Log in
Sign Up See how it works
See how it works Log in Sign Up
Beginner Any Industry

How to build a campaign to accelerate onboarding for new users

Guide users through onboarding based on real-time behavior while identifying key steps that lead to successful onboarding.

 

Segment Made by Segment

What do you need?

  • Segment Connections

  • An advertising tool like Facebook Ads

Easily personalize customer experiences with first-party data

With a huge integration catalog and plenty of no-code features, Segment provides easy-to-maintain capability to your teams with minimal engineering effort. Great data doesn't have to be hard work!

Get started for free

On this page

The desired outcome for building a campaign to accelerate onboarding for new users is to streamline and enhance the onboarding process, ensuring that new users quickly understand and engage with the app, leading to long-term user retention and satisfaction. This includes:

  • Faster Onboarding Completion: Achieve a higher percentage of users completing the onboarding process in a shorter time frame, reducing the drop-off rate during onboarding.

  • Increased User Engagement: Enhance user engagement by providing personalized guidance and support based on real-time behavior, ensuring users are actively interacting with the app's key features.
  • Higher User Retention: Improve user retention rates by ensuring that new users have a smooth and positive onboarding experience, making them more likely to continue using the app.

Step 1: Add the required Sources: 

In your workspace, add a new prod or dev source for your website and (optional) another for your order processing system. This should be your website where checkout events will be tracked and the system that captures completed orders. These sources will be responsible for collecting the required Track Events and sending them to Segment.

  •     Sign Up or Log In to Segment

First, access the Segment platform by signing up or logging into your existing account.

  •     Create a Source for Your Website

A source in Segment acts as the origin of data you collect, such as user interactions on your website.

  1. In your Segment workspace, navigate to the Sources section.

  2. Click the Add Source button.

  3. From the catalog of sources, select JavaScript (for websites)

  4. Provide a name for your source, e.g., "i.e. Company Website - Dev or Prod".

  5. Optionally, add labels for organization.

  6. Enter your website URL.

  7. Click Create Source button
  •       Install the Segment Snippet

After creating your source, Segment will provide you with a JavaScript snippet.

  1. Copy the JavaScript snippet provided by Segment.

  2. Paste the snippet into the <head> tag of your site to install Segment.

If you need to connect your website, mobile app, or server as a source please refer to our documentation on these touchpoints. 

Step 2: Track your events 

In order to build the funnels needed to encourage new user signups, you'll need to track three key events: Signed In, “Onboarding Step Completed",“Onboarding Completed’ from your website.. 

  • Signed In: Manually add this event to your site  (See Spec: Track documentation).

  • Onboarding Step Completed: Manually add this event to your site  (See Spec: Track documentation).

  • Onboarding Completed: Manually add this event to your site  (See Spec: Track documentation).

 

In this example, we're not only tracking events like ‘Signed In’, but also sending additional properties like ‘first_name’ and ‘email’. These properties provide important context about the event and can be extremely valuable in your analysis. Learn more about properties.

You should trigger Identify when the user performs the  ‘Signed In’ event  because this allows you to tie a user to their actions and record traits about them, i.e., first_name, last_name, email. This can further be used for personalized messaging or ads  in your onboarding campaign. 

Only Identify calls can add and update user traits to a profile. For connections-only customers, the Identify event can still be mapped to downstream destinations to create/update user profiles.

Step 3: Add Destinations

Choose where you want to send the collected data—for this use case we recommend using in-app messaging or connecting to a paid media destination like Facebook Ads or Google Ads. 

  1. In your Segment workspace, add a new destination.

Select your preferred tool from the catalog. This destination will receive the data collected by your source and use it according to your needs.

Step 4: Test your setup

Finally, test your setup to ensure data is being collected and sent correctly. You can do this by performing the actions you're tracking on your dev website and checking if the corresponding events appear in your Segment debugger and analytics tool.
 

The Source Debugger is a tool that helps you confirm that API calls made from your website, mobile app, or servers arrive to your Segment Source, so you can troubleshoot your Segment setup even quicker. 

Your data may not show up instantaneously and there may be a delay, but once the data is flowing you are ready to move to the next step. 

Step 5: Analyze and activate

With accurate setup and data flow:

  1. Analyze the data to understand user behavior throughout the onboarding process.

  2. Identify drop-off points and optimize them to improve conversion rates.

  3. Deploy targeted engagement strategies to convert interested users into completing the most essential onboarding steps required for your product or service. 

In the below example you can see several different options to creatively accelerate onboarding by targeting users in the process with targeted messaging specific to your product and their own use case. 

 

Final Thoughts 

Accelerating the onboarding process for new users is a critical strategy for ensuring the long-term success of your app. By guiding users through the onboarding process based on real-time behavior and identifying key steps that lead to successful onboarding, you can significantly enhance user engagement and retention. The step-by-step process outlined above—from adding the required sources and tracking events to analyzing and activating data—provides a comprehensive framework for achieving these goals.

 

Getting started is easy

Start connecting your data with Segment.

Get a demo Create a free account An icon of a right chevron