could also be for a B2B (Business-to-Business) audience, as could other types of products. B2B products are typically integral to business operations, and any hiccups in their usage can have significant ripple effects. 

Imagine a factory assembly line – if one machine isn’t working properly, it can disrupt the entire process. B2B products can also rely on integrations with other software tools in an organization’s IT infrastructure, so proper product onboarding can be vital to ensure the product smoothly melds into their existing tool stack. 

With B2B users there are often whole teams to onboard and train, so effective in-product onboarding is a scalable way of getting lots of people up to speed with the least logistical barriers (like booking meetings and preparing materials).  After all, if a product is supposed to enhance business productivity, you don’t want to seem inefficient from the get-go!. 

Consumer apps

And let’s not forget consumer apps! In a world where users have countless apps vying for their attention, first impressions matter a lot. Onboarding for consumer apps is all about quickly engaging users and demonstrating value. 

It’s like hosting a fantastic housewarming party – you want your guests to feel welcome, show them around, and make sure they’re having a great time. A good onboarding process hooks users right from the start, showing them exactly how the app can make their lives better, whether it’s by helping them stay organized, entertained, or connected.

What Should Good Product Onboarding Achieve?

We’ve already covered why product onboarding is important, but what exactly will it do for your product and organization? How will you know you’ve implemented a successful product onboarding process? What needles should you expect to move?

Minimize Your Product’s Time-to-Value

This is the primary goal of product onboarding, and the metric that will bring on all the other benefits. You see, the idea of focusing on the initial journey your users have in your product is to get them to your ‘wow moments’ as soon as possible. 

Those wow moments (also known as aha moments or value moments) are the times when most users realize the value of your product. They are the points of interaction when you expect your users to declare ‘oooooh I get it!’. 

Whatever the particular feature or in-app action you’ve identified as the defining ‘wow moment’ in your product, that is where you need to get your user sooner rather than later. 

The time it takes to reach that moment – or the period of interaction (if it takes a little longer than a minute) – is referred to as Time to Value (TTV). Good product onboarding, in its quest to get people to “wow” in the shortest amount of time, is the primary way you can reduce that TTV and help your users achieve their first success with your product. 

Increase Your Conversion Rate 

The more successful your product onboarding is at reducing that time to value, the less chance you have of your new users getting bored and ditching on you. In this way, effective product onboarding is vital for converting users into paying customers. 

Imagine you’re a busy Marketing Manager and you’ve felt for a while like you could do with a better tool to help you plan your campaign calendar and share it with the team. But researching tools and trying different options will take a while, so you keep pushing it down the to-do list in favor of urgent campaign deadlines. 

Let’s say you’ve had a meeting canceled at the last minute and you now have half an hour to spare. You decide to have a very quick tool at a couple of tools. So you google ‘Best campaign calendar tools’ and click on the first result you see. There’s a free trial available so you look at the time and decide to sign up – you have 20 minutes left to have a look around. 

But you find yourself having to fill in multiple forms after that initial sign up form. Then you have to make a bunch of decisions as part of the flow – none of which you have the time to think about. Next you have to set up an integration with your Outlook calendar and next you have to invite team members. But you’re not ready to invite team members – you don’t know if this tool is any good yet! You haven’t even seen the proper interface yet. 

You look at the clock and you have three minutes until your next meeting. Time is up. You have no idea if the product will help you and you don’t have time to keep looking. So that’s it. That tool will not be getting your business. 

If that product onboarding had taken you straight to their main UI, showing the calendar view, populated with some example campaign data, nicely categorized and tagged, with checklists and ‘follow for updates’ CTAs, you’d have had a pretty solid sense of how useful that tool could be for you. You might have been very tempted to put your card details in then and there. Conversion made. 

Lay the Groundwork for Your Adoption Strategy

If product onboarding is the first date, ongoing adoption is the marriage. Once you’ve nailed that initial onboarding, you need to turn that enthusiasm for your product into sustained and habitual use. 

Adoption is where the long-term growth and sustainability will come from. Getting your users to really embed your product in their lives is how you will ensure retention, reduce churn and drive expansion revenue. 

But none of that will be possible without effective product onboarding. It’s the gateway to your long term future with each user. After all, if you users lose interest during their initial onboarding  then you won’t have the opportunity to hit them with all the clever tactics and techniques you’ve implemented as part of your adoption strategy. 

How to Measure the Success of Product Onboarding

Let’s take a look at the specific metrics you can use track the results of your product onboarding efforts. 

• Time to Value (TTV): As mentioned above, this is the time it takes for a new user to reach that all-important wow moment.

• User Activation Rate: The percentage of users who complete the key onboarding steps you’ve identified as being the most likely to lead to conversion or longer term retention.
  
• Product Usage: How frequently and extensively users engage with the product. There are various metrics you can use here like Daily Active Users. Find the complete list in our Complete List of Product KPIs. 
  
• Customer Retention: The rate at which users continue to use and pay for the product over time.
  
• Customer Satisfaction: Feedback from users about their onboarding experience, often gathered through surveys.

Who Is Responsible for Product Onboarding?

Since we’re talking about product onboarding here and not white-glove onboarding or automated email onboarding, the weight of responsibility falls on the Product Manager. It is typically your job to design the onboarding flow, running the discovery and research to find out what actions best demonstrate the value of your product to use user type. 

You’ll need to do extensive data diving and user research to identify the all-important wow moments. Next, you’ll design and user test an onboarding experience to get new users to those value moments as fast as possible. 

Inevitably there will be rounds of testing and iteration before you have something ready for launch, after which you’ll need to measure the results and tweak accordingly. 

But you’re not the only person on the team who will be involved in designing the product onboarding flow. You’ll need to work with UX Researchers, UX/UI and Product Designer, followed by your development team to get it built and live (obviously). 

8 Tips for Successful Product Onboarding

Say hello!

Don’t underestimate the importance of a welcome message! Not only will it set a friendly tone but it’s a great chance to make absolutely certain that your user knows what they’re in for. It’s an opportunity to set some expectations and clarify things like trial period, credit card requirements and the core reasons why your product is worth their time. 

Understand Your Users

Tailor the onboarding process to address the specific needs and pain points of your target audience. Find out what they want to achieve, what their goals are and what their motivation is for trying your product. Certainly, if one of the core purposes of product onboarding is helping the user to see the value in the shortest time, you need to establish what they actually value! 

Just be careful to get the balance right between getting useful insight into the user and bombarding them with taxing questions that might put them off.

Keep It Simple

Avoid overwhelming users with too much information at once. Yes your product might be complex and offer a lot of value, but don’t think you need to express it all right away. If there’s too much to digest at once, you risk the user coming away confused instead of convinced. 

It’s better to really convince new users of one really solid value, then try to convey it all at once and do none of it enough justice. So, focus on the core benefits of your product and break the process into manageable steps.

Use Contextual Tutorials 

If anything is particularly complex and you don’t think a tooltip or short explanatory paragraph will be enough, try incorporating video tutorials and longer form guides directly into the product. So, rather than linking out to a help center article or a blog on your website, put these learning materials within slideouts or popup modals and allow your users learning without leaving the product. 

This means the user can read the training material and put that learning into practice right away. They can keep referring to the help article while they’re still in the product experience. 

Make it Motivating

Here at ProdPad, we keep our onboarding interesting by throwing in some gamification. When you start a ProdPad free trial you’ll find a list of tasks, each of which is worth additional days on your trial. The more you do, the longer you get to try ProdPad for free. 

We’ve had great success with this approach, rewarding our users for their efforts to set up their product roadmaps, their product vision, import their customer feedback and more. To find out more about the results of this experiment, have a look here. Otherwise, why not try it for yourself! 

Show Progress

It’s a good idea to show your users the progress they’re making through your onboarding journey. This is especially valuable if you’ve managed to craft a short, sharp onboarding flow that won’t take long to work through. You should advertise that benefit with a progress bar that shows that they’re already progressing quickly through the process. 

Remove friction

At every stage of your onboarding flow look for friction points. Keep stripping it back and removing any unnecessary steps to decrease the points at which a user might drop off. Once you’ve streamlined the flow by removing friction points, you stand the best chance of increasing the overall completion rate of your product onboarding journey. 

Collect feedback

Do not be tempted to ship your first iteration of a product onboarding flow and then walk away, off to the next product initiative. Product onboarding is about moving some very specific needles and impacting exact metrics. So you need to measure the results by looking at your usage data and conversion rates, but you should also collect feedback from your customers and find out what they thought of the experience.