The Power of Storytelling in Onboarding New Users
Build a great product and they’ll come. The real challenge is getting them to stick around.
Picture this. Someone signs up to use your product. They’re also evaluating several of your competitors at the same time. You’ve got less than 60 seconds to convince them, without human aid, why they should choose you. Fail to nail the onboarding experience, and you lose them forever.
This was the very real challenge our team was facing at HubSpot. Our job is to help the people who sign up to our free CRM see how using the tool will help their businesses grow. We’re a cross-disciplinary team of UX and content designers, researchers, engineers, and product managers, and we ran a six-week-long project to see if using the power of user-focused storytelling could help us get that job done.
The results were remarkable. We saw nearly every metric we were tracking spike up — retention, activation, completion of setup tasks, user sentiment in feedback.
It does help that the HubSpot CRM is a truly great product. And I’m not just saying that because they pay me. It’s packed with tools and features that make sales, marketing, and customer service a breeze. It saves thousands of people across the globe hours, and basically helps them to win at business and life. And it’s free.
But powerful products with lots of features and use cases can be hard to explain. So this is the story of how we crafted a story compelling enough to help our users get started, see the value, and stick around.
Getting Started Is Hard
Even great tools and apps can lose new users fast if they don’t have a great framework to help people get started. It’s no fun to find yourself inside a strange, empty portal that you realize you have to figure out how to operate by yourself.
Some users will manage to get started, even without lots of help. Others will get started with a little human help from support. But without careful onboarding, many users will flee, never to return. The fact is that most users need at least some in-product guidance and help to find the value they seek in your product right away.
Plan A: The Checklist
One of the first things our team tried was to give new users a list of setup tasks, tailored to their role. Once they finished those tasks, they’d be well equipped to start using their new tools and getting the value they wanted. Over the next three years, we tweaked and tested several variations of this task list.
But although the design and content of the list kept improving, after three years, the rate at which people were inviting their team members — team activation — had flatlined. Something about that checklist just wasn’t helping them cross that bridge.
Back to the drawing board
It became clear that the checklist itself wasn’t the problem — or the answer, in fact. Actually, the checklist was great — and vital — for people who already understood the value of HubSpot, and who were mentally ready to start using the free CRM. But we realised that those users who didn’t already understand the value of HubSpot were unlikely to invest their time learning the tool without really getting what was in it for them first. We needed to make some big changes.
We decided we needed to:
- Make our unboxing process an easy, touchless, and engaging experience
- Show people the magic of HubSpot CRM before asking them for more of their valuable time or data, which is core to the inbound philosophy
- Get them to see that HubSpot was designed for people just like them
- Demonstrate clearly how HubSpot CRM would help them get where they wanted to go
Plan B: Demo Mode
Research into the current experience led us to come up with a solution we call “demo mode.” Essentially, this gives users a two-minute hands-on product walkthrough that lets them experience their free tools and see all the magic moments that we know make people say WOW before requiring any kind of setup.
The two-minute demo, which users see as soon as they finish signing up, takes place in a sandbox, so any user worries about messing up the integrity of their data or account are assuaged. The format is a combination of tooltips overlayed on realistic screens containing realistic sample data, and interactive moments where users perform simple life-like actions to progress to the next stage of the demo.
You might be thinking this sounds very much like an interactive shepherd tour. You’re not wrong. However, there is a difference. It all centres around a story, and the star of the story is our user.
Why storytelling?
So, why did we choose storytelling, one of the oldest teaching devices known to mankind, as the primary method of onboarding for our cutting-edge technology?
“Like good films, products need to engage for a business to be successful.’’
Donna Lichaw, The User’s Journey
And there’s nothing more engaging than a good yarn. They can convey complex information in an entertaining way. They’re memorable. And crucially, they can inspire and motivate.
Crafting the narrative
The first step towards nailing the story was to plot out the narrative. Most stories look like this:
- There’s always a HERO.
- The hero always has a GOAL.
- There are always PROBLEMS that stop the hero from reaching their goal.
- There are always SOLUTIONS which help them overcome their problems and reach their goal.
We already had our hero: our users. We knew their names, where they work, and what they do — because they’d told us during the signup process. Not only could we show them the right tools for them, but we could also personalise the story by using their name and company name, and even showing their website at key moments.
We knew what our heroes’ goals and problems were, thanks to the ever-growing bank of detailed user research studies from the mighty HubSpot research team.
And of course, we already had the solutions to help our users overcome their problems and reach their goals. After all, this is exactly what all our tools are designed to do in the first place.
It was also really helpful at this point to note what our heroes’ current processes were, and what their anxieties around moving to a new solution were. For example, a lot of our users new to CRM software were using messy spreadsheets to store their contacts, and were worried that moving to a new system would be costly and difficult to learn.
Being able to reference a user’s current process and address their real anxieties during the story is a really powerful way of conveying to users that we get it, we know where they’re coming from, and they can trust us to provide a solution.
Once we had all this information mapped out, it was fairly easy to map our solutions to their problems and goals, and organise them into a logical flow. Now we knew what screens we needed, we could pass on the rough designs to our engineers to start the build, while we continued to finesse the narrative.
Nailing the language
We were already working on three separate demos for each of our personas: salespeople, sales leaders, and marketers. The next job was to get the language right.
To ensure relevancy and keep users engaged, we had to make sure the words and phrases we used were authentic to each persona, and comprehensible to all users across all experience levels.
Users with no experience of CRM software were encountering concepts, tools, features, actions and objects for the first time. And users who were new to HubSpot, but had used similar software before, were encountering familiar concepts and tools but with brand new HubSpotty (yes, that is a word) terminology.
By trawling through user interviews and user feedback channels, we noted the language each persona used when speaking about their day-to-day work. We also talked to our services and sales teams — people who talk to and onboard new users every day. And we were lucky enough to have a sales professional in the room as we designed our flows. All invaluable resources which helped to add a real authenticity to our demos.
Bringing it to life
It’s the job of the opening tooltip to set the scene, engage, and use a realistic, simple scenario that our audience can relate to. Placing them in the narrative with a familiar goal they’d like to achieve creates a compelling reason for them to continue onto the next step. Ideally, they’re eager to find out what happens next to this fictional version of themselves, and don’t drop off.
You can see in the first tooltip of the marketing demo some authentic language (“The beginning of the quarter…a quick look at the numbers”) and realistic sample data. Then “Sales needs some new, good quality leads to work on” — that’s the problem and the goal right there. The numbers aren’t looking good. The goal is to turn this around.
Part of this particular demo story involves sending a new lead an engaging campaign email using our email builder. As we knew from research, some marketers had to get help every time they created an email. So we knew that one of the most important value props to highlight in the demo was our tool’s ease of use.
The final tooltip of every demo always circles back to the opening tooltip, concluding with the user successfully reaching their original goal. Remember in this case the goal was to give sales some new, good quality leads to work on? Well, here’s the conclusion.
Our user has managed to turn a website visitor into a good lead in just a few clicks. We also remind them that they’ve done it using HubSpot’s free tools. Showing our user in a familiar and frustrating situation and ending with them in a far more successful situation through the power of HubSpot is a really powerful motivator. At this point, we were pretty confident that they would be excited about the possibilities of HubSpot, so it was the perfect moment to invite them to set up and start using their new tools right away.
So… did it work?
The six-week methodical, carefully researched project was labour and time-intensive, not to mention fraught at times. But it was worth it.
A huge 60% of users who started a demo finished it. The number of setup tasks getting completed went up by nearly a third. We got 82% positive user feedback (that’s really good). Retention went up.
And the team activation rate that hadn’t changed in three years? Reader, we moved it. Quite considerably. All to the power of a simple story, well told.
Does this sound like the kind of creative, collaborative, user-centered work you’d enjoy? Explore the open positions on the HubSpot Product team.
