📂 Invest in onboarding practices to accelerate time to value

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Sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin. And there's no better way to generate results tomorrow than through email outreach. I couldn't be more excited to partner with Sales.co to help more startups do cold email well. They handle everything from idea generation to a/b testing. All you have to do is show up for the sales call. Founded by two software engineers, their approach is data-driven and scalable, and they only care about bringing you qualified leads. Make sure to mention "Corey" or "Swipe Files."

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📖 The following is an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, Founding Marketing. It's a (very) rough draft of thoughts, notes, and research... so feel free to reply with your feedback on what I should expand more on and what needs to be clarified. Enjoy!

One thing that both product people and marketers alike share is the habit of over-explaining.

Product people want to show how every feature works.

Marketers want to talk about every single benefit.

But the truth is that it’s unnecessary. In fact, it can be detrimental.

Think about the last landing page you were on and how much you read.

Think about the last time you signed up for a product and how many tooltips you clicked through, videos you watched, and help docs you read.

Think about the last time you bought something online and how many options you had to choose, information you had to give, and decisions you had to make.

We expect far too much of people sometimes. And much is to be gained by removing what’s unnecessary.

To set the stage for onboarding, I’d like to introduce a concept called the minimum path to value.

The minimum path to value is a concept to find the least amount of steps required to get someone to understand enough to make a decision about your product or service.

The thought experiment goes:

“If you stripped away everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary for someone to feel comfortable making a decision, what would it look like?”

And it’s actually founded on a principle called Hick’s law.

Hick’s Law states that the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

Basically, the longer it takes and the more work required, the less likely it is to be completed.

So the goal of onboarding is not to teach users everything they need to know to use the product, it’s actually to do the bare minimum needed for them to realize the value and be able to make a decision.

Onboarding experiences are usually made up of:

• Forms
• Initial screens
• Emails
• Tutorials and tooltips
• Videos
• Documentation
• Notifications
• Calls and meetings
• Integrations
• Data inputs

That’s a lot, right? Which is why we have to be careful about which tools we use and how much is implemented into your onboarding experience. If you did everything, you’d flood users and overwhelm them.

So let’s look at each one.

Forms

The onboarding experience starts with that very first step of signing up for the service. It may seem obvious, but filling in the signup form is the first touchpoint that could leave a lasting impression on the customer – especially if it’s a bad one.

Things to consider:

• Generally, just asking for the absolutely necessary information is a good strategy here – it reduces the complexity and barrier to signing up.
• Add some social proof – a much-needed helping hand to get through the chore of signing up.
• Social signup buttons – they’re proven to increase signup rates, and the process is generally much smoother for the user. Also, they see a brand that they respect on your site (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Google)
• If you need a lot of information from someone, consider splitting it up into multiple, short forms over multiple pages.

Initial screens

Dropping someone into a blank screen and expecting them to find their way around and do everything themselves is a bad idea. Dedicated pages and sequences of pages can hold someone’s hand (virtually) and take them step-by-step through the work they need in order to start immediately seeing value out of the product.

Things to consider:

• Use dedicated pages to capture important information, explain information, show a video, and many of the other onboarding tools we’ll cover.
• Use pages to segment and personalize the onboarding experience if there are a lot of different uses or outcomes.

Quickbooks is a great example of how you segment and personalize the onboarding experience based on who you are or what you want to achieve.

More companies should think about onboarding this way.

You want to get someone to what they want to do as quickly as possible. This way they can trust they can do it over and over again.

Emails

Emails can come in the form of:

1. Scheduled, educational emails
2. Triggered, action-based emails

You have a great opportunity to keep your new customer engaged and educated by sending them a drip campaign of emails. This is your best chance of getting the customer to really use all the features of your product.

• Make sure you introduce just one new concept per email – the rest can wait for the following emails.
• Follow a posting schedule that supports “little and often”. If you get this right, the customer will expect (and even look forward to) each subsequent mail.
• The goal is not to show each feature of the product and how it works in detail. The goal is to entice the customer to go and try out the feature. If you don’t get people INTO your app, they’ll become disengaged.

Here’s a list of email ideas you can use to create your own onboarding emails

Tutorials, tooltips, and checklists

You can use some form of tutorial to guide new customers through the UI of your product, and show how to do something.

Things to consider:

• Making it skippable. This is critical. There’s nothing worse than being forced through a tutorial that you don’t need to or want to see. Let me out!!
• Making it possible for people to come back to it later. People commonly skip pop-ups and notifications when they first log in to something. So at least make sure that they can find it again when they realize it was actually quite useful to them after all…

Interactive states

You can also use a specialized product experience to help customers practice doing things in the app.

Things to consider:

• Keep it simple: Show simple actions that anyone can complete
• Start easy and then move to more complex: You want to encourage actions but also don’t want start off to complicated.

Videos

Sometimes people sign up for your product without a full idea of what it can do. Including a link to your demo or explainer video in your onboarding communications can offer a helpful overview of all of your product’s features. This way, users will be better equipped to get the most out of your product.

Video offers the benefit of being able to show your product in action. You can walk people visually through workflows, and for many, it’s much easier to follow along with a video than a convoluted list of steps.

Things to keep in mind:

• Keep it as short as possible. The longer it is, the less likely it is to be watched all the way through.
• Highlight the major actions and workflows, not the major features. It’s easy to want to tour the entire product. Focus on the major outcomes customers can get to.

Documentation

Documentation isn’t an entirely exciting prospect, but it’s an important element of any onboarding experience. If everything goes well, perhaps it’s not needed at all. But you want to be sure that when users are really stuck, they can get the guidance they need – and that it’s easily accessible and understandable.

Things to consider:

• Bad or out-of-date documentation can be worse than no documentation at all. Make sure that the documentation you do have is easily maintainable – otherwise get rid of it.
• Structure your documentation around the tasks that the user is trying to accomplish with your product (and name them this way), rather than your internal view of the product. There’s nothing wrong with “How to do X…“

Notifications

Notifications can be used to inspire the next action or get someone back into the app, usually in the form of an email or push notification if you have an accompanying mobile app.

Things to consider:

• Frequency. Getting this right is a fine balance between fading into background noise and spamming the user into frustration.
• Send just enough information to spark curiosity, but not too much where they get everything they need to know.
• Choice. Let the user fine-tune your notifications to achieve the frequency that suits them.

Calls and meetings

This can have a huge impact on the overall onboarding experience of your customers. Why? Because it’s a touch-point with a human being. The power of simply picking up the phone and having a quick chat with a new customer to check-in can out-rank almost any other element listed here. And the best thing is, it’s two-way – you get a ton of valuable feedback at the same time! Win-win.

Things to consider:

• Find the right point in time to do this. Too soon, and the customer won’t really have anything much to tell you – they might even find your behaviour almost “needy”. Too late, and they may already have made a clear-cut decision that their sub-par experience will mean that they won’t be paying for your product.
• Think about what you can do with the data you get from these calls. It’s likely that there are some great actionable insights, but you need to take a measured approach – it’s easy to derail your vision and roadmap for the product with individual cases of feedback, particularly when talking directly with customers (there’s more emotion involved).

Data inputs

It’s not uncommon to require customers to import their data (or connect data sources) to actually use. Buffer needs you to connect a social account, Baremetrics needs you to connect a billing system, Facebook needs you to install their pixel, Fullstory needs you to install a code snippet, etc. This is one of the major barriers to the whole onboarding process – customers will generally not see any value from the product until they complete this step.

Things to consider:

• Automating as much of the process as possible
• Supporting those who get stuck
• Not requiring hours of the user’s time (we’ll let you know when it’s finished).
• Making it easier to do and providing alternatives

What if you already have an onboarding experience?

How do you use this idea of the minimum path to value?

Take inventory of every step between input and output

Pick a multi-step process you want to use this for and then take inventory of every one of those steps, and each element in that step.

So what’s the start, the end (where a goal is achieved), and everything in between?

This can include:

• Actions users must take
• Information required
• Screens
• Backend programs or infrastructure

Get everything written down so that it’s right in front of you.

Remove all nonessential elements

Now, do an audit of every one of these steps and elements and ask yourself: “Is this essential to get to someone to the end goal?”

If not, remove.

If yes, keep it.

You have to be sort of cut-throat in this process. Question yourself. Is it really essential? Is there something we can do or provide that makes it nonessential?

Don’t be afraid to get creative here. The goal is to stress test everything and let only let what’s truly essential remain.

Reconstruct and iterate

And then you can begin to reconstruct with what you have left and test this new process. The goal is to find the minimum path to value.

Simplify choices for the user by breaking down complex tasks into smaller steps. Avoid overwhelming users by highlighting recommended options. Don’t drop someone into blank screens or digital mazes.

Keep It Short and Simple.

Or more affectionately, Keep It Simple Stupid.

You may have to go through again and take inventory, remove more nonessential steps, and then reconstruct again.

Add a screen that asks for the user’s goals. Use these goals to personalize the first screens they see when dropped into the dashboard so you can serve a relevant product tour. You can also trigger automated emails “remember how you said you wanted to X?” as a fail-safe.

The most important element of onboarding is a successful “first run” to get someone to experience the product by trying it. Remove all distractions and provide guard rails that they can’t deviate from until the first run is complete. Think of it as training wheels on a bike.

Turn any installation instructions into a modal that can be accessed even after the first run. It’s very likely a new user will need to reference it a few times and you don’t want to hide it from them until you’re confident they’re locked in.

Capture attribution in onboarding by asking "how'd you hear about us?" It's not perfect, but it helps fill in gaps in data that you won't see in analytics platforms.

—Corey

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