What questions do you ask users when trying to improve user onboarding from a product marketing perspective?

I truly believe the onboarding experience is the make or break moment for your product, especially for a self-serve user base. You could have the most incredible product in the world, but if it’s a pain to get set up, you’ll lose your customer. To improve the onboarding experience, I’d focus both on the folks who did not succeed with using your product and have gone inactive as well as those that did successfully get up and running with your product. What you want to understand is what makes one ...Read More

Oh, I love this question! I’ve been tasked to overhaul many onboarding programs and customer insights are integral to my approach. I believe the best insights are validated through multiple sources so here are a few methods I’d recommend using to inform your strategy: Customer Interviews: Talk to your customers! Make sure you’re not just talking to the successful ones either. While they might be harder to get in touch with (and you may need to offer some $$), interviewing customers who churned e ...Read More

When I think about improving onboarding, I think about the initial motivations and expectations users are bringing to my product and the specific pain points during onboarding. Here are questions you can ask: Initial motivations and expectations What initially motivated you to sign up for our product? What problem were you trying to solve/what were you trying to do? How much time did you dedicate to solving this problem with our product? What expectations did you have before using our product? W ...Read More

Optimizing onboarding becomes very important in a self-serve model because you don’t have the benefit of a sales team to guide prospects through sign-up and onboarding funnels. It’s great that you already have a list of new users who dropped off because you can start collecting insights by looking at your own data. I recommend segmenting this list by prospects who didn’t complete and did complete the funnel. Start by understanding where in the funnel prospects are dropping off and how you can re ...Read More

Typically the goal of user onboarding is to quickly realize value from your product and achieve some sort of usage goal associated with your product funnel. In the case of products like Zoom, it'd be scheduling and conducting your first X calls or meetings. For SurveyMonkey, it's deploying your first survey and collecting at least X responses. So to understand how to improve that from a business metrics + customer experience standpoint, you'll want to understand what blocks or enables users to s ...Read More

This sounds like the classic "leaky bucket" problem: your bucket is leaking (users), and you're not sure why, so it's hard to figure out what to do about it. Solving this requires a combination of quantitative and qualitative insights. As a starting point, make sure you understand exactly where and when in the customer journey you are losing engagement with users. This might be really granular: if people are signing up for your service and then never come back, there might be an issue with your ...Read More

Think of onboarding as a path towards value. Product marketing, growth, and product should all work together to make the time to value as short as possible. The end goal is always to get the user "activated" (also known as the aha moment). So the first question your product team should be able to answer is --> how do we define activation in the platform? Once that north star is identified (and validated), all work you do on onboarding will be guiding that user towards activation. If we use Ai ...Read More

I would approach this in two ways:1. Identify where the problem lies -- use quant data to understand where drop-off is occuring2. Identify why the problem exists -- understand user motivation and where the friction is in their flow that's preventing them from succeeding. For the latter, you can ask questions along the lines of:- Why did you sign-up for this product? What was the immediate trigger and the underlying pain?- What were you hoping to accomplish during your first session?- What part o ...Read More

Important question: Are your "users" also your "buyers" or are the two separate? If they are not, then there are a few things you will want to do before you ever begin soliciting and analyzing feedback: 1. Reassess your messaging; was it geared towards users, or just buyers? The two will often have different roles, and more importantly, respond to different incentives. Did you capture that for the users the first time around and really demonstrate to them the benefits of adoption? 2. Consult wit ...Read More