A message from Ben:
Understanding and optimizing onboarding is one the most important things that you can do to increase conversion. Many product teams obsess over making the sign up experience as frictionless as possible which is important, but there is another component that plays an equally important role in the likelihood of someone to activate: Motivation.
For example, let’s say that you’ve launched a slew of onboarding improvements for your new app. You’ve worked hard to remove as much negative friction from your activation flows and conversion is looking strong, but you still aren’t hitting your targets. There’s not much more you can do to make sign up easier and you’re struggling to know where to focus next.
It could be that the sign up process is still too hard, but If you take a step back and think about why users and teams are getting stuck or dropping out of the sign up flow, there’s actually only one valid answer and it's a tough pill to swallow. The users that are starting the sign up process lack the motivation to convert.
I created a series of templates that you can use to determine if you have the right users going through your sign up process and if they have the motivation required to convert.