Step 3 of 5 on how to double your SaaS revenue using the rule of 72.
If you’ve been following our blog, you know that we’ve been focusing on the rule of 72, and how it can help you double the growth of your business.
Our framework for making use of the rule of 72, is that by improving five key conversion rates from our example company’s customer journey you can double your revenue in record time. In this post, we’ll be covering how to improve your user / customer onboarding rate by 15%.
What is Customer Onboarding / User Onboarding?
At InnerTrends we define the onboarding process as the moment from which the user creates their account with your product or app, to the moment when the promise of your product or app is delivered to them for the first time.
This promise is the value that your product or app can deliver to him or her.
Read more he about how we look at user onboarding and why successful onboarding ends with a promise.
For many software applications, onboarding is where a significant number of potential customers drop-off in the sales process. Though it’s common for a new user to a website to drop-off when it comes time to create an account, the act of completing the onboarding process (to get to the point where they achieve what an ad or web copy has promised them) can be troublesome as well. However, it’s also an area that holds a lot of potential for both B2C and B2B businesses.
For the sake of keeping the math simple, we’ll assume that you get 500 new free trial accounts per month and 100 complete the customer onboarding process. That is a 20% user onboarding conversion rate. To increase this rate by 15% we would need to increase the conversion rate to 23% and get 52 new onboarded accounts per month bringing us to 152 onboarded accounts per month as our goal using the rule of 72.
You know your need – onboard an additional 15% of accounts. Now, it’s time to find opportunities to grow this number with as little effort as possible.
How can you tell if your user onboarding experience is helping users find value or making them abandon your app? Using InnerTrends software, you can take timely actions based on the provided insights into the exact moment users drop off, the average time it takes a user to complete the process, your current conversion rate, and much more.
With this data, you will be able to analyze what points in your onboarding process need improvement.
Why User Onboarding So Essential?
Before we go further let’s understand why user onboarding is so important. It will be the key goal within your product that all new accounts that have success with your product will need to achieve.
User onboarding will be essential in successfully increasing the conversion rates of the next 2 steps of our plan to double your SaaS revenue.
Watch this video to learn how the onboarding process relates to the other core goals within your product including retention and upgrading to paid.
What is TTV (Time To Value)?
No one wants to spend a lot of time or effort setting up and learning a product that might not even do what it promised. Time to value or TTV refers to the time it takes for a user to see the value they were hoping to get from your product.
This is often referred to as TTFV or Time To First Value within the User Onboarding process since this is the first time you get a chance to deliver on the promise of your business.
The goal here will simply be to get user to TTFV in the most optimal way and time. This doesn’t always mean as fast as possible though.
Optimizing Time To Value
So now that we understand how getting to first value is not all about speed, how do we break this down further?
The best way to do this is to begin to understand the time it takes to reach each of the core steps within your onboarding process.
Check out this report from InnerTrends:
With this simple report we can understand the average time it takes between our core required onboarding steps. Some are minutes, while others can take days.
A report like this can help you optimize your Time To Value by triggering sales and marketing activities at just the right time to help your users onboard at the most optimal times.
User Onboarding Optimization Resources
At InnerTrends we have put together a number of great resources on how to improve your user onboarding to help increase your conversion rate by 15% and reach your goal of doubling your SaaS revenue.
- B2B Customer Onboarding Process: Optimize Your User Onboarding Time
- 13 Blank State Examples You Can Use to Improve User Experience During Onboarding
- User Onboarding: 27 Must Review Resources To Better Activation
- Successful Onboarding Ends With A Promise
- The Growth Hacker’s Guide to Better Onboarding
- Is your churn problem actually an onboarding problem?
- Product Manager vs. Marketer: Who’s In Charge of User Onboarding?
Other User Onboarding Enhancements
Here are a few other tips that may be helpful in raising your onboarding conversion rate to reach your goals.
It’s beneficial to also take action outside of the product, such as surveying those users who have successfully completed the process to find out what they liked, what they didn’t, and where they think you have room for improvement.
Their answers could provide you with easy ways to improve your process you might not otherwise have thought of.
However, we still recommend validating your findings with data in InnerTrends. Maybe you have a step in the process that causes too much friction and isn’t that important- removing it might be all you need to increase your onboarding rate and hit your 15% conversion rate increase goal.
Additionally, here are a few user experience changes you may want to consider implementing in your customer onboarding experience that could help your users reach each step of the user onboarding process:
- Adding hints, hotspots, walkthroughs or tooltips in strategic areas of your product and at just the right times.
- Include smart knowledgebase suggestions about how to get the most out of your product
- Producing video tutorials for more complex areas to walk them through and complete the task easier
As you implement changes, collect and analyze all of the data related to those changes so you know when you have validated your growth opportunity.
Continue making tweaks to your process to improve your user onboarding or time to value within this phase of the growth plan in order to reach your 15% conversion rate increase and double your SaaS revenue.
Get the Complete eBook on How To Double Your Software Revenue
While we’ve covered a lot in this post, believe it or not, we’ve barely scratched the surface of things you can do to double revenue in your SaaS company. We invite you to download the complete eBook to get insights on the rest of the steps for doubling the revenue of your business
