TL:DR – Most onboarding efforts in online communities fail because they overload users with unnecessary steps and information while failing to address the real reasons people don’t engage.
Rather than adding more onboarding tactics, communities should simplify the experience, reduce clutter, and emphasise high-impact activities like personal messages, event sign-ups, and digest emails.
We Waste So Much Time On Onboarding Journeys
One of my (many) less popular opinions is that the vast majority of time and energy investing in onboarding journeys is wasted.
Commitment curves, engagement ladders, gamification, and automation emails sound like clever, intuitive ideas that should work—but they rarely do.
Many have the opposite impact—they make finding the signal amongst the noise harder, doing more harm than good.
Why Are Onboarding Journeys Rarely Successful in Communities?
There are three reasons for the failure of most onboarding journeys.
- The vast majority of customer communities are transactional. Members visit, ask a question, and leave when they get an answer. Trust me, if your iPhone breaks, the only thing you want to do is find a solution. You don’t want to introduce yourself, personalise your profile, subscribe to the newsletter, etc…
- It’s almost impossible to persuade members to do something they don’t want to. The reason most people don’t participate isn’t because they aren’t properly welcomed or don’t know how to use the site. It’s because they lack the time, knowledge, or motivation to participate. Onboarding journeys have a negligible impact on that.
- Information overload. We’re overwhelmed by the relentless torrent of pings, messages, and notifications, and we’ve learned to ignore most of them. Automated messages (with a few exceptions) rank at the top of the list of messages we ignore.
Given how much attention is given to onboarding, there’s very little data showing the impact of changing/tweaking onboarding on engagement and retention.
This doesn’t mean all onboarding activities are a bust.
When we’ve seen significant improvements in onboarding, it’s usually because the original onboarding was so poor that it did more harm than good. This typically means removing as many steps as possible.
There are things you can do that impact when and how people engage. The problem is that these are rarely the things people do.
Which Onboarding Activities Don’t Have An Impact?
I’d recommend beginning with an onboarding audit.
Go through the journey (or get us to do it) where you look at every page, click, and receive notifications to make your first post. You might be surprised how often a platform (or your organisation) has added something you didn’t expect.
Then, go through it with prospective members and see how they progress while they share their thinking.
I’ve conducted many UX interviews, during which we asked people to share their screens and show us how they engage with the community.
The results are always surprisingly similar.
If they don’t find the answer they want and want to ask a question, they click register, complete the details, click submit, see the link in the confirmation email, and then ask their question.
When we later asked what they thought of the welcome emails and subsequent emails, they either admitted they didn’t open them or couldn’t recall what they said.
You almost always cut a lot of activities out. This often includes:
- Automated emails. We’ve experimented a lot with long automated email series. If you’re going to do this, this is still the best approach. But the impact of these declines with every passing year. If you’re going to use them, stop using them to explain how to use the platform and use them to highlight some immediate value people can get from the community. (signing up for events seems especially effective).
- First badge notifications. Just remove these – they’re pure spam. People don’t need to be given a badge for making their first post, discussion, or getting their first like, etc…It’s incredibly patronising and should be removed.
- Welcome emails can significantly impact smaller communities and have a negligible effect on larger ones. The problem is that they’re often written to be ignored. If you can’t surprise someone in a welcome email, it’s best to remove it. It’s more noise. The worst offenders in onboarding journeys are communities that automatically add subscribers to the company’s mailing list—and then they receive half a dozen emails in the first week.
- The on-site tutorials do slightly better with less technical audiences, but most people click through them without reading anything. I’d try to make this more of an ‘opt-in’ experience or place it in the ‘troubleshooting’ area.
A good way of thinking about it is to remember any community you’ve joined. Did you honestly read and remember any of the above content? Did it have an impact on you?
For the vast majority of us, the answer is no.
The fundamental reason for this is that people would sooner give up on overly complex platforms than learn how to use them. If the platform isn’t intuitive, people quit.
Aside: If your platform is so complex that you need an email series to explain its use, you’re using the wrong platform (or need to improve the terminology).
The Problem With Commitment Curves
A quick aside on creating commitment curves/engagement ladders here.
Proponents of commitment curves believe in the learner-to-leader model. People join a community tentatively. They need to undertake small activities before moving on to bigger ones. Commitment increases over time. Many onboarding journeys are designed around this principle.
The problem with this approach is it runs contrary to the data.Whenever we study the data, we find it’s a total crapshoot. Almost nobody steadily engages up any ladder—most jump in sporadically. They do a few posts here and there, disappear on vacation for a month, come back and publish an article, then vanish for a while…People are just as likely to move down the curve as up it (or skip several steps altogether in either direction).
The Five Onboarding Areas Which Have A Real Impact
There are only five onboarding areas which we’ve seen have a real impact.
1) Genuinely personal messages from a real person (especially from a smaller community). If they get a well-researched, genuine email from someone – that has an impact. However, it is only feasible in a smaller community. We’ve been experimenting with AI recently to do the research and suggest a message the community manager adapts – it feels like it could work, but it’s early days.
2) Asking people to select groups and people to follow within a community. I’m saying this from a small dataset, but it seems to have a small impact on long-term engagement (this may be mixed up with personalisation, and it’s only correlational data). I suspect that getting people to sign up for a group, follow people’s updates, and opt-in to something they want to learn more about has an impact.
3) Signing up for an upcoming event. This is curiously successful – not quite sure why. I suspect it engages people in something at a specific date – and this causes more future visits to a community. They commit to engage at a particular time and place. The challenge is you need to keep this updated with upcoming events (too often, someone forgets, and newcomers are invited to sign up for a non-existent event).
4) Introduction threads. It is hard to separate correlation from causation on this. However, this may have a positive impact on smaller communities (especially the non-support type). The problem with these threads is they often become 50+ pages long, and no one reads them. You must ask people to share something about themselves that others want to learn about.
5) Ensuring members receive the digest and notifications. This is critical for ongoing engagement and participation. I constantly steer clients away from one community platform because it doesn’t offer digests. No digests or email notifications are a killer (aside: email notifications are becoming more complex due to GDPR laws, which let people opt out of receiving messages from an organisation).
In short, in larger communities, asking people to follow specific groups/people, sign up for events, and receive digests has the most significant impact.
Personal messages and introduction threads may have a small impact in smaller communities.
As I mentioned recently, we’ve had far better results removing things from the onboarding journey than adding them.
How FeverBee Would Improve Your Community Experience
One of the things FeverBee does is help clients improve the community experience to be better aligned with member needs (contact us if you want help).
This usually depends less on onboarding and instead focusing on the highest impact areas.
Around 90% of someone’s propensity to lurk (learn) depends entirely on whether they need to participate. You can only influence that so much. All that time and effort on onboarding can be better invested in improving the learning experience.
1) Simplify the taxonomy and navigation.
I can’t stress enough how powerful it is to get the taxonomy right. Are you going to structure the community by:
- Product category. Product one, product two, product three, etc…
- Visitor intent. Search, get help, learn, share advice, get started, etc…
- Visitor type. Users, developers, resellers, partners, etc…
Aside – Download our Community Taxonomy Templates for free.
Generally speaking, I’d suggest a product category for smaller communities and a visitor type for larger communities. Too many people try to be clever with intent, but we’ve found this is less intuitive.
Even within this, the exact labelling you use for each section greatly impacts what people do. Often, simple tweaks help. For example.
- Ask Questions > Forum
- Tutorials > Knowledge Base
- Contact us > Get Help
- Introduction to […] > Get Started
Of all the things with the highest impact, improving the navigation and taxonomy is a winner.
2) Reducing/removing clutter.
From a past client experience, eliminating clutter can be a huge win.
- Remove features not used by at least 20% of active members.
- Archive or merge categories which aren’t attracting dozens of posts per month.
- Remove static pages which don’t attract at least 100 views per month.
- Consider removing members who haven’t posted in two years.
- Archive or merge groups which don’t attract regular discussions.
- Archive discussions following these principles.
- Remove the majority of profile fields from member profiles.
- Reduce the size of the navigation menu to a handful of simple options.
The metrics are somewhat arbitrary – ensure you can stand behind whatever figures you use.
Often, just cleaning out the clutter massively improves the member experience.
3) Sharing a regular ‘community best practices’ newsletter.
Earlier, I said most newsletters are ignored – and that’s true. That’s partly because of newsletter fatigue and partly because most newsletters are terrible.
They’re usually full of self-indulgent community news, which members don’t have the time or inclination to read about (see community narcissism).
The best newsletters do one of two things:
- They become a beacon for what’s happening in the industry. The Overflow is a great example. This includes industry news, resources shared from experts across the web, upcoming events, etc…
- They spread helpful tips and advice published in the community. What helpful advice in the community needs to be shared more widely? What tips and issues could be helpful to if seen by more people in the community?
4) Undertaking UX research to see where people get stuck and make improvements.
I talked about this in my past post; you should undertake UX testing to see where people get stuck and make improvements. You can learn more about the process here.
- Set up interviews with non-participants.
- Give them learning tasks to do.
- See where they get stuck and prioritise the severity of the issue.
- Identify solutions and time/effort required.
- Create a prioritised roadmap of issues to resolve.
This process always identifies unforeseen problems you can solve and ensures you’re concentrating your resources on the most significant wins.
5) Highlighting common issues/mistakes with 101 guides.
A hugely underrated activity is creating community-generated 101 guides where members are invited to submit their best advice for newcomers to a product or a topic. This is then published as a book/resource.
You can build up a whole collection of tips featuring the names and contributions of members. It naturally leads to social media promotion, too.
My favourite questions include:
- What advice would you give to newcomers getting started in product/topic?
- What’s the biggest challenge, and how did you overcome it?
- What would you do differently if you were to go start again with product/topic?
This has the dual impact of generating a huge amount of engagement while creating valuable content for members.
This approach also benefits from the school play effect. People featured in it tend to promote it widely.
A Typical List Of High-Priority Activities
Generally, you want to spend most of your time on the things that have the most significant long-term impact on most members. Here are some common examples:
Summary
Let’s do a quick summary of how to improve the community experience.
- Conduct an Onboarding Audit – Walk through the entire onboarding journey as a new member (or hire someone to do it) and identify unnecessary steps, confusing elements, and redundant messaging.
- Eliminate Low-Impact Features – Remove automated emails, badge notifications, and tutorials that most users ignore. Simplify the experience by cutting out anything that doesn’t directly drive engagement.
- Enhance Navigation & Taxonomy – Optimize the structure of the community by categorizing sections based on user needs (e.g., product categories for small communities, visitor type for large ones) and simplifying labels for clarity.
- Encourage Early Engagement with High-Impact Activities – Guide new members to join relevant groups, follow key contributors, sign up for events, and opt into digest emails to increase long-term participation.
- Personalize Outreach for New Members – Send genuine, well-researched welcome messages from a real person (or AI-assisted personalization in larger communities) to make new members feel valued.
- Regularly Conduct UX Research – Interview non-participating members to understand where they get stuck, then prioritize and implement solutions to remove barriers.
- Create and Promote Community-Generated 101 Guides – Encourage members to share their best advice for newcomers, compile these into a resource, and promote it widely to improve onboarding and engagement.
