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Your user’s onboarding experience is one of the most critical user journeys and one of the hardest to master. An effective user onboarding process demands constant attention and iteration as your product releases new features. Even for product-led growth (PLG) products, in-app onboarding guidance is often a one-size-fits-all journey. Many products collect user information with an onboarding survey, but few leverage that data to personalize the user onboarding experience. The risks? A one-size-fits-some onboarding journey. Low activation rates, poor digital adoption, and, eventually, a higher churn rate.
Personalizing your onboarding experience can be more manageable than you think By tailoring the journey based on user roles, goals, and lifecycle stages or using a combination of these approaches, you can significantly enhance your user onboarding experience and improve your activation rates.
How to Personalize Your User Onboarding Experience
By Role: Change the onboarding journey based on a user’s role, for example, admin vs. end-user or technical vs. non-technical roles.
By Goal: Ask users what they care about, then tailor a checklist to help a user hit their primary objective,
By Lifecycle Stage: Have one version of your onboarding journey before activation and then flip the UX to an ‘everboarding’ experience
Combination: Combine the approaches above to create a personalized journey for each user.
Would personalization help your product? As we work through the four tried-and-tested approaches to product personalization, you will also see examples from different best-in-class SaaS products.
#1 Persona-based onboarding
Persona-based onboarding involves changing your onboarding journey based on a user’s role. For example, let’s say you have both marketers and developers who log into your product. You might determine that a new marketing user may be interested in a video on advanced segmentation tools or examples of campaign templates. In contrast, a new developer might prefer to review detailed API documentation independently.
What are the benefits of persona-based onboarding?
Reduce time-to-value
Role-based onboarding helps users hit key activation milestones faster by focusing on workflows and features that are relevant to them. For instance, developers might quickly set up a technical integration or automation, whereas marketers may import data and create reports immediately. Differentiating which products matter to each persona can help you decompose what activation means for your audiences.
Increased engagement rates
By showcasing features and workflows pertinent to each role, users can perceive why your product is valuable to them. Changing the onboarding helps new users feel like your product was designed for their unique needs. Airtable famously changed its onboarding for marketers to present itself as a ‘content calendar’ instead of an interactive database.
Easier access to relevant learning materials
Providing role-specific tutorials, documentation, and support materials makes learning your product smoother and more intuitive. This approach can respect varying levels of technical expertise and focus on what each user needs to learn to be successful.
When should you implement a persona-based onboarding experience?
Diverse Use Cases
When your product serves multiple user types across an organization.
Feature-Rich Products
When your product has numerous features catering to specific user types, such as Campaign-Building features vs. Integrations & API Access.
High Learning Curve
When your product requires a relatively high level of technical skill or installation work.
How to implement a persona-based onboarding
- Role Selection at Signup
Allow users to select their role during the signup process, so you can leverage this data to display a tailored onboarding experience. The simplest implementations ask for role data directly after the user has created an account. This avoids the problem of relating data from an anonymous user or relying on an integration to reveal a new user’s role.
- Dynamic Onboarding Flows
Use conditional logic in your onboarding process to guide users through different paths based on their role type. Start with your two most common roles and build out your experiences. You don’t have to go from 0 to 100 onboardings!
- Role-Based Content and Resources
Develop and provide role-specific tutorials, use case guidance, help articles, and resources.
Example from an automation platform
Make is an automation platform that many different personas can use. In their onboarding survey, they ask new users to identify their roles. This data is then used to personalize their in-app onboarding experience:
- Technical Users receive more detailed technical information about how to set up automated workflows.
- Marketers see common marketing integrations relevant to their role, like how to integrate Facebook Ads.
- Generalist users are given simple prompts with many popular use cases and integrations to help them get started quickly.
#2 Goal-based onboarding
Goal-based onboarding asks new users what their core use for your product is, and then changes the experience to help them hit that objective. For example, one user might need to increase revenue by increasing customer engagement, while another might want to save time by automating internal processes. Goal-based onboarding ensures the user's specific goals are the focus of any in-app onboarding experience. For example:
- Customer Engagement: A user focused on increasing customer engagement would receive onboarding highlighting features like automated messaging, customer segmentation, and engagement analytics.
- Process Optimization: A user looking to optimize internal processes might be guided through setting up workflows, automating tasks, and integrating with other tools.
What are the benefits of goal-based onboarding?
Faster time to value
Users can realize the value of your product more quickly, reducing the time and effort spent exploring features that aren’t relevant to their core use.
Higher adoption rates
Users who achieve their initial goals are more likely to continue exploring your product later, which gives them more opportunities to discover additional features.
When should you implement a goal-based onboarding experience?
Multiple product lines
If your product has multiple product lines, it can likely do many things and be used by people with different objectives.
B2B Products
Unlikely B2C products, which are often laser-focused on helping users solve a specific problem, B2B products often contain a suite of product lines.
Mature products
If your software has been in the market for multiple years, it will likely have multiple product lines and allow users to achieve multiple objectives.
How to implement role-based onboarding
- Identify key goals
Based on your product’s positioning and user feedback, you can uncover your top user goals and display those as goal selection options at first login. We would recommend displaying no more than six.
- Serve goal selection prompt at first login
Allow users to select their primary goal or goals during signup so you can tailor their onboarding journey.
- Personalize onboarding checklists & resources
Match each goal with the most relevant feature set. You can learn more about how to create an onboarding checklist from our blog.
Example from an email and marketing automation platform
ActiveCampaign, an email and marketing automation platform, asks users about their core purpose. The tool then displays an onboarding checklist with the most relevant features and messaging that aligns with each goal. For example:
- Email Campaigns: The welcome message and onboarding steps are personalized for users looking to launch email campaigns and support ActiveCampaign’s value proposition in this area.
- Automation: Users are recommended to begin by choosing a template automation to learn how the builder works.
#3 Lifecycle-based onboarding
Lifecycle-based onboarding uses a user's journey with your product and their varying readiness levels to access more advanced functionalities. For example, early-stage users might require basic guidance and feature introductions, while more advanced users may want deeper insights relevant to their more advanced usage patterns.
What are the benefits of lifecycle-based onboarding?
Progressive Learning
Users gradually learn more complex features and workflows as they become more familiar with your product. This paced onboarding maintains engagement and prevents users from feeling overwhelmed initially.
An ‘Everboarding’ approach to activation
Onboarding is never really over. There is always a new or underutilized feature to adopt. Stage-specific guidance helps users continuously find value as they progress and adopt more features over time.
When should you implement a lifecycle-based onboarding experience?
Valuable for Every Product
We’ve found a lifecycle approach to user onboarding benefits nearly all products by ensuring users continually find value and stay engaged.
How to implement lifecycle-based onboarding
- Identify your Lifecycle Stages
Identify and track the most relevant user lifecycle stages for your product. You can define these stages by completing key product actions, specific usage patterns, or the time since signup. A simple place to start is to break out new from activated users.
New users: In their first 30 days, users might be served an onboarding experience focused on account setup, basic feature introductions, and completing an initial checklist of actions to help them get started.
Activated Users: Once users have completed key onboarding actions, you might transition the experience with prompts to explore advanced features or tailor content based on their usage patterns.
Personalized onboarding for admins & added users
One important difference between Lifecycle-based onboarding and role-based or goal-based approaches is that lifecycle onboarding can apply to all your users, not just new ones. There are infinite combinations you can play with!
Example from an AI-enhanced gifting and automation platform
Sendoso surfaces initial key actions & resources to admin users to help them get up and running. Once admins have completed the initial steps, users see prompts to explore more advanced functionality, driving wider adoption and creating more value over time.
#4 Combined Personalization: The ‘ultimate’ onboarding strategy
The combined user onboarding strategy mixes goal-based, lifecycle-based, and persona-based approaches to provide a truly personalized user onboarding experience.
What are the benefits of a combined onboarding strategy?
Holistic personalization
This approach leverages multiple aspects of user needs, readiness, and usage behavior, helping your product become a ‘digital customer success manager.’
Enhanced activation rates
Users are more likely to activate and find value quickly due to highly tailored guidance.
Example from an AI customer experience platform for e-commerce stores
Gorgias uses a combination of all the major onboarding strategies:
- Goal-Based: New users are presented with a goal selection screen and a tailored checklist. For example, Gorgias recommends specific integrations based on a new user’s inputs.
- Lifecycle-Based: Once the account has finished the initial onboarding, each user receives a set of personalized “recommended next steps” based on their usage patterns.
- Persona-Based: Agents, who use the product daily but are not responsible for configuring it, receive a simple onboarding checklist with quick access to educational resources.
Experiment and combine the best-performing tactics to create the most effective onboarding experience
As products mature, personalizing your user onboarding experience becomes crucial for driving user activation rates and ensuring ongoing engagement and feature adoption. As you build more features and have more types of users logging in, your onboarding experiences will necessarily also need to adapt. Having an experimental mindset as you continuously iterate your user onboarding experience is the key to long-term success. By testing different personalization techniques and tailoring the onboarding journey based on user roles, goals, and lifecycle stages, you can significantly shorten your users’ activation time. Ultimately, an onboarding experience that feels relevant and unfolds over time will improve feature adoption rates and drive product growth.
In-app personalization does not need to be complicated. Leveraging digital adoption tools (like Candu!) can make implementing and testing these strategies much simpler. Using no-code UX editors, you can ensure each user receives the guidance they need at each stage to succeed with your product without burdening your engineering, CS, and Support teams. Want to see how this can be done in your product? Request a free demo today!
