As tech professionals, we want to collect as much data as possible, provide all the cues within the app, get users to perform several actions, and then send a series of emails. However, this approach can be overwhelming and make users abandon the whole process, especially when they are only evaluating your product.

So how can you optimize your onboarding flow to get the best results?

The first and most important thing to consider when designing your onboarding process is to get the user to the “aha” moment quickly. Everything else can be a distraction. As you build out a new product or look to improve your current onboarding flow, here are a few things to consider:

1. Always think about what’s best for the customers. Always.
2. Design your product to be as intuitive as possible, your product should be easy to navigate and use.
3. User testing is very important when building products, make sure you get the product in the hands of your ideal customer profile and learn from how they interact with it.
4. Implement behavioral analytics tools such as Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity for session recordings, scroll, and heat mapping. This will enable you to see the places and elements where users experience friction and drop-off.
5. Eliminate multiple steps. Remember, the goal is to get them to that moment where they see the value of your product. Why do you need to break down the signup process into multiple steps if it can be done at a go? Why does a user need to go through 12 tooltip suggestions before they can perform the action they came for initially?
6. Review the number of onboarding emails you send out. Do you need to send a new customer who is trying your product 5 emails in 7 days? As a user, will you read them yourself?
7. Finally, check the content and subject line of those emails. There’s no need to cramp all your 25 features into onboarding emails.

There’s no end to the amount of improvement we can make to the customers’ onboarding journey, the key is to keep an eye on it and look out for those opportunities.