Done right, SaaS onboarding reduces your churn, improves your conversion rates, and drives up both your LTV and potential upgrade revenue – not just immediately, but in the future as well.
But onboarding isn’t just about getting a sale. It’s about how to get the right people using the right things, as I’ve seen time and time again at Ramp Ventures and other SaaS companies I’ve worked with.
If you’re serious about improving your SaaS company’s performance, you need to get your onboarding right. And if you want to fix your onboarding, you need to start following Aaron Krall, founder of the SaaS Growth Hacks group on Facebook, as well as a founder of SaaS Accelerator, a 12-month coaching course for SaaS companies.
I had the chance to sit down and chat with Aaron recently, and in this article, I’m sharing some of the best takeaways that came out of our conversation on all things SaaS, onboarding, growth, getting off the ground and making your customers better understand their product.
How to Build a Proper SaaS Onboarding Process
If you’re new to SaaS onboarding, where do you start? According to Aaron, the first step is segmentation: “Who is using the tool? Why are they using your tool versus other tools? And what is it that they’re trying to accomplish with the tool? Once we identify that, then we can create onboarding sequences.”
Aaron continues, “In an ideal world, you’d have unlimited onboarding sequences for every unique individual. You can’t do that at scale, but you can figure out what are your top customer profiles, and what do they want to accomplish with your tool. And segment them out at the beginning of the onboarding process, so each individual segment can be led to the right moment in the tool where they see value, and have the right experience.”
At Mailshake, for example, we have users who are salespeople, marketers, PR professionals and recruiters. If I sent a recruiter sales stuff as part of their onboarding sequence, they’d would be confused. I’d leave them thinking, “What the heck are you talking about? I don’t care. I’m in the wrong software. I should cancel.”
Once you’ve segmented your onboarding sequences, Aaron recommends identifying key points of value. He explains, “After we do segmentation, we come up with what we call the first value hypothesis, which is ‘What is it that we think the user needs to accomplish in the tool to get to their moment of first value?’ Once we come up with a hypothesis, we can test it and then design our entire onboarding process around getting each specific segment to that moment of first value.”
Once that moment of first value is reached, Aaron enters users into more of a traditional sales sequence. “We have something called the sales sequence, which only goes out to customers who have achieved that moment of first value (or who are close to it). This is where we say, ‘Hey, hopefully you’ve enjoyed the tool. Here are all the things that you’re gonna be able to do once you sign up.’ And then we have a series of emails that go out that are just designed to get them to take the next step and upgrade, regardless of when the trial ends.”
Aaron also sees these sequences as an important opportunity for testing: “All of these sequences work together to get that customer to that moment. And if they don’t get to that moment, we want to figure out why. What happened?”
This testing is even more important if you’re a new company that hasn’t really honed in on its target customers yet. Back when we first started Mailshake, I didn’t know who our customers were. I had a hunch. The hunch was wrong. The way I fixed this was by giving every single person that came through the door the option to do a call.
Now, in no way was this scalable. In fact, it wasn’t intended to be scalable. But after about 20 calls, I started to develop a baseline understanding. And after about 100 calls, I finally felt like I knew who our customers are. It was hard work, but it was necessary for me to figure it out. If you’re newer, go talk to your customers. It isn’t just your onboarding sequences that are going to benefit.
Onboarding Tips by SaaS Type
In the same way you should be targeting your onboarding sequences to your customers, you need to take your SaaS company type into consideration. Here are a few tips Aaron shared relating to onboarding for specific SaaS business models:
Free Trials
When you’re dealing with free trials, you have a really low friction point. Anybody can sign up. So, according to Aaron, “With the free trial, because it’s low friction, you want to say, ‘Here’s the problem we solve’ and then get them into the tool. And then, during that free trial period – however long that trial period is – you need to help them have success with the tool.”
Aaron suggests that one of the ways you do this is by building up the pain users are experiencing and getting them motivated to solve their specific problems. As he explains, “It’s so easy to just sign up for something for free and then if you don’t figure it out in 10 seconds, you just move on, right? So, because they’re not invested, we have to build the value of the product and then also hit on the pain points. And that’s where the onboarding emails come in.”
It’s basically, in my experience, getting users to the moment of first value – all without involving sales.
Freemium Models
Aaron hit it home here: “One of the biggest mistakes I see is people hiding their best features in the high, top-tier plans. So, in the freemium model, you only get like one or two things, so you don’t understand the real value in the product.”
A better approach, in his experience, is to give them your best stuff to make sure they get hooked, but limit it in some way. “Once they get hooked, they’ll upgrade,” he says. “During that time, the onboarding process is more about educating them on what the tool can be used for to get them to use it more and upgrade.”
Paid Up Front
Finally, for SaaS companies that require fees paid up front, Aaron believes that you really need to build value upfront in the tool. “You need to really blow people away, because no one’s going to pull out their credit card and sign up for something unless they really feel like it’s going to solve their problems,” he says.
There are also steps you can take to reduce friction at this point. For example, Aaron might explain that, “We’re going to charge you some money up front, but that’s because we want to deliver the best support we can. If for some reason you don’t love it in the first 30 days, just let us know. We’ll just ask you why you canceled, or why it wasn’t a good fit.”
In his experience, that reduces a lot of friction and objections. “Then, when they get in, the idea is that, because they paid up front, they’re much more motivated to get the tool to work,” he explains. Your onboarding sequence can help here, but identifying success triggers within the app helps as well.
Aaron gives a possible example for Mailshake: “If they put in their credit card and they haven’t sent out emails yet, you can be like, ‘Hey Sue, just curious. I see you’ve signed up, but haven’t tried Mailshake out yet. What’s going on?’ Then you can put more resources into getting them to stick around. It’s a lot more front-loaded for those who pay up front first. You can be a little more one-on-one at that point.”
SaaS Onboarding Mistakes
Optimizing your SaaS onboarding process isn’t just about being able to follow best practices. It’s also about being aware of common mistakes in order to avoid them in the first place.
Mistake #1: Using Drip vs Triggered Onboarding Sequences
According to Aaron one of the first biggest mistakes he sees people making is building in a drip onboarding process for their email instead of a trigger-based onboarding process. “When you do that, you’re training your users to not open your emails, because the emails that they’re getting are not relevant to where they’re at in the signup process,” he says.
Aaron gives an example (and I’ll admit that I’ve made this mistake plenty of times before): “If you’ve already connected your Google account to whatever tool, and you get an email that says, ‘Hey, have you connected your Google account yet?’ That’s frustrating. You should know that I’ve connected my Google account. You own the software, right?”
Mistake #2: Including Too Many CTAs in Each Message
Aaron also hones in on clarity. He sees far too many emails going out that have multiple calls to action, instead of just one. “Just strip it down to the one thing that you want your customers to do,” he advises. “Usually, during the onboarding process, it’s the next necessary action that you need to get your customers to take to have success with the product.”
I get the temptation to pack as much value as possible into each message. As a founder, and as a marketer, you want to give everybody a lot of value. For example, if I want to lose weight, somebody might advise me, “Okay, you’ve got to go to the gym every day. You’ve got to start eating healthy. I want you to cut out carbs and stop drinking. I want you to also go to sleep every night at 10:00.”
Contrast that with something like, “Hey, look, forget everything you know about weight loss. I just want you to cut out rice and carbs at your last meal of the day. You do that for a month, and then talk to me again.”
There’s this misconception that we only have users’ attention for 10 seconds, so we should give them as much as we can. But it’s overwhelming. Instead, according to Aaron, “Let’s get them to do one thing. Have them get a quick win, and let them feel like they’re making progress. And then, they’ll build momentum, and then they’ll start doing all the hard stuff. Once they get momentum and start to see quick wins, it’s so much easier for them to have success with the product.”
Mistake #3: Keep the Focus Off Your Features
Finally, Aaron cautions against pummeling users with news about new features. “When it comes down to it, we’re not selling a software,” he emphasizes. “We’re selling a solution to a problem. It just happens to be in software.” As a result, he suggests that, “the emails that go out shouldn’t be focused on the cool feature that you developed or what features are coming out. It should all be focused around what is the benefit that they’re going to get once they accomplish a specific action.”
I couldn’t agree more. We actually have a rule we follow at Mailshake where we don’t send new featured emails. We put the announcements in the app where users can read them, and we’ll lace information about new features throughout our marketing content. But it won’t be a new feature email unless it’s a new product or unless we know everyone’s asking about it. Even then, they’ll only go to customers, and they’ll start with, “Hey, you’ve been begging for the ability to do this so you can get more sales.”
Instead of going all-in on features, we focus on education. We did this recently with a new company we just bought called Right Inbox. Before we bought it, the onboarding sequence was drip-based and built around features. Now, we focus on providing helpful information like, “Here’s how you spend less time on email” or “Using the Pomodoro technique to master email.” We still lace features in by mentioning, “Oh, by the way, here’s a feature that helps you do that,” but because of the way we changed the sequence, we saw a 23% increase in conversion rates.
Aaron also recommends bringing old-school sales practices into SaaS onboarding to minimize this issue, particularly in the case of the “Your free trial is ending email.” He shares, “No salesperson in their right mind would say to somebody, ‘Hey, dude. You’ve only got one day left to buy,” if they’ve never showed any interest in the product. You’d never sell somebody using that kind of pressure over the phone.”
Instead, Aaron and I agree that a better approach is to think about your email sequence as if you were having a conversation with somebody over the phone. What would you say to somebody who’s interested, versus someone who’s uninterested, but who you want to get interested? That, to me, is the secret to framing your SaaS onboarding emails.
Did any of Aaron’s tips surprise you? Are you planning to make changes based on his suggestions? Leave me a note below sharing your thoughts:
Image: Pixabay
I build and grow SaaS companies.
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