In the 2024 International Finance Corporation Research Series, 3 notable challenges of digital adoption in Africa came up:
I want to focus on the last one, a challenge I faced in my previous role as the country manager of an early-stage startup in Kenya. Due to a lack of human capital, like many bootstrapping startups, our user adoption experienced slowed growth.
Another notable challenge was a lengthy and complex user signup process. In almost every signup, it was critical to reach out to the users and guide them. But this was a bit of a product problem like too many features and account types that confused the users.
I spoke to two startup founders before writing this piece. I was curious to understand the challenges they face during the user onboarding process.
“While we have been building in silence, we have faced our fair share of challenges,” said Paul, the co-founder of Kiota Pay, in our virtual meeting. Kiota Pay is a fast-rising spend management company for infrastructure development and the construction industry.
“At first there was a mismatch between the product functionality and the consumer expectations. Secondly, the users sometimes have a problem comprehending the product features and how to get around the tasks.” He added.
On the other hand, Charles Dairo, the co-founder of Beezop, is facing a different problem. Beezop is a business process management tool that allows operations/project managers and HR teams to track and manage tasks, and employee onboarding.
The business process management tool has experienced successful adoption since its inception. Rather, the most common objection to the adoption is pricing, which users often get over upon realizing the value of the product. Beezop has a standard pricing of $10 per user per month. The 7-day trial allows users to engage with the platform to experience the full value of the product.
Armed with this intel, I embarked on a process to create a comprehensive guide on how to create an efficient user onboarding process for African startups.
Let’s get started…
“User onboarding,” and “Customer Acquisition” are exciting achievements for founders and product managers.
But, in most cases, do we say we have successfully onboarded a new user or did they sign up and pay for the service?
I learned from experience that successful user onboarding is more than getting a signup. It goes all the way to helping the user obtain maximum value from your product.
What is User Onboarding?
User onboarding is guiding users to get meaningful product value through discovery to adoption processes.
At this stage, the customer acquisition stage, users are often looking into solving their specific pain points.
In this scenario, user onboarding begins at the first impression they get of your product. It could be through an Ad you put out or referrals – basically, their first interaction with your product.
At this stage, you must communicate your product positioning and distinguished value. This is where building and increasing brand awareness comes in. You care about metrics like traffic, sign-ups, and engagement.
You see, this step matters because this is where you create a perception of what life is like for your users when they adopt your product.
Think about it for a minute…
You need crystal clear messaging on how your product improves the user’s life. But there are two traps to avoid:
- Overpromising your product value
- A mismatch between communicated product value and user experience
I have had a classic experience with the second scenario. And the truth is, no amount of product tours and tutorials can get you out of this hole.
We had initially discussed the product goals that would be viable and sustainable in the long run. However, there was a huge mismatch between the perceived product value and what it offered. From the marketing and sales POV, users wanted an easy-to-use platform to resell products on social media. However, the product team worked around it but very few people could grasp how to sign up, let alone navigate. Additionally, while the founders agreed on the product messaging, they would show up with a different output, making it difficult to remain consistent.
While getting that first paying customer validates your idea, you cannot claim successful user onboarding.
The acquisition is where you set up a cyclical user onboarding process that retains customers. Your messaging must be crystal clear to filter people who don’t need your product and focus on the ones who should be using it.
This brings me to this…
The sales, marketing, and product (dev) teams must work together to create a concrete product positioning and messaging. This ensures that your product delivers the value you promise.
But then, what happens when you get your first customer? Or even get that one customer who commits to your product after the trial period?
I mean, you cannot create a sustainable business from one-off customers. You need to retain your users in a cyclical process to achieve monthly recurring revenue.
How do you ensure that your user keeps coming back?
By creating a user onboarding process that ensures your customers get meaningful value – that improves their lives and motivates them to keep using your product.
In the next section, I will create a guide to improve your user onboarding by helping users experience value repeatedly from acquisition through to MRR (monthly recurring revenue).
Let’s start from the beginning…
It is common for product founders to develop the product before proper market research. I remember when I started working in B2B marketing, it was exhilarating. At first, I didn’t think about it too much, until the founders explained their strategy and goals.
I will risk it and say it; while sales is the product’s focus, most of us in the business fail to approach it right. Recurring sales come from a successful, repetitive user onboarding process.
In this case, there was a product, untested, with founders hungry for a sale to validate the user onboarding process.
I remember having a lengthy meeting about the user onboarding and it was met with so much resistance. I didn’t want to give up on the entire product, so I did what any other product marketer would do:
Product tours
How-to guides
Webinars
One-on-one calls with users
Email workflows
…you name it. But nothing can save your product if your onboarding process is complex and too long.
Eventually, as the first employee; I somehow convinced the founders to go to the customers, literally, and ask them why they contacted us. This helped us understand the problems that they hoped our platform would solve.
For the first time, we now understood our product better, and our customers more intimately.
How to create an efficient user onboarding process
When creating your user journey, you have an opportunity to plant a seed of the future value of your product early. You do this during the customer acquisition stage, whether through ads, blog posts, whitepapers, etc.
During this stage, your product messaging should be crystal clear; how does your product improve the user’s lives? This means you need clear messaging and product positioning. If your user onboarding process flops, you are likely to run into problems with users:
- Signing up and not coming back
- Don’t complete the signup process
- Don’t upgrade to a paid account
- Leave even after paying for the first subscription
It all boils down to users leaving your app. Getting them back is almost impossible because they didn’t find your product valuable enough to adopt it fully.
In this section, we shall look at how to build a user onboarding loop that provides value at every stage of this process.
Preparing your audience during the acquisition stage
Like every other business, your product marketing strategy starts with the user. Users want a tool they can use without a lengthy learning process. Additionally, they are also a bit selfish in that they always ask what’s in for them.
“There is a lot of resistance that comes after sign up. And this is mostly because of the change of habit bound to happen when users adopt a new software” Paul added on the challenges Kiota Pay faces during onboarding. “It is mostly because the product value has not been communicated properly.” – Paul Macharia, Co-founder, Kiota Pay
Besides, adopting a new product is a significant behavioral change in both businesses and individuals. Your product has to offer enough value to the customer, enough to leave old habits.
It is easier for founders who define their target audiences before building a product. And this happens through product market research. But this article is not about Product-Led growth.
So let’s come back to preparing your audience.
How do they visualize your products? When mapping out your user onboarding process, think about their first contact with your product. In most cases, we only think about the user sign-up process.
Additional brainstorming ideas to help you map out your audience may include:
- What problem/challenge triggered them to search for a solution like yours?
- What is their desired outcome after adopting your tool?
- What defines success for them?
- What’s keeping them from achieving their desired outcome?
- Why did they choose your product?
This brings the conversation to your product messaging and positioning. How did they find out about your product? For instance, an HR and Payroll SaaS startup could run an Ad targeting small businesses to use their HR and Payroll system.
People who interact with this ad, hypothetically, have an interest in the service. Now, when they interact with your product, you must find out how they are using your products.
You can find this out in two ways:
- Through tools with analytics and insight-tracking features
- Contact them and ask how they are using your product
After the first sign-up, the user realizes the value of the product when it helps them solve a problem. The onboarding process is not over until your users experience value repeatedly, enough to make them abandon their old habits.
In addition, users don’t have time to read the entire product documentation to get the value of your product. They care about their own need and desires. I will give you a very relatable example.
When you purchase a washing machine, you don’t want to go home and read the user manual. Instead, you care that it is easy to use, and the buttons are crystal clear about the washer’s functions. Overall, you care that the brand improves your life and makes you feel good about the value for money aspect.
Your job is to prepare your audience and remove any friction within your user onboarding process by reducing the time it takes for them to experience product value.
Getting your onboarding team
Your onboarding team is critical to creating a smooth user onboarding process. However, most startups in Africa do not have the resources required for a full in-house team.
This is one challenge every product marketer in the region can agree with – handling all user onboarding tasks. This often leads to problems like inefficiency stunted growth, and eventually no growth at all.
Beezop was born out of necessity. Talking to Charles, I learned that he previously ran a web design agency when he realized a need for software that streamlines business operations.
“Running a business like a web design agency requires a series of critical steps, and the team needs to work together. I did not have a tool to help me track the tasks involved in each project. As a result, we would lose a lot of time and we also struggled with consistency, owing to a lack of a tailored operations process.”
Charles Dairo, Co-founder, Beezop.
It was when Charles and the second Beezop co-founder, Maryanne came up with this brilliant idea – a software that would help manage business processes. Maryanne also needed a solution for managing and tracking documents and business processes.
Beezop helps business managers improve their consistency and easily manage recurring critical processes. From employee onboarding to project management, Beezop helps you scale your business by cutting down on error and time.
However, for both Kiota Pay and Beezop, a lack of resources to hire a complete team is a major reason for the slow adoption. In most cases, founders are forced to execute these processes until the company gets funding to hire skilled labor.
For an efficient user onboarding process, you need to bring these teams together:
Marketing
The marketing team communicates your product value to the prospective users. They will do this by creating trigger onboarding workflows, from Ad campaigns to content marketing.
It could be through whitepapers, educational blog posts, templates, case studies, and other forms of content to remind the user how the product improves their lives.
Customer Success Team
The customer success team goes beyond customer support. This team aims to understand the user’s needs during the onboarding process.
It helps you identify the friction within your onboarding process by paying attention to where users are stuck and reaching out to assist.
This team should have extensive product know-how so they can demonstrate product value immediately.
Sales
The sales department is mostly creating demos to showcase the value of the product. They will use different instances to provide customized solutions for the user.
Additionally, the sales team will also communicate customer feedback from their prospects to the customer success.
Additionally, the product team will also become a part of the onboarding team by working with all these departments to deliver value to the customer.
Whether you have resources for a diverse team, or you are bootstrapping, you need all these aspects working together, in a cyclical approach.
The marketing team initiates a relationship, sales build on it, and the product team tweaks the product to address user pain points.
Define your Onboarding Success Milestones
Every user journey is different, based on your onboarding criteria. From early on, founders need to define what a successful onboarding looks like beyond the signup.
The first criterion to define user onboarding is signing up. When you get a first sign-up, it signals a strong interest in your product. However, friction in the signup process may deter them from completion.
For instance, a freemium product will get higher sign-ups, but they might not be quality leads. It is a great start when gathering data because it is frictionless. Users don’t have to worry about entering payment details.
However, this also means users who aren’t in your target audience bracket will also sign up, giving you false hope, and false data.
Many users Vs. Quality Leads
When you are creating a user onboarding to funnel in quality leads that will adopt and pay for your service, you might consider a different approach.
For example, you may provide a free trial but also ask for payment details during the signup process. This will, of course, create higher friction, but for a better cause – getting people who need your products.
The second criterion is ensuring that your user achieves their desired outcome using your product. For instance, if you have just launched a money wallet, a user signing up, loading money, and transacting within the app would define a successful user onboarding.
Defining your user onboarding success milestone means identifying these three things:
- When the user finishes the signup process
- When do they experience the value of your product for the first time?
- When do they decide to adopt your product and integrate it into their lives?
In return, you have learned how users interact with your product to the point of adopting it extensively. This means they are likely to continue using your product and getting the most out of it.
Kiota Pay User Onboarding Process
For Kiota Pay, the user onboarding milestones get personal with the user. According to Paul, one of the pain points the service solves is efficiency in money management for construction, infrastructure development companies, and manufacturers.
“Initially, we offered a payment solution for landlords and real estate agencies. However, we quickly realized that while the reception was fairly good, there would be a future problem with scalability and profitability. Most of them do not require a tool to manage payments. Rent collection and payment within the industry has always been an informal process, and the market was not ready to digitize rent collection and payment management within the real estate industry” Paul explained to me.
” We then transition to spend management for developers and the construction industry. We help our customers track spendage which saves on wastage and improves efficiency.”
To facilitate the user onboarding process, Paul explained that they almost always have to offer guided onboarding to their customers. Some of the milestones of the Kiota Pay user onboarding process include the:
- Calling the users from the first point of contact (customer acquisition) to complete the sign-up
- Tracking the feature usage cycle (understanding how the pain points the user intends to solve
- Tracking spending from loading money to transactions
- Tracking the time spent on each feature to know if the user has adopted the system to completion
Beezop User Onboarding Process
On the other hand, Beezop has not had a user onboarding problem related to the product. Speaking on Beezop’s user onboarding journey Charles is quite specific.
“Our user acquisition is mostly through direct outreach on LinkedIn and other online community that I am a part of. We have also had some customers reach out to us from our organic social media.
“The second step in our user onboarding journey involves a demo call. This is where I address objections and demonstrate the product value. We then offer our clients a trial version, even though most times they are willing to pay for it.
“We also have to follow up on the trial version users to determine any friction and why they stopped using it. The most common objection we receive is pricing.” Charles said.
The key user onboarding milestones differ from one company to another. It would help to track your user onboarding process to map out your milestones.
Identify and remove friction within your user onboarding process
Successful user onboarding requires a repetitive set of steps that each user goes through before adopting your product. Now, every user journey will have some hiccups that the customer success team can address.
But as you move on, you realize that most requests and friction result from clutter or complex sign-up processes. This calls to improve your user onboarding process by simplifying the process.
For instance, do you need all the information you’ve been asking from your users? Too many fields to fill may deter customers from completing the signup process. In this case, think about removing unnecessary form fields.
Another common issue is the users don’t know what to do beyond signing up. This is where you start thinking about product tours within the signup process.
Product tours are an excellent asset to direct the user to take a desired action.
You can also involve the marketing team to create curated content showcasing your product’s value. For instance, they may need cheat sheets, templates, and other useful resources to adopt your product fully.