Wanna kill your app? Do this 👉🏼
Each mistake costs you 20% of your marketing spends.
Welcome to the 46th edition of the GrowthX Newsletter. Every Tuesday & Thursday I write a piece on startups & business growth. Today’s piece is going to 94,400+ operators & leaders from startups like Google, Stripe, Swiggy, Razorpay, CRED & more
Someone recently asked me this question.
Have you fixed your acquisition?
And without much pause, I blurted.
Bro, you don’t fix acquisition. You fix retention.
You fix retention for new users, M0, M1, M2 & so on!
And it all starts from user app on-boarding.
What is app on-boarding?
App onboarding is like meeting someone for the first time.
You may like it. You may hit it off just fine. Or you may hate it.
Much like real life, if you hate it in first go, you’ll probably won’t come back.
You set the context → You tell them how they can navigate → You introduce the product.
3 steps to fix your on-boarding 🚀
Take screenshots
Take a screenshot of every single screen from page 0 till the page that lands your user to the app home page.Analyse every single screen
Why is it there, What purpose is it solving, Shall we remove it?
Heat maps
Tracking motion on the screens can be your blessing in disguise.Use app heat maps to see where users are clicking, what they’re skipping, which actions are they taking the most. There, you’ll have your answers.
Bring them to ‘AHA’
Onboarding’s goal is to introduce users to their first AHA moment and show the value of the app.Ensure that in these first steps, you educate users about core features of your app & their benefits.
How to track success?
On-boarding funnel & track anomalies
Always start with the on-boarding funnel. Assign each page, each task a specific event and track its traction. You’d be surprised to see say, how many users don’t play the video or totally ignore the sign up button.Each metric has a job-to-be-done.
Measure the impact on-boarding has on retention or adoption.
Introduce your core-action
One of country’s biggest music app with a green icon realised that when their users download a song, is when their retention is the highest. The user stickiness increases effortlessly to days beyond D90.
They ensured downloading the song was the only core action expected off a new user and made it a part of app on-boarding.Behavioural personas
This is your goldmine for creating cohorts. Learning how your users are navigating on the app will break your preconceived notions & hypothesis. As creators of the app, we see everything as the next obvious things, but sometimes, it’s far from the truth.Use heat-maps, CTRs, drop-offs, feature adoption, skip button, sign-up buttons as drivers of these information.
Do’s for your on-boarding flow🔥
Work with brevity. Anything that can be removed, should be removed.
Streamline the entry gates for a higher completion rate.
Observe users who skip on-boarding. What do they do?
Have a productised priming for your core action
Set up an automated journey distributed across D0-D7 to help user navigate on the app, especially acting on the core action if missed (push notification, email, SMS)
Push for at least 1 habit forming that leads user to contributing towards revenue
Play with cohorts.
Run A/B tests with screens, communication, sign-up goals, & value props.
Focus on creating a flow that helps users learn about your product, introduces them to value proposition, and doesn’t overwhelm them.
Global brands to check for their on-boarding?
Duolingo. Figma. Slack. Grammarly
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Snippets to collect or share📝
First impression might not be the last impression. But in app-onboarding, the first impression definitely determines your user's retention.
App-onboarding is similar to surfboarding. Users can’t anticipate the next thing. Hence keep an element of consistency in the process and pleasant surprises.
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