The Ultimate Guide To Self Service Onboarding In The PLG Era

Gone are the days when flashy marketing campaigns and sleek sales pitches drove a product’s triumph. The product-led growth (PLG) era has ushered in a paradigm shift, where the product takes center stage, and its inherent value becomes the catalyst for user acquisition, retention, and advocacy.

As Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, learned the hard way, even an industry-leading position can crumble if the product consistently fails to provide value to its target users. Competitors like Ahrefs and Majestic, who prioritized delivering an outstanding product experience, ultimately surpassed Moz, once the industry leader.

This cautionary tale underscores the pivotal role of self service onboarding in the PLG era. By empowering users to explore and experience the product’s value on their terms, self service onboarding accelerates time-to-value. It fosters a deep connection between the user and the product, paving the way for long-term loyalty and advocacy.

Defining Self Service Onboarding: A User-Centric Approach

Self service onboarding is a user-centric approach that enables customers to onboard themselves by providing the necessary guidance and resources to understand and leverage the product’s features effectively. Unlike traditional onboarding methods that funnel users through a predefined path, self service onboarding allows users to chart their course, learning and discovering the product’s capabilities at their own pace and in alignment with their specific needs.

At its core, self service onboarding is driven by the product itself, aligning seamlessly with the principles of the product-led growth era. By empowering users to explore and experience the product firsthand, self service onboarding enhances user engagement and fosters a deeper understanding of the product’s value proposition.

The Scalability Advantage

One key advantage of self service onboarding is its inherent scalability. By automating the onboarding process and enabling users to onboard, self service onboarding frees up valuable resources for product, sales, and customer success teams. Sales teams no longer need to dedicate extensive time to in-depth product demos. In contrast, customer success teams can focus on providing targeted support rather than guiding every user through onboarding.

The Effectiveness Edge

Traditional onboarding approaches often bombard users with a deluge of information, presenting them with a comprehensive overview of all the product’s features, regardless of their immediate needs or use cases. This approach risks overwhelming users and fails to communicate the product’s core value proposition effectively.

In contrast, self service onboarding takes a more targeted approach, allowing users to focus on the specific features and functionalities that align with their immediate goals and pain points. By learning through hands-on experience and exploration, users are better equipped to internalize the product’s value and develop a deeper understanding of its capabilities.

The Product-Led Advantage

In the PLG era, the product drives user acquisition, retention, and advocacy. self service onboarding aligns seamlessly with this philosophy by enabling users to start using the product immediately, accelerating their time-to-value and fostering a stronger connection with the product from the outset.

Self service onboarding reduces the barriers to entry and empowers users to experience the product’s value first-hand. It positions the product as the primary catalyst for user engagement and growth, aligning perfectly with the tenets of the product-led growth era.

Proactive vs. Reactive Onboarding: Striking the Right Balance

Regarding self service onboarding, it’s essential to balance proactive and reactive approaches. Proactive onboarding involves predefined onboarding flows that guide users through the initial stages of product discovery and usage. In contrast, reactive onboarding provides guidance and support as users navigate the product on their terms.

Proactive Onboarding: Setting the Stage

Proactive onboarding is typically the first stage of the onboarding process, governing users’ initial interactions with the product. By understanding the user journey and the path to activation, proactive onboarding engages users with predefined flows that help them progress from the “Aha!” moment (when they perceive the product’s value) to the activation point (when they experience the product’s value firsthand).

Reactive Onboarding: Empowering Self-Discovery

Reactive onboarding occurs after users have activated and are actively using the product. This approach provides guidance and support as users explore more advanced features and functionalities, enabling them to become “power users” and fully leverage the product’s capabilities.

The Self Service Sweet Spot

While self service onboarding primarily falls under the reactive onboarding umbrella, it’s crucial to incorporate elements of proactive onboarding to ensure a seamless and practical user experience. By combining predefined onboarding flows with reactive, user-driven guidance, self service onboarding strikes the perfect balance, enabling users to chart their course while benefiting from targeted support and direction.

Understanding the User Adoption Journey: The Flywheel Approach

To design an effective self service onboarding strategy, it’s essential to understand the user adoption journey—the path users take from initial awareness to becoming loyal advocates of your product. Visualizing this journey as a flywheel provides valuable insights and helps you identify the key touchpoints and milestones.

The User Adoption Flywheel

The user adoption flywheel consists of various stages, each representing a critical milestone in the user’s journey with your product. These stages may include:

• New User: The user has just signed up or started a trial.
• Trial: The user is actively exploring and evaluating the product.
• Aha! Moment: The user understands the product’s value proposition.
• Activation: The user experiences the product’s value first-hand.
• Active User: The user has decided to adopt the product and is using it regularly.
• Paid User: The user has converted to a paid subscription or plan.
• Loyal User: The user is deeply engaged and advocates for the product.
• Advocate: The user actively promotes and recommends the product to others.

Tailoring Self Service Onboarding to the User Journey

By understanding the user adoption flywheel, you can tailor your self service onboarding strategy to address users’ specific needs and pain points at each journey stage. For example, during the trial stage, your onboarding efforts should guide users towards the “Aha!” moment, helping them understand the product’s value proposition and experience it firsthand.

Once users reach the activation stage, your self service onboarding can shift towards introducing more advanced features and functionalities, enabling users to become “power users” and unlock the product’s full potential.

The Flywheel in Action: A Social Media Scheduling Tool Example

Let’s consider the example of Postfity, a social media scheduling tool for individuals and small businesses. When new users sign up, Postfity greets them with a personalized welcome screen that gathers information about their use cases and goals. This tailored approach sets the stage for a more personalized and practical self service onboarding experience.

As the user progresses through the trial stage, Postfity guides them through connecting their social media accounts and scheduling their first post using interactive walkthroughs and checklists. Once the user completes these tasks, they experience the “Aha!” moment – realizing the value of using a social media scheduling tool to streamline their content distribution process.

At this point, Postfity considers the activated users and nudges them to upgrade to a paid plan. For users who choose to continue using the free trial, Postfity introduces additional features and functionalities through tooltips and native tooltips, enabling them to become “power users” and unlock the tool’s full potential.

Postfity leverages the user adoption flywheel throughout this journey to tailor its self service onboarding strategy. This ensures that users receive the proper guidance and support at the right time, ultimately driving them to become loyal product advocates.

Preparing for Self Service Onboarding: Laying the Groundwork

Implementing an effective self service onboarding strategy requires careful preparation and a deep understanding of your users’ needs. The following steps can lay a solid foundation for a successful self service onboarding experience.

Set and Manage Expectations

One of the most critical aspects of self service onboarding is setting and managing user expectations from the outset. Overpromising and underdelivering can quickly erode user trust and lead to disengagement. Be upfront and transparent about your product’s capabilities and limitations, ensuring that users clearly understand what they can expect from the beginning.

Embrace Scalable Non-Scalability

While self service onboarding is designed to scale, you must be prepared to go the extra mile for your users, especially in the early stages. Personalized touches, such as customized video messages or one-on-one demos, can strengthen the relationship with your users and foster a deeper connection with your product.

As Corey from Baremetrics discovered, offering personalized demos can result in impressive open and reply rates, demonstrating the power of human touch in the self service onboarding process.

Understand Your User Journey

Understanding your user journey deeply is crucial for designing an effective self service onboarding strategy. By mapping out the various paths users may take, identifying potential roadblocks, and pinpointing the “Aha!” moments and activation points, you can tailor your onboarding efforts to address the specific needs of your users at each stage of their journey.

Define Your Jobs-to-be-Done

The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework is a powerful tool for understanding your users’ motivations and why they seek out your product. By defining your product’s JTBD, you can ensure that your self service onboarding efforts are laser-focused on addressing your users’ specific pain points and goals, ultimately accelerating their time-to-value and fostering a deeper connection with your product.

Talk to Your Users

While data and analytics provide valuable insights, there is no substitute for direct user feedback. Make it a priority to engage with your users at every stage of their journey, actively seeking their input, concerns, and suggestions. This feedback can inform your self service onboarding strategy, help you identify areas for improvement, and ensure that your efforts are aligned with your users’ needs and preferences.

Set Up Product Analytics

Implementing robust product analytics is essential for measuring the effectiveness of your self service onboarding strategy and identifying areas for optimization. Tools like Heap and Mix panel can provide valuable insights into user behavior, engagement, and drop-off points, enabling you to make data-driven decisions and continuously refine your onboarding approach.

By laying this solid foundation, you can ensure that your self service onboarding efforts are tailored to your users’ needs, aligned with their motivations, and supported by data-driven insights, setting the stage for a successful and impactful user experience.

Adding Self Service Onboarding to Your Product: Best Practices

Once you’ve laid the groundwork for your self service onboarding strategy, it’s time to implement it within your product. Consider the following best practices to ensure a seamless and practical user experience:

Interactive Walkthroughs: Immersive Learning by Doing

Interactive walkthroughs are potent tools for self service onboarding, as they encourage users to learn by doing rather than simply observing. By guiding users through hands-on interactions with your product, interactive walkthroughs foster a deeper understanding of its features and functionalities, enabling users to experience the value first-hand.

Few customer onboarding tools have a “Driven Actions” feature that allows you to create interactive walkthroughs that require users to perform specific actions, such as clicking, hovering, or inputting text. This ensures an immersive and engaging learning experience.

Native Tooltips: Contextual Guidance at the Point of Need

Native tooltips are unobtrusive in-app messages that provide contextual guidance and explanations to users as they navigate your product. Native tooltips give a subtle and effective way to introduce new features or offer additional context without interrupting the user’s flow. They appear as small icons or tooltips when users hover over or click on specific elements.

Postfity, for example, employs native tooltips to explain secondary features like “post ideas” and “social tips calendar,” enabling users to explore these functionalities at their own pace without overwhelming them with information upfront.

Help Center Widget: Seamless Access to Knowledge

Integrating a help center widget within your product can significantly enhance the self service onboarding experience. By providing users with easy access to your knowledge base and documentation directly within the application, you empower them to find answers and guidance without leaving the product interface.

Tools like Projetly offer a Resource Center that enables you to create a comprehensive help center widget that automatically displays relevant documentation based on the user’s current context. This ensures that users have access to the information they need when they need it.

Academies: Structured Learning Paths

Academies, also known as schools or universities, are structured learning paths that guide users through a comprehensive understanding of your product and its capabilities. By offering courses, tutorials, and certifications, academies provide users with a structured approach to mastering your product, enabling them to unlock their full potential and become “power users.”

Companies like Hubspot and Heap have successfully implemented academies, offering users a wealth of knowledge and resources to enhance their skills and deepen their understanding of the respective products.

Best Practices for Effective Self Service Onboarding

In addition to leveraging the tools and techniques mentioned above, consider the following best practices to optimize your self service onboarding strategy:

• Focus on One Key Action: Identify the primary action you want your users to complete at each stage of their journey, and tailor your onboarding efforts to guide them towards that specific goal. Avoid overwhelming users with too many tasks or distractions.
• Add a Welcome Screen: A well-designed screen can set the tone for your self service onboarding experience. Use this opportunity to introduce your product, reiterate its value proposition, and provide users with a clear path forward.
• Make it Contextual: Contextual onboarding ensures users receive relevant information and guidance based on their current actions and needs. Leverage user behavior and custom events to trigger contextual onboarding experiences.
• Use Milestones and Checklists: Celebrate user progress and achievements by incorporating milestones and checklists into your self service onboarding strategy. These elements give users a sense of accomplishment, help them visualize their progress, and identify the next steps.
• Enable Self-Selection and Self-Exclusion: Empower users to choose their path by allowing them to self-select the features and functionalities they wish to explore. Similarly, it provides opportunities for self-exclusion, enabling users to skip or opt out of specific onboarding experiences that may not be relevant to their needs.
• Inject In-App Experiences: Keep users engaged and focused by delivering onboarding experiences directly within your product interface. Utilize models, slide-outs, tooltips, and hotspots to provide contextual guidance and information without requiring users to leave the application.
• Stay Within Arm’s Reach: While self service onboarding empowers users to explore independently, it’s essential to remain accessible and provide support when needed. Leverage chatbots, knowledge bases, and dedicated support channels to ensure users can easily access assistance when encountering roadblocks or having additional questions.

By implementing these best practices and leveraging the tools and techniques discussed, you can create a self service onboarding experience that is engaging, personalized, and tailored to your users’ unique needs and preferences. This will drive product adoption, retention, and advocacy in the product-led growth era.

Conclusion

In the era of product-led growth, self service onboarding has emerged as a powerful strategy for SaaS businesses to deliver an exceptional user experience from the first interaction. Self service onboarding accelerates time-to-value by empowering users to explore and experience the product’s value on their terms. It fosters a deep connection between the user and the product, paving the way for long-term loyalty and advocacy.

By understanding the user adoption journey, defining your product’s Jobs-to-be-Done, and leveraging best practices such as interactive walkthroughs, native tooltips, help center widgets, and academies, you can create a self-service onboarding experience that is engaging, personalized, and tailored to your users’ unique needs and preferences.

Remember, self service onboarding is not about abandoning your users but empowering them to take control of their learning and discovery journey while providing the necessary support and guidance to ensure their success.

As you embark on your self service onboarding journey, embrace the principles of the product-led growth era, prioritize user-centricity, and continuously seek user feedback and insights. By doing so, you can unlock your product’s full potential and establish a loyal and engaged user base that will drive your business to new heights of success.

Frequently Asked Questions