#013 - Cloudy with a Chance of SaaS
For an Amazing Onboarding Experience - The 5Es
Lucky number 13 was set for publishing on Halloween, spooky.
Design December, starts a month early
I’ve written and spoken a bit about my Masters of Design Methods degree. My design school experience was not about art, colors, layouts, or fonts. Instead, it focused on Strategy, Innovation, and Leadership, along with many models based on repeatable methods. I am going to focus the next several posts on this type of Design. This first Design post is about the 5Es, a concept dating back to a Ted Talk from 1997[1]. It is a simple model to ensure you are covering the entire user journey from beginning to end, aka from Entice, to Enter, Engage, Exit, and finally to Extend.
Entice
What are you doing to attract potential users to your SaaS? You raise awareness through general marketing, social media posts, news articles, email blasts, cold calling, and optimizing your website for search engines. For your SaaS, the most important Enticement artifact, once potential users are aware of you, is your website. Countless articles have been written about optimizing your landing page, calls to action, and pricing models to grab a potential user’s attention. At a minimum, you should consider social proof, videos, pricing, and FAQs, as specific landing page content you need a strategy around.
Enter
How do first-time users sign up for your service, and have you provided an onboarding experience with as little friction as possible? For better or worse, providing a free 14-day trial has become typical, this will give you plenty of email addresses to market to, but the rest of your experience should be tailored to converting them into a paying customer. At this stage, you want to gather an email address and a password, that’s it. Limiting the number of fields people have to fill out for the 14-day trial will increase the number of people completing the signup process. All other information gathering, like credit card numbers, general demographics, and marketing questions should be pushed to later in the process. Once you have a baseline signup process working and are driving traffic, you can make changes to the information you gather, and test whether it materially affects signup rates and/or long-term retention.
Engage
Once users have entered your application, how will they learn what your application can do for them? Will you use quickstart videos and documentation or curate a self-discovery type of experience with step-by-step guides directing the user to the next best action? Whichever method you employ you want, to ensure your users are as comfortable as possible with using your tool and seeing value in the experience. Giving them ongoing feedback around their successes, and pointing them to resolving their errors on their own without magic knowledge is key for onboarding customers successfully. And, consider showing your users how many other users are simultaneously using the application as social proof that they’ve made the right choice.
Exit
How will you wrap up an experience for your user while also encouraging them to come back? Consider showing them what they’ve accomplished in their session with feedback and metrics. How can you show them what they have accomplished, or can you show them metrics and other data that show others using the SaaS successfully? You can show them how many people in the last hour, day, or week, did the same thing they just did, as an example. By thanking them for their use, encouraging good behavior, and giving some social proof, you will encourage a return to your application.
Extend
Remember at the beginning of the post that I mentioned that typical SaaS are free for the first 14 days? At this point, once you have an email address, you can Extend the experience for your users, offering them more of whatever you are offering for free. That could mean giving them a 30-day eval, more storage, or more capabilities/features. The more of your application that they dig into and you encourage them to use during the free period, the more likely they’ll be to extend their use beyond the free period. This is the E that most technical people tend to forget, and, even if it does get addressed most experiences don’t put enough time into it. With that said, if you put some effort into it, it’s an easy way to differentiate yourself from the pack and retain a user beyond the trial period.
By using the 5E model you will create curated and fantastic experiences for your new SaaS users and encourage those new users to become long-term customers.
1 Tip:
Use the 5Es
Entice: Market well and raise awareness
Enter: Give them a reason to use your offering
Engage: Curate and make an enjoyable experience
Exit: Let people know that others are accomplishing the same thing
Extend: Convert to paying customers
Thank You
Jim ‘The Designatic’ Tyrrell
[1] https://doblin.com/about Click on 1997, part way down, and you should see “Landmark User Research Method”