How to build effective in-app onboarding

As you learned earlier, the most effective way to deliver user onboarding is inside your software. In-app onboarding not only allows you to meet users where they are—it also enables more personalized and intelligent experiences that adapt to users’ needs.

When thinking about how you’ll build in-app onboarding, consider three critical elements: in-app guides, product analytics, and user feedback.

In-app guides

This is arguably the most important part of in-app onboarding. You need to be able to walk users through key features inside your software with contextual tips and interactive content. Ideally, the tool you use will offer a variety of in-app guide formats to leverage. Here’s a quick overview of types of in-app guides:

Tooltips: These are brief, informational messages triggered by a user action and usually anchored to a specific element in the product. Tooltips are an effective way to answer FAQs or provide additional context during onboarding.

Lightboxes: This in-app message often dims or darkens the rest of the page to emphasize the content. Because lightboxes can be intrusive, they’re best for important notifications that require acknowledgement, like the beginning of your onboarding flow.

Walkthroughs: These multi-step in-app messages are designed to walk software users through a complete workflow or task, like how to set up your profile after logging in for the first time.

On-demand resources: This is when resources live inside the product where users can access them at any time. Pendo customers use the Resource Center to house onboarding materials, release notes, tutorial videos, and more.

Product analytics

While in-app guides serve as the foundation of in-app onboarding, it’s equally important to utilize data to optimize your onboarding.

Most notably, data from a product analytics tool can help you choose which features correlate with long-term success in the product and therefore should be introduced to users during onboarding.

Build in-app onboarding around the features and workflows that users need in order to accomplish their most important tasks.

It might be tempting to show new users all of your product’s great features, but it’s best to build onboarding around only the most relevant features—namely those that users need in order to accomplish their most important tasks. This not only gives them the right foundation of product knowledge, it prevents them from feeling overwhelmed at the outset of their usage.

The makeup of your in-app onboarding will also largely depend on what you’re looking to achieve, whether it’s to increase awareness and adoption of key features or drive conversions from freemium and/or free trial experiences. For example, you can use product analytics data to better understand which actions in the product lead to outcomes like positive customer sentiment, retention, or trial conversion, and ensure your onboarding flow directs users to those actions.

After you’ve launched your onboarding flows, you should also leverage analytics to understand how users interact with your product—and where there are friction points. Analytics are essential to measuring how onboarding flows are performing and what can be improved.

Here are some key metrics that will help you understand the effectiveness of your onboarding process—and identify where you need to iterate.

Onboarding completion rates: How many users successfully complete the onboarding flow? To find this, divide the number of users who finished onboarding by the total number of users in the onboarding cohort.
Guide engagement: Are users interacting with your onboarding guides? Through research for Pendo’s Product Benchmarks, we found that the average guide engagement rate for companies of all sizes is 28.5%.
Time to value: How long does it take users to adopt a core feature after logging in? Our research shows that the average time to value for companies of all sizes is 1.5 days.
Feature adoption: Are users engaging with your core features after onboarding? On average, only 6% of features drive 80% of click volume in software.
Time on app: How long are users spending on your mobile and web apps? The average time to compare is 12.8 minutes on web apps and 5.7 minutes on mobile apps.
Retention rates: Are users sticking around after the initial onboarding? For companies of all sizes, average one-month user retention is 38%.

Bonus tip: Use a session replay tool to visualize how customers are moving through your onboarding experience or using your product in order to see exactly where they’re running into issues. This gives crucial context to product analytics data, for example if you see drop off in an onboarding walkthrough and want to understand what’s causing the friction.

Looking for more KPIs to drive your onboarding strategy? Check out the 10 KPIs every product leader needs to know in 2025.

User feedback

Collecting real-time user feedback will help you continuously improve the onboarding experience. Is something in the flow confusing? Are users frustrated about a certain step? In-app feedback capture is the fastest way to find out.

After your onboarding flows are live, use in-app surveys and polls to ask customers for feedback on their onboarding experience. Soliciting this feedback in-app means users’ onboarding experience will be fresh in their minds, making them more likely to respond—and respond honestly.

It’s also useful to deliver surveys and polls at strategic moments in users’ workflows. For example, avoid asking for feedback when users are still in the middle of an onboarding flow or task. Instead, serve an in-app survey or poll after a user has completed an onboarding step or the entire experience.

4 ways to optimize your in-app onboarding

With those three overarching components in mind, let’s go over four best practices for building successful in-app onboarding.

1. Personalize as much as possible

Your software likely serves multiple types of users with different needs and workflows required to utilize the product effectively. Rather than delivering the same onboarding experience to all users, personalization makes onboarding feel relevant and tailored, helping to increase engagement and speed up time to value.

This can be as simple as asking users what they want to accomplish in your product when they first log in, and adjusting the onboarding path accordingly. It can also involve using known metadata to segment your user base and dynamically serve different onboarding flows. This not only improves the experience for each user, but also reduces unnecessary friction and confusion by removing irrelevant content.

Ways to segment your onboarding guides:

Job title
Industry
Permission level in the product
Free trial vs. paying customers

2. Focus on value, not features

It’s easy for onboarding to become a feature tour that overwhelms new users with options—rather than guiding them to value. The best in-app onboarding shifts the focus from what your product can do to how it helps users succeed. This might mean walking users through a specific workflow that is foundational to using your software, like setting up their dashboard or creating their first report.

When users quickly experience your product’s value, they’re more likely to stay engaged and explore further. Instead of pointing out every feature, center your onboarding around the functionality and tasks that will expedite time to value.

Pro tip: Use a product analytics tool to determine the features that expedite time to value, for example by identifying which ones are used by customers with high retention rates.

3. Provide onboarding resources on-demand

No matter how well-designed your onboarding is, some users will skip it, forget parts of it, or run into questions later. That’s why it’s important to also provide on-demand training materials inside your product.

This way, users can access content like tutorials, guides, or FAQs without needing to leave the product or disrupt their workflow. Embedding a help center, resource hub, or contextual tooltips that users can revisit extends the life of your onboarding experience—and reduces the reliance on your support team.

4. Don’t neglect out-of-product channels

Just because your onboarding experience lives inside your software doesn’t mean you should ignore other channels. Remember: Onboarding is one part of a user’s broader experience, and you want it to feel connected to the rest of the ways you engage with customers.

For example, you might also send new users an email to welcome them to the product, provide key resources, and encourage them to log in. Email is also an effective way to re-engage users who dropped off and didn’t complete the full onboarding experience.

In-app onboarding that made an impact

It’s one thing to learn onboarding strategies and tactics—it’s another to see how real companies are bringing them to life. In this section, we’re going to walk through four examples of in-app onboarding that drove measurable business results. We hope these will help inspire your own efforts and get you thinking about what’s possible with data-driven, iterative in-app onboarding.

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