Building an engaging onboarding journey for your new customers is crucial in terms of creating customer loyalty. It is the first interaction with your customers and this is your chance to make sure they are hooked. Sometimes this can feel overwhelming and you don’t know where to start. Therefore I have created a small guide to help you navigate this task.
Here are some valuable pointers that will improve your onboarding process.
- The First Email
The welcome email is an important part of your onboarding as it will set the tone for your onboarding process. View it as an opportunity to give a good first impression for all of your new subscribers. The goal should be to leave an impression that convinces new subscribers to continue to engage with the rest of your onboarding journey.
- Optimize for Mobile Users
With mobile devices today being an extension of ourselves, more people use tablets and phones not only to check their messages but also to interact with brands and companies. It’s therefore very important to make sure that the quality is up to par, not only for desktop but also for mobile devices. This is important not only for the onboarding journey but for all emails in general. Examples of how to optimize for mobile devices could be making sure that you have an email template that looks good regardless of device and that the creatives being used have fast loading speed.
- Utilize Personalization
When it comes to email engagement, personalization is a tool that can lead to higher open and click-through rates and improve the customers experience. The more data you have on your subscribers the more you can customize their experience. Personalization is something that can be utilized in many different ways, as an example personalization could be based on creating emails with different messaging depending on the data you have such as which product they subscribe to or what actions they have taken. Personalization is tied to the entirety of the onboarding journey in the way that the more tailored the onboarding experience feels, the more relevant it becomes to the subscriber.
- Be Personal – Stand Out!
A strong encouragement is to be personal and dare to stand out! Sometimes it’s about not being afraid to be brave and do something different. Something that sets your company aside from other companies. That could mean a lot, but an example is to sometimes not focus on the product so much but instead focus on your communication to your audience.
For example when you send emails to customers, a small thing like addressing them by their name makes it more personal and friendly. Another example could be that in the same way an editor in chief might be the sender of a certain email, utilizing more people from the company as the sender with information relevant to what they do as well. This allows the subscriber to feel more familiar with the company and thus makes it more personal.
- Create Automations
In short, creating automations is about setting rules and triggers for when and to who your emails should be sent out. This is done by segmenting your audience based on all of the data you’ve gathered. For example, you could base it on both actions taken or not taken by subscribers and make sure that the communication they receive is tailored for them.
This allows you to personalize your communication to your subscribers based on what products they buy, their behavior and what actions they have taken, only to name a few. Furthermore, automations remove the manuale work of having to send out emails one by one and instead rely on the triggers and rules you have implemented. This allows you to be more effective in your work as all you need to do is oversee your automations once they have been created, to make sure they work properly.
- A/B Testing
Since your subscribers have different experiences throughout their customer journey, it is very important to experiment. What I mean is that different subscribers react to things differently from one another, therefore it is vital to try to understand them in order to provide them with a great experience. An example of this could be that certain types of headers or subject-lines in an email will make a subscriber engage and take part of the value that is being offered, and some will discourage them. A/B testing is a method that allows you to get a better understanding of what keeps the subscribers interested to take part of the offered value.
To continue on with the previous example, A/B testing is very useful in understanding what generates a higher open and click through rate on your emails, because it gives you the opportunity to test things such as which subject-line is best or what type of creative content works for certain types of emails and so on. Conducting experiments with the help of A/B testing is very important as it helps you understand your subscribers, which is what’s needed in order for you to give them a great experience.
Final Advice
As a final advice, it is beneficial to keep the copy short and simple for the purpose of not losing your readers and make sure that they take part of the value you are offering them. Also, it is very important to keep your call to action in focus to guide you readers to take the action you want them to take.
