PLG: Onboarding
Three principles for high conversion onboarding
Doesn't matter what stage you're at, growth is hard. Whether you're transitioning to a "product-led" go-to-market strategy or trying to improve conversion rates, building a great onboarding flow can be a challenge.
While there's no one-size-fits-all playbook, there are a few key principles that hold true across the board:
Don't overcomplicate it: Your customers are smart.
Do prioritise the obvious: You probably don't need to experiment.
Remember first-time use is crucial: If it's not intuitive, users won't come back.
Customers are smart
I'm sure you talk to customers. You understand their needs and problems and you've created products and features to solve them. So it surprises me when I hear founders say they're worried customers "won't know how to find value in their product".
This is especially true in B2B. Customers usually have one or two main goals to achieve with your product. But if a product has many features or is intentionally complex, there's a fear that customers won't be able to understand it when they start using it.
So where I see people make mistakes is by trying to make the onboarding and setup process too complicated. Asking too many questions and trying to collect a lot of data.
The thing is, customers can probably figure out how to use your product! So just guide them to the right part of the product and let them use it!
And even as you add more features and functionality, customers' needs don't change so much that you have to completely change your onboarding flow every 6 months. 1
Instead, focus on allowing customers to get to the value you deliver as quickly as possible.
Trust your gut
I've seen a small change in paywall copy increase the number of people who subscribe by a few percentage points. It was helpful to try different versions to find the best one.
But I often see teams wanting to test ideas because a) they've heard people say experimenting is good and/or b) they or someone else don't believe in the idea.
Those reasons aren't great, especially when the goal is to greatly increase the number of people who sign up or activate. Also, testing an idea usually requires the same amount of work from the engineering team.
I've been in this situation before, and looking back, I realised we should have just launched to all customers from the start.
Likewise, it’s often the simple things that make the biggest improvements in activation. Are buttons in the right place? Does the UX feel intuitive and familiar? Can customers easily get back to where they left off?
When should you experiment? When you've reached the highest conversion possible with your current sign-up rate and making a big change might make it worse.
Instead, focus on simple, obvious improvements that can be made to the sign-up and onboarding process. Or add a condition for a certain type of customer and release it.
Back a big idea and go for it.
Make it make sense
For companies without a sales team, it's important to get the first-time use right.
I recently found a product that seemed very valuable to me.
I entered a prompt into the AI "generator" on their website. Instead of getting a pre-generated webpage with a response based on my prompt, I was redirected to a page where a 12-minute video started playing automatically (what the heck?). So I closed the video and found myself in a blank workflow builder with no clear next steps.
What I expected was to be redirected to a pre-generated webpage with a response based on my prompt.
This is a typical case of trying to do the right thing but executing it poorly.
Good: I could use the product without signing up, but I had to sign up to save my work. Very smart.
Bad: Even though I landed on the main feature of the product, I gave up.
So, while you may have made it easy for users to reach that point and they may be smart, you still need to help them understand how to use the product.
A great example of this is the demo invoice flow we launched at Invoice2go. When a customer signed up and told us what they needed, if they wanted to send an invoice, we guided them to a demo invoice. Importantly, the demo invoice was already half completed and could be sent back to their inbox with just 2 clicks.
This eliminated multiple steps and clicks for the customer and demonstrated the value they came to the product for within minutes of downloading the app.
The key principle for first-time use is to stay focused on showcasing the value that customers expect to receive.
So, get customers to the feature that is most likely to add value for them and guide them through it in a way that demonstrates that value.
One exception to this might be if you’ve changed strategy or moved to a different market segment.