User Onboarding Tools to Drive Customer Success
Which onboarding tools do you need to reach success in your onboarding process?
Failing to showcase your product’s value immediately will lead to losing your users as quickly as they come aboard.
That is where user onboarding tools can be of help.
Utilising the best user onboarding software that aligns with your business needs can be a huge advantage for enterprises. Yet, many companies still struggle with this. Most of them need an understanding of user onboarding tools and classifications.
In this article, we will go over a handpicked selection of the best user onboarding tools. Each with features designed to enrich the user onboarding experience and speed up your customers’ progress towards appreciating your product’s value.
Table of Contents
- Understanding user onboarding tools
- User onboarding vs. product onboarding
- Importance of user onboarding tools
- Excellent user onboarding tools to drive customer success
- Conclusion
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Understanding user onboarding tools
There are a lot of user onboarding tools that serve as reliable customer onboarding software. These platforms assist you in effectively showing and making new users understand the intricacies of your product.
With these onboarding tools, you can simplify the user onboarding flow. You are guaranteeing a seamless and hassle-free journey for all your users.
Not only that, but these onboarding tools can also help you provide a genuine and welcoming atmosphere. It enables your new customers to grasp your product’s inner workings better.
User onboarding vs. product onboarding
People often confuse user onboarding and product onboarding. This is due to their shared goals for the product and the business. They even use similar techniques and tools.
However, the difference between the two is the specific areas they focus on.
The primary focus of user onboarding is introducing new users to your product. Guiding them through each step during the initial phases. This helps them use the product efficiently and ensures a smooth and confident start.
Think of it as a journey of discovery, where users dive into the core principles of your product. This process helps them understand how it works, helping them recognise your product’s benefits to their daily life.
Imagine user onboarding as going on virtual product tours with users. You first walk them through simple tasks, like a helpful guide. Then reveal the benefits and advantages of your software along the way.
Source: Userguiding
Meanwhile, product onboarding tools focus on the product’s features and functionality. They aim to introduce and familiarise new and existing users with their capabilities.
Its ultimate goal is to educate users about the latest features and show how your product can improve their experience—allowing users to derive optimal value from it.
Importance of user onboarding tools
Using the best user onboarding tools will ensure that your users reach that “Aha moment!’ right from the start. This will result in increased user engagement and enhanced user experience. This also makes your onboarding process seamless and efficient.
According to Forbes, a disengaged user’s financial impact can incur approximately $16,000 yearly. It indicates how vital user engagement is, highlighting why user onboarding tools are essential.
When you concentrate on customer onboarding and get it right, you create a foundation for many benefits. Benefits that positively influence the growth of your business.
To start, here are three:
- Improve user experience – Undoubtedly, onboarding is all about the customer. Designing your onboarding program to make it a breeze for customers will help them achieve their goals. Keeping things straightforward during onboarding can significantly improve the users’ experience with your product.
- Boost customer retention – Dissatisfied customers are the last thing you want. One of the reasons your customers might be dissatisfied is struggling with the onboarding process. That’s why customer onboarding when executed successfully, is vital in guiding customers and fostering greater user adoption.
- Increase revenue – When customers delight in our products, they become enthusiastic advocates who actively refer them to others. As mentioned, you can enhance customer retention by designing an excellent user onboarding process. Improved retention directly contributes to lowering customer acquisition costs and driving revenue growth.
Excellent user onboarding tools to drive customer success
#1. In-app experience
The key to onboarding is ensuring users a seamless and enjoyable journey as they begin exploring your app. Statistics show that, on average, every app loses around 77% of its users within three days. Why is this crucial?
To create a captivating first-time experience, here are some onboarding tools that can work wonders.
Appcues allows you to craft onboarding experiences with no coding knowledge required. This means marketers and product specialists can take the lead in onboarding initiatives without relying on developers. At the same time, developers can channel their efforts into enhancing the product.
Tour My App revolutionises the user onboarding process by enabling you to create engaging, code-free in-application tutorials. These tutorials are a valuable user onboarding tool, highlighting essential features, and showcasing your value. It’s a faster and easier way to onboard users, ensuring they understand your application’s benefits.
Tour My App places customisation right in your hands, allowing you to tailor it as desired. Its user-friendly interface ensures a smooth user journey. The standout features include built-in analytics, valuable insights, and the convenience of creating tutorials without any necessary coding expertise.
Userpilot is one of the most effective onboarding tools that helps boost user adoption by delivering personalised product experiences based on user behaviour. With it, you can create personalised user onboarding flows for new signups, user guides, in-app surveys, and more.
Source: Userpilot
#2. Data enrichment onboarding tools
During onboarding, your users provide valuable information such as email addresses, personal preferences, and geographical data. With a data enrichment tool, you can gather important customer data and use it to customise your onboarding process. This will make the user onboarding experience more exciting and personal.
Clearbit equips you with vital insights such as location, job title, industry, etc. Users have praised Clearbit for its time-saving capabilities in customising websites for their target customers and effectively discovering and qualifying leads.
#3. Gamification onboarding tools
Gamification is the process of applying game-like features to a non-game environment. Gamifying your user onboarding process makes it easy for you to introduce your product as fun and interactive. Some of the best practices include:
- Gamify your onboarding dashboard – The welcome screen is the first thing your users will see when they sign up. Since most users despise filling out boring forms, you can let them create personalised avatars instead. This makes the process more exciting and gives you the information you need.
- Onboarding checklists – This strategy will help your users remember unfinished tasks in their onboarding process. Even if your process is straightforward, some users may still overlook things they need to do. You can also incentivise this process to encourage your users to do it.
- Use badges and points to reward engagement – Using achievement badges as a reward for specific actions will help boost engagement. Activation badges are the most popular strategy to encourage users to explore your product and learn more.
With gamification, you can host weekly challenges and post leaderboards to keep your users engaged long after onboarding.
#4. Behaviour-based email
During user onboarding, you must tread carefully and ensure you don’t overwhelm new users with too much information. Knowing the difference between offering valuable guidance and bombarding your users is crucial. Luckily, using email as an onboarding tool lends itself well to this challenge.
Email remains one of the most-used communication platforms today. By launching a drip campaign, you can deliver essential information to users. This will ensure they receive the most valuable aspects of your app when needed.
Customer.io thrives on helping businesses create flawless messaging flows. They focus on developing automated processes that ease smooth communication with users across email, push notifications, and SMS messages.
Using a real-time customer data platform helps deliver in-app messages crafted to correspond with individual behaviours, creating greater engagement.
Mailchimp is one of the most comprehensive web-based email onboarding tools worldwide. This tool lets you personalise and send targeted emails, run precise ad campaigns, automate follow-ups, and monitor your movements.
Source: Mailchimp
When engaging and guiding users through their onboarding journey, Mailchimp shines as a powerful email marketing tool. With its product analytics tool, you can send personalised emails that resonate with the right audience at the right moments.
Userlist is a user-friendly SaaS email automation platform crafted with customer onboarding in mind. With its robust capabilities to analyse user behaviour data, Userlist helps you design personalised onboarding campaigns. This will help you deliver the perfect information at precisely the right moments.
#5. Data analytics
It’s not only about knowing when users come and go; it’s crucial to understand why. With a short timeframe to engage users, these analytical onboarding tools provide you with a data-driven approach to maximise this opportunity.
Amplitude specialises in data analysis using behavioural cohorts and usage habits. You can use Amplitude to determine your users’ aha moment and tailor your onboarding to drive users to it.
Mixpanel is your go-to solution for tracking user behaviour and product experience. Its simple and engaging user interface caters to both mobile and web applications. Mixpanel lets you visualise and segment your data, generate insightful reports, and track your user onboarding KPIs.
With Mixpanel, you gain visibility into the progress of your user onboarding process, pinpointing areas where individual users may need targeted support and increased engagement.
#6. Qualitative feedback
Creating a flawless onboarding experience for your app often involves refining your product based on customer feedback. With qualitative feedback onboarding tools, you give your customers a voice and improve the onboarding process based on their genuine insights.
This onboarding tool allows you to segment users based on different attributes. You schedule pop-up surveys to appear at preferred times and gather insightful opinions throughout the user onboarding process.
Are you looking for an all-inclusive feedback management platform? Feedier is one of the most potent onboarding tools that allows you to gather valuable feedback across various aspects. You can gather input through your application, product, in-app experience, and user onboarding experience.
Typeform specialises in crafting surveys with a minimal yet memorable design. While giving priority to your users is essential, acquiring valuable feedback can be demanding and costly. This is where Typeform proves invaluable, providing a time- and cost-effective solution.
With Typeform, you can create business forms, quizzes, surveys, product feedback, landing pages, and more.
SurveyMonkey is a robust cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool that simplifies designing and executing professional online surveys.
SurveyMonkey is one of the most helpful onboarding tools to determine whether your user onboarding process is correct. It offers various survey options. From easy polls to comprehensive market research, it will help you gather the feedback you need to develop your process.
#7. Customer Support
Customer support is a weak point for most companies, but this presents an excellent opportunity for those who excel in this area. By implementing the right onboarding tools, you will differentiate yourself and enjoy notable cost savings.
Source: Salesforce
Every product manager is familiar that users will encounter a problem with their product sooner or later. This will lead them to decide whether to ask for help or stop using the product altogether. You can ensure users take the first path by offering reliable customer support.
Zendesk
With Zendesk, you can effortlessly guide users through their onboarding journey using convenient chat support. Let AI bots handle routine queries, saving your team’s time while allowing users to speak with a representative for personalised support. Zendesk also enables you to build a help centre, ensuring that users will find immediate answers to their onboarding questions.
So, when users run into any challenges during the onboarding process, they can turn to your help centre for support.
LiveChat
LiveChat is an excellent tool that enables real-time conversations with customers, allowing you to address their concerns as they arise. Take advantage of this onboarding tool to engage with your users directly and provide timely solutions to their problems.
Uncover the hurdles your users encounter along their journey with the help of LiveChat’s rich user analytics. Using this onboarding tool, you can rack your onboarding process to identify where friction arises and affects your customers’ experience.
No matter how well-designed your tutorials and in-app support are, your new customers will always have questions about the process. That’s when a helpdesk platform like Help Scout becomes useful.
With Help Scout, you can help customers through a shared inbox, provide self-assistance options, and engage via live chat.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a cloud-based software designed to help businesses efficiently manage customer care and support operations. Its primary purpose is to integrate chat support into user onboarding processes and ensure accurate monitoring of all conversations.
Freshdesk is a ticketing software that caters to small and medium businesses seeking a user-friendly solution for managing their helpdesk. This helpdesk tool enables you to manage customer support tickets, track and resolve user queries, and address other customer inquiries.
#8. Video onboarding tools
Videos are perfect for catching and retaining your customer’s attention. When welcoming new users to your platform, videos are the most excellent source of information you can provide.
Source: Intercom
Do you have a feature in your product that users tend to overlook and ignore during onboarding? This happens because the feature appears complex and intimidating, leading to low product adoption rates.
One solution is to create a video that takes users on a step-by-step journey through its usage. This approach increases the likelihood of users embracing the feature and becoming loyal customers.
Here are some of the best video onboarding tools you can check out:
Wistia
The very principle of compelling storytelling lies with “show, don’t tell.” Wistia understands this concept and equips you with visual onboarding tools that show how your product can enhance your users’ lives.
Video tutorials are important in your user onboarding process, as they build trust by introducing the people behind your product. Wistia offers you onboarding tools to create and customise videos that showcase your product in action. This will help users find the value in your product faster and with more impact.
With Wistia, you can see how users interact with your video. You can monitor user interactions, allowing you to create content that takes their onboarding experience to new heights.
Vidyard simplifies the process of recording and sharing videos, adding a functional and engaging element to user onboarding. It enables you to organise live streams and create interactive user onboarding experiences.
Vimeo
Vimeo stands out as a popular choice for video onboarding tools. You can use it for hosting videos, providing all the tools to record, manage, and share videos with exceptional quality.
Conclusion
The success of your user lifecycle hinges on a well-executed user onboarding process. With the help of the onboarding tools mentioned above, you can gather insightful data and unlock essential features. You can now usher them from the Register button to complete product adoption.
Our gamification experts at Mambo are excited to help you enhance your user onboarding process. Book a demo today!
