My SaaS founder friend's poor onboarding led to a 15% churn in a month - here's what I told him

One of my SaaS founder friend told me he didn't send an onboarding email - and guess what?

The users didn't know what to do as a next step. So folks began to churn and leave. They weren't able to experience the value the product had to offer.

As you may have guessed, that was a hard pill for my friend to swallow.

Especially since I know how hard he works on his product.

Thankfully, I diagnosed the problem for him. I wrote this post initially for my friend but now I thought I'd share this with you guys here. Who knows there may be other Daniels here as well :)

I know you guys are short on time so have kept this short. Okay here goes:

The 10 elements your SaaS onboarding email must have

Your onboarding email is the first email your users will receive from you. Statistically, welcome emails have the highest open rates at >90% & can increase your revenue by 320%.

So this is a great opportunity to make a lasting first impression on your users. Here are 10 elements to include:

Thank your users - This one’s obvious but your customers are busy people. Acknowledge that they have taken a chance by trying your product. Send them your welcome email within 7-14 mins of signing up.

Personalize- Make sure your email is personalized to the recipient by the first name (at the very least). This is a basic expectation that all welcome emails should follow. You gotta make sure it feels like a personal message.

Have a great subject line - Make it relevant, personalized & include some type of freebie, exclusivity, or urgency, and hit the sweet spot of 6-10 words. Having an emoji boosts open rates by 56%.

No overwhelm - Keep it short, sweet & packed with value.

Identify your user’s one clear JTBD - Jobs to be done framework is pretty powerful. Give your users a simple, straightforward task to accomplish that will enable them to take that next step to fulfil the JTBD that your product promises. This could be to import a list of email subs or create their first AI-generated tweet. This opens the door to further product usage and boosts engagement and retention.

Have one main CTA corresponding to the JTBD - Have one clear CTA. Emails with a single CTA button increased clicks 371% and sales 1,617%. Have a button CTA and not a text CTA. Button CTAs perform 100% better than text based CTAs.

**Encourage customers to reply **- Send questions to your users. Getting customers to reply to your welcome email will also serve to protect your email deliverability. Maybe you can get them to share a success story after their first week or two weeks of using your product. Or incentivize them to reply (maybe you can send them a discount)

Make life easy for the user- Make sure your email offers a link to a tutorial video and clarify how long it is Include suggestions and guides to help users learn the best practices and next steps after signing up.

Add some images/gifs in there - These could be product images or just fun images. The point being emails with images are opened 4.5x more.

Track success of your onboarding welcome email - Track your open rates, click rates, sign ups to product, bounce rates, deliverability rates.

And there you have it - use these 10 ideas in your onboarding emails and send your user to the AHA land faster hopefully excited with what superpowers he'll gain thanks to your product.

PS - If you want to fix your own SaaS onboarding, you can go here. Just enter your SaaS URL. And in 48 hours, get a personalized, custom-made video along with recommendations on how to optimize your onboarding flow in your inbox.