Doesn’t it feel good when you experience personalization and localization during the onboarding process? It makes you feel like you’re the only user that matters. And, of course, it allows you to better connect with the product from the word “go.”
At Jungle Scout, our onboarding process is always evolving. We’re always seeking ways to improve the onboarding experience. For example, we recently translated the new user onboarding experience for the Chinese market, which opened up a whole new world of opportunities.
Why Is It Important To Have a Personalized User Onboarding Experience?
Think about it this way: as a user, would you rather have a generic onboarding experience or one that’s designed with personalization and localization in mind?
Almost everyone would opt for the personalized and localized option regardless of the product or service. Here’s why it’s important:
- Personalization makes the user feel like the only user.
- Personalization helps engage users to move them through the onboarding process.
- Localization allows your brand to better connect with customers, regardless of location and language.
Can you get by without personalization and localization? Sure, but you’re leaving a lot to be desired. And with that, you’re bogging down your adoption and retention rates.
What's the Difference Between Onboarding Early vs. Late Stage Users?
New user onboarding isn’t the same across the board. If you treat early-stage users the same as late-stage users — and vice versa — you run the risk of “losing them” along the way. Understanding the difference between the two allows you to customize your onboarding process accordingly.
Early Stage Users
For early-stage users, your focus should be on their time-to-value in terms of reaching their goals. The first detail to think about is how long it’ll take to reach their goals. This could be several months down the road for an early-stage user.
So, a lot of what you do during onboarding is deciding how to keep them engaged. What types of resources should you provide? How will you provide these resources? What can you do to personalize them?
At Jungle Scout, we launched Jungle Scout Academy to address this potential hiccup. We created a massive amount of educational content that walks the user step by step through the process of reaching their goals.
Late Stage Users
Early stage and late stage users are in different parts of their journey. For some late-stage users, time-to-value could occur within a few hours or days. This is opposed to weeks or months for early-stage users.
Using Jungle Scout’s Amazon seller software as an example, new users can sign into their accounts and immediately review sales data to determine if they’re turning a profit or losing money. This is a quick win for late-stage users. At that point, they’re sold on the product and what it can do for them. They don’t have to wait to see what their money paid for.
Jungle Scout Onboarding Localization and Personalization Case Study
At Jungle Scout, our mission is to help Amazon sellers start, grow, and manage their businesses. It empowers users to make data-driven decisions, automate their inventory, and save time, all with the idea of boosting sales.
How Jungle Scout realized the need to translate the onboarding experience for the Chinese Market
While growing our business in North America and Europe, we came to find that more and more Chinese users were signing up for our service. Soon enough, the numbers in China outpaced those in Europe, which really opened our eyes to the market.
That led us to conduct further research, which showed that 50 percent of Amazon sellers in the United States are Chinese. As we dug deeper into the numbers — focusing specifically on where our users come from — we found that those with the highest time on site and highest engagement rate were Chinese.
That was a problem because their entire experience was still in English.
How Jungle Scout localized the onboarding of their new Chinese users
With better knowledge of our market, we decided to double down. We opened an office in China, hired a Chinese team, and started accepting Chinese forms of payment. All of this led us to localize the onboarding experience.
The first step was to localize all of our educational assets. This allowed our Chinese users to more efficiently move through the onboarding process while maintaining a high level of engagement. They no longer had to forgo these educational assets or translate them in hopes of taking away the most important information.
The next step was understanding that the customer experience is different for our Chinese users. And not just understand this but also take steps to make the process better suited to their wants and needs.
That’s when I decided to better leverage our Chinese team members. I spoke with them about the culture of this user base, how to connect with them, and the general requirements of this specific audience. This led me to better understand their sales, marketing, and engagement processes, along with the data they most heavily rely on.
This provided the jumping-off point required to make changes for the better. As these changes were implemented, we watched our Chinese market growth explode. The initial investment was big, but we’re now seeing the dividends pay off.
Tips for Product-Led Companies Wanting To Improve New User Onboarding
Are you interested in using onboarding personalization and localization to boost adoption rates within your product-led company? In addition to taking inspiration from our story above, here are some additional tips.
Don’t stop talking to your customers
It’s natural to provide strong customer service in the early days of your company. However, as time goes by, your attention wanes, and you stop talking to and learning from your customers. Letting this happen means you’re missing out on one of your best resources.
Listen to your customers’ pain points. Talk to them about what they do and don’t like. Look for large patterns that can guide you toward impactful changes to your onboarding process.
Know how people are using your product
Don’t underscore the value of seeing how people are using your product. You know you have customers, but do you know:
- How they’re using your product.
- Why they’re using your product.
- The hang-ups that are holding them back.
There’s no such thing as an unimportant piece of data. No matter how significant or insignificant it appears on the surface, every number tells a bigger story. And that story will lead you to better understand how people are using your product.
