7 product onboarding best practices for a better customer experience 

You spend a lot of time and resources getting people to sign up for your product. But just because someone signs up doesn’t mean they fully understand how your product works. That’s why product onboarding is such a crucial stage in the customer journey—and why it’s a cross-functional responsibility. Both product and marketing teams must work together to build a product onboarding process that makes the product feel intuitive, straightforward, and absolutely essential. In turn, team alignment ensures both marketing and product are laser-focused on achieving the same goal: making the customer experience absolutely seamless.

Product onboarding is the process of taking customers along a journey from sign-up to seeing value. Typically, it involves a series of steps that customers must complete to truly understand a product, benefit from it, and feel a sense of success.

Product onboarding content often includes product tours, educational materials, and how-to videos to ensure new customers can get up and running quickly. Email is a common channel for onboarding, but the most successful campaigns also leverage other channels, like in-app messaging, push notifications, and SMS.

While sales-led companies may have their sales or customer success team manage the onboarding process, product-led companies allow the product to do the selling. This approach ensures the customer can self-serve their experience with your product. Instead of needing to loop in the sales team to explain something tricky or complex, the product itself acts as the guidepost. 

This is beneficial in a couple of ways. First, it puts the customer experience front and center from day one. Marketing and product teams make customer-first decisions by leveraging customer data, usage patterns, and in-the-moment feedback to improve the overall experience. Second, customers can usually self-serve through the onboarding process—at their own pace. They can discover features and benefits independently, ultimately leading to a deeper understanding and appreciation for the product.

Looking to enhance the initial experience new users have with your product while fostering long-term satisfaction? Start here.

A new customer isn’t yet a reliable source of revenue; even if they’ve signed up for a paid plan, you need them to stick around to recoup the cost of acquiring them. And if you have a free trial or use a freemium model, you’re not seeing any revenue yet.

Prioritizing your product onboarding has bottom-line impact because it helps you capture paying customers and build the relationships that lead to retention. Think of your product onboarding process as laying the foundation for high customer lifetime value—and you need that foundation to be shatter-proof. That’s why onboarding should be on the radar for everyone whose role intersects with the customer experience.

Tips for making product onboarding a strategic priority:

• Set specific performance goals for your onboarding series, like a target conversion rate from sign-up to active user
• Align both marketing and product teams around your onboarding goals (collaboration is key!)
• Monitor and optimize your onboarding processes monthly or quarterly based on a continuous stream of customer data
• Consult with sales, customer success, and other customer-facing teams throughout the development of your product onboarding process

Once you build a product onboarding series, don’t set it and forget it. Establishing clear goals and measuring campaign performance can tell you much about how well your messages work. But there’s plenty more to learn—and your customers’ behaviors will tell you what you’re missing.

Every time you launch or update onboarding campaigns, ask yourself a series of ongoing questions:

• Are our customers engaging with this content in the way we expected?
• What product questions aren’t getting answered in onboarding?
• What support issues are most frequently raised during the product onboarding process?
• Where are people going to answer their lingering questions?

Look for opportunities to learn about your customers and their behaviors as they navigate your product for the first time. Then, apply what you learn to tweak, test, learn some more, and iterate again.

💡 Pro tip: Launch an NPS survey

NPS surveys can provide valuable insights into how your customers are feeling about the onboarding process, what they find helpful, and where there may be room for improvement. Use this feedback to continuously iterate and improve your product onboarding experience.

Product-led growth hinges on making sure customers see value from your product quickly—and if you offer a free trial, you have a specific, limited window to make that happen before time’s up. Your free trial period is an opportunity for your customers to get to know your product. It’s also an opportunity for you to get to know them. Look at the roadblocks people encounter and the questions they ask—you’ll quickly see where customers are falling through gaps in your product onboarding processes.

For example, here at Customer.io we discovered that not everyone who failed to convert after their free trial actually wanted to abandon our product. By analyzing our support tickets in the window after customers churned, we saw that 8% of inquiries were from customers asking, “How can I reactivate my account?” It was a eureka moment for us: amidst our eagerness to help people use the product, we hadn’t made the process of paying for it clear enough!

So we developed a series of timely reminders, clearer plan options, and ways to self-reactivate their account as part of onboarding communications. Since then, 77% of the people who viewed their canceled state at the end of a trial have reactivated their accounts.

Don’t assume your new customers are already experts at using your product, or even that they truly know what it does. One of the most vital user onboarding best practices is to put yourself in the mindset of a total newbie. What do they need to understand in order to reach the aha moment with your product? What basic functions and core features do they need to use? By way of example, let’s look at the initial aha moment for someone using Customer.io Journeys. We’ve found that the value clicks for people when they send their first campaign. Since we have a 14-day free trial, we need to guide them through the necessary steps as soon as onboarding starts. In this case, our product onboarding checklist includes:

• Creating an account
• Importing audience members and data
• Building a segment
• Creating an email
• Sending a campaign (the aha moment!)

Use your product onboarding process to make it easy for a new customer to go from novice to master with lots of guidance and support.

Email can be a great channel for introducing people to your product: you can include detailed instructions and links to additional resources and send a series that builds knowledge in a specific sequence. But remember that you have multiple channels available for connecting with customers, and all of them can be valuable. Consider how each of these channels can be used in tandem to create a holistic product onboarding experience:

• Email: Email is ideal for long-form content like case studies, educational videos, links to blog posts, and other resources. To create a customized experience, trigger personalized onboarding emails based on customer actions—for instance, when they use a feature for the first time, trigger an onboarding email with pro tips for getting the most out of it.
• In-app messages: One of the best times to onboard someone is while they’re actively engaged in your product. In-app messages are particularly powerful during onboarding because you can use them for mobile app personalization. With in-app messages, you can create a customized product tour, use banners to confirm people’s actions and lead them to the next step, and solicit feedback with in-app surveys.
• SMS: Text messages are ideal for time-sensitive information. For mobile onboarding, the best practices align your messages with customer needs. For instance, SMS is ideal for letting people know time’s running out to complete an onboarding step, like providing identity verification for a banking app.
• Push notifications: Your product onboarding journey needs to drive people into your app, and push notifications are a perfect channel for doing just that. Consider using push to remind customers about a set-up step they started but didn’t finish, alerting them to an important feature they haven’t used, or nudging them when their free trial is nearing an end.

You might have an idea about how every new customer will get acquainted with your product, but your audience is not a monolith. People will have different needs, take different routes, and complete actions in different sequences and time frames. Personalization enables the kind of customized experiences that build trust and loyalty on an individual level.

Try these three different methods for personalization:

• Segmentation: Different types of customers will benefit from different onboarding experiences. Create segments based on things like use case, industry, or role. For example, say your platform has both admin and editor roles. You’d build separate campaigns for admins that might include instructions for adding people and managing billing while onboarding for editors might focus more on features and how-tos.
• Behavior: Your product onboarding should react to what customers actually do. For instance, say you’ve built a five-day email series walking people through the five steps they need to take after signing up. If a customer completes the first three steps on day one, they’ll be confused if they subsequently get emails telling them to do what they already finished. Instead, your campaign should automatically trigger the message related to the step they haven’t taken yet.
• Content: Use customer data to personalize the content of your product onboarding messages. Your customers provide plenty of information about themselves when they sign up, so leverage it to make your communications feel relevant and authentic. Name, location, time zone, interests, subscription details—dig into your data to deliver tailored messages that speak to each individual’s needs.

Your onboarding is a great place to test assumptions about your product and how your customers interact with it. Use this simple process to set up an onboarding sequence that can probe your product assumptions:

• Identify the steps you think are the most important for customers to find value in your product
• List and order those steps based on how you expect customers to progress through using your app
• Narrow that list to the four or five most important steps
• Craft a sequential product onboarding campaign leading people through the steps

The insights you gain here are valuable for both marketing and product teams. You’ll likely discover where your messaging needs to be tweaked to better address customer needs. But you’re also liable to have some realizations about the product itself—a feature you thought was important isn’t actually being used much, a UX choice that seemed intuitive is throwing people off, or maybe people are doing things with your product than you’d originally envisioned! All this is fodder for iteration and optimization.

💡 Pro tip: Launch an A/B test

A/B testing is a great way to test different versions of your onboarding sequence and see which one performs better. This allows you to continuously improve the onboarding process, based on data and customer feedback.

Your new customers are at the right place, at the right time—and they’re waiting for you to meet them there. By signing up, they’ve already partially bought into your value proposition, and the ball’s in your court to take them the rest of the way. With a well-crafted product onboarding process, you can seize the opportunity to usher people from their first moment of engagement through to a long-term relationship with your brand.

Once you implement a product onboarding campaign, the fun has just begun. Ongoing experimentation is how you can tailor these best practices to meet the unique needs of your audience. We’ve put together a guide to experimentation at this and every other stage of the customer lifecycle. Download our guide to growth marketing experiments now and start tinkering!