Even if other businesses could get away with a mediocre customer onboarding strategy, a SaaS business cannot. The reason is obvious: SaaS products are getting increasingly complicated and their unique value proposition is getting more and more subtle to identify.
So rather than leave your new users to have their way with your SaaS product and discover its value by chance, why not take a more proactive approach and help them with it?
SaaS user onboarding is designed to help new SaaS users appreciate the full potential of a SaaS product. It’s a more rigorous process compared to other types of businesses but it’s not necessarily more complicated. You can automate most of it using the right tools. Let’s see what SaaS user onboarding is and how to do it right.
What is SaaS user onboarding?
User onboarding is the process of guiding new customers through a SaaS product to help them understand its value and achieve their goals efficiently. The aim is to make them proficient in your product so they could use its full potential and enjoy using it.
User onboarding includes steps like welcome emails, interactive tutorials, tooltips, and AI-driven assistance to ensure users quickly adapt and engage with the platform.
Why is onboarding important for B2B SaaS?
A strong onboarding process directly impacts user success, making it essential for B2B SaaS growth.
- Reduces Churn: a smooth onboarding experience helps users see value early, preventing drop-offs.
- Boosts Adoption: clear guidance ensures users explore and utilize key features effectively.
- Improves Retention & LTV: engaged customers are more likely to stay long-term and upgrade.
- Enhances Customer Satisfaction: personalized onboarding fosters a positive user experience.
- Reduces Support Load: proactive education minimizes the need for extensive customer support.
Components of an Effective Onboarding Process
An effective onboarding is a mix of the following components:
Personalized Onboarding Journeys
Personalization is not just about adding users’ first names in the subject line or the greeting. It requires understanding individual user needs, goals, and behavior and tailoring the onboarding experience to them in sync.
A generalized user onboarding process is a recipe for disaster — the users feel disconnected and overwhelmed with irrelevant product emails and notifications. Most of these emails even find a permanent home in the user’s spam box!
What appeals to them, however, is a personalized onboarding ritual. The one where they feel like the only one (hero of the story!) in the brand’s mind. They respond to emails considering their intention behind signing up for the product.
Behavior-Based Emails
Behavior-based emails take user segmentation and personalization to the next level. They get triggered when the user takes (or does not take) an action in the product. Based on the triggered action event, an email lands in the user’s inbox, prompting them to take the next step.
The AI-enabled behavior-tracking tools have simplified identifying impactful behavior events and sending triggered emails at the right time. The result is that triggered emails bring 10x more revenue per email than business-as-usual ones.
With behavior-based emails, you also avoid being spammy or annoying with ill-timed emails.
Interactive Tutorials and Product Tours
Around 89% of potential customers may look for alternatives if the onboarding process for a product feels too complicated. Interactive tutorials and product tours help solve this by making onboarding simple. They engage the users when they sign up and guide them through the product at every step.
These tools use small tips, hints, or pop-ups to guide users through the product step-by-step. This helps them understand key features, keeps them interested, and makes it easier to get started without feeling overwhelmed.
By applying key design principles, such as progressive disclosure and cognitive load reduction, interactive tutorials can effectively guide users without overwhelming them.
Clear Value Proposition Communication
Value proposition should be at the forefront of your onboarding process. It’s because until the users perceive the value of your product or realize what’s in it for them, they won’t stay. So, put your product USP in the limelight and give users a live experience of their problem’s solution.
Communicating a clear USP does two things. It sets realistic expectations for your product in the users’ minds from the beginning. And it helps you identify and address any misconceptions users might have about your product.
Effective Welcome Email Series
Welcome emails have an average open rate of 50%. These emails give brands a golden chance to introduce their product, set clear expectations, and provide resources to kickstart user onboarding.
Welcome emails also set the stage for your future interactions with the user. But first things first, thank them for signing up (maybe include a reward/coupon), and show them how grateful you are to be connected to them.
Then, you prepare them for what’s next in future emails and point to relevant product tutorials based on their interest in your tool.
Product-Led Onboarding Strategies
Product-led onboarding allows users to get firsthand experience with the product without sales intervention. It gives them the independence to explore the product on their own via product tutorials, walkthroughs, trials, freemium models, and knowledge base.
Here, humans aren’t involved in product discovery or even onboarding. The users go through the resources independently and use self-service to clarify any doubts.
You just have to ensure the tutorials, walkthrough videos, and support materials are self-sufficient to address user concerns. The in-product experience should be convincing enough to prompt them to purchase.
AI agents streamline SaaS customer onboarding by automating personalized guidance, answering queries instantly, and providing proactive support. They analyze user behavior to offer tailored tutorials, optimize onboarding flows, and predict potential roadblocks. By automating repetitive tasks and engaging users in real time, AI ensures a smooth, efficient, and engaging onboarding experience.
Onboarding KPIs
You cannot rely on a specific onboarding tactic, assuming it would work every time. Long-term success lies in tracking onboarding KPIs. The ones like user interactions, feedback, and behavior give you enough data to guide your future strategies.
Here are some KPIs to help you evaluate your onboarding efforts.
Daily and Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU): Measures the number of unique users engaging with your product daily or monthly. A high DAU/MAU ratio indicates strong user retention and frequent product use.
Retention Rate: The percentage of users who continue using your product over a specific period. A high retention rate suggests long-term user satisfaction and product stickiness.
Churn Rate: The percentage of users who stop using your product within a given time frame. A lower churn rate means better customer satisfaction and stronger user loyalty.
Activation Rate: The percentage of users who complete key actions shortly after signing up. A high activation rate indicates an effective onboarding process and early product value realization.
Engagement Rate: Measures how actively users interact with your product, such as session duration, feature usage, or interactions. A high engagement rate suggests strong product relevance and user involvement.
Free Trial Conversion Rate: The percentage of trial users who upgrade to a paid plan. A high conversion rate signals that users see sufficient value in your product during the trial period.
Onboarding Completion Rate: The percentage of users who successfully finish the onboarding process. A higher rate means your onboarding is effective in guiding users toward product adoption.
Time to Value (Aha Moment): The time it takes for users to realize the core value of your product. A shorter time to value helps improve user retention and satisfaction.
Feature Adoption Rate: The percentage of users actively using a specific feature after its release. A high rate indicates that the feature meets user needs and is well-integrated into their workflows.
Onboarding Support Tickets Per Day: The number of customer support inquiries related to onboarding. A high volume may suggest issues with the onboarding process, requiring better guidance or automation.
Best Practices for B2B SaaS Onboarding
B2B SaaS onboarding is a whole experience for users—let’s see how to ramp that up!
Initiating Onboarding Before the Sale
Onboarding starts way before a user books a demo for your product or becomes a customer. It kicks in right when they land on your website. They look at your product’s home page and take in the experience and how you showcase your product benefits.
If you can give them a front-row seat to the experience they’d be having with your product, that’s even better. Onboarding doesn’t have to go by the rules. You can first engage the users in your product, let them play around with it, and prompt them to sign up once hooked. This way, you get them invested in your product even before they’ve signed up.
HubSpot follows a similar process with its Free CRM software. It provides its users with a 100% free CRM tool with access to all its tools and no expiration date. There’s just one-click signup in the way, and you’re good to create a new project! The user doesn’t have to jump into a tiresome series of questions immediately.
The idea behind onboarding before a sale is to simplify the process to the extent that users cannot back off after having a taste of your product.
Start with a third-party login (Google/Facebook/Apple) and let them in. Then, you give the users the best of your product features to play with; show them what they can do with a free trial. Once invested, ask them more relevant questions to understand their preferences. When you identify the moment they want more from your product, you can point them to premium features and ask for other details.
Personalizing the Onboarding Experience
Just like your product is not a “one-size-fits-all” solution, the onboarding experience shouldn’t be one. Every user has a slightly different reason for using your product, depending on the use cases you’re catering to.
You cannot send onboarding emails with product tours for adding a company in HubSpot CRM to a user who signs up for its live chat software. It’s completely irrelevant and disconnects you from the user.
That’s where personalization fits right in — the onboarding emails, product walkthroughs, and tutorials talk about the use case they signed up for. So they don’t have to dive through the ocean of materials to reach their destination.
Look at how Notion does it. It customizes its onboarding based on the reason a user signed up.
Notion directly asks the users about their plans with the tool. Like how they want to use it, what the role is, who will use the tool, the features you need, and the name of your workspace. Based on your answers, it sets up a personalized workspace for you with all the templates and tools ready to use.
How do you do it? Just follow a 3-step process:
- Identify the user’s primary goal: What is the main job they want to do with your product?
- Map out a minimum onboarding path: what steps must they follow to get to a specific feature?
- Personalize the onboarding based on the main goal: how can the users use a feature to complete the job identified in the #1 step?
In the third step, you either send onboarding mail to the user with tips on using the feature or add in-app checklists and pop-ups to guide them through the feature.
Use Behavior-Triggered Communication
You’ve onboarded new users. They played a bit with your product, watched some tutorials, and then…! What’s next? Have they signed up yet? No. Are they even considering it? You won’t know because they’ve been inactive for a while now.
What if they were about to check out a feature and something came up? Until you nudge them, they won’t remember. That’s where behavior-triggered communication saves the day. These emails have an open rate of 45.38% and a click-through rate of 5.02%, more than newsletters.
When you record the exact events where a user starts or pauses an action, it triggers an automated email that prompts the user to complete the action.
Common behavioral events that trigger an email include:
- a welcome email when the user signs up
- a product tutorial to explain the feature and its usage when the user spends a long time exploring it on your website
- a recommendation email with a tip to enhance the new project user-created
- a gentle nudge to check out the new features of the application when the user is inactive
- a trial expiry email to prompt them to buy a paid plan so they don’t lose their progress.
Wistia’s Soapbox has a way of pulling users back in just after they’ve taken some action and logged out of the product. It sends usage-based onboarding emails to its users.
All you need is to infuse behavior-based prompts in your otherwise straight onboarding process, adding an extra push when needed.
Gamification in User Onboarding
Gamification in onboarding brings out the hidden competitor in your users. As Christiaan Huynen, CEO and Founder of DesignBro, says, “Gamifying increases the appeal of learning, interaction, and retention. This is because our brains are wired to avoid pain and seek pleasure, and playing a game is always a fun thing to do.”
Making gamification a part of your in-app experience prompts users to get through the onboarding process quickly. They see a challenge, an opportunity for achievement and success, and a desire to compete.
The whole experience gets their creative juices flowing, and they’re so hooked by the end that a rematch is in order! It also motivates them to reuse the product and play some more.
Here are some gamification elements you can use in your onboarding.
- Badges and rewards — when users complete a feature tutorial or create their project, they earn a badge/reward.
- Progress bars — to let users know the stage they’re at during onboarding and to show the progress made toward achieving a particular milestone in the project.
- Leaderboards — to motivate users with an overview of their achievements so far
- Quizzes and challenges — allowing users to try out a feature on their own and celebrate their win once they do it right.
- Redeemable Points — for completing specific onboarding steps, users get some points that they can use to redeem add-ons.
CRED offers users a gamified way to explore the product and assess their knowledge. It hosts quizzes based on multiple topics and the product itself.
When the users complete the quiz, they win rewards — a reward from the brand if it’s a brand-based quiz. A leaderboard for the users shows their rank based on the rewards they win.
Balance Product-Led and Sales-Led Strategies
Product-led onboarding focuses on using the product as the leading actor. There’s no human intervention in onboarding, from signing up to getting product tours or purchasing. Everything is a self-service utility because the users follow in-app pop-ups and instructions to complete their onboarding. They can even reach their “aha moment” without human interactions.
For example, Airtable gives users a guided tour of how to build an app. The users can follow the instructions on the screen to build the app.
However, sales-led onboarding requires humans to intervene and move the users down their onboarding journey. At every onboarding step, a human supports the user through the process. Whether it’s booking a call for a demo, sending onboarding emails, nudging for inactivity, or following up to close the deal.
For example, ServiceNow has a “Get Started” button on every product page, which brings the user to the form to connect with a sales expert.
But the success doesn’t lie in comparing product-led and sales-led onboarding. It should be a mixture of both strategies—pickup elements from both methods to create a custom onboarding strategy for your product.
You need product tutorials, demo videos, and self-service centers to prompt independent users. But you also need a support team to follow up with the user to ensure their concerns are addressed. If there’s a complex feature with higher-end pricing than others, a sales expert can resolve user queries and help them move down in their buying journey.
Finally: Continuous improvement and iteration
User onboarding isn’t a one-and-done process—it’s an ongoing cycle of learning, testing, and refining. As your product evolves, so should your onboarding strategy. With Encharge.io, you can track key metrics like activation rates and feature adoption while automating personalized onboarding flows based on user behavior.
Use behavior-driven emails and in-app messages to nudge users at the right moments and A/B test different onboarding sequences to see what works best. Most importantly, listen to your users—Encharge.io’s segmentation and automation tools help fine-tune the experience based on real-time engagement. The more you iterate, the better your onboarding becomes, which eventually leads to higher engagement, lower churn, and long-term customer success.
