How to create a great first impression with an onboarding experience

The app onboarding continues to gain importance for marketers and businesses. The onboarding process defines the way the value of a new app can be explained to the users. But here the old saying “the first impression is the last impression” is truly effective. 

It has been seen that the first impression often helps enticing and engaging the users for longer and boosting the retention rate. In contrast, apps failing to impress the users in the first instance can be completely avoided.  

According to most studies, getting new users is 5 to 25 times more difficult than retaining the users and reselling a solution to them. In spite of this, just 18% of the businesses insist on User Retention in contrast to the 44% who focus mainly on new User Acquisition. For example, take the app development in Ireland, where the budding business apps mostly focus on reaching out to as many as possible instead of focusing on retention. 

This is precisely why we are here to explain about creating a great first impression with an onboarding experience. 

Key Reasons Businesses Need to Consider User Onboarding 

If you ask any business how important it is for them to keep the customers happy so that they come back to the same brand? Well, that is exactly the way user onboarding is important.

The user onboarding process makes sure that the app portrays its key value propositions that the user is delighted with and the way the app is going to work. 

Since the users these days have a lot of options to choose from in-app marketplaces, the app makers need to convince them about the user experience and benefits at the earliest so that they keep using the app and get satisfaction from the very first moment.

Here we briefly mention the key benefits of the user onboarding process. 

• Unique user onboarding ensures that the customers will return to the app again and again for more. Since the user onboarding makes customers happy with the first experience, it makes them come back to the app again and again. 
• A good onboarding experience also makes the primary users spread the news about the app and help others know about the app. To be precise good onboarding experience will encourage more robust word-of-mouth marketing.  
• The biggest advantage of user onboarding is keeping the user churn at low while ensuring higher retention. 

Creating Those Aha or Wow Moments

How do you explain your first digital experience with a product most positively? Yes, you whisper Aha or say Wow. Such positive surprises explain how success is the user onboarding experience. This is why creating a great first impression with a superb user onboarding often means creating such aha or wow moments. Explaining the core value of the app with actual user context is more important than just explaining the benefits. 

Because of the absence of great onboarding, most apps experience so many drop-offs in terms of retention in such a short-term. When the value of the app doesn’t uplift the mood of the users, and they just don’t find anything exclusively great with the app, they churn out. 

The recognition of core value apart, a superb user onboarding also helps in creating those aha or wow moments by explaining how easy it is for the users to get things done or how the app can help them solve certain problems most easily. That aha or wow moments by an onboarding experience can only be created when it is explained in the context of specific user contexts. 

Most Effective Tips to Create a Great First Impression 

Now, if you want to create a great first impression with your app, it is important to know the users for whom the user experience is being designed. This is why for user onboarding; it is extremely important to create very well-defined user personas. You can create different user personas with various user expectations and accordingly can create ideal user onboarding that works in each case. 

Here we provide some great tips for creating the most enticing user onboarding process. 

• First of all, make sure that the user onboarding experience remains unique for the app.
• Ensure fast and easy user onboarding so that users need to spend less time in getting their things done. Social media logins and the proper use of buttons and navigations at the right areas is necessary for this. 
• Make sure the navigation remains intuitive and thoroughly actionable with little to confuse about. 
• Make sure you explain the value proposition of the app in clear terms. In case of complexity of app features, make use of relevant tips appearing through pop-ups and text to ensure optimum clarity. 
• Always showcase the best features of the app as found to be popular about the app analytics and research data.  
• Set clear expectations about the app and the features and explain how things are going to work. 
• Try unique and innovative methods to boost user engagement and keep them enticed to the app onboarding process till the end. For example, the Robin Hood app allows users to carry out a fake purchase and thus helps users to see how the process works to their advantage. 
• Lastly, it is important to ask users to provide only relevant information that the app needs. 

Conclusion 

Through the user onboarding process, the first impression of the app makes a lasting impression. This is why onboarding is often the key to great user retention and business conversion. 

Author Bio:
Jamie Waltz is a Chief Technical Officer of Square Root Solutions – App Development Companies in Ireland, apart from his profession being a technology geek, he likes to write on mobile app design & development through his 6+ years of app development experience.