It’s amazing how little human nature changes throughout history
despite how technology affects the way we interact. When it comes right
down to it – first impressions are still everything. Your first
interaction with a customer has changed over the years from shaking the
hand of a potential client to having a potential client sign up for a
free software trial. The consequence of this is that when a potential
client downloads your free trial, you have a significantly shorter
period of time to make a good first impression because your potential
client’s capacity and willingness to maintain their attention is greatly
limited. Customers today expect immediate results – if the value is not
evident immediately and if the product does not make sense immediately,
then you’ve lost your customer. No amount of follow-up emails are going
to get them back on board.
Now, assuming you make a good first impression and that your client
has signed up, is your onboarding program good enough to cement that
good impression? Neil Patel of KissMetrics says that there is a real
problem with many free-to-paid SaaS marketing tactics -- free-to-paid
SaaS marketing tactics are aggressive only until people sign up and
then..that’s it. Not nearly enough energy is spent on what happens after
clients sign up. After clients sign up, they need to be funneled
through an aggressive onboarding program. Customer onboarding should
remove as many barriers as possible. The user should feel like they are
being guided by the hand, step-by-step, through your software platform.
The process shouldn’t overwhelm or confuse them and make them
question the value of the product. However, in reality, many onboarding
processes come from a “functional” or “technical” mindset. They focus on
getting customers running through the basic motions rather than
painting a bigger picture and concentrating on value delivery. Your
customer’s bag has been packed, they’ve been fitted with a nice pair of
boots, you’ve given them a bottle of water and a brown-bag lunch, and
then you dropped them in the middle of a desert and said, “Good luck –
that should be everything you need. We’ll check back in thirty days.
When can we expect that check?” The customer is essentially left to fend
for themselves, to learn the software by themselves. In an “immediate
results society,” this is simply not something most prospects want to
deal with.
So, how do you demonstrate instant value and ensure customers are not
overwhelmed or confused at any milestone throughout the onboarding
process (minimizing abandonment due to frustration)? The answer is
constant engagement. It doesn’t end at getting your users setup and
sending email check-ins. You must communicate with your customers every
step of the way from in-app messages to emails to phone calls and tailor
it to their stage in the learning process (or lack thereof).
The burden of education shouldn’t fall solely on the trial user --
you have to change this by taking them by the hand every step of the
way, checking in with them, and engaging throughout the entire process
to eliminate the guess work. This is where an online guidance tool comes
in. Online guidance tools allow you to accelerate customer onboarding
through structured step-by-step instruction, from start to finish. You
want to ensure that your customer resources are always visible and easy
to access – support number, support email address, live chat, and so on.
In other words – your trial user should want for nothing. They
shouldn’t have to go searching blindly within your software for the
functionality they want, nor should they have to go through the
frustration of wading through tutorial videos and content – running from
window to window – in order to understand even the most basic
functionality of your software.
Instead, they should be able to jump head-first into any aspect of
your software from the most basic to the most advanced and easily
experience the type of functionality they want with no guess work,
searching or complicated learning curve. This type of immediate and
constant engagement, coupled with hand-holding, ensures clear and rapid
onboarding. At this point, you’ve led your customer so far in, that the
customer’s only logical way forward is to purchase the software.