Improving User Experience in SaaS Onboarding

When I was head of growth, our team reached 40% activation rates, and onboarded hundreds of thousands of new users. Without knowing it, we discovered a framework. Here are the 6 steps we followed. 1. Define value: Successful onboarding is typically judged by new user activation rates. But what is activation? The moment users receive value. Reaching it should lead to higher retention & conversion to paid plans. First define it. Then get new users there. 2. Deliver value, quickly Revisit your flow and make sure it gets users to the activation moment fast. Remove unnecessary steps, complexity, and distractions along the way. Not sure how to start? Try reducing time (or steps) to activate by 50%. 3. Motivate users to action: Don't settle for simple. Look for sticking points in the user experience you can solve with microcopy, empty states, tours, email flows, etc. Then remind users what to do next with on-demand checklists, progress bars, & milestone celebrations. 4. Customize the experience: Ditch the one-size fits all approach. Learn about your different use cases. Then, create different product "recipes" to help users achieve their specific goals. 5. Start in the middle: Solve for the biggest user pain points stopping users from starting. Lean on customizable templates and pre-made playbooks to help people go 0-1 faster. 6. Build momentum pre-signup: Create ways for website visitors to start interacting with the product - and building momentum, before they fill out any forms. This means that you'll deliver value sooner, and to more people. Keep it simple. Learn what's valuable to users. Then deliver value on their terms.

I spent 5 years scaling Superhuman's white glove, concierge onboarding. …and another 2 years rebuilding it in product. My biggest lessons on effective product onboarding: It must be *opinionated*, *interruptive*, and *interactive*. ••• 🧐 Opinionated There's a million ways to use Superhuman, but only one correct way. We had unopinionated steps in the onboarding, like teaching "j" and "k" to navigate. But what really matters is Inbox Zero. Marking Done. Our most extreme form is Get Me To Zero — a pop-up that practically coerces you to Mark Done *everything*. This experience gets an astonishing 60% new user opt-in. New users want to experience something different; they want to learn. We pruned away the bland, and left behind pure, unfiltered opinion. Exactly what made our concierge onboarding effective. 💥 Interruptive We've all seen them before: checklists, tooltips, nudges. Inoffensive growth clutter that piles up in the corners of your app. We shipped all this and more. But it had precisely zero impact. Our most impactful changes were interruptive: on-rails demos, full-screen takeovers, product overlays. Arresting user attention is critical: if an experience is tucked away in the corner, it will be ignored. If it's ignored, it may as well not exist. 🕹️ Interactive You can't be Opinionated and Interruptive without being Interactive. It's a crime to force users to engage with non-actionable information. Instead, provide functionality: an action to take, setting to toggle, CTA to click. It's more fun AND users build muscle memory. There is something to do in every step of our onboarding. Perhaps that's how we get away with an onboarding nearly 50 screens long 🤭 ••• Final thought: if you're struggling with this flow, simply watch new users. Note all the places you want to jump in — there's your onboarding 👌 s/o to the very thoughtful Superhumans building this: Ben ✨Kalyn Lilliana Kevin Peik Erin Gaurav 💜 #plg #onboarding #activation

STOP sending generic welcome emails ✋ Do this instead: Gautam Mehandru (Sr VP Revenue Marketing at CrowdStrike) joined us on CMO Diaries and broke down his playbook for customer marketing. Let's dive in 👇 CONTEXT Your customers watched your content for 18 months before buying. Then you send them a generic welcome email? This is how most B2B SaaS operates. Don't be most SaaS... Your goal is simple. 🤩 Happy customers that expand. Expansion starts from understanding. Understanding starts from your data sets. So... Where should you start? START by breaking down your customer journey into 🧵 "Micro segments" 1) Map customer journey broken down by each purchased feature 2) Identify expansion champions vs. at risk users (based on their actual login pattern data) 2) Target users who login 3x/week This messaging should be DIFFERENT VS users who haven't logged in for 14+ days Your messaging for these journeys should be unique. Based on their actual usage patterns. That starts with your data. "Having data around those customers is super critical. It'll help you identify your ideal candidates, number one. It'll help you focus on ones that have the high engagement, high adoption" You want to look for these super cohorts. And focus on making them even better. That requires a mindset swap: ❌ OLD WAY "one size fits all" welcome then expansion campaigns ✅ NEW WAY 1:1 personalized flows based on usage data from welcome to expansion Not sure where to start? Use this sequencing if you're starting from scratch: First 30 days: Focus exclusively on core feature mastery Days 31 - 60: Introduce your simple complementary features Days 61 - 90: Show ROI achieved by similar customers ONLY then introduce expansion opportunities by tracking these metrics: - Track "Time to Value" for every key feature purchased - Measure % of features activated in first 90 days  - Create an "Expansion Readiness Score" based on actual product usage You need to go well beyond NPS scores and renewal rates. These three metrics give you a deeper pov. 📌 Buyers are EXPECTING personalization now The KEY to happy expanding customers? SHOW them you really get them. That starts with your welcome. Invest accordingly ✌️

When onboarding is complicated, adoption plummets. One of the biggest challenges vertical SaaS companies face when embedding payments is creating a smooth, intuitive onboarding experience.. I’m currently working with a vertical SaaS company to solve this exact problem. Here’s their current flow: 1. A customer indicates their desire to use the embedded payments solution. 2. They send the customer to Authorize.net. 3. The customer goes through a clunky registration process with zero visibility into what’s happening from our client. 4. When they’re done, they have to generate an API key and manually paste it back into our clients dashboard. At this stage, 90% of potential adopters drop off. How many business owners who just want to take credit cards know what an API is key is? Much less where to paste it and what happens next? I’ve seen this same pattern with Authorize.net, Stripe, and WorldPay — redirecting users into a separate, unfamiliar process without clear guidance. Who is Authorize.net to a non-fintech business? A stranger. Why should they have to figure out API keys just to get paid? They shouldn't. Meanwhile, there’s no status tracking, no abandonment monitoring, no pre-filled forms (even though the SaaS platform already has the merchant’s legal name, billing address, and key details). If SaaS companies want high embedded payments adoption, they need to own the onboarding experience. Make it seamless. And remove friction. Onboarding should be seamless: ✅ No unnecessary redirects ✅ No manual API key handling ✅ No re-entering data the SaaS platform already has ✅ Clear status tracking and abandonment monitoring Abstract the complexity away so customers don’t even realize they’re being onboarded.

We spoke to 80+ SaaS leaders about onboarding, and here’s the brutal truth we found: 49% of users don’t quit at signup. They quit at the first key feature. People want to use your product. They leave when you ask them to use it. Because the “aha!” moment is buried behind setup, integrations, or data imports.  Here are 3 quick fixes that actually work 👇  1. A simple setup email with step-by-step visuals  2. Pre-built templates/workflows (at Mailmodo, we hand users a library so they can quickstart instantly)  3. Social proof: show how completing the step drives impact (“Teams who connect their CRM save 5+ hours weekly”) And this is just the surface. Our State of Onboarding 2025 report took 5 weeks of work, 80+ respondents, and the expertise of leaders like Aiza Coronado, Ramli John, and Jon Farah. We even built it as a customizable dashboard so you can filter benchmarks by your GTM model and product type, and see exactly where your onboarding stands. 👉 If you haven’t checked it out yet, now’s the time.