Onboarding new users can feel like introducing a friend to your favorite movie. You want them to dive right in, appreciate all the best parts, and walk away with a memorable experience.

That’s where the magic of Bonboarding shines, especially for online platforms.

Bonboarding specializes in crafting these introductions, ensuring that businesses offer their users an intuitive and enriching start.
Think of it as rolling out the red carpet for your users, guiding them gracefully through your product offering, and making sure they know all the ins and outs.

And like any pivotal business strategy, onboarding has its metrics of success.

In this article, we’re diving deep into the five essential onboarding KPIs every SaaS business should be tracking.
So, if you’re keen to optimize that crucial first impression and boost your conversion rates, read on!

The Imperative of Measuring Onboarding Success

Refining onboarding without metrics is like navigating in the dark. With metrics, clarity surfaces.
Here are some tricks we use to improve our onboarding metrics:

• Personalized Onboarding: create a custom onboarding process to clearly explain and display your feature list.

• Highlighting core features: highlight and gamify features that encourage users to take action.

• Optimized UX Copy: make every word count and resonate.

• User Journey Insights: trace the path from signup to brand advocacy.

• Spot Bottlenecks: identify and resolve hitches in the process.

• Fast-Track User Value: reduce the time taken to achieve product value.

An example: Kodai revamped their onboarding process, and by keeping a close eye on the performance of their product tours, they could improve their user activation. Tweaking their onboarding tour increased their free-to-paid conversion by 26%.

The takeaway: Harness metrics for a powerful user introduction to your product.

5 Onboarding Metrics and KPIs to Track Performance

Optimizing your onboarding strategy is essential for enhancing user experience and conversion rates. The following key metrics provide great insights into the success of your onboarding process:

1. Retention Rate

The retention rate is a reflection of how well your product resonates with users post-onboarding. Specifically, it’s the percentage of users retained over a set timeframe:

Retention rate = Remaining users / Initial number of users

A successful onboarding process, especially during the initial week and month, can significantly boost this metric. Learn more about creating lasting first impressions with Bonboarding’s insights on where user onboarding starts.

2. Engagement Rate

Engagement rate indicates the frequency and depth of user interaction with your product:

Engagement rate = Active users in a cohort / Users in that cohort

Effective onboarding can ramp up user engagement, ensuring users fully utilize your platform’s features. Dive deeper into the nuances of engagement with Bonboarding’s product features, which are crafted to foster user interaction.

3. Free Trial Conversion Rate

This metric gauges the effectiveness of your onboarding in transitioning free trial users to paying customers:

Free trial conversion rate = Users who convert / Free trial users

If this metric isn’t hitting desired targets, consider revisiting your onboarding flow to better showcase the value of your paid offerings.

4. Completion Rate

The completion rate underscores the effectiveness of your onboarding flow:

Completion rate = Users who finished onboarding / Users in the onboarding cohort

A low completion rate suggests friction points that deter users from fully navigating the onboarding process. Bonboarding’s product analytics provide tools to spot and rectify these issues.

5. Time to Value (TTV)

TTV measures the time users take to derive value from your product:

TTV = Time to reach the first ‘aha’ moment

Efficient onboarding should swiftly guide users to this moment, underscoring the product’s value proposition. For ways to enhance TTV, take a closer look at Bonboarding’s approach to highlighting new features.

Each of these metrics, when tracked and acted on, can drastically improve the user’s onboarding journey, setting the stage for long-term user engagement and success.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do you measure user onboarding success?

User onboarding success can be measured through a combination of metrics such as retention rate, engagement rate, completion rate, free trial conversion rate, and time to value (TTV).
Monitoring these metrics provides insights into the effectiveness of the onboarding process and areas of improvement.

For a deep dive into onboarding metrics, check out Bonboarding’s analytics features.

2. What does onboarding include in customer success?

Onboarding in customer success encompasses a series of steps that guide and educate new users on how to effectively utilize a product or service. This can include product tours, training sessions, tutorials, and continuous support. Effective onboarding ensures customers derive maximum value from the product, leading to higher satisfaction and retention.

Explore Bonboarding’s approach to understand their onboarding methodology.

3. What is the metric for user onboarding?

There are several metrics to gauge user onboarding efficacy. Some of the primary ones include retention rate, engagement rate, free trial conversion rate, completion rate, and TTV. Each metric offers a unique perspective on user behaviour during the onboarding process.

For a comprehensive view on metrics, refer to Bonboarding’s product analytics.

4. What are onboarding success factors?

Onboarding success factors include clear communication, personalized user experiences, interactive tutorials, quick time to value, and consistent feedback mechanisms. Ensuring that users feel supported, educated, and valued during the onboarding process is key to its success.

Dive into Bonboarding’s features to see how they incorporate these factors.

5. How do we measure customer success?

Customer success can be measured through metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), customer health score, and customer churn rate.
Monitoring these metrics provides insights into customer happiness, loyalty, and the overall value they derive from a product or service.

For more on how Bonboarding views customer success, visit their About page.