5 Tactics for Better Onboarding: How We Grew Activation by 20%

If you find this valuable, we'd love for you to try Supa Screenshot, our latest free product ❤️

Startling fact: as much as 80% of users who sign up for your product end up never coming back after the first day.

This means only 20% of top-of-funnel users come back to use your product in a meaningful way.

It also denotes the importance of first impressions — which are paramount to converting, retaining, and expanding your customer base.

And where first impressions typically form is within your initial onboarding experience.

But despite this, onboarding is frequently overlooked as a one-time checklist – often becoming stale as your product, messaging, and GTM tactics evolve.

And we’ve been guilty of this too at Supademo, where we struggled with a pattern of less-than-ideal customer activation, slow time-to-value, and low onboarding completion.

In an effort to improve these metrics, we focused on hypothesizing and implementing a series of tactics to reduce friction and accelerate time-to-value.

Ultimately, these:

• Increased onboarding completion rate by ~10%
• Increased activation rate by ~20%;
• Decreased time it took to achieve the "aha! moment" by ~39%

Here’s an actionable guide on the five tactics we implemented to improve our product onboarding:

1) Reverse trial directly into our highest-tier plan

Companies often find themselves wrestling with the choice between offering a Trial or adopting a Freemium model. As Elena Vera says: “opt for neither, because Reverse Trials are simply.. better.”
A reverse trial lets the product do the talking rather than gatekeeping with marketing lingo. It also helps customers test-drive plans that best fit their use case — without the paradox of choice.

What we did:

• Avoid overwhelming users by focusing on only highlighting core features up-front
• Nudge users to try premium features based on usage or time-based triggers
• Clearly indicate what happens at the end of the reverse trial (i.e. downgrade to freemium with limited features)

2) Use social proof everywhere

Communicate benefits through customers' voices – not just your own. This helps build trust, credibility and authority, which are crucial to their willingness to invest time and complete onboarding.

What we did:

• Added social proof throughout our entire product onboarding flow
• Tied specific social proof to specific pages (team-based testimonial on “invite your team” page)
• Linked use cases emails with case studies that map directly to the one mentioned

3) Force users to experience our "aha moment"

When building a complex product with many bells and whistles, it can be challenging to surface key features intuitively. Since our “aha” moment is tied to creating a Supademo, we “forced” users to as one of their first onboarding steps.

What we did:

• Make the first recording semi-mandatory during onboarding, removing paradox of choice
• Automatically enable and apply features meant to “wow” users or drive virality by default. You have limited time to impress new users!
• Added templates and Supademo examples everywhere — in-app, personalized onboarding emails, etc

4) Push for team usage

It's commonly accepted that team-based, collaborative SaaS platforms like Slack tend to have higher retention and lower churn. Lateral usage in the org = wider surface area for penetration, more use cases and higher odds of reaching an internal champion.

What we did:

• Automatically show matching workspaces based on domain – with an option to request access, auto-join “open” workspaces
• Encourage users to invite right during onboarding — with the goal of converting them while at peak interest (i.e. initial onboarding)

5) Personalized, action-triggered onboarding emails

Instead of dripping a handful of generic email sequences to every signup, we decided to add personalization via dynamic Supademos and product-triggered onboarding emails. With little effort, we get notified of our highest potential/most engaged leads while personalizing at scale.

What we did

• Welcome email with a personalized product tour at scale, using dynamic variables
• Automated, plain text founder emails to drive responses and feedback
• Emails when success metrics are met – with encouragement and clear next steps to guide to deeper adoption
• Short, two-sentence feature tips weekly - spacing them out so it's less intrusive and helps us stay top-of-mind — while increasing odds of catching users at the right timing

Hopefully, this helps other founders here iterate on and improve their product onboarding experience!