Also known as customer onboarding, and many businesses neglect the significance of this process in their customer retention strategies. In this post, we’ll be focusing on some surefire onboarding habits that can boost customers’ success and increase retention. So what is a best practice regarding the onboarding of new subscribers?
In simpler terms, SaaS customer onboarding is catered towards introducing your offerings to prospects and making them understand the use and scope of your products. To draw in customers and capture their interest, there needs to be a well-structured customer onboarding strategy to market the best use and benefits of your products. It boosts customer retention and satisfaction, which helps your business to stay fresh in the user’s mind.
6 SaaS Onboarding Best Practices to Ensure Success
You might be armed with all the best resources and a strong customer success team, but if you’re failing to provide a memorable onboarding experience to customers, then you won’t be able to win their loyalty. Offering reliable assistance and understanding their business needs play a vital role in developing positive client relationships and increasing profitability.
1. Understand Customers’ Expectations
To enhance your onboarding progress, business executives must urge sales teams to devise a strategy that helps them understand the user and their expectations from the product. What are their problems? How can you address their needs? Or any problems they might face using the product; these questions should all be answered by your teams to initiate a meaningful user experience and achieve customer satisfaction.
It’s about building rapport and a bond with your customers using the data you receive so you can serve them better henceforth. You can create surveys and polls on social media platforms or send them via email to subscribers to gather some valuable insights.
2. Develop Procedures For The Onboarding Cycle
When it comes to prioritizing onboarding practices, there are certain steps to focus on which can help businesses boost product recognition and familiarization. If you aren’t putting in the effort to deliver a memorable experience, then you’re less likely to bring back customers after the first try. Here are some procedures to follow to enable a seamless customer onboarding process:
- Create a simple signup procedure
- Notification about account creation
- Verification or confirmation email sent
- First contact, aka welcome email
- The first login
- Product tour, either through a checklist or tutorial
- Offer support through documentation
- In-App Notifications
- Send a message or give a checkup call
Whether you’re offering a service like a cleaning or membership of some sort, following these steps can help establish a relationship with your customer base and convince them to return.
3. Learn From Your SaaS Competitors
In order to follow the proper approach for customer onboarding, you need to study your competitors and find out what they’re doing differently to deliver a pleasant experience to their customers and helping them migrate to the cloud. Look through their tactics, assess their weak and strong points, and then construct your customer onboarding plans through which the targeted audience can realize how beneficial your product can be.
When you are using apps of renowned industries that offer free trials, find out how they make their apps easier to use. Is it easier to navigate through their app? Give a glance to the different techniques they have used and how it influences the user’s experience. Another important feature to test out is whether they provide on-demand customer service. Such features will help you to evaluate how well they are committed to offering help.
In addition to this, you need to uncover the hurdles those industries have faced during their growth and how effectively they overcame them. Explore their blogs and social media pages to see the kind of digital marketing strategies they apply to make their services stand out more. Also, observing your competitor’s customer service center will inspire you to serve your customers better.
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4. The SaaS Signup Process
While the SaaS market is quite saturated, if you follow a surefire strategy with some tech-driven tactics, you’ll be sure to get ahead of the competition. One way to do so is by creating a simple yet instructive signup form which asks for only little and relevant information. This shrinks the barrier to signing up.
The form should include positive comments that support your signing up process. For example, say that you can access various features of your app by filling this simple sign up form. Include positive customer testimonials and reviews that encourage new users to fill up your registration form. Make sure to add social signup buttons that allow customers direct access to your software without the need to fill up forms. The signup buttons should include all popular social media platforms.
5. Sending A Gripping Welcome Email 
Once a new user has signed up, it is essential that you send an email offering extending a warm welcome to the subscriber. This is your first real email, which initializes the bond between you and your customer, so make it count. The first step in making a suitable welcoming email is to avoid adding too much content. Keep it short and to the point with an appreciative tone, state relevant facts and information regarding your service to capture their attention, and encourage them to follow your socials or visit your website.
This is followed by providing relevant material that is helpful to the customer, such as a short video or link to popular content. You can even offer some downloadable resources to add more value to their experience. Emails are a great way to stay in touch and directly relevant content, specified ads, and promotional messages to your customers.
6. Build Customer Trust
In order to make your onboarding lifecycle successful for the long term, you need to focus your efforts on building customer trust and loyalty. When a customer trusts your business, it results in a higher customer success rate. Below are a few points that can enhance customer trust in your service or product:
- Providing concise and honest details of your service.
- Offer excellent customer support round the clock.
- Direct customers towards the right content and pages.
- Always respond to customer feedback promptly.
SaaS Onboarding Best Practices
Give your customers the best experience through your SaaS software by implementing robust onboarding strategies. These techniques should not only make it easier for your customer to understand how to use your SaaS offering, but also make them understand how your SaaS product can bring benefit to their lives.
Author Bio
Nouman provides ghostwriting and copywriting services. His educational background in the technical field and business studies helps him in tackling topics ranging from career and business productivity to web development and digital marketing. He occasionally writes articles for carpet cleaning.