Effective onboarding is considered the key to bringing SaaS customers into your service right. Thus, your startup business needs to pay plenty of attention to it. But where do you start monitoring it? Here are the key metrics you should look into and track as your customer progresses through their onboarding sessions.
SaaS Customer Onboarding Metric no. 1: Time To Value
The goal of the onboarding process is to help customers see the value in the product you are providing. As such, the first metric you would want to consider is Time To Value (TTV). As the name implies, this is the time it takes for customers to realize the expected value of your product.
Image from SmartKarrot.
Calculating this is pretty straightforward. Just record the time it takes for customers to reach your desired conclusion. It does mean that you should provide a clear picture of that moment. The shorter the time to value is, the more effective your onboarding is.
How Your Startup Business Can Improve On This?
So, your goal with TTV is to lower it. But you might wonder how to do that. After all, people learn at different paces. One handy trick here is to segment your users right at the welcome screen. Organize customers according to categories like role, goals, and intended use. You can then create a more personalized onboarding experience based on these.
Image from JustinMind.
You would also want your SaaS product to match customers’ technical environments readily. For instance, you can integrate the service with the software they likely use. That helps them discover the practical applications of your servicer faster.
SaaS Customer Onboarding Matric no. 2: Onboarding Completion Rate
The next onboarding metric that you want to observe is the completion rate. It denotes how long it takes for people to set up and complete the use of your product without the need for assistance. That will help you determine the effectiveness of your onboarding process.
Image from Announce Kit.
To do this, you can start by developing a simple onboarding procedure. You can then use this as a benchmark to determine how fast users acclimate to the product. Take note of the issues they encountered during the onboarding process.
How Your Startup Company Can Better Improve This?
Dealing with customer onboarding completion rate isn’t just about making the process faster. You also want to make sure that people do get to learn what they are supposed to from the process. For that, create a checklist of the various milestones you want to cover.
Image from InMoment.
Make sure to arrange the checklist methodically. That helps users progress through the process at a more natural pace. Note that you might have to design several lists to cover various customer goals.
SaaS Onboarding Metric no. 3: Customer Engagement
After customers have found the value of your product, you need to observe how they engage with it. Your goal here is to see how they are adapting to the product. There are various engagement areas that you can explore.
First up is how often they log into your service. More frequent logins indicate that they are getting more value out of your service. You would also want to determine the duration of each login session. That will give you an additional idea of how they are going with your product.
How Your Startup Company Should Dig Deeper?
But customer engagement is more than just logins. You should also look into how your customers engage your service during onboarding. Some of the things you want to observe are:
- Features used: What specific features are they using most often?
- Time spent on features: Look into how long customers use a particular feature during each session.
- Feature adoption rate: Look at how many customers are using each feature and how fast that adoption is happening.
- Customer journey: Determine at which stage of the journey customers use specific features.
By looking at each of these elements more closely during the onboarding process, you can determine how to improve the actual user experience. These initial studies will help you refine the specific features to suit customer needs better.
SaaS Onboarding Metric no. 4: Free To Paid Conversion
If your SaaS startup company uses a free trial or freemium business model, the onboarding process will often happen during that free trial period. The goal is, of course, to convince users to make the switch to the paid version.
Image from AppCues.
Thus, you would want to keep track of the rate at which that is happening. That is a very straightforward metric. But you can further explore this by looking at the dynamics of how these conversions are happening.
For instance, you can see when the conversion happens. A conversion that happens within or right after the onboarding stage indicates that your efforts produce a strong customer desire for the product. Meanwhile, if there is a pause before actual conversion, it might indicate some hesitation on the part of the customer.
How Your Startup Business Can Boost The Metric
According to industry statistics, a free-to-paid conversion rate above 25% is a good start. However, increasing that rate requires you to look further into your onboarding metrics. Here, you want to identify possible obstacles that prevent people from converting.
For instance, they might be waiting for a specific feature to come out. Or in the case of a freemium model, the free version already suffices for their needs. Here, you need to look for ways the paid version can add more value to the service. That will require you to take into account different customer wants. Find a common denominator from these to leverage as more value for your paid service.
Helping Your Startup Business With These Onboarding Metrics
With these diverse sets of metrics, your SaaS service might have a hard time keeping track of everything. After all, these are not the only ones you need to monitor. You also need to deal with the main service KPIs.
Virtua Solutions can help you with that. By outsourcing the onboarding process to us, we can be the ones keeping tabs on these metrics. Our team of agents can provide you with a steady stream of the data you need. We will also give you expert insights into what these figures might mean to your business.
With our help, you can further refine the onboarding process and better serve users. That will give your startup business more opportunities to draw in people and generate conversions. Contact us today and we will be ready to aid you.