3 Common Onboarding Mistakes to Avoid in 2023

The numbers are scary as hell:

• Most SaaS companies lose 75% of their new users within the first week.
• 40 to 60% of free trial users will use your product once and never return.

If you want to avoid early churn and drive adoption for your hard-earned new accounts, you shouldn’t worry about these 3 things when onboarding customers:

1. Showing all your features
2. Solving for every use case
3. Automating every single step

These can all come later.

Instead, focus on the direct path to “aha”.

Look at onboarding as a bridge between a customers present pain and future success.

Its an opportunity to validate your customers investment of time, attention, (and money) in your product.

Then…you earn the opportunity to take the next step and increase activation of new features and use cases.

Customers that don’t onboard effectively don’t expand, and rarely renew.

So do this instead:

1. Identify the goal your customer signed up to achieve
2. Lay out a path with the steps that MUST be completed to reach the first milestone toward that goal
3. Focus on completing one step at a time to reach that milestone.
4. Capture feedback about whether the milestone is being hit.
5. Repeat for the next milestone.

It doesn’t have to be 100% automated or scalable. It needs to drive successful outcomes.

Customers need to see progress towards their goals.

Customers who see progress will build momentum and increase their investment.

They also don’t require chasing for renewals because they become a non-event.

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