There’s something giddy about the first time you try something new.
For your new users, you’ve got about 7 seconds to make a great first impression. That’s literally a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment defined by your user experience. In that short window you have to answer, “Was this purchase worth it?”
How you treat your users in those first moments matters. This is why product onboarding, or the process of guiding your users to find value in your product, is so important. The average time to value takes months—56.2 days, according to our research—but it doesn’t have to take that long. Done right, a connected, multi-channel messaging approach can accelerate user activation, improve retention, and reduce churn.
A strong onboarding experience sets the tone for the rest of a user’s relationship with you. In this post, we’ll talk through what great product onboarding flows look like plus best practices and tools to make this critical time period valuable for you and your users.
Product onboarding is the high-level process of guiding new users to value within a product. This can be free users or a separate flow for customer onboarding.
This starts from the moment someone signs up for your product or service. This is about setting up the systems and workflows that teach users how to use the product, of course, but more importantly, how to use it in a way that achieves their goals and meets their jobs-to-be-done.
We often think of product onboarding as a “product tour” or a step-by-step guide. That’s one aspect of product onboarding, but it’s really only the beginning of the experience that includes sales demos, FAQs, customer support chats, formal training courses, and walkthroughs.
“Product onboarding” isn’t limited to the product. You’re much more likely to be successful using a multi-channel onboarding approach that looks like this:
We’ll talk more about how to make this work for your product below.
If this sounds a lot like user onboarding…that’s because it’s a very similar process. They’re often used interchangeably, but they’re slightly different.
Product onboarding exists at the systems level—the 30,000-foot view of your product and how you introduce it to your entire user base. These are the systems that every new user sees, regardless of their role or permissions. User onboarding works alongside product onboarding to take a more personalized approach based on specific user needs.
Basically, user onboarding focuses on the individual, while product onboarding focuses on the product as a whole. Both work together to create a great onboarding experience.
Trying to build a successful business with high churn is like trying to fill a bucket of water riddled with holes. You end up frantically pouring more water into it, only to see most of that hard work leak out.
Product onboarding is one of the ways you can patch the holes in the leaky bucket of your customer acquisition by driving engagement and showing value right away. Improving user retention by 15% in the first week compounds into nearly twice the number of retained users after 10 weeks. That’s a big deal in terms of revenue.
“Many teams make the mistake of waiting until the actual moment of attrition to deal with their churn problem instead of just being proactive. Retention efforts should begin at the moment of customer acquisition, not when customer satisfaction begins to wane,” writes Katryna Balboni.
Product onboarding sets up the systems in place to effectively welcome new users and turn them into active users. This helps users find their time to value much more quickly—that “aha” moment that shows them exactly why they signed up in the first place. 25% of users abandon an app after just one use if they don't immediately understand its value. Without that clear and compelling aha moment, users are less likely to stick around. This engagement keeps users around for longer and makes it easier on you operationally by reducing support and customer acquisition costs (CAC).
Product onboarding isn’t just about a guided walkthrough. Approach onboarding as if it’s a feature in your product where the job-to-be-done is to learn. When trying to produce any kind of action, think of Nir Eyal’s Hooked model:
Product onboarding is all about the triggers you use that encourage a user to find their aha moment. This requires two things: Motivation and ability. You can assume your newest users have high motivation already, because they’ve just signed up for your product. But what they don’t have is the ability to turn your product into value yet. That’s what you need to set up through a multi-channel onboarding flow. This includes:
The first hurdle your new users have to get through is your signup process. Just because they said yes and made it through your checkout flow doesn’t mean they’ll keep going. Your goal here should be to get them into the product as quickly as possible.
That means simplifying the signup process as much as possible with single sign-on (SSO) and forms that ask for just a few pieces of information.
This example from workspace software Dock is super simple. You can either use SSO or input your email to get started. A little social proof helps get users over the line for their free trial.
Once they’re logged in, use your welcome screen as a place to gather more information about them and what they need. (That’s where the user onboarding piece kicks in.) Use onboarding checklists, tooltips, and hotspots to guide users within the product as they complete their initial setup tasks.
That doesn’t mean show them every single awesome feature. You don’t want to drag users on long product tours. Three-step tours have a 72% completion rate, while seven-step tours drop to 16%, according to Chameleon.io. Instead, go for step-by-step interactive walkthroughs and allow exit points for them to explore on their own.
This example from IBM illustrates how product onboarding and user onboarding go hand-in-hand. This choose-your-own adventure style welcome flow allows users to focus on exactly what they’re looking for right away.
What’s tricky about getting onboarding right is that every user is a little different. Some may be coming to you familiar with your product but with a different email address; others may have no idea what it is your product even does. Track how users engage with your onboarding journey over time, including using event tracking and session recordings to spot friction points.
As part of your onboarding flow, implement in-app surveys to ask users about their onboarding experience. Don’t go about collecting user feedback right away—let your product simmer for a little bit with your new users. Let them finish the free trial and complete key milestones before asking for user feedback. NPS is a great indicator, but at this stage, make it more specific, like this Shake Shack example.
Remember, the goal of your onboarding program isn’t just new user activation or completing the flow, but establishing a long-term relationship with you. Be patient when receiving and taking action on customer feedback. When you make changes to your product onboarding, look at your customer retention, churn, and customer satisfaction numbers over time.
Onboarding doesn’t stop when users leave your app—out-of-product messaging keeps them engaged and moving toward activation. Your onboarding flow should not just include what is available in your app, but the overall experience that a new user has with you, from how they engage with the customer success team or billing to the sales/support handoff. In fact, 78% of users report a better overall experience when interactions are consistent across email and in-app channels.
That means creating an onboarding team: Work with marketing teams, sales teams, and support teams to create a multi-channel onboarding experience. Combine in-app guidance with emails, push notifications, and SMS to re-engage users who:
OPM is most effective when personalized—leverage product usage data to send messages that feel timely and relevant.
What does this look like in practice? The product onboarding process works best when you map out a clear onboarding journey for your users to follow. But it’s not “look at this! And this! And now this!” Make it as easy as possible for them to learn about your product. Here’s how:
There’s a reason “know your audience” is a fundamental piece of product management and product marketing. But so many teams skip this step or make assumptions about what a user needs or wants based on their personal understanding of the product. Trust me: You’re too close to the product to be able to know what a user actually needs. (And “well, we spent all this time creating X feature so…” is not a valid reason for it to be included in your onboarding flow.)
You need to put yourself in the mindset of a user who:
That’s the inertia you’re up against with an onboarding flow.
Clayton Christensen’s JTBD, or jobs-to-be-done framework, is one way to understand how to translate user needs into the features and lessons to serve up during the onboarding flow. Finding what it is they want to achieve by using your product can help you get them there that much more quickly.
Next, map out exactly what steps your customers need to take in order to fully understand your product and use it to achieve their goals. You can do this in two ways:
Use this to define what actions indicate user activation and therefore need to be prioritized in your onboarding flow. Things like starting a new project, completing their billing setup, inviting the rest of their team, or using a key feature.
Put that front and center for new users so they can work through tasks, either in a guided flow or in a checklist, like this example from running app Strava.
Even if you’ve built the best UX in the world, learning something new takes time. Encourage your new users to keep going by adding progress bars and milestone celebrations.
Gamification doesn’t have to feel like an actual video game.This MailChimp example could not be simpler—just a few minimalist dots to indicate onboarding progress—but it gets the job done.
“People are naturally biased to complete tasks when they feel like they've already made some progress. You can use this bias to motivate users to complete your onboarding—progress bars or indicators remind users you've given them a task that they've yet to finish,” writes Jackson Noel.
While we don’t typically think of product onboarding as personalized (that’s part of the user onboarding process for you), you can go beyond a one-size-fits all by adding a layer of automation. Instead of a static welcome flow, use a dynamic onboarding flow that adapts to user behavior. This example from Headspace uses automation to tailor onboarding flows based on who the user is and what they need.
Or, rely on behavioral triggers for in-app tooltips or emails to nudge your users along. “You could show a tooltip when a user hovers over or interacts with a new feature. Alternatively, opt for contextual pop-ups to tackle situations like users who might appear stuck, such as idling on a page for too long,” writes Jared DeLuca. “Use them sparingly though, to avoid overwhelming users or disrupting their flow.”
AI-powered chatbots can also assist with FAQs and troubleshooting to educate users. That way, you get the benefit of an always-on support team without forcing them to stay up all hours of the night or stay the weekend to catch a user as they complete an onboarding task.
Onboarding isn’t over after the first login. If you want to turn new users into active users into new customers, you have to continue to educate users well after the first time they see your UX.
Besides, your product team is always working on new features and UX. Help your users keep up by adding ongoing feature education to your product flows. Use in-app announcements for new features and create mini-walkthroughs to guide users as part of your product launches.
Showing, rather than telling, is a powerful way to encourage more feature adoption (and you might even get a solid upsell by showing off premium features.)
Managing product onboarding takes a variety of tools for your tech stack. A few of our favorites include:
Your users don’t hang out in your app all day. Even your superfans aren’t living and breathing your code the way you do. You need to prove to your new users that signing up for your product was a good idea. Building habits of long-lasting user engagement means meeting them where they are in the customer journey—whether they’re in the app or not—with the right message at the right time.
Appcues connects in-app, email, and push onboarding flows so you can create user journeys that take a holistic approach. The more you can improve your product onboarding experience, the better you can battle churn, drive product adoption, and build a lasting relationship with your users. See how Appcues can help.
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