Bring and keep more customers by tracking initial onboarding success

There’s no better place to identify what’s hampering growth of your SaaS business than taking a closer look at initial onboarding success of your users.

Let’s unpack terminology first.

What do I mean by initial onboarding success

Definition of a fully onboarded customer does not exist. Onboarding never ends. Especially for SaaS vendors where customers can start small and expand their use of the product in more advanced ways over time, the notion of “onboarded” as a status is impossible to nail down.

What about the initially onboarded user? It’s far easier to try and define it:

Initially onboarded user inside of the product is the one that either achieved initial success with the product — realized value, or haven’t gotten actual value yet, but for the first time outside of our sales and marketing efforts, they saw the real value potential in the relationship with our business. This is also called the first AHA-moment.

Measuring initial onboarding success

Initial success can be achieved through a set of Success milestones. There are different initial success definitions per specific segments of users, and their needs.

Success milestones are micro-steps of the user journey. Success milestones can be either performed actions (measurable) OR realization that step is achievable (non-measurable — if you can’t find any proxy metric to cover for it, skip for now).

Success milestones don’t have to happen consecutively.

You want to find a minimal number of success milestones necessary for users to achieve initial success. Success milestones must be identified (and refined over time) based on qualitative and quantitative user research. You should look for user action combinations that show significantly better user retention rates compared to users that didn’t perform these actions in this combination.

Ok, final terms coupled with initial success and success milestones are initial setup rate and initial setup actions, respectively.

Initial setup rate — percentage of users that performed all initial setup actions (measurable Success Milestones). Those can be multiple actions identified as mandatory for a user to get value out of the product. E.g. for a CRM product, Initial setup actions could be both bringing data to a CRM, and second action — mapping sales processes.

Example

Let’s say we’re building HealthyRemoter® — a remote time tracking app that truly promotes remote employees work-life balance. Users entering the web app for the first time get a question on how they prefer to care about their work-life balance — do they prefer guidance or choice?

Thanks user research we’ve initially identified success milestones for these 2 user segments:

For users that prefer guidance: they have to install the mobile app, and approve 1+ app recommendation to reach initial success.

For users that prefer choice: they have to install the mobile app, choose how to spend pause from work, and start tracking work at least once to reach initial success.

See the diagram below:

In the user segment that prefers guidance there are 3 users. 2 of them achieved initial success — they reached all Initial success milestones. One user didn’t.

Let’s assume all these success milestones are measurable. We can then easily calculate the initial set up rate.

It’s 67% (2 of 3 users) setup rate for the User segment.

Let’s now look at user segment that prefers choice. User E is interesting. User E performed 50% of initial setup actions (1 of 2), so this user has not achieved initial success.

Set up rate for the entire segment is ruthless here, it’s 0%.

Now, bring and keep more customers

When you start a business, you often start with one segment of users. When your business is more mature, identifying and tracking initial onboarding success for multiple segments helps you identify which segments are worth keeping, which are not, and test new segments more consistently.

Also, making sure your users find value in your product is often the most critical and fruitful thing to look at at first, both to keep growing your new business MRR, and to prevent churn from day 1. I’m writing about preventing churn here: Build your first Churn Prevention Funnel, in a spreadsheet) .

Coming back to the example above — from tracking initial onboarding success and success milestones, there’s a plethora of questions you can then ask yourself to bring and keep more customers. Couple of them:

• Do I initially onboard users well enough in each of the segments?
• Why do most users in the user segment preferring guidance reach initial success, while others don’t reach any success milestone?
• What kind of friction exists for users in the user segment preferring choice? Did we identify the correct success milestones for this segment? Is this segment worth investment? Should we find another segment? This user segment has a lot of inherent complexity in nature to be able to get value out of the product. How can we simplify?
• Knowing which segments are best from conversion to payment, and long-term retention, which segments we should further invest in, or stop investing in?

Getting answers to those will tell you what your next actions are. You’ll be so excited when you’ll discover these actions. Good luck!

Thank you

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