Why SaaS Onboardings Fail — Common Mistakes and How They Hurt Growth

We spoke about what Onboarding needs to do for clients and what it can do for your company in the previous post. Here we will cover the main reasons why so many Onboarding attempts fail to serve their clients and their companies. Let’s start by going through some common Onboarding problems we see on the market today, so you can assess how yours measures up.

🧩 Why Onboardings fail?

Some products have inadequate Onboarding or fail to provide it at all, letting clients to figure it out for themselves. This can demand a greater amount of effort they are willing to invest and can make some churn.
Weak onboardings ignore client objectives, their characteristics and context. Product centric onboardings are a good example. These explain what the product and its features do, but fail to explain how clients should use it efficiently to do the jobs it was hired for. Such onboardings are also of little help to those who are stuck or need support.

If onboarding happens outside your product, e.g. via email, you might be asking your clients to perform some gnarly UX acrobatics. Like constantly switching between their email and your product while they are trying to learn a new piece of software. They may not want to do that. It’s also not very effective to explain the UI and usage flows outside the product. The same applies for onboardings that live in sign-up flows or hide in Help Centres.

When onboardings are treated as a one time project, rather than a part of the product, they are usually launched with the new release and then forgotten about. Sooner or later they become obsolete, either not covering newly added functionality or not tending to new client needs the new features themselves might have generated.

🧩 Why is it crucial to get Onboarding right?

Your Onboarding needs to make your clients successful with the product and help your product grow. Not getting your Onboarding right means you are not efficiently helping your clients get started and be successful with your product. Low Activation, Adoption, Retention, and low NPS scores for new clients are the usual consequences, and they all affect your bottom line. It can also lead to missed learnings about your clients’ needs and expectations, and how your product should address them. Those learnings are precious opportunities your product and business can grow on.

🧩 Is my onboarding underperforming, or worse, failing?

Yes, it just might be if it doesn’t guide the most relevant client segments to their respective objectives in a way that is appropriate for their context, is not updated when needed and doesn’t generate new learnings about client needs. Do you want us to have a look?

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Product Onboarding: Why users churn after sign-up? 📊

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Onboarding

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