Access Report: The State of Product Onboarding (2023)

How different onboarding strategies work for different kinds of businesses (B2B and B2C), and what we can learn from both successful and not-so-successful onboarding efforts.

User onboarding is a fundamental step in product growth, shaping how users start their journey with a product. This stage is full of challenges but also chances to make a good first impression.

🚀In today’s issue of Productify, I am beyond delighted to interview and bring onboard ex-Miro Growth leaders Kate Syuma and Viktoria Kharlamova to make a deep dive into what makes onboarding empowered, how different strategies work for different kinds of businesses (B2B and B2C), and what we can learn from both successful and not-so-successful onboarding efforts based on their comprehensive Onboarding Report 2023.

Bandan: Truly excited about this report! Let us kick off with the question on everyone’s mind. What are the primary problems companies face in onboarding new users? Why should one care?

Kate & Viktoria: Businesses often deal with several key challenges:

• Engagement: It's tough to keep users hooked on the onboarding stuff. It's not just about grabbing their attention once but keeping them interested the whole time. This means using cool, interactive stuff, and stories they can relate to, and making sure it all matters to what they need or want.

• Data Utilisation: Here's the thing about data - it's not just collecting it, but understanding and using it right to make the onboarding feel personal for each user. And then, there's this extra challenge of figuring out how to use this data to make things even better or find new ways to grow.

• Metric Definition & Improvement: Figuring out what makes onboarding successful and constantly trying to make it better is pretty complicated. This involves identifying key metrics such as team/user activation, time to value, and user satisfaction, and then systematically tweaking the onboarding process to enhance these metrics.

• Content Balance: Finding the right equilibrium in onboarding content—ensuring it's neither too overwhelming nor too sparse—is tricky. The goal is to provide enough information to get users started without bombarding them with too much detail, which can lead to information overload and disengagement.

• Activation Achievement: The big goal is to get users to a point where they're not just using the product but really seeing its value and making it a part of their daily lives. 

The Example of User Onboarding Experience in Mailchimp

Bandan: So, how is Activation in user onboarding typically defined and measured? Would you recommend any frameworks?

Viktoria: Companies usually use activation metrics based on the Reforge framework, it consists of three phases:

• Setup Moment: Users complete essential actions to access the product's core value.

• Aha Moment: The initial realization of the product's core value.

• Habit Moment: Users develop regular usage patterns around the core value proposition of the product.

These phases are critical to understanding and measuring a user's journey from initial contact to loyal customer. To calculate Activation funnel metrics you need to start from Habit and calculate it, taking into account that it correlates with LR retention and higher monetization.

Bandan: Given the range of teams inside organizations, could you elaborate on who is typically working on User Onboarding and Activation metrics in companies?

Kate: The responsibility varies:

• Growth Teams: In 26% of cases, dedicated growth teams handle onboarding. These teams usually consist of 2 developers, PM, Product Designer, and Data Analyst.

• Product Managers & Designers: 18% rely on a combination of these roles.

• Leadership: Co-founders or Company Leaders are involved in 14% of cases.

• Multiple Teams: In 6% of companies, various product teams collaborate.

• Sales/Customer Success Teams: These teams are responsible for 4% of onboarding, especially in B2B companies.

Bandan: If we now look at this from a user perspective, what are the main problems they face during onboarding?

Viktoria: It is different for B2B and B2C products. For B2B the main User Issues are:

• Interface Complexity: Users often face the challenge of dealing with complex product interfaces. These interfaces have many features and advanced options which can be overwhelming for new users. A more customized and detailed approach is needed to help users navigate these complexities.

• Unclear Instructions: Often, onboarding instructions are not clear or detailed enough, making it hard for users to understand how to use the product. This includes a lack of step-by-step guides, leading to confusion and frustration.

• Inadequate Resources: There's a lack of comprehensive support and training materials like detailed tutorials, FAQs, etc. This makes it harder for users to fully understand and use the main features of the product.

For B2C main User Issues are:

• Information Overload: In B2C, users are often bombarded with too much information too quickly during onboarding. This can overwhelm them and make it hard to remember important details about the product.

• Lack of Personalization: Onboarding experiences are often too generic and don’t cater to the specific goals and preferences of different users. This lack of personalization can lead to lower activation.

• Technical Problems: Glitches and bugs during onboarding are common issues that disrupt the process. These technical problems can frustrate users and affect their view of the product’s value and reliability.

Bandan: Failure teaches us a lot. What lessons have been learned from unsuccessful onboarding experiments?

Viktoria: Key takeaways that research participants highlighted include:

• Balance Is Key: It’s crucial to give users the right amount of info. If you give them too much, they get lost; too little, and they don’t get what they need. The trick is to hit that sweet spot where they have enough info to get going but aren’t swamped by it.

• Keep Users Hooked: It's really important to find ways to keep users interested, especially the ones who might get bored quickly. This means figuring out what users like and making the whole introduction to the product fun and interactive so they stay interested the whole time.

• Value Communication: From the get-go, make sure users know why the product is awesome. They should quickly get what’s in it for them and why it’s useful, so they see the value right away.

• Adaptability and Continuous Improvement: Embracing a flexible approach to onboarding, where continuous experimentation and adjustments are made based on user feedback, is essential for an effective and evolving onboarding process. Be sure to do experiments with onboarding regularly and run research on all experimentation stages.

Viktoria & Kate: Here are a couple more learnings from our experience:

• Iteration is king: There is a high probability that the experiment won’t bring impact from the 1st iteration, there is a 5x higher probability that it bring from the 3rd iteration.

• Check why behind the data: Data will tell you what is happening but only users can tell you why this is happening. The unsuccessful experiment is the one that didn’t provide you with learnings and insight about users. To get this precious learning you need to run usability tests, interviews, and surveys after you get data results.

Kate: To turn it around, Bandan. What would be your advice when it comes to iterating and experimenting on onboarding journeys?

Bandan: At Booking.com, I learned immensely about the value of experimentation when it comes to customer journeys - onboarding as well as conversion. In fact, 67% of experiments that my team ran did not lead to statistically significant results although all ideas we rolled out were seemingly great ideas to begin with. Hence, it is really important to be curious and always be learning. From my deep-dives, these were my learnings:

• Invest into upfront user testing: User testing your onboarding flows reveals a lot about possible points where users could drop-off due to unclear information or just purely because of cognitive load of number of steps. Ensuring you act on the feedback before starting experiment ensures a high chance of success  

• Know your primary metric and secondary metrics: Often, experiments are set up with one primary goal that needs to move positively, but most product goals come with a trade-off. Ensure you have both primary metric (Increase conversion) and secondary metric (with increasing customer service /chatbot interactions) in sight when running experiments.

• Zoom out to a funnel view: Onboarding journey can easily be broken down into multiple steps and ensuring you have full view of which parts of the funnel the conversion is good and where it lacks behind - allows you to optimise your experiment for right stage of the funnel.

Bandan: Coming to B2B versus B2C products, do you see any difference or distinction in onboarding formats for them respectively?

Kate: The strategies for onboarding vary significantly between B2B and B2C, each tailored to meet the unique needs of their audiences. For B2B specialists usually use:

• Video Tutorials: These are detailed guides that explain the complex parts of a product. They help users really understand all the different features, which is super important for B2B products that can be complicated and have lots of parts.

• Interactive Walkthroughs: These are hands-on, step-by-step guides that lead users through the product’s features. They’re especially effective in a B2B setting as they allow users to learn by doing, which is crucial for understanding complex systems.

• Onboarding Specialists: Personalized guidance from experts who can offer tailored advice and solutions. This approach is invaluable in B2B scenarios where products may require more specific knowledge or where businesses might have unique use cases.

When it comes to user onboarding for B2C products, certain practices stand out for their effectiveness in engaging and retaining users:

• Personalized Emails: These are customized onboarding emails crafted to connect with users on an individual level. By tailoring the content to the user's goal, role, and use case, these emails make the initial interaction with the product feel more personal and engaging.

• Interactive Tutorials: These provide an engaging and straightforward way for a wide range of users to learn about the product. By making the tutorials interactive, users are more likely to be engaged and understand how to use the product effectively.

• Gamification: This involves adding game-like elements to the onboarding process, making it more fun and rewarding by adding progress and achievements celebrations. By turning learning and exploration into a game, users are more likely to enjoy the onboarding process and engage deeply with the product.

Viktoria: People also highlighted several products with great user onboarding flows, you can see them below and be inspired by their examples.

We recommend reviewing onboarding flows from these products regularly, at least once a quarter. Split the list between PM and Designer to uncover improvements faster. 

Wrapping up this deep dive into product onboarding in 2023, it's pretty clear that onboarding is a huge deal. It's not just a step in getting a product out there; it really shapes how users first see and keep seeing the product. So, Vicki and Kate did this big study, the Onboarding Report 2023, and it showed us a bunch of cool stuff about how onboarding works differently for businesses (B2B) and regular customers (B2C).

So, here are the main highlights:

1. Getting the Info Just Right: It's key to give users enough info but not too much. You want them to have what they need without feeling swamped.

2. Making It Personal and Engaging: Early on, keeping users interested is super important. B2C companies do this with personalized emails and fun tutorials, while B2B companies go for more in-depth tutorials and expert help. It’s all about making the experience fit what the user needs.

3. Always Improving: Onboarding can't just stay the same. You gotta keep tweaking it, getting feedback, and changing things up to keep up with what users want and new tech stuff.

4. Always Experimenting: You can accelerate improvements by having multiple experimental bets in place and seeing what works. Ensure you know which metrics you want to move

5. Different Strokes for Different Folks: B2B and B2C need different approaches. B2B is more about detailed help, and B2C is more about making things fun and interactive.

6. Learning from the Best: Checking out how the top products do their onboarding can give you great ideas for your own.

So, in a nutshell, onboarding in 2023 is pretty dynamic. You've got to mix creativity with understanding user behavior and keep up with all the digital changes. Going forward, all these insights and strategies we've seen are going to keep shaping how we bring users into new products, aiming for a smooth, fun, and useful start.

You can get the full version of the Onboarding Report with 20+ pages of insights by filling out the form:

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