Top Tips for SaaS Product Onboarding with Email

SaaS product onboarding when done well can transform new users into lifelong advocates. Companies that successfully onboard your product are:

1. Less likely to churn
2. More likely to upgrade in the future
3. More likely to be advocates

All of these are incredibly important to building a successful business. They all help drive new revenue and improve NRR. And… product onboarding can be accomplished with much less effort than you think. Normally product onboarding needs to be driven by, well, Product. You need to change your product to streamline and guide. While not a replacement for this, there’s something else you can do. Something MARKETING can do: Email.

Here are four actionable tips to level up your B2B product onboarding with email.

1. Trigger emails based on product action

Static, time-based onboarding is a thing of the past. Your users might not always move through your product in a predictable sequence—they progress at their own pace, based on their needs. The key to effective onboarding is operating on product actions: using what users do (or don’t do) in your product to guide your engagement strategy in real-time.

One Inflection.io customer initially relied on static drip campaigns. Every user received the same emails, regardless of their actions, leading to disengagement and what I call revenue leak.

They transformed their approach using our modern marketing automation capabilities. They dynamically segmented users based on behavior, triggering timely, personalized communications tied to key milestones—like verifying an email or completing a first API call. They get a reminder to do a step if they skipped it or if a step is already done they just get the next step.

The result? An 80% increase in free-to-paid conversions. Personalized, action-driven onboarding didn’t just boost conversions—it led to more customers, more advocates, and less churn.

2. Think account-based onboarding

B2B products often involve multiple stakeholders from the same company, each with different goals, expectations, and sometimes with different knowledge of your company or different sets of technical skills. Onboarding isn’t just about individual users—it’s about onboarding an entire account (company). Some tips:

• Create tailored experiences for different user roles (e.g., admins vs. end-users).
• Provide team-focused resources like shared checklists, onboarding dashboards, or group training sessions.
• Facilitate collaboration among team members to ensure they all get value from the product.

Make sure you are considering workspaces as part of onboarding, if that is a component of your product.

3. Take a metric.

As the saying goes: “What gets measured gets done.” For marketing to have skin in the game, leadership needs to take on metrics tied to onboarding success—such as time-to-value, adoption rates, or free-to-paid conversions. If marketing has goals of only pipeline or ARR, onboarding will never be prioritized to the degree it needs to be. But when marketing owns a piece of onboarding, the whole GTM team aligns around turning sign-ups into champions.

One of the best metrics for marketing to take on is NRR - and you can count on the impact of modern marketing automation on NRR. The top SaaS companies have NRR of 120% or higher. Yet, most companies have NRR of < 100%. NRR is a powerful multiple in SaaS and when the entire GTM team is focused on it just as much as ARR, you have potential to grow much faster.

Inflection is a marketing automation platform that lets you activate your product data and data warehouse to drive more pipeline, improve product onboarding and adoption, and revenue expansion, all from one platform. Request a marketing automation demo today.