The Best Examples of Powerful User Onboarding

You will not get a second chance to make the first impression as a brand. This is why user onboarding is crucial to the overall success of a company. A study by Wyzowl shows that more than 86 percent of customers are likely to stay loyal to a brand that invests in the new user onboarding experience.

Creating the ideal user onboarding experience can be challenging since it requires an in-depth study of customers, satisfaction monitoring, and very cleargoals, also based on the type of business. Designing a comfortable user onboarding process is not just the key to productivity growth, but it is what keeps customers coming back.

Even though today’s customers are more informed and powerful than ever, they still need assistance and direction while using your products for the first time. Brands need to provide customers with all the information needed to set up/install the product and use it effectively. Onboarding new users involves more than just giving them a brief introduction to the product.

Through your user onboarding experience, you will have to illustrate and justify why the products are suitable for the customers and how they can leverage all the features. Think of it as a selling point or an initial presentation of your brand’s products. You want your customers to feel like they can start building something important using your products in their everyday lives.

When you welcome customers the right way, they are more likely to be satisfied with the product and stay loyal to the brand in the future. Therefore, it is of utmost importance for brands to invest in their user onboarding process.

This blog will walk you through the basics of new user onboarding practices. Read on to discover the best onboarding flow examples from popular brands!

What is user onboarding?

Before we dive into the best onboarding flow examples, let’s see what the term means. In layman’s terms, user onboarding refers to the process of integrating new customers and making them familiarized with the brand’s products or services.

In the onboarding process, it is fundamental to provide customers with a walkthrough that demonstrates the features of the products and how to use the products in easily actionable steps. User onboarding marks the time when customers get to know the brand closely and form their first impressions. This is why user onboarding is crucial for companies.

Brands typically invest in user onboarding to increase customer satisfaction and make sure that they can successfully use the product. This eventually leads to an increase in customer retention and brand loyalty. That happens because when customers have a good experience with your brand and manage to use your product satisfyingly, you will conquer their trust and they will likely re-purchase from you.

Why is user onboarding important?

User onboarding is significant for brands because it can help customers master their products and services. Rather than letting your customers figure things out for themselves, it is better to have an in-house process to educate them on the products they purchased from you.

The onboarding process not only increases customer satisfaction but also prevents churn rates, meaning that customers will complete the setup and start using the product. Since customers aren’t wasting time figuring out the products, they can focus on the goal they want to achieve by using the products.

The leading purpose of a user onboarding flow is to enable user activation and user retention. User activation means your customers understand your products and how to use their features. User retention means providing customers with a reason to re-purchase from your brand. It usually depends on your product’s design and performance and the effectiveness of the user onboarding flow. If your user onboarding flow fails to activate and retain your customers, your products will never grow.

According to a study conducted by Google Play Store, most apps lose more than 77 percent of their users within the first three days of installation. In thirty days, the number can jump to almost 90 percent. Just like the market is saturated with competition, it is equally flooded with impatient customers. Thus, if brands want to prevent churn rates, it is essential to design an outstanding onboarding experience!

Here are three reasons why brands should invest in their user onboarding experience:

1. First impressions matter

The user onboarding experience begins as soon as customers first interact with your products. This can be visiting your landing page, reading a blog, seeing a social media post, interacting with an existing user, and so on. If the customer is unsatisfied with what they experience, at first sight, they will unlikely purchase your product.

User onboarding decides if your products are going to rock or not. Therefore, it is imperative to carefully design a proper user onboarding experience.

2. A good onboarding flow is a good investment

Customers who are impressed with the onboarding experience of a brand show a 12% to 21% higher willingness than the rest to invest more money in it. Thus, spending more resources to improve your user onboarding flow is a smart long-term investment.

A good onboarding experience helps you convert more customers and reduces the burden on the customer support staff. Studies show that there can be a decrease in customer support calls up to more than 72%.

3. Competition is higher than ever

There are millions of brands out there in the market. However, only a few manage to become successful and stand out in the industry. Those are the ones that care about customers and invest resources in improving their experience and boosting satisfaction!

If your customers don’t get the hang of your products, they will likely go to a competitor brand offering a better user onboarding experience. Studies show that more than 50% of customers have churned or returned a product because they couldn’t figure out how to use it.

If you want your brand to succeed, you can’t risk losing half of your customers. Start thinking about a strategy to step up your customer experience, Layerise could be the perfect solution for you!

12 user onboarding best practices

Below are some of the best onboarding practices for your brand:

1. Get to know your users and define your target audience

The most common mistake brands make while designing a product and creating an onboarding process is assuming that each user is the same. But, not all customers are the same. You must find your target audience and design your product’s elements according to this demographic’s preference. Knowing your target audience is invaluable information.

When defining your target audience, ask yourself questions like:

What age group do my customers belong to?

What is their ethnic or cultural background?

Are my products more suitable for men or women, or are they gender neutral?

What kind of content does my target audience consume?

What are my target audience’s hobbies and interests?

Once you have successfully answered these questions, you can narrow down a demographic. Try figuring out the ideal customer onboarding experience for your target audience.

Creating a user onboarding process can be a trial and error method. You can try creating different user personas and testing them in a focus group. This will allow you to double-check and ensure that your design truly reflects your audience’s needs and wants.

2. Map out customer journeys

As we discussed, a successful onboarding process requires a clear picture of the customers. After figuring out your target audience, craft user personas that reflect their needs and preferences. These insights can help establish user flows that will fit customer journeys. Each customer persona will follow a different path to purchase and will use the product differently.

Map out the different customer journeys to tailor the onboarding experience to your customers. For example, creating different landing pages will help you capture a wider audience and increase conversions by personalizing the products to their specific goals. These pages can also be valuable in providing testing opportunities to determine which onboarding features are the most effective ones for your brand.

Identifying multiple customer personas doesn’t mean that you have to design multiple onboarding processes but you must make the experience easy and enjoyable for all of them considering their different characteristics and adding a bit of personalization.

3. Manage expectations when onboarding users

Your user onboarding process will set your customers’ future expectations. It is quite easy to set high expectations initially, but brands need to be able to stick to them over time. Your brand can experience drops in performance if you fail to fulfill those expectations. When customers feel frustrated because their expectations are not met and they feel like their time has been wasted, you could risk losing them forever.

Therefore, it is imperative to be wise and set realistic expectations. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. An excellent way to set realistic expectations is by immediately informing your customers about what they can expect from your product and the best ways to use it.

4. Make it easy for your customers to set up

Even if your customers are intrigued by your products, they won’t go through the next steps if the installation process is complicated. Likewise, if your sign-up page has a lot of friction, no customer will bother to fill it. In both these situations, you will see an increase in your customer churn rate.

It doesn’t take many resources or time to improve your setup process, you just need to keep it as simple and relevant as possible. Here is what an effective setup process should include:

It should only contain a few, simple steps

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The relevant information your customers need should be very clearly stated

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Thanks to Layerise’s customer registration process, you can ensure a quick and seamless onboarding experience. Layerise solution allows customers to set up their accounts by simply scanning a QR code positioned on the product. This way, the customers can easily set up the product, and you can start collecting information about customers from the very beginning.

5. Include all the information your customers need to use your product

While product tours are a crucial part of the onboarding process, they barely scratch the surface. Your users expect and deserve more.

Remember that the onboarding process and product tour are not the same things. The main difference between the two is that product tours are just an opportunity to sell your products, whereas the user onboarding flow shows your customers how they can benefit from your products.

Therefore, instead of creating a basic product tour, include all the information your customers need to start using your products. Talk about the benefits, features, what your users will gain from it, and how they can use it best.

6. Experiential learning → teach your customers how to use the product step by step

For most brands, it is best to implement a function-oriented user onboarding process. It is inspired by David Kolb’s learning-by-doing approach or experiential learning. Following experiential learning approach, the most effective way to activate your users and help them understand your products is by allowing them to carry out one action.

These actions can be broken down into simple steps for users’ convenience. For instance, teach your users first the primary functions of your products and then get into the more complex functionalities. To make experiential learning successful, try to make the process fun, and it will have a positive reinforcing value on your users, and they will grow an affinity towards your brands.

7. Make the onboarding experience fun and lively

Surprise is one of the most compelling emotions and can be both positive and negative. Users like to be delightedly surprised, which is what brands should aim for if they want to set themselves apart from the competition. During the user onboarding approach, brands should try to create a “WOW” effect. There are many ways in which you can do this. For instance, treat your users to an absorbing animation each time they complete a milestone.

Including an element of surprise can help brands forge a strong emotional link with their users. It will not only allow your customers to learn about your brand and products faster, but it will also set the tone for initial customer loyalty.

The trick is to use powerful and gripping visual elements to keep your users engaged. Don’t make your onboarding process boring, they might lose interest and abandon your products. You can also try instilling the “AHA” or “Eureka,” which will instill values of confidence and pride in your users when they hit a milestone or discover a hidden feature of your products.

8. Send notifications at milestones

Sending push notifications at milestones is an excellent way of motivating users to get to the end of the onboarding process. But, you need to ask the user’s permission to send these notifications, which usually directly impacts how many users will agree and decline.

If your users agree to push notifications, you can send them to important touchpoints. Keep in mind that this will help only if you ensure that these notifications are appropriately curated: They shouldn’t be too long, they should be interesting, and catch the user’s attention.

9. Personalize the experience

Personalized customer service refers to delivering customized services that meet the exact needs and wants of the customer. Thanks to the personalization of your services you will increase customer satisfaction, thus strengthening the relationship between your brand and your customers.

Brands should strive to create a personalized experience for each customer. This can be successfully done once you figure out your target audience, map out user journeys, and take time to understand each customer.

A report from the Forrester survey stated that companies earned 6% more sales revenue and a 33% increase in customer loyalty and engagement when they applied customer-centric personalization strategies. If you want to make your onboarding experience special for your customers you have to collect relevant data and personalize the experience accordingly. Layerise can help you by automating the personalization of the experience for your customers. Read more about Layerise solution here.

10. Communicate in your user’s language

This is a pretty straightforward step if you know what users are like. Communicating in your user’s language makes the user onboarding experience easier and more enjoyable. It helps your users understand what you are trying to communicate and also connect with them on an emotional level. It forges a personal link between the brand and its customers.

You can start by using simple imagery, sounds, animations, etc., to trigger an emotional response in your user. In some cases, common phrases or pop culture references can be a great way to make your users enthusiastic.

11. Send follow up instructions

If your products have some complexity that the customer should be aware of, you can send follow-up instructions and make sure your customers are informed.

Do this by creating a complementary set of content for user onboarding. These follow-up instructions could be sent to the customer through an email and they could be presented through a video. Youtube tutorials are an excellent way of illustrating how your users can use your products. They can provide in-depth information while not initially overloading the users with too much detailed information.

However, ensure you don’t send follow-up instructions to customers that didn’t bother completing the onboarding process. Take this as a clear sign of the user being uninterested. Flooding uninterested users’ inboxes with notifications and instructions can backfire and create a bad reputation.

12. Test the onboarding experience

Usually, no one gets it right on their first try. Creating a good user onboarding flow comes with multiple options you must consider before implementing the final draft. It is common for brands to have several versions of the flow, and it is recommended to test them thoroughly.

Once you have tested the onboarding experience exhaustively, you can narrow down the necessities. User testing is an incredible opportunity to learn from your customers: This is when you should pay close attention to people’s reactions and learn.

Ask yourself questions like, “Are my users bored?” “What do they find confusing in the process?” “How can I make this better?”. The best way to achieve this is by hosting focus groups and surveying participants on how they felt about the experience of using your products.

How Layerise can help you create an excellent user onboarding experience?

Brands should remember that onboarding is more than giving their users a warm welcome, and it is about helping the users experience the value of their products firsthand, while setting them up for long-term success.

Layerise can help your brand improve its onboarding process. Once customers have received the product they simply scan a QR code on the packaging or directly on your product and they can quickly register their product ownership. When the customer scans the QR code and registers, all the information provided will automatically personalize the experience, in terms of notifications, language, videos, etc.

During the registration, the customer will need to add the phone number. That way, you will unlock the possibility to communicate with them through SMSs and create SMS marketing campaigns.

With Layerise collecting data about your customers has never been easier. With Layerise, you can get an in-depth view of your customers based on geographical, demographical, preference, and behavioral variables. Understand what your customers do and track their satisfaction. This will help you better understand your customers to design an onboarding experience that is tailored to them.

Moreover, with Layerise you can create an excellent setup guide, using videos and animations to help your customers familirize with your product. It is important to make the setup process as easy and intuitive as possible. The customer should be able to start using the product as soon as possible without wasting too much time.

With Layerise Virtual Assistant you can provide the best post-sale experience. The Virtual Assistant will help your customers in case of problems in the usage of the product. Any Assistant you create can be easily downloaded to a phone or any other device supporting PWA's. Any update or change will be automatically pushed to your customer's device without any required actions.

If you want to learn more about how Layerise can help your business, book a free demo now.

5 Customer onboarding flow examples

Here are five most helpful customer onboarding flow examples to help you learn from the best. To understand the determinants that make a new user onboarding flow effective, pay close attention to how these companies educate customers on how to use their products.

1. Grammarly

Grammarly has made quite a name for itself as a writing assistant tool that scans its user’s writing in different formats to help them improve the effectiveness of their text. Adjusting readability and clarity helps its users write appropriately. Grammarly has a wide range of speakers (both English natives and foreign English speakers); thus, they have made their onboarding process simple to follow for any customer.

The Grammarly app follows a “learning-by-doing” approach and starts the onboarding by providing its first-time users with a quick product tour. Then, users are presented with a demo of an example document to help them understand how Grammarly works in real-time. This interactive and visual experience gives users a solid grasp of the platform before they start using Grammarly.

2. Netflix

Netflix is a streaming platform consumed by millions of users daily, and this also means users need relatively little instruction to understand how a streaming product works. But, the biggest challenge for Netflix is to get their users to sign up, create accounts, and start paying.

They overcome this by initiating an assertive and intuitive CTA (Call To Action). When users open the app, they see a screen explaining what they are getting. It is a one-month free trial with the ongoing cost of a subscription after that date. It is presented with a compelling CTA “Start Your Free Month.”

If users are interested, Netflix requires simple email, password, and payment details. These screens are kept as minimal as possible, only asking for the most relevant information. Netflix also asks for a few preferences to offer its users relevant content.

Overall, the Netflix new user onboarding flow is simple and highly intuitive. Netflix reassures the users that there is no long-term commitment involved, and they can cancel their subscription anytime.

3. Avast

Avast Antivirus is one of the most promising names in the freemium PC protection industry. Most users don’t want to spend time learning how to stay secure online and protect themselves from cybercrime; they just want a program to do it for them.

To address this, Avast’s Online Security and Privacy Onboarding gives its users privacy controls before offering them privacy education. Thus, Avast starts its onboarding flow by configuring its user’s online privacy settings. After users are done configuring their privacy settings, they are offered additional information and educational toolkits.

4. Toggl

Toggl is a time-tracker app with a myriad of functions and tools. Although Toggl’s list of features is exhaustive, it counters it effectively by dividing its product tour into multiple walkthroughs with stopping points between each. Therefore, it follows a unique approach of letting users learn at their speed.

Toggl’s product tour starts with a rundown of the essential features like how to set a tracker, name the tracked activity, and stop your tracker. When users are done following this guide, Toggle congratulates them with an interesting visual that lets them know how much they have left to learn. This is a perfect example of how new user onboarding flows should be designed.

5. Notion

The Notion is a product organizer that helps users map their personal and professional lives through various dashboards. Notion’s new user onboarding flow begins by collecting essential user data that enables them to branch and personalize the experience accordingly.

Users are presented with a page showing a checklist within Notion itself that sets the foundation for users to understand how the tool works. Thus, it doesn’t take long to see what Notion is about, and users are particularly impressed with the briefness.