Onboarding Funnel

A person who leaves during the first session has often not yet seen what the product does. A later reminder email has little to remind them of, so the loss is permanent. Measuring onboarding as a funnel, instead of building it once and forgetting it, shows exactly which step loses the most people. Fixing an early step also lifts every stage behind it, because more people arrive at the later steps.

• List every step from signup to activation and give each its own conversion rate.
• Fix the worst step first, then measure again. Solving one usually reveals the next.
• Remove any step that does not move the user towards value.
• Track the time between steps as well as the conversion. A slow step loses people even when its rate looks acceptable.
• Compare each new batch of signups with the last, so a fix can be shown to work.

An onboarding funnel maps everything a new user has to do between signing up and getting value. A typical sequence is: create an account, confirm an email address, connect a data source, invite a colleague, finish a first task. Each step has a conversion rate, which is the share of people who reach it out of those who completed the step before. The final step is usually activation, the moment a user first gets the result they signed up for.

• Counting signups as success. A signup that never reaches value is a future cancellation.
• Asking for effort before showing any reward, such as a long data import before the user has seen a single result.