You’ve got one chance to kill churn when a new user opens their welcome email.
Picture this:
A new user eager to try your product signs up for a free trial. They’re excited. Hopeful. Maybe even a little relieved—finally, they’ve found a tool that could solve their problem.
Then, the first onboarding email lands in their inbox.
They open it, expecting a clear next step.
Instead, they get a long-winded message packed with product features, multiple CTAs, and generic instructions.
Their excitement fades.
They close the email, thinking, I’ll return to this later. But they soon forget about it. A few days pass, and they still haven’t explored your product. Then, a week. Finally, their trial’s over.
You just lost a customer.
Most onboarding emails don’t fail because they lack details—they fail because they overwhelm, confuse, or fail to resonate.
Users switch to other apps if they can’t immediately see how your product fits into their workflow. If they don’t know what to do next, they won’t convert, and every delay makes them forget why they signed up.
The solution? Stop using details to fill space and start using them to build trust & desire for your SaaS.
At the right places, the correct types of details make users feel understood, guide them seamlessly to activation, and reduce SaaS churn before it starts.
In this post, we’re explaining exactly how to do it, with examples you can follow.
Why Users Churn Before They Activate
Call it whatever you want—voluntary churn, early churn, active churn—if a new user quits before experiencing their first AHA moment, you’ve lost them forever.
Most SaaS companies focus on stopping retention churn (when paying users cancel) but ignore onboarding churn, where new users never get far enough to experience the product’s value.
If users don’t activate, they don’t stay.
According to DigitalOcean, users churn when they don’t experience immediate value. The longer it takes to get results, the more likely they are to leave.
Userpilot also reinforces that if users never get past the first step, they won’t convert. Finally, as Userlane explains, if users feel lost or overwhelmed from the start, they disengage, and this often happens in onboarding emails.
There Are Three Types of SaaS Churn You Should Know
Not all churn is the same. SaaS Academy breaks it down into three key types:
- Involuntary Churn – Payment failures, expired cards, and billing issues.
- Retention Churn – Paying customers cancel due to poor fit, lack of ongoing value, or pricing concerns.
- Onboarding Churn (Early Churn) – New users quit before experiencing the product’s value.
While retention churn requires long-term engagement strategies, you can fix onboarding churn by clarifying the messaging gaps in your emails.
Paddle highlights that onboarding churn is preventable when you align your acquisition and onboarding. New users will drop off if your sales and marketing teams’ promises in the first few emails aren’t true.
What Onboarding Emails Should Do to Reduce Churn
Onboarding emails should do more than welcome users. They should reduce friction, guide users toward activation, and eliminate decision fatigue.
Effective onboarding emails:
- Make the next step obvious so users don’t have to figure it out themselves.
- Eliminate confusion by reinforcing what was promised before they signed up.
- Shorten time-to-value so they experience a win quickly.
By aligning your messaging across your marketing, sales, and product teams, onboarding emails help you communicate your product’s benefits while priming new users to convert. When done right, they turn uncertain users into engaged customers before they churn.
Why SaaS Users Disappear Before They Convert
Many SaaS teams believe that reducing SaaS churn involves packing more product details, guides, tutorials, and explanations into their onboarding emails.
But users don’t churn because they lack information; they churn because:
- Your emails don’t make the next step obvious. Instead of highlighting the next step, they confuse them with unnecessary details.
- They don’t see how your product fits into their workflow. They won’t desire the transformation if they can’t picture themselves using it.
- Your messaging overwhelms them instead of guiding them. Too much information, CTAs, and conflicting messages make your emails feel like a chore.
And here’s what most SaaS teams miss: users don’t sit there analyzing missing details in your emails. Unless they’re a copywriter, they don’t think, “This email didn’t explain the feature well enough.”
They think, “This is too much work. I’ll deal with it later.” And they never touch the email again until it’s time to clear their inboxes. By then, you’ve still lost them to another SaaS.
Take this example from BambooHR.
Instead of dumping product specs or step-by-step guides, they simplify the onboarding process by breaking it into clear, actionable steps. The email focuses on what the user can do next, not what the product can do in theory.
Contrast that with this email from Sumo.
It lists multiple features but lacks a clear, singular direction. The result? A user who may understand what the product does but still doesn’t feel compelled to take action.
The key isn’t to bombard users with more information. It’s giving them the correct details at the right time, so they stay engaged, take action, and get closer to their ‘AHA’ moment.
The 4-Step Framework for High-Retention Onboarding Emails
SaaS teams spend thousands of dollars to get users through the door.
However, most users leave before they ever experience the moment that makes them think, “This is exactly what I needed,” not because they didn’t need the product or weren’t interested.
However, because onboarding emails slowed them down instead of guiding them forward.
Imagine signing up for a tool you’re excited about.
You open the first email, expecting a clear next step. Instead, you get a feature dump, a robotic welcome message, or worse—an overwhelming to-do list that feels like homework.
So, you close the tab. You tell yourself you’ll “get back to it later.”
But later never comes. A few weeks go by, and that once-exciting tool gets buried under 500 unread emails—until you hit “delete” without a second thought.
That’s exactly what’s happening to your users.
Instead of moving them toward activation, most onboarding emails:
- Dump product features without showing how they solve the user’s problem.
- Contradict messaging from the website/landing page during sign-up, making users second-guess if they signed up for the right product.
- Make onboarding feel like a chore instead of an effortless path toward the desired outcome.
Churn is inevitable BUT preventable.
A well-structured onboarding email sequence builds momentum, making the user’s next step clear, easy, and desirable, so they want to take action.
The best onboarding emails never welcome users. Instead, they pull them in, guide them toward action, and make activation an easy win instead of another chore. In this post, I’ve compiled ten emails that do that excellently.
Here’s how to write onboarding emails that move users toward completion instead of losing them.
1. Focus on the User’s Success Story
Your users aren’t interested in the months you spent perfecting features or your innovative roadmap.
They need this question answered: “How quickly can this make my life better?”
Too many SaaS onboarding emails ignore the emotional commitment needed to convert by focusing on product features instead of user benefits.
When This Matters Most:
This approach is crucial when users show strong interest but haven’t figured out how your product fits their daily workflow. They’re almost there, but they need that final push.
The Psychology Behind It:
Users don’t convert because they understand your product’s technical details. They convert when they can picture themselves succeeding with it.
Paddle’s studies show that simply demonstrating immediate value – rather than overwhelming users with features – can double onboarding engagement.
Instead of technical specifications, show them their dream state:
❌ We built this with love.
✅ Save two hours every week by automating your reporting with one click.
Take this example from Lanteria:
2. Sell the Destination, Not the Journey
Nobody buys software to own software. They buy the promise of doing things faster, easier, and less frustrating.
Yet many SaaS onboarding emails still lead with messages like: “AI-powered scheduling assistant”
That’s technically accurate, but what does it mean for your user? What does the AI add to their experience? Is it even a feature that they’d use often?
When This Matters Most:
Use this when users are teetering between interest and action. Something’s holding them back, and your job is to show them what success looks like.
Why It’s Effective:
Users won’t use your product if they can’t visualize the outcome. Your emails must empathize with their pain points while showing them how their life could improve after adopting your product.
DigitalOcean discovered that onboarding emails focusing on user transformation consistently outperformed feature-focused messages in driving activation.
Skip the feature list and focus on the transformation:
❌ AI-powered scheduling assistant
✅ Like a personal assistant, but smarter and cheaper
Take this example from Vend:
3. Empathize With Your Users’ Problems
Users don’t convert because they grasp your product’s specs; they convert because it feels like the answer they’ve been searching for.
Most SaaS onboarding emails fail because they’re just lifeless feature lists that fail to spark any emotional connection.
When This Resonates Most:
Your users experience emotions like frustration, hope, excitement, or pressure to solve a problem, yet your emails sound like they were written by a robot who’s never felt any of these things.
The Science Behind It:
Logical stuff like product details alone rarely converts. The numbers don’t lie: DigitalRoute found that injecting emotion into onboarding emails boosted customer retention by 67%.
People click, buy, or open the app when they see their own story reflected at them, which proves that you understand their struggles and that your product fixes them.
You can use testimonials, prizes/certifications, case studies, and great storytelling to show your users what winning with your product looks like.
Connect with their feelings:
❌ Increase employee engagement
✅ Make Mondays less miserable.
Take this example from FreshDesk:
4. Highlight the Cost of Inaction
Here’s a psychological truth: fear of loss hits harder than hope for gain.
We’re wired to avoid losses more intensely than we chase wins. That’s why the most effective SaaS onboarding emails don’t just paint a rosy future – they show users what they could lose by sticking with the old, less-effective solution.
When This Matters Most:
Your users know their current approach isn’t working, but they’re stuck with it because they’re unsure if the new solution will work. They need proof that the pain of staying put feels worse than the effort of changing.
Why It Moves People:
Even when we know we need to change, we resist it.
Custify’s research shows that reminding users what they’re losing through inaction can slash churn rates by up to 40%.
Your emails should clarify that sticking to failed, overcomplicated tools is riskier than trying another solution.
Cut through the fluff and clarify the risks:
❌ Streamline your accounting
✅ Tired of chasing invoices? Automate your payments in minutes.
Take this example from 17Hats:
Fix Your Emails Before More Users Churn
Your onboarding emails are either pulling users in or pushing them away.
- Clear onboarding emails reduce churn by keeping users engaged before they slip away.
- Action-driven CTAs improve activation rates by making the next step impossible to ignore.
- Specific, benefit-driven messaging speeds up product adoption by showing users exactly what they gain.
Your goal isn’t just to get users to read your emails; it’s to make taking action natural and easy.
Take a look at your first two onboarding emails:
- Are they focused on the user instead of your product?
- Do they drive action instead of dumping information?
- Is the next step so clear they don’t have to think?
If not, your emails aren’t working.
Want a faster way to fix them?
I’ll audit your first two onboarding emails and pinpoint where users are dropping off, so you can fix the gaps before more users churn.
Get your free OP10 audit here.
P.S: Click on this post for a more detailed framework on researching, planning, and writing emails.
