When it comes to the SaaS market, product-led onboarding has revolutionized the way new users experience and explore a new product. As first-time users, it is crucial to involve these precious customers with an immersive onboarding process from the get-go.
Research suggests that 81% of businesses believe that giving their customers a strong product experience leads to more business growth. These simple practices build loyal clients and a sustainable growth strategy.
In this article, learn more about product-led onboarding features and practices and explore real-world examples of successful product-led models.
Product-led onboarding introduces users to your product by guiding them through its use and extra features without using real-time customer support.
This helps create a journey for the customer, helping them discover the features of your product step-by-step with video tutorials, onboarding checklists, in-app guidance, and interactive walkthroughs.
Product-led onboarding and product-led growth both work towards familiarizing the user with the product, but the end goals differ in both cases.
| FEATURES | PRODUCT-LED-ONBOARDING | PRODUCT-LED GROWTH |
| Objective | Help users understand core functions and major features | Use the product as the main tool for user acquisition, retention, and expansion |
| Major Focus | User’s first-time experience and understanding | Managing the product’s value to drive overall business growth |
| Methods and Tools | In-app guidance, checklists, interactive walkthroughs, tutorials | Freemium models, free trials, in-app features, user conversion strategies |
| Goal | Make the product self-explanatory and accelerate time-to-value | Make the product a self-sustaining model aiming for long-term retention and word-of-mouth |
| Human Intervention | Minimized with immersive onboarding features | Encourages a self-sustaining system with less reliance on human resources |
| User Experience | Aims for the “ahaa!” moment where users discover features | Focuses on smooth experience leading to user satisfaction and long-term use |
| Target Audience | New users | Both new and expert users |
| Examples | Tutorials, in-app guidance, checklists | Freemium models, free trials, upgrade pathways |
When you use a product-led onboarding process, your users become more resourceful, aligned, and confident about the product’s value. You don’t have to use complicated walkthroughs or interactions for any product’s success.
Simply offering users valued information at the right time and providing solutions to their challenges can result in a smooth onboarding. You can also automate your onboarding process for a more efficient process, for both customers and employees.
Furthermore, familiarising yourself with onboarding metrics can help you improve your onboarding processes for a better customer experience and retention.
Here are a few tips to make sure your onboarding process is seamless and effective for all users:
Prepare a clean structure to onboard new users, straight from neat sign-up processes to dashboards and workflows.
By making sure you entice your users with a wonderful first-time walkthrough, you’re setting yourself apart from competitive products and using an opportunity to educate your users about your product’s value.
At Engagedly, when you sign up as a user, you’re provided with a smooth onboarding checklist and in-app tools that guide you in exploring all key features.
You must engage users with timely pop-ups and walkthroughs that unfold your product to increase user excitement.
Slack uses smooth walkthroughs for onboarding. Throughout the process, users are aided with messages and prompts to set up channels and integrate apps easily.
Other than smooth onboarding, you need to keep the product relevant and engaging enough for your users by providing contextual resources at every step. As 38% of users in most product-led businesses interact with your product using freemiums or free trials, you must ensure that you give them more product value during this initial trial period.
Dropbox has a strong knowledge base with articles, video tutorials, and FAQs to assist users in operating and understanding the product.
Having a community that backs your product’s credibility and shares extensive knowledge with struggling users is a major benefit of an online community. Promote a culture of collaboration by encouraging your users to:
Figma hosts a strong community that helps in the peer-led onboarding process. The forum allows users or even organizations to share projects, files, plugins, and widgets. Having an interactive space allows the users to comment, share, and provide feedback that eventually builds a strong product image.
The following are some examples of where companies drive customer engagement through first-time product interactions:
Notion is a SaaS company that provides solutions to manage work for you and your team. With great user onboarding interfaces and product-led growth strategies, Notion has massively scaled and ensured a satisfied clientele.
Hubspot’s strong product-led onboarding strategy is successful because of easily accessible self-serve resources and an active community. Furthermore, it has a mix of interactive tutorials, on-demand video courses, and in-app prompts to facilitate a smooth onboarding for all users.
Slack has a wonderful database and resources that help users get acquainted with its interface easily. From personalized channel recommendations to interactive tutorials, Slack excels at providing the most welcoming user onboarding experience.
Product-led onboarding is a powerful method to attract and educate new users and offer them more interactive learning opportunities. By making your product a constant learning experience, you’re driving more consumers while also maintaining overall user engagement.
Ready to revolutionize your onboarding process with a product-led approach? Engagedly’s powerful Onboarding LMS helps you deliver seamless, engaging, and personalized experiences for new hires. Empower your employees to hit the ground running with interactive learning modules, automated workflows, and real-time progress tracking.
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Product-led onboarding is a training approach that uses the product itself to guide new users, giving them hands-on experience and learning opportunities throughout the product journey.
Product-led onboarding accelerates learning, promotes user satisfaction, and reduces support costs by allowing users to learn by doing.
Best practices include developing a clear onboarding plan, leveraging interactive training methods, providing access to resources, encouraging collaboration, and collecting feedback for continuous improvement.
Companies like Zoom, Trello, HubSpot, LinkedIn, and Salesforce use product-led onboarding to train new users, ensuring the best user experience and satisfaction with their products.
