As a SaaS company, we don’t want to overwhelm customers with too much communication. At the same time, we want to gather as many insights as possible. Each step in the customer journey should be strategic, including the onboarding survey.
Our SaaS team at involve.me has been using onboarding surveys since our product launched. Today, we’d like to share tips on setting up these surveys, common mistakes to avoid, and how to automate the process. This will help other SaaS companies collect and use customer data wisely.
The Goal of the Onboarding Survey
There are two main goals for giving an onboarding survey to new SaaS users. First, it helps personalize the user's experience by gathering insights into their needs and profile.
Second, it provides the SaaS company with valuable data that can influence product and marketing decisions and predict customer retention based on the survey responses.
One of the questions in our onboarding survey
Let me walk you through the onboarding survey that involve.me’s new customers see when they create a free account and access the editor for the first time. The survey consists of three questions:
1. What is your industry?
2. What’s the size of your company?
3. What would you like to use involve.me for?
Answers to these questions help our SaaS team with the following:
1. Personalize Customer Experience
Based on the answers to the questions about the customer's industry and current needs (whether it's lead generation or managing human resources), we offer a set of templates—forms, quizzes, surveys, calculators—that specifically help new customers with their inquiries.
While new users can explore the templates on their own, it's always better to provide some guidance. According to statistics from 2024, a poor onboarding experience in the software industry results in a user drop-off rate of 40-60% after sign-up. Redirecting new customers to relevant content and features can significantly increase retention rates.
“76% of customers are likely to continue using a service if they have a positive onboarding experience.“
How did we create such personalization in the product?
To create a pop-up survey with onboarding questions, we used our own product—involve.me survey maker.
Instead of having the "Thank You" page as the final step, we set a custom URL for each specific industry. When a custom URL is set, participants are redirected to the configured URL upon completing the survey. For projects with multiple outcomes, we set different URLs for each outcome, ensuring tailored content for each new user:
involve.me's custom redirect
Improve the Marketing Strategy
Learning about our customers' industries and goals helped our marketing team identify the best strategies to provide more value and attract more users to create accounts on involve.me.
Our marketing team began by analyzing survey responses and comparing them to customer histories. This helped us determine which customers, from which industries, stayed with us the longest and who fit our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Based on this data, we expanded our template library, wrote blog articles featuring our solutions (form and survey templates serving different goals), and created industry-specific landing pages.
While our SaaS product is customizable and can be used across all industries, we created personalized content for our ICPs from different sectors. We used this approach to show our customers how creatively they could use involve.me.
One example is the Social Media Hashtag Generator template for marketing agencies:
It's a customizable template. Get it here.
Another example is the Price Quote Calculator for the software industry:
It's a customizable template. Get it here.
Features Planning
involve.me is a feature-rich and multi-industry product. The data from the onboarding survey, where customers share how they plan to use the product, helps our SaaS team prioritize which features to develop next.
For example, when we discovered that many customers use involve.me specifically for lead generation, we introduced email validation options. These options help ensure high-quality leads by preventing participants from submitting invalid emails.
The Mistakes We Made with the Onboarding Survey
Our onboarding survey has evolved since the very beginning of the product. Initially, the survey had six questions, each on a separate page. When we decided to shorten the survey to just three relevant questions, we saw an 11% increase in responses.
This change made sense, as new customers need to first get to know the product and decide if it’s right for them before sharing a lot of information. More established customers who like the product and have used it extensively are more willing to share insights that can influence future features.
Before, our onboarding survey covered the whole screen. This made users leave our product without even trying it, instead of completing the survey first. Now, the survey is integrated into the product, allowing users to see the involve.me dashboard behind the survey, which helps them understand that they are already in the product.
pop-up survey in the product
How We Embedded the Onboarding Survey into the Product
We created the onboarding survey using the involve.me tool. Other SaaS companies can similarly create a survey with their branding elements and get a unique embed code that can be added to their website or product. It’s possible to control the survey trigger and timeline within the pop-up settings in the involve.me editor:
An example of setting up survey triggers
To create a similar, embeddable survey, you can use our AI generator. This tool analyzes your company’s website elements and, based on your prompts, generates the survey:
Create your survey with AI
Just paste your URL & click generate
Alternatively, you can use one of our pre-designed templates to create an onboarding survey for your customers:
Collect customer feedback
Start with a customizable template
Onboarding Survey Integrations
We integrated the onboarding survey with Brevo, our CRM tool, to enhance our marketing automation. Based on the survey responses, we send out a personalized welcome email a few minutes after signup, featuring three recommended templates. This immediate personalization helps new users feel understood right from the start.
A few days later, we follow up with another email promoting blog articles related to customer's industry. This strategy keeps users engaged and helps them see the value in our service.
An example of the lead nurturing campaign (in Brevo) based on the survey responses
Recommendations for Other SaaS Companies
Drawing from our experience at involve.me, here are concise recommendations for other SaaS companies looking to optimize their onboarding process and use surveys effectively:
Set clear goals: Use onboarding surveys to personalize user experiences. Analyze survey responses to identify Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and create targeted blog content and features that cater to specific customer segments.
Optimize survey structure: Keep surveys short and integrate them into the product interface. Your team can reduce the number of questions by implementing conditional logic. This means that respondents only see questions relevant to their previous answers.
Prioritize feature development: Base feature prioritization on user feedback gathered through surveys to address user needs.
Learn from mistakes: Analyze user feedback and response rates to enhance the user experience. It's possible that (in your case) adding more questions to the survey could improve personalization. Consider the needs of new customers and adjust the survey accordingly.
Take advantage of integrations for automation by connecting surveys with CRM tools. This allows for automated personalized follow-ups, boosting user engagement. Also, you can connect surveys with Excel, Notion, Airtable, and other tools to ensure access to data for all team members.
Explore our template library to discover the perfect survey form for your specific needs:
