Looking to improve the onboarding process in your business to maximize your product-led growth (PLG) motion?
If so, you've come to the right place.
In this article, we'll give you a framework to help you set key milestones in your onboarding process, guide users towards them, and measure the results of your efforts.
Let's start by talking about one of the most important onboarding milestones there is: the Aha moment.
What is an Aha moment in Onboarding?
In regular English, an Aha moment is simply a moment of insight. In the product world, there can (and should) be multiple Aha moments at each stage of the customer journey.
But for the purposes of this article, we're talking specifically about the Aha moment that occurs during user onboarding. This is one single point in the onboarding process where the user realizes emotionally for the first time that your product is going to be valuable to them. A lot of the time, the Aha moment is often conflated with activation, but the two aren't the same.
Activation is when a customer actually experiences your product's value first-hand for the first time versus the emotional realization that the product is valuable.
This is all still a bit theoretical, so let's use Uber as an example:
- Aha moment: Reading the app's description on Google Play and realizing that you can order an Uber in minutes to your current location.
- Activation: Installing the app and ordering your first Uber.
Exactly when the Aha moment takes take place varies from user to user and company to company. It's not as simple as placing the Aha moment into a generalized onboarding pathway that can apply to all situations.
PS: Want to learn what your product's Aha moment is? Find out in this article.
Why "Aha Moments" Lead to Product Adoption and Long-Term Success
The Aha moment is a critical milestone in the SaaS onboarding process–to the point when reaching it is often the difference between a user activating or churning.
The reasons for this are largely psychological: we all crave that feeling of an "Aha." But what impact does that feeling have on user behavior?
Let’s look at a few examples to find out.
Increased motivation to explore the product
Pipedrive does a great job of leading prospective users towards the Aha moment above the fold on their homepage:
The screenshot of the dashboard visually demonstrates what it will look like to manage a sales deal flow using Pipedrive. If you’re a solo entrepreneur who’s feeling overwhelmed by the chaos of managing deals in your head, this image is sure to give you a feeling of relief!
The image is placed so high on Pipedrive’s homepage is bound to encourage users to explore further.
Improves product understanding and perceived value
Here's a fact about human nature: we only pay for products or services that we perceive to be valuable. And the amount we're willing to pay correlates with the amount of value we perceive.
It stands to reason that businesses need to communicate the value of their product to some degree before a user is willing to sign up and spend money.
GrowthMentor, a platform offering unlimited mentorship for a subscription payment, does a good job of this. They communicate their value as follows:
They follow this up with FAQs so their audience can further increase their knowledge of their product:
Drive emotional connection and brand loyalty
Known for its ability to help board game fans manufacture their own games, the Game Crafter has a slightly unusual way to nudge leads towards the Aha moment.
Rather than using text or images to explain what they do, they have a one-minute explainer video:
If you’re a board game fan, you’re bound to get excited as you start to imagine what playing a game that you had made would feel like.
The Game Crafter continues to build that sense of emotional anticipation later down their homepage, with images of indie games from around the world:
Onboarding tips to bring users to the Aha moment quickly and consistently
To maximize your odds of becoming a successful product-led business, let's explore some practical steps you can take in your business to improve your onboarding process and ensure users reach the Aha moment more efficiently.
Identify user goals
You can't know what will constitute an Aha moment for your users without having a deep understanding of their needs and goals.
The best way to deepen your understanding is to talk to your customers. The book Lean Customer Development sets out a framework for interviewing users in such a way that you listen to their problems without biasing them with your solution.
Additionally, have a look at platforms like Mixpanel and Amplitude and see what you can learn about your users' behavior. Where are they spending time in your app?
You can even bring the dialogue with your users inside your app itself, just how Dropbox does it:
A simple in-app survey like this is a great way to get to know your users and their priorities better. It will also make them feel heard.
Personalize the Journey
When you start out, it's advisable to target one user segment and solve one problem for them. But as you scale, your audience will become more complex, and the range of problems your app solves will likely broaden.
What constitutes an Aha moment for one part of your audience won't necessarily be meaningful for another part.
Onboarding platforms like UserGuiding let you segment your users according to their particular product goals–often referred to as "Jobs to be Done" (JTBD).
Ideally, you want to be segmenting your users at the beginning of their journey based on their JTBD and then put them through onboarding material that speaks to their specific needs.
For example, HubSpot asks their users upfront which category they belong to:
The rest of the onboarding is customized according to the answer given.
Focus on Usability
The easier your platform is to use, the more likely it is that people will stick around long enough to get to the Aha moment.
Onboarding tools are your friend here.
You can use them to build tooltips and hotspots to highlight individual features that you think are important for particular customer segments:
Or you can create product tours that walk them through the features that they'll eventually need to use in order to activate. A best practice here is to group those features into a checklist and have new users work through them, one by one:
Showcase positive user experiences
Nothing demonstrates trust more than communicating, "Look at all these people who have used our product to do what you want to do."
This begins before users even sign up for your app. Your website should be peppered with testimonials and smiling faces of users who have achieved success with your product.
This is likely to lead to new users thinking: "Aha, I could set this up for my business too!"
A more advanced version of this can also be done in-app. There are lots of products that greet new users with empty states like this:
Few things are more demotivating–the user feels like there's no sense of community, and they have to start from scratch.
It would be far better to replace those empty states with demo user data. That way, users can imagine what success with your product will look and feel like. If you can get them to do that, the Aha moment won't be far behind.
Incorporate Feedback Mechanisms
Even if you follow all the guidance in this post, you won't get your onboarding right the first time. So, you should build feedback mechanisms into your onboarding process to allow you to acquire insights that facilitate continuous improvement.
In-app surveys can be as simple as NPS surveys that score features between 1 and 10…
… or as complicated as in-depth questionnaires that really get to the bottom of product usage:
There's also value in embedding an in-app chat widget so that users can reach out to you when they have questions:
All this raises the question, though: which data should you be collecting to measure the success of your onboarding?
How to measure the impact of onboarding processes
The first thing you'll want to track is the percentage of users who complete key steps in the onboarding process.
To do this, use your onboarding platform of choice to define a goal. For example, it could be "completing the product tour" or whatever you decide equates to hitting the Aha moment.
Your onboarding tool will now tell you how many users complete that goal, what segments those users are in, and how long it takes users to complete the most important steps.
Is there a step where users consistently drop out of the process? That's a good sign that your onboarding needs to be improved.
Mixpanel and Amplitude can also help you track user engagement metrics such as feature usage and session duration.
Again, if the analytics are showing you that an important feature isn't being used or people are clicking away from it in a second or two, then your onboarding needs some work.
Looking at this question from the perspective of your whole business, instead of just individual product features, is also essential to track your user retention and churn rates.
For new user onboarding specifically, your retention rate over the first day or the first week will be the most important. You'd be shocked by how many thousands of users most businesses lose just within the first few days of product usage.
Are your users churning before they hit the Aha moment? If so, that's an indicator to look at your onboarding again and keep testing new configurations until you find what works.
Wrapping Up
Having read this article, you should now have a framework to understand:
- What the Aha moment is
- Why the Aha moment is a critical milestone in onboarding
- How a good onboarding process can boost your PLG
- How you can improve the chances of users reaching the Aha moment and onboarding successfully
- And how you can track whether your onboarding is working
For more details about how to set up a frictionless onboarding process for your business, why not consider signing up for ProductLed Academy? Over 400 product-led companies have already used our the ProductLed System to scale effectively.
Here's the link you need to get started.
