 Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Product School webinar. Thanks for joining us today. Just in case you didn't know, Product School teaches product management, coding, data analytics, digital marketing, and blockchain courses online and at our 15 campuses worldwide. On top of that, every week we offer some amazing local product management events and host online webinars, live streams, and ask me anything sessions. Head over to productschool.com after this webinar to check them out. Hi everyone, my name is Enzo. I am a product manager at Zalondo. Zalondo is the European fashion leading e-commerce company and today I'm going to talk about user onboarding. So as humans, we create relationships with things we interact over and over again, cars we drive, tools we use, and as with any relationship, first impressions matters. And that's kind of a well understood concept. But despite that well-known importance of first impressions, there's still a lot of companies that don't give enough attention. If you think about it, user onboarding is the one thing that every single one of your users will experience. Once someone has decided to try your application, you get that one chance to get them to your value proposition, right? Or even your ha-ha moment. On the other hand, the poor onboarding experience can really leave the user with a bad impression and can cause an immediate turn. So on the other hand, if you think about it, a good onboarding can differentiate you from your competition. It can even change the economics of the industry you're operating in. So prior to working at Zalondo, I worked for a fintech company also based in Berlin called number 26. And what we did is we did a video KYC to onboard the users. So the users could open a bank account with us by simply doing a phone call with us. This has helped us to lower the cost by 10x. And it also brought a very, very nice experience for the users. In that sense, we managed to open in an industry that was extremely competitive in terms of acquisition. But also, we also managed to put a good experience within that onboarding. So think about it as also a possible way to improve your experience. So in time where the competition for the attention and the loyalty is tough, building that strong connection from the very beginning has become a must have. This is why great product makes great first expression. And this is why I wanted to talk to you about user onboarding today. So I'm going to share the slides I usually present at boot camps, product boot camps, or small product circles. And I hope you guys like it. Please feel free to share feedbacks afterwards. If I miss any tips, it is meant to be very action oriented. So I hope you folks learn action stuff that you could actually directly implement into your project or product or companies you will be joining or that you actually already joined. So user onboarding, what do I mean by user onboarding? When I talk about user onboarding, I'm referring to that moment when a user is unfamiliar with your product to the moment that it will get that satisfaction. So it's quite broad, but I will try to turn it down to the last points, last touch point that you have marketing wise up to the first points of your activation, the first points that you have touch point that you have inside your product. So if your company exists to change the world, the crappy onboarding means it's changing the world a lot less. In that way, humanity is more poor. And literally, your business is actually more poor, because unless people would have actually managed experience, what is your product is about what you're trying to deliver as a value to them. If you Google the onboarding rebuilt impact, these are kind of the articles that you will find out from companies about what the impact of the user onboarding has been. So some of the companies that have changed or rebuilt their onboarding managed to increase by 10% their conversion rates up to multiplied by 2.5 if you look at Keshabi. Here, I'm referring to the conversion from a trial to a paid customer. So today's syllabus, I'm going to go through four steps. First, how do you capture your user's heart within your onboarding? I'm starting with the user's heart and the emotion, because it's usually where people get started with. This is usually what attracts your eyes, makes you do the first click and what entitles you to discover something new. Then we're going to go through the rationality of your customers. How do you get them to sign off? How do you get the sign up from their mind? The sign up from their mind too. Later on, we're going to go through pathing the way. The first two parts are about the pre-sign up. It's about the touch point, mostly in your marketing acquisition. How do you convince them? Point number three is really about how you clean up your funnel so that people can actually convert and start using your product. This is really about the sign up processes. Last but not least, we'll go through aligning the in-app touch point. These are the first touch points usually within your product. They're quite important because this is where you need to manage to make sure that your marketing and your onboarding is aligned with the value that your product is delivering. This is the definition of onboarding. It could be broader, it could be more narrow, but this is a deficient I'm going to stick to today during this presentation. Step number one, how do you capture your user's heart? We're going to nail four things for that. We're going to talk about your value proposition briefly. Hopefully, most of you guys are familiar with that. We're going to talk about context, why it's important to focus on people, and last but not least, your aha moment. Value proposition, let's go fast on this one. It needs to be clear. It needs to be a bit inspiring, not too much so people can understand. I really like the one from MailChimp that says build your brand, sell more stuff. It's straight to the point. We know what you're going to get from that. Make sure it resonates well. Make sure it's very visible because it's what most of the customers will see when they get started with you. Now, more importantly, is the context. Again, MailChimp is doing it right. If you scroll a little bit down on the MailChimp landing page, this is what you're going to find. That image puts you actually in the context. So you see a mobile phone in the background. You see some colorful circles. You see a leaf, and you feel you're in your living room or in your sofa. You envision yourself with that mobile phone in the end. This is very strong because it resonates for human being to see what they could achieve in their day to day using that product. So putting the text around your product is also a very good practice when it comes to the first touch much of your user onboarding. Now, I'm going to give credit to Samuel Ulick, who is a specialist of user onboarding. We'll put together this scheme, which is what should you advocate, should you communicate when you talk about your product. Is it option A or option B? So option A tells you what your product is about. This thing is told a little bit. This is Flower 3000. This is the trademark technology. This is what it does. It's easy to install, blah, blah, blah. Option B is actually Mario once he has eaten that flower. Mario can throw fireballs. That's the good option says this is what you can become. This is what you can do as soon as you have eaten that flower. What is very important when you talk about user onboarding is not to sell your product through features, but rather to sell to the person what that person could become once that person has used your product or used the features. So think about the Mario, what the Mario is. Try to sentence something around it and make sure it's very visible on your first touch points. That is the explanation of that. You're not selling the flower. You're rather selling the awesome Mario doing gadgets. So if you have product, I took three examples of product that I liked around there. Think about what you're making people better at with this product. So every note, for instance, is making people better at remembering things. Intake on at making the business personal and sketch at iterating on designs. So try to phrase that. Try to make it very clear, discuss that with your team, and then feel free to put it ahead and very visible on your early touch points because this is what will resonate emotionally speaking with your customers. Now I want to talk about the aha moment. Why aha moment in onboarding? I know it's a bit counterintuitive. This is because my previous company that I worked for, number 26, managed to put the aha moment right in the user onboarding. So I mentioned that in the introduction we used to have and we still do actually have a KYC which is done through a video call, which means that you could actually open an account just from your seat. People were ultimately satisfied with this sign up and they would actually talk about it. At some point, we even realized that it was a aha moment for the users and that they would actually use, they would actually talk about it to the other customers. A aha moment for Mario would be, oh, I can throw fireballs by just hitting that flower. It's that moment of realization that you have achieved something that you couldn't do before you started to use the product. Great aha moments are rare. You usually remember them. A few of them that I've listed, Netflix, I can rent a movie without going to the video store, Dropbox. I can drag my files into one folder and they automatically sync on all my devices. And one password you can basically have very advanced secure password without even having to remembering them. This is very strong. This is very hard to have one. A lot of people think they have one. They don't. A lot of people are chasing for one for long time and years. If you have one, feel free to write it and feel free to elaborate retroactively what we discussed based on that aha moment. You can also think about multiplying your aha moment. You might have one in your product, but you might have one in the onboarding like we did at number 26. I like that guy, as you can notice, he said that basically if your aha moment is too deep inside your product, you're lost. Try to move it upward. Think of Uber, for instance. Uber, when you open the app for the first time, you can actually already see the cabs and you can try and you can see that they're around you and that they're moving. They're actually the real cabs. It's not a fake map. When you try to book one of these cabs, then Uber tells you, hey, give us your credit card so we can book that cab. The very interesting thing that Uber did is that they really move upward in their experience, the aha moment. You can first already have this hormone secretion before even you manage to book your first cab. This is very powerful. If you have an aha moment, try to move it upward in your onboarding so that people can already attach emotion. Now that we've already captured the heart of your customers, let's see how we can capture the mind. Let's be rational for a bit. Let's list the product, your value proposition, or your SPs. Think about your quality number one, quality number two, quality number three that can be attached to different set of features that you have and think beyond your features also. Think about the security and speed. For instance, a lot of companies have been innovating around security, speed, or even design. Think about Slack. Slack has done a great work, a great job to reinvent a little bit the collaborative communication, but they also did a very, very good job around design. So moving forward, now that you have this value proposition, your SPs, let's see how you can emphasize on them. First of all, our testimonial. They're a very efficient way to establish trust and credibility. They usually come on your website or in the app, for instance, app store, stuff like that. You can also go further. If you think about Intercom, they have a specific page for that, which is called intercom.com slash testimonials, for instance. And they only listed all the testimonials there. So you can actually really push hard on the testimonial if you want. Feel free to be creative. Next comes the transparency. Long time ago, people would say that their website was SSL Encrypted, stuff like that. Now, people want to know if you had some press coverage, if you were featured by Apple Store or the Google Play, and what is the rating that you have. So feel free to put that on your early touchpoint. People are pretty interested into that. Last but not least, the numbers. It's very rational. Show the numbers that put you in a good situation. I like this company, Lydia.com. It's a French mobile peer-to-peer monitoring sphere app. What they do is they have this kind of counter, which is not animated right now, but you have this kind of counter, which is moving and it's matching the number of users that have actually joined and installed the app. It kind of gives you an idea of how many people are using it and it builds interest, right? You're like, if that many people have used that app, maybe it's worth doing it. Social media counters are an efficient and a classic way to also rely on the power of numbers. If you think about it, it's also what restaurants do. If you go to a restaurant and you're one of the first customers, they will put you next to the windows that other customers can see that you're there. And people are like, trust slightly more the restaurant. They don't think they're going to get food poisoning if people are eating there. Ultimately, if you manage to get the testimonials, the approvals, the numbers, you might get to a success. The success is like the holy grail of rationalities. What is that one metric, one thing that you have changed in the life of the people that you can brag and that you can communicate clearly? And if you have one, it's also a very powerful thing. I took the example of Slack. Slack says that they can reduce by almost half the internal emails that you receive, internal emails, not external emails, right? This is a very, very strong value provision. It's even more than a value provision. It's a rational success. If you have one like that, feel free to share it. Again, it's hard to get to one, but feel free to be inspired by something like Slack. Now that we have a clear understanding of the first touch points of your marketing onboarding, let's see what we can do inside your funnel, your signup funnel to make sure that the pass is clear and that people can go through and go and eat your value prep position. We're going to focus on two things. Removing the frictions that slow people down and try to avoid people from drifting away from your signup. So removing frictions. There are lots of things. There are lots of websites still there where you see catchers. Catchers are meant for people not to spam. They are used by websites not to receive some spam. But on the other hand, a lot of people are hesitant or don't know how the catcher works, or a lot of people are failing the catcher even though they are actually humans, right? There is a very interesting study for most where they compare two signups, one with the catcher, one without the catcher. And what they found out is that in the end, they didn't get that much spam. And they were at the loss, a total loss of around 3% conversion just because the catcher was too hard to take or people were just not willing to take a catcher process. So think about stuff that you can remove such as the catcher. Ask yourself the right questions. You absolutely have to ask people phone number. You need people to confirm their email before they sign up to the app. Stuff like that you can start to remove are going to significantly change the number of people that actually make it through your sign up. Now, in some situation, you need to ask a lot of questions. So at number 26, we had legally to ask a lot of questions for people to open a bank account. This is because we were supposed and we were doing it obviously to give the user personal information to the bank regulators. So we had to ask these questions. So we thought, okay, how can we make it less painful? What we did is on mobile, we break one screen for one questions. And we have asked our users, okay, can you take that one page sign up with 10 questions? And can you take that multi-step sign up with one question for 10 pages? And what did you feel was easier to take? What we learned is that almost all the users that we have felt that the multi-step sign up was much, much easier to take, much smoother, much faster. We look at data. It wasn't faster. People were spending more time, actually, to interact with all these CTAs. But in the end, they were very happy. So think about the tasks that you have, the steps that you want to do. Feel free to break them. Also feel free to reshuffle. What we did at number 26 is we reshuffle the steps. We did the LLFDB test. And then we learned what was the highest conversion rate, which order of the steps was driving to the highest conversion rates. What we learned is that, for instance, if you start with the email, you might hurt your conversion rate because people struggle a little bit with the Arab ad sign. So we put it slightly further in the pipe. And we started with the more exciting questions or the more fun questions like, what is your name? What is your hedge? What do you leave? Look at the cart. We're going to send you once you're signed up. So try to bring some excitement and make the engagement progressive. Start with small things, easy things to take. Now, second part, don't let your user drift away. An important topic we have approached at Zalando is the Copenhagen field. Copenhagen field is very exciting. People already come to you because they found a coupon or people think it's cool to have a coupon in some situation. But once you reach a page and there is an open coupon field, a lot of people are actually drifting away. A lot of people are actually opening another tab and searching Zalando coupon whatsoever. At this point of time, you have a massive drift away. So think about whether or not your coupon field should be very visible or if it should be a little bit more hidden in the end. Maybe it will lead to less people drifting away if you do that. About requiring people to validate their email. Now, if you look at most of the great companies from the valley, for instance, most of them don't ask you to validate your emails anymore. For instance, I've been asked by Facebook for the last eight years to validate my hotmail.com email. I haven't done it and they never kicked me out from Facebook. This is because they don't really need that. Don't wait for a user to validate their email so that they're on board. Push them already to the application and if you need to clear your database at some point and so on, you might consider sending reminders and so on. But don't do that in the user onboarding because it doesn't bring direct value, immediate direct value to the users. Within how we can clear the pass now to the sign up, now let's make sure that we have aligned the first touch point so that we reach the highest success of conversion through the sign up. So align the first in-app touch point. We're going to approach three things today. Today, three rules to follow. First, to make your first impression great. Then to make sure that the first touch point can be taken into one seat where the user is and then I'm going to go through a little bit of cutting the steps also in the first, in the beginning of the application. So first impression, make sure that the first impressions ends with a cherry on the top. Make sure that people can get immediate value once they get started. At n number 26, you would get the card ship, you get an iBan, you would get something right away. Think about what is the actual value you can deliver immediately so that people can start to stick to your product. I really like what Buffer did. What Buffer did is that so Buffer is a tool where you can program some social media posts. The first thing they ask you when you learn on their website is to log in through a social media platform. Why is it efficient? It's because in one click, you already have a dashboard. We start to be set it up with your social media account and you can still see how you can program a post and so on. So within one click, Buffer brings you to an immediate value. That's very powerful. Now the one seat. If you can avoid people from having to move or open the app again or do another action, especially in the physical world, to start to get some value, then you should consider that. So at number 26, people were able to do the KYC through a phone call. Like I previously explained, this meant that they were not supposed to face a physical agent. They were not supposed to they didn't have to go to a bank agency so that a person could see the client face in person. This is very powerful because you can actually in the end manage to open a bank account within eight or 10 minutes and this was really unique. So more stickiness and even it was even a hard moment for some of the customers. So think about it. Can you remove things at this point and can you make the action taken into one seat? The seat that the customer is currently at. This is drastically changing your business model. Now, classic, how can you cut some steps? I'm going to take the example of a Google Doc. This is what so a Google Doc is meant to be a collaborative document and what you want to do is you want to basically create a document, have some things inside the document and make sure that some people can also use it because it's meant to be a collaborative platform. So the five steps to create a Google Doc should have been to create a document, to name it, save it, copy the link and then share the link. Actually, what Google did is that they removed the second step. You don't have to name a doc. They're going to take the first words of your document. If you want to change that name, you can change it, of course. But if you give a title, if you start with something on your document, it's already going to be the name of your doc. Boom. They remove one step. You're supposed to save the doc. This is how you do with Microsoft Word. You don't have to do that anymore. It's automatically saved. Step three, which is to copy the code, it's kind of complex if you think about it. You have to scroll your mouse up to the end, command C or right click, copy. You don't have to do that. If you do one single click, then you have this reminder that says that the link is copied to your clipboard. So in the end, what Google did is they moved away from five steps to two and they didn't sacrifice the power to create a doc. That's very powerful. They brought you to the value provision within a very, very short amount of time. If you have a few touch points within your first application experience and you want to bring someone to a value, think about what are the steps. You can list the steps, bullets by bullets, and then you can think if there are any ways to actually remove the steps to make the life easier for the users. Be careful not to remove too many steps because sometimes the users care a little bit minimum about some of the steps. So ultimately, make sure that these three rules are aligned with your concept of activation. Being the first impression, the one-seat of the steps. The concept of activation, probably some of you are already familiar with, it is what are the actions that need to be taken for the users so that that user is very, very likely to be activated, to be an active user with a great retention that you can also define. I give you the example of Twitter. Twitter has defined that 30 followers is the activation threshold. So what they realize is that if a user started to follow 30 followers or started to have 30 person to follow, then that person will be very likely engaged in the coming weeks. So they didn't push people for the search. They didn't push people to do a tweet. What they push people is to follow the people. So the step that I mentioned prior to that at Twitter meant that people follow other people. So when you start the first time using Twitter, you usually have a pop-up that shows you all the people you are related to or the people you are likely to be interested in and what Twitter wants you to do at this point is to follow these people because they know that this is the metric that is likely to make you activate. That was the case a couple of years ago. I'm not sure if Twitter is still using that, but it's a very famous case just for you to have a rule of thumb in your mind. Like any user problem and product-related topics, make it an ongoing process, your onboarding process, improvement process. Start with something that has an impact and look for the quick wins and make it iterative. Rollout, improvement, repeat. There are three tools I recommend, Tempter.io, Gucha.io and Medalia.io. These three tools can be implemented on web sign-up and at each step of your sign-up, you could actually ask people's questions about what the struggle, what they don't find, if they're about to leave, why they would leave and you can actually start to get some very precise drill down on what people are not successfully doing in each step of your product. These are not mobile SDKs as far as I know. So it's mostly for web, so SaaS product. I'm sure you could find something else, but these are just, again, a way for you to think that you can ask questions at every step of your sign-up and try to drill down what could be improved. So instead of having a list of improvement that I shared with you, actually make your own assumption and find out about these problems. Voila, congratulations. If you follow these examples or if you get better IDs or found anything else related to user onboarding, you probably make your user onboarding much, much better. And congratulations. Again, a short remember of the processes, capturing the user's heart, talk to their mind, cleaning your path so that they can sign up and making sure that the first touchpoints of your application are aligned with that whole value provision. Because in the end, it's not only about pushing people, it's also about delivering against what your promise is. So if you manage to improve the click-through rate on your first marketing touchpoint and if you lied on your sign-up to get more conversion, but then the people don't activate, then it's kind of useless. A good sign-up and a good product feature or a good release is always meant to ultimately have a final good implication or engagement from the users. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy and see you soon.