Aazar Shad:
This is Aazar. I'm Head of Growth at Userpilot, and I would love to share my concepts regarding proactive and reactive onboarding. Let's just dive into it quickly. The first thing is I'm Head of Growth at Userpilot. We help more than 500 SaaS companies. We also have something similar, summit for product managers specifically to drive product growth. It's called Product Drive Summit, you can find it on Google as well.
Aazar Shad:
I also run a podcast called Growth Marketing Stories and it's all about growth from acquisition to referral. And we talk about stories that can inspire us. I also have, specifically, a teardown on this specific topic. So we also do a little bit of SaaS companies product onboarding teardown on and off. And we recently did a research on product onboarding and that you can also find it on Google and also on our notes as well. And last but not the least, I also have huge experience in SaaS, so I would love to share it with you.
Aazar Shad:
So first things first, who is this presentation for? This presentation is specifically for companies that are product-led. They have complex features, so they have to explain a lot of specific feature, then it's very overwhelming for users to find all the features. So, those companies are a bit advanced and there's a huge learning curve and education goes into educating the users. And this presentation is specific for those companies, who are trying to educate the users proactively and reactively.
Aazar Shad:
So let's just dive into it. And why? The first and the most important thing, the reason why this is important is because everything is going to product-led, right? That's one. And the second thing is that everybody wish to have self-serve onboarding or, at least at certain part, it could be self-serve. And this is the reason why you need this presentation, or this is the reason why you need this kind of approach to your onboarding.
Aazar Shad:
And the most important thing is that you need to be where your users are. And so, if you are going to be where your users are, they're going to learn themselves without even knowing that they've been onboarded. So that's the reason why proactive and reactive onboarding, both are really important concepts. I'm not going to dive further into it because we are going to talk about it. But one thing I can tell you is that in order to have the best product experience, you need to give the users both kind of experiences. Right? So let's just dive into it.
Aazar Shad:
Let me pin this to the side. Cool. So this is my flywheel, product-led user adoption funnel. Not funnel, sorry, flywheel. And this flywheel specifically is focused on product-led businesses. And this is very important because if you understand this flywheel, you will be able to segment your users appropriately. You will be able to create onboarding appropriately. You will be able to actually give the 'wow' experience to every user in your product adoption journey, in their product adoption journey and give them understanding on how to do things correctly.
Aazar Shad:
So first things first, in this flywheel, the first step is 'aha'. 'Aha' is where the user understands the value of your application. Not value, just understands it, right? Activation happens next, which is they do certain steps inside your application when they come for the first time and then they get activated and they just don't understand the value, but they have actually realized the value of your application.
Aazar Shad:
Quick examples through, let's say, a social media tool which helps users in scheduling, such as buffer, when the user comes for the first time, the 'aha' is that, "Okay. This will help me schedule posts." But once the user has scheduled 10 posts they get to understand, "Okay. You know what? Now I understand why it helps me. And it helps me by saving time." So they got activated by having scheduling 10 posts. But now, in the product-led world, we don't only test one application, we test a couple of them. So they are still in the process of a journey to test which application they use. Or recently, I was moving into podcasting. And, while doing podcasting, I tried three different applications. One was Audacity, the other was GarageBand, and the third was EastGroup. And after trying three application, I selected one of them.
Aazar Shad:
And when I selected, I actually invested my time more. So I went to their onboarding, for example, these groups onboarding, and I tried to see how they do it. I learned through the course and I started importing my recording there. And I started, not only just selecting it, but I started making more effort and publishing the first specific recording for my podcast. And also, try to ask for feedback by sharing [inaudible 00:05:14] . So, that's where I selected the application. For example, in social media, you are at the stage where you have evaluated a couple of tools in social media, and not only you're scheduling it, but you're inviting other people. And inviting could be one of the phase where the event happened and you have selected other people, so now you're getting more serious about it. And then you still keep doing further steps and then become a paid user.
Aazar Shad:
At this phase for a product led business, Slack is a good example. They become product qualified when they pay, right, the users pay. So 50,000 messages is the barrier. For a lot of companies, there are a lot of steps from 'aha' to actually pay it. And so, the paid users is actually the pay and the [convenience inaudible 00:06:01] of your application. So we are very clear about this event. But then, even when they become paid user, doesn't mean that their journey has stopped. Actually, that's when the marriage has happened, when you are actually going to help them succeed. And, so you have to move from paid to basic, but keep educating them about few features, keep helping them discover new features. In a social media tool, for example, when you also tell them, "Hey, we also have Instagram scheduling as well," you can upload it to stories, right?
Aazar Shad:
So they become basic user. And these basic users also keep using it. They haven't realized the whole application value. Let's say, they haven't found more features, but they are happy with the application. But you not only want to make them basic user, you want to move them from basic to pro users, right? So again, in social media, let's say this company has released a new feature and they want users to interact with these features, they become pro users. Pro users are adopting the features faster, pro users are adopting the latest releases faster, pro users are telling other people about it. So pro users are really, really big champions for you. And then becoming the pro user, eventually become an advocate. So for example, I became a big advocate of Descript on Twitter, before [inaudible 00:07:24] because it was so easy to use compared to other two applications.
Aazar Shad:
And I became a advocate or a pro user when I started using the advantage of called Overdub, which basically dubs my voice and I don't have even have to speak. So a lot of things are there, but the idea is that the user has to go to a lot of steps to actually get to there. And your job is to segment them properly, understand it. And in this adoption flywheel, you need to understand that you need to onboard users proactively and reactively. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So that's why this flywheel was very important.
Aazar Shad:
So what is proactive onboarding? In simple terms, proactive onboarding is where you are trying to educate the user, and you're trying to change the user's behavior proactively and you're guiding them. And this is usually happens in the welcome first-round experience where you're trying to tell them, "Hey, this is the first button click here." And so, the idea is that you transition them from new users to 'aha' users, to 'aha' users, to actually activated users. And that activation phase is really important. If the users get activated faster, they're likely to pay more as well. They're likely to be faster, as well. And so, you just need to keep educating them over time. That's the idea. So how to basically implement such kind of proactive onboarding. The way to actually know how to proactively onboard the user is that, first of all, you need to learn certain cohorts inside your application, by looking at the users, and find out who are these users who are paying you, and who are these users who are likely to use those features?
Aazar Shad:
So let's say if you have certain features, look at your cohort analysis, find out in your cohort analysis users who are retained the most, which features they use. And those features should be the features that you should be focusing on, and then you can drill down to a couple of more features that can help you to understand the 'aha' and the value faster. So these are the two reasons: one is find out the users who were retained, and once you understand which features they were first using. And then the second thing is that as soon as you have shortlist a couple of features, find out which of the features are actually showing the 'aha' faster.
Aazar Shad:
That's how we can find out how we can proactively educate the user. So, for example, in Userpilot, in our application, what we do is that as soon as somebody has installed the application, which is an activation moment for us, we try to push them to add customer wins, because we know that if they add some kind of customer win in our application, they will be able to understand the value of Userpilot more because they can see that things that their users are adopting the future.
Aazar Shad:
In social media, for example, if there's somebody has connected their social media, then the next step is to make them schedule it, right? So scheduling could be the feature that you want to proactively make them onboard. So that's the idea about proactive onboarding and how to do that, how to implement that, but you need certain tools for that. So I'm giving you certain tools. One is a checklist. A checklist is great from 'aha' to activation. What we have found that people who use Userpilot checklist, they are 4x more likely to convert to paid users if they use a checklist the right way. The second is first-run, and first-week welcome flows, so behavior based. As I said, if there's one action that you want the user to move towards, you make them click on it as soon as they come inside the application, and get them the 'aha' faster. And then, you wait for the user and then based on their behavior, if they've achieved some certain kinds of milestones, you can push them to those actions.
Aazar Shad:
What we found out, that only 17% of the SaaS companies are actually having some kind of behavior based customer events to push the user to the next action, through our product onboarding research that I talked about. So I think this is the lowest hanging fruit where you learn which features are the most useful to the users in the first week, and based on their behavior, based on their milestones, keep telling them what to do next. You can also use the chat board that a lot of companies use at a certain stage to proactively onboard and educate the users. And the last, but not the least, the most important one to proactively onboard the user, is to use a trigger and behavior based emails, right?
Aazar Shad:
Basically, if you have certain milestones inside your application and for Albacross, was installing the JavaScript. And if you tell them if they have, or have not done, the users more likely to do the next step. The second thing is context-based. This is HubSpot example.
Aazar Shad:
So basically, I installed HubSpot lately, and HubSpot CRM. And then I was already having the Chrome extension as well installed. And what happened was, that I was trying to copy/paste certain things inside my email, and then they showed me this specific popup by telling me to save as template and use this template feature. And that was a great upsell to use certain features based on context. So do use that, based on milestones, and that the most important thing in proactive onboarding is to use checklist. Checklist is, as I said, is the single best way to actually activate the users. What we've seen at Userpilot, our customers use our checklist and they are 4x more likely to convert a user into paid customer, if they use checklists. So I'd highly recommend to use checklists for proactive onboarding.
Aazar Shad:
Now let's talk about reactive onboarding. Reactive onboarding is basically, you wait for the user to make the first action. When they want to learn certain things. When they want to make certain action to learn more about the application, and you have to simply provide that. How can you provide that? You can simply provide that by first understanding the user recording, for looking at your user recording, find the frustration points, which feature they're trying to click, and they don't understand that. You can also find out these reactive onboarding points, the things that you need to help them with is actually through chat. Basically, they keep asking you questions in your chat tool. You should make help docs about it and if there's a help docs about it, maybe you want to react to reactively help them.
Aazar Shad:
And then, the most important thing is that there are certain features you already know that your users are not able to discover, and are really important to provide value faster. So those features, even if they are activated post activation, those features might be really important and you want to give it to them, and they are trying to learn about the tool or trying to learn about your features. There are several tools out there, some of them you might already be aware of, such as help docs. We've, we've seen the 99% of SaaS companies already have some kind of help docs and people are already aware of chat tools as well, and how-to videos and webinars and Academy. But there are two new things that are there in the market, and we've been learning from them. What we've seen that companies like Airtable, companies like Notion, all of them are using it. And so we highly recommend that inside your application as well.
Aazar Shad:
So the two tools are basically native tooltips, as well as in-app help widget, on demand help widget. So how do you do that? So, this is a resource center/help widget of Userpilot on the left side. So basically, you can embed the checklist in there, you can embed help docs in there, and you can even provide page based contextual flaws that can help a user learn and understand. So you can definitely use something like this. One other example, that widget-
Aazar Shad:
So you can see on the right side, there's a [inaudible 00:15:13] help center. And you can try to find out basic questions in there. And then you see on the right side, there's a help keep university as well that you can learn from. The idea basically, is that you give every possible way to users, to educate themselves through an in-app help widget.
Aazar Shad:
And the second thing is native tooltips. This is nothing new. Actually, the reason why people started using tooltips, that you put in an info button or a question mark button. But this was previously done by developers. But now, something like that, Userpilot can offer. So you don't have to go and ask a developer to do it. You can just use something like Userpilot. Anyway, the most important thing is that native tooltips are the best way to actually educate the user about a button, about a concept they don't understand and you try to teach them through it and connect your help desks and help questionnaires as well. So basically, the idea is that you make the user understand about difficult concept through native tooltips. So for example, net promoter score is not easy to understand and Userpilot offers that as well.
Aazar Shad:
So what we did, was we used a native tooltip to actually educate the user about that specific score. And we couldn't have done that through in-app popups or something like that, and to actively teach them. It's only when they want to learn. So we tried to do that with native tooltips. So why do you need both? You need both because some folks hate pop-ups. We are in 2020, and there are a lot of people who are kind of tired of popups. So for reactive onboarding, you need to wait for the user, right? So you need to wait for them to make an action. And some folks ignore it, so even in their onboarding, they have the intent to use the tool, they learn to learn about the tool, but they just simply ignore it initially. And then you want to give them an opportunity to come back to your application and maybe learn more about it. And you can do that through native tooltips or resource center, so that they can always come back to it whenever they want.
Aazar Shad:
And some of the users are not looking at the moment, the thing that you're trying to teach them. So for that, you need to have that educational cues, and educational help wherever the user wants. And proactive onboarding, as I said in my previous summit [inaudible 00:17:36] if you were there, that we found out that not a lot of SaaS companies use custom events to proactively change user behavior. And so, this is a great opportunity to actually change user behavior and tell them, teach them a way to interact with your application better through proactive onboarding. And what we found out when we did the recent webinar with [inaudible 00:18:02] guys, and we found out that they are actually using something similar as well to increase attention, and then it gives you the testing based on accounts.
Aazar Shad:
So what we found out, that proactively onboarding and changing the user behavior makes it easier to retain your existing users. So, that's the one big benefit out of it. And proactive onboarding will always be there because you initially don't want to lose them or leave them hanging. We've talked about it, that you want to make sure that the first run experience is amazing and proactive onboarding is great for that aspect. So can you prove it? Obviously, I can prove it. Some data from our case study on the left side, you see there's a scene and clicks and click rate. So we see that around 3%-5% of the users are actually clicking on specific floors in one of our clients help widget. This mean that people come back to the application, right? And, perhaps the data is not that statistically significant, we recently collected that, but it still shows that people are trying to come back and learn from it.
Aazar Shad:
And you see that 21% actually clicked on the help widget on the right side in the resource center. And that's something also very important as well. So almost our active users are, let's say around 1000+, and those 1000+ active users keep coming back to our application. Out of those, 293 actually went and clicked on that NPS calculator native tooltip. This means that 30% have actually tried to learn about the score inside the application. And that's very useful as well, because you see that people are trying to learn a specific score, about a specific button or a specific feature by themselves and by clicking on it. So what I'm saying is this works. So if you use it, it will help your users to educate them and will help you grow faster.
Aazar Shad:
So last but not least, so why this whole thing has happened. This whole thing has happened because I want to make you understand that proactive onboarding and reactive onboarding is something that we need to embed in our product-led growth model to help the users educate it. If they're educated, and if they're activated, they're more likely to understand and pay you and you will grow faster, because you have made available the education for users as they like, and as they want it to be. And so, to try to embed this proactive and reactive onboarding in your onboarding, and that will make your onboarding much easier. And it [inaudible 00:20:46] as well.
Aazar Shad:
Last thing, giveaways. The simple giveaway here is that I do use our onboarding teardown for free for 30 minutes. And so, you can just tweet at me @aazarshad, for free user onboarding, and I'll do it.
Aazar Shad:
Just give me your website and email address there, so I can send the video over. I'm happy to do that. We have, as I said, did research on SaaS product onboarding of 2020, and we found out good stats. You can find out that. We have an evergreen summit, so you can still go register and learn from it. So you can go and find out more and learn. Since you were in this summit means that you're focusing on learning, and it's a free summit. So you can just go and learn more concepts. There are concepts on product growth, product optimization, product analytics, as well as other topics in product management. So I'm pretty sure this will be useful. We have also made a bite-size summaries. I have given the link there, but you can find it there and if you don't have time to go to summit, you can just read five minutes summaries.
Aazar Shad:
And on that specific landing page, just download the ebook, it's around 50 pages, but each talk is about around five minutes of read and that might just be enough for you. You can also follow me, my podcast on aazarshad.com/podcasts. And there are a couple of links there, whichever web podcasting app you have, you can just click on it and follow the growth marketing stories. I talk from acquisition to referrals. So if you want to get inspired, if you want to learn from other growth marketeers, that would be the specific podcast for you. Other than the other couple of them, which are there. And if you want to connect with me, just reach out to me on LinkedIn at Aazar Ali Shad, and you will be easily to find me, I'm pretty-
Aazar Shad:
That's all. I hope this was useful for you. Bye-bye.
