Chapter 11: Where Do We Go From Here?

EUREKA Book Draft

CHAPTER 12: Where Do We Go From Here?

Retention is the most important thing for growth.
- Alex Shultz, VP Analytics and CMO at Facebook
Great businesses are built on high customer retention. It’s not about everyone hearing about a product—it’s about those who use it successfully. A great onboarding experience is a foundation for high customer retention.
I had to learn this the hard way while consulting for a SaaS company a few years ago.
Maybe you can relate?
My team and I were spending thousands of dollars on ads and taking hours (and even weeks!) to build content for SEO.
We were getting a ton of signups, which was awesome.
But very few signups converted into paying customers. (So few that it was downright embarrassing.)
I started digging into the data and realized that new users were getting stuck… but where?
In the onboarding!
That’s when I immediately started to optimize it as best I could. And, surprise, surprise, as soon as I was done, we saw a HUGE uplift in free users turning into paying customers. Not only that, I realized that users who completed the user onboarding process stuck around much longer than those who didn’t.
I had to know if I could carry out the same optimization process for other companies and achieve the same excellent results. That’s when I started working with Wes Bush at ProductLed to see if this was a repeatable framework.
Sure enough, it was!
One of our clients doubled their trial-to-paid conversion rate. This drove a 315% increase in MRR in six months, just by removing one step in their user onboarding!
It was clear Wes and I were onto something. And after seeing the results from our techniques time and again, I started documenting them so that I could share our discovery with others one day.
That’s how the EUREKA framework was born:

1. Establish your onboarding team: To deliver an effective, immersive, and seamless onboarding experience for new users, your approach needs to be collaborative across functions and departments. Onboarding can't just be quilted together from the work of different departments. It must be holistic. If it's not, users receive a fractured experience.
2. Understand your user’s desired outcomes: The best way to get users to perceive, realize, and adopt the value of a product is to figure out the reason they signed up in the first place. Particularly, you need to define what value means to your users.
3. Refine your onboarding success criteria and metric: Your team needs to have a clear picture of what it means to successfully onboard new users.
4. Evaluate and optimize your onboarding path: To minimize the time it takes for new users to experience a product’s value, you have to map out your user’s journey and determine which steps should be delayed or eliminated.
5. Keep new users engaged inside and outside of your product: To help guide new users to experience your product’s value, consider using triggers inside and outside your product. These could include product tours, welcome messages, progress bars for in-app triggers and onboarding emails, SMS and app notifications.
6. Apply the changes, analyze the results, and repeat: User onboarding is a continuous process and you need to continue to iterate on the onboarding experience.

Congratulations! You’ve made it through the EUREKA framework to improve your user onboarding.
One final tip: the most successful teams don’t look at improving their onboarding as a one-time action item. It’s a cyclical process that becomes vital to the success of your product. That’s why the EUREKA framework must become part of your product design and development process.
When the onboarding experience is seamless, it feels like magic. It’s hard to revert to the way tasks used to get done. Get user onboarding right, and new users experience a “Eureka!” moment and embrace the product into their lives.
All thanks to a better onboarding experience!