Options to make initial customer experience as compelling as possible

When a customer signs up for a free trial, often their mind gets made up in the first few hours or even minutes of using the product.

Our app has a number of steps which need to be completed before the customer can get the most from the software - at the moment we just have them as a simple list with links to the relevant forms to add the information etc and each item is cleared once it is done but it just doesn't feel very professional.

We have considered:

• Welcome email with details on what we need and why
• Simply making the list more visually appealing - use buttons for example
• Video of initial setup
• Some sort of overlay which guides them through the setup dynamically - there are a few good examples at http://clementvouillon.com/article/why-a-good-product-onboarding-is-important-for-saas/ but cannot find how this is achieved

What other options are there to ensure that the customers first experience is a good one and that they don't lose interest inside a short time?

Question is likely too broad to get a definitive answer - if there was a simple list on how to improve onboarding / increase conversion rate, everyone would have implemented it.

Many times, dropbox is referenced as a company to study regarding onboarding. They ask very few questions and "reward" you with something of value (additional storage space) when you complete certain tasks - installing a desktop app, adding your phone to upload photos, get a friend to join.

Like the examples in the link you provided, the tasks that a company promotes to help improve the onboarding process are specific to the company and product offering. How one would implement it (via javascript callouts or video) isn't as important as what should be promoted.

Suggest you do some user testing / funnel analysis to determine where the onboarding process gets stalled, and do some interviews. Armed with this information, you will have a better idea on what to address first.

Check out betterment.com for a really clever demo of how you could pull off a software demo with a preloaded user profile.

They sell 401K investing, which obviously requires substantial preconfiguration. But if you click into their demo you can quickly understand their concept and selling point being highly user friendly. (Not pitching their stuff BTW, just think it answers your question.)

I like the idea of improving or collecting items over time to improve the customer experience. Not a big survey upfront, but improving over time and distributing the configuration over time.

Could you provide smart defaults to the application?

Ask a couple more questions during their sign up and then default a lot of the data to educated guesses and encourage them to fine tune them for the best results?

Something that will give them an idea of what it's like, and then info to encourage them to access each area to configure their account in detail?