Top 5 Essential Things To Create Effective User Onboarding

Let's face it. 

No matter how disruptive your product is, it is as good as its target users perceive it to be. 

This makes effective communication of the value of your product so critical in its long-term success. 

Fail to do so and your product is designed to fall flat in the market even before you notice. 

This is exactly where an impactful user onboarding comes in.

An immersive user onboarding creates the first opportunity for your brand to build a sustainable relationship with your audience. It helps your users experience its value proposition.  

The problem?

Designing an impactful user onboarding is tricky. But you have help. 

In this post, we demystify the five core factors that can alleviate your user onboarding experience in no time. 

Top 5 Hacks that can supercharge your user onboarding in 2022

The key to unlocking an optimal user onboarding lies in the user experience. 

No wonder why more and more brands are inclining towards experience-focused product development and marketing. It not only lowers down churn rate but improves the customer lifetime value. 

A recent research by Salesforce hints that almost 80% of global customers consider brand experience as a critical factor in their buying process. 

That is a significant number. 

The following section demystifies the five core building blocks that make up a cohesive user onboarding experience. 

1) Make it all about your user

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Every customer is different and so are their needs. This makes understanding your ideal customer's world critical to delivering them an impactful onboarding experience. 

It not only helps you to understand how to design the message flow but the areas that are most relevant to that particular customer. Now there are two critical strategies that you can apply here. If you are interested in getting a comprehensive idea, check this detailed guide here. 

1. Personalize your user experience

If there is one area where you can start using all your gathered user data, start with personalizing user experiences. There are many ways to do so. 

From welcome messages to self-help guides everything shall be based on the audience profile. However, it all falls back to how relevant the content is for your users. 

2. Customize your user onboarding 

Customization is the more advanced strategy when it comes to curating persona-based onboarding experiences. 

Here you not only use your user profiles but engage with the user to co-create a product experience customized for them. You can do so in many ways. 

From deploying onboarding questionnaires to creating trigger-based recommendations everything is curated based on some user action. 

2) Engage your users from point zero

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Want to know the secret of addictive products? 

It is their engagement levels. 

If you want to hook your users to your product, you need to engage them enough to hold their attention. Without having a conversation with your users, it is difficult to do so. 

Here are two methods to do so. But it is not limited to the following. There are more user engagement strategies that you can test. 

a) Involve action

Interactive content is the foundational pillar of user engagement for an impactful onboarding. 

This means you need to create those two-way conversational loops. Knowing your users wouldn't do enough. You need to allow them to choose for themselves. 

There are so many ways to do so. From meta onboarding, progress bars, and checklists to tooltips and hotspots you can deploy one or a combination of interactive content. 

But at the core, the efficacy of your interactive content is measured via how strong its CTA (call to action) is. Your main goal here is to nudge your user to complete at least one task or the core tasks for a seamless experience with your product. 

b) Create emotional hooks 

One key ingredient of creating addictive products is gamification. 

This not only makes the product usage fun but creates an emotional link between your user and the product. 

This makes creating those 'AHA' moments so critical. This can give them a sense of accomplishment. 

Popups like 'that was mastery' and 'seems like you have been practicing' can boost user interaction significantly. 

3) Create value-driven experience 

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Your first impression is the last.

Probably the last chance before your users decide to abandon your product forever. This makes creating a value-based onboarding experience critical for overall success. 

But that is not all. Your onboarding design should have a multi-level value ladder system. Here are a few ways to do so. 

a) Make it hassle-free

One of the core foundations of creating viral products lies in the ease of product usage. The lesser the friction, the higher the adoption rate. 

One key metric to validate product efficiency is by measuring the value for time. 

• How much time does your user need to see value in your product? 
• Is it immediate? 
• Does it take more than a few seconds? 

The faster your product can deliver value to your customers, the higher will be your onboarding experience quality. 

b) Make it easy 

It might look obvious on the surface but designing simple interfaces is one of the toughest jobs in product development. 

There are so many factors that interplay to give a superlative onboarding experience. 

To start with, map the language of your target users and align your content style to theirs. 

Ensure you use direct and concise sentences to communicate. But that does not mean your language has to be dry and robotic. 

Use humor and personality consistently. It will only alleviate your user engagement. Make sure to reduce any unnecessary steps in task completion. 

The lower the learning curve, the more user-friendly the product will be. 

4) Walk that extra mile to assist your user

User assistance is a key factor when considering an effective user onboarding experience. 

No matter how precognitive your product's user interaction design is, interpretation gaps are an integral part of the user ecosystem. 

Having integrated user support can alleviate the complete brand experience right from the onboarding. Here are a few ways you can do so. But here's the thing. 

Only deploying assistance would not land you sustainable success in onboarding. You need more. Along with assisting, you need to measure the efficacy of the methods. Fail to do so, you will never know which strategy is working for you and which is draining your resources. 

Curious about what metrics to track? Check this detailed customer success guide to launch an effective customer success. 

a) Introduce them to your product 

One of the best ways to engage your users during an onboarding experience is to give them an overall feel about the brand culture. Product tours are one of the best ways to familiarize your users with the product and brand. 

b) Provide real-time assistance 

Mitigating product usage problems completely is a rare case. Product tours can only do so much. This makes having real-time assistance critical for customer success. 

There are many ways to do so. From developing ultimate guides, FAQs (frequently asked questions) to AI-powered help desks you can choose whatever option suits your unique business needs. 

5) Be obsessed with user feedback

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Keeping up with the ever-changing expectations of the user is difficult. 

What meets their demands today might not work tomorrow. This makes staying open to feedback so critical. 

But here is the thing. Fail to do it right and you might end up losing more customers than gaining new ones. Here are a few ideas to do so the right way. But if you want to dig deeper, here is a definitive guide to using user feedback to improve the user onboarding experience. 

a) Survey your users all the time

Surveys are probably the best way to gain insight into the areas where your users are facing problems. 

But to work efficiently, you need to be mindful of the quality and quantity of questions you ask your users. 

Also, ensure to create these questions with multiple choices. This will give a framework to measure the core problem areas. 

This can be of different types. From NPS (net promoter score) feedback, long-form surveys, in-app surveys to phone calls you can choose any of the forms that suit your business operations. 

A pro tip here would be to go for multi-format feedback. But at the heart, ensure to create a multi-level feedback ecosystem to be proactive rather than reactive.   

b) Track user activity (with permission)

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One of the best ways to understand user behavior is to observe them in action. 

Getting a peek inside how and what they interact within your product can reveal problem areas that never came out before. 

You can easily create heatmaps to do so. However, to do so effectively, you need to ask for the consent of your users. Make sure you make your user data privacy a top priority. 

Another impactful way is to monitor your brand on social media. This will enable you to get a clearer picture of your product's performance from your user's perspective. 

Conclusion

User onboarding will continue to be the secret sauce in making a product a best seller amongst other factors. 

The above tips are sure to give foundational direction to design your next user onboarding experience. 

However, here's a word of advice. 

There is no one size fits all practice that can help you to reach your optimal user onboarding experience. This makes experimentation the summing factor of all the factors of creating an effective user onboarding experience. 

Keep listening to your audience and reiterate. 

Remember, while crafting experiences, incremental designs potentially can have an exponential impact on the overall experience of your users.