5+ Best Practices for Free Trial Onboarding Emails for B2B SaaS

Your onboarding emails for your B2B SaaS are doing one of two things: 

1. Guiding users toward their ‘AHA’ moment (AKA making them realize that they can’t live without your software—which means they’ll have to upgrade to paid at the end of their trial).
2. Creating confusion that pushes trial users away from your app.

Optimizing your onboarding emails often falls to the bottom of the priority list—you have your confirmation, a quick welcome, and maybe one or two sharing a few features, so at least you’ve got something up, right? 

Except, your onboarding emails are your best shot at turning trial users into paying customers. It’s where you prove your value before users have a chance to forget why they signed up in the first place. So they deserve to be at the top of your priority list.

But how do you use your onboarding emails to get your users to the ‘AHA’ moment? Here are some of the best practices for onboarding emails for B2B SaaS:

#1. Give Your Users ONE Action Per Email

And that one action in their first email should be the first step towards your ‘AHA’ moment. Your users don’t need a laundry list of instructions. Pinpoint exactly what they need to do that’s going to make them stick with your app long-term. 

For example, do they really need to add their name and picture to their profile? In most cases, no. Don’t waste Day 0 real estate on things that won’t keep users in your app. 

→ There’s ONE exception where you can include multiple actions in one email: When the second action is in the SAME place as the first one!

#2. Send Multiple Emails (Even on Day 0)

Don’t start on the defensive, thinking people will hate getting your emails. Some people think getting one email is too many emails—but you’re not focusing on those people. You’re focusing on the users who are excited about your tool, the users who want to be supported by YOU.

Send however many emails you need to convince your users that your tool is going to change things if they implement it into their lives—and do everything in your power to make sure they DO implement it.

On day 0, there’s a sweet spot of three emails. First, your confirmation email (legally required), second, your welcome email, and third, an email that shows them what to do in your app to get closer to the ‘AHA’ moment!

#3. Make Your Onboarding Feel Like a 1:1 Experience

Especially if you’re already asking your users questions about what they do and why they’re interested in your app in the first place. 

Take this example from Scoro’s onboarding questionnaire:

Users should be put into the sequence that correlates with and talks about the feature they chose during this step of the onboarding process.

The user who chooses “Optimize processes and collaboration” and the user who chooses “Increase business and project profitability” have different goals and therefore should receive emails that are relevant to those goals.

Your onboarding sequence should feel like a personalized experience for your trial users—use their answers to guide what onboarding sequence they’re added to and what language you use in that sequence. For example, you can segment based on the feature they’re most interested in or would benefit the most from.

This WILL change based on your user behavior—what they really need vs. what your users think they need. Whatever the root cause problem is for the symptom they’re experiencing (that your app solves).

#4. Match Your Onboarding Emails to Your In-App Experience

Users love a set-up checklist. What they don’t love is when the emails in their inbox are telling them to do one thing, but the in-app checklist is telling them to do another. This disconnect is easy to overlook, but it can cause major confusion for your trial users (and confused users don’t convert).

Take this in-app checklist from Cloudways:

Each of these checklist items could easily become an email.

The easiest way to avoid this is to match your email actions to your in-app to-do list. For example, you can set up daily emails in your onboarding sequence, prompting your trial user to take each checklist action.

Or—and this is my favorite method—you can trigger emails based on whether your user has taken the action, or not. If the user takes action, then they get an email about taking the next action (and so on). But if the user hasn’t taken action yet, they’re sent a boxcar reminding them to take the action.

If you want to learn more about Boxcars and how to use them to increase the number of trial users who upgrade to a paid account, watch this free training!

#5. Talk Their Talk

Use the words that your users use to talk about their problems and goals—not what you and your team use internally or in the industry. Your users won’t connect to your company if you’re not talking THEIR talk. 

Pull words from their reviews, from onboarding surveys, and even from emails they send in to your support team

Users should know with absolute certainty that you know where they’re at, you understand their problems and challenges, and you know where they want to go.

From their day 0 welcome email to third boxcar reminding them to set up their account, every email in your B2B SaaS app’s onboarding should speak to your user and their problems using THEIR words. 

#6. Regularly Review and Update Your Onboarding Emails

Unless your conversion rate is 100%, you should always review and update your onboarding emails. Your free trial sequence is what guides your user to the ‘AHA’ moment, the moment when your users convert to a paid user.

Regularly updating your emails is also what prevents the disconnect between your in-app experience and your onboarding experience. Often, you update your app (which IS a good thing), but you don’t update your onboarding sequence to match.

Your Onboarding Emails Have One Job

And it’s not just to explain your app’s features. Your onboarding sequence should be more than a product tour; every email should move your users closer to experiencing the value that makes them want to pay. 

It creates an experience so valuable that a user can’t imagine going back to their old way of doing things. That’s how you reach the ‘AHA’ moment and turn your trial users into customers (and die-hard fans).Ready to build an onboarding sequence that actually converts? Book a free consult. It’s what we’re here for.