6 Onboarding Best Practices for New Customers

The onboarding process is one of the most crucial stages of the customer lifecycle.  

It sets the tone for their entire relationship with your company, which ultimately dictates whether they keep using your products or services long-term.  

By following onboarding best practices, you can set your customers up for success and demonstrate the value of your offerings.  

As a result, your customers are happier and more loyal, and you get to increase their lifetime value.  

The experts at our digital marketing agency in Nashville will share with you six onboarding practices you can use to retain customers and grow your business!

Onboarding Best Practices Benefits

User onboarding aims to actively guide each customer towards greater adoption until they can’t imagine living life without your product.  

This increases customer satisfaction, which is the link between acquiring new customers and turning them into loyal, repeat buyers.  

Aside from this, following best practices also benefit you in the following ways:

• Ensures that your customers experience success with your product. This means that they can see the real value potential in their relationship with you.  
• Prevents customer churn. By making sure that your customers experience success with your products or services, they’re more likely to remain loyal.  
• Reintroduces your product or service’s value to sustain a meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship.  

6 New Customer Onboarding Best Practices

1. Get to Know Your Customers and Their Biggest Motivations

To create effective onboarding materials, the best digital marketing agency in Nashville suggests that you identify your customers’ biggest motivations for buying.  

What are their needs? What are the pain points or problems that they want to solve with your products or services?

Make this front and center of your onboarding materials to reassure your customers that they’re in the right place. It’s also a great way to remind them of your product’s value.  

If you're not sure why your customers are buying your products, survey them to understand what they get out of buying from you. With that information, you can inform and refine your onboarding experience.  

Here are some questions you need to answer to help refine your onboarding process and materials:

• What do your customers want from your products?  
• What problems are they experiencing that your products or services are solving?  
• What would stop them from using your services or products?  
• Why did the customers who churned switch to your competitors?

2. Offer a Multichannel Onboarding Experience

Nowadays, consumers consume information across multiple channels and have different preferences for learning styles.  

Provide your customers with a multichannel onboarding experience to increase engagement and retention.  

But how can you design a successful multichannel onboarding experience? The first thing you need to do is evaluate the buyer’s journey and determine what information you need to provide at which stage, and what the best channel for this are.  

Will your customers want to read a quick start guide and later watch a video tutorial? Will they want to join webinars after receiving emails with links to resources?

Here are some ideas on how to build a multichannel onboarding experience from your go-to digital marketing agency in Nashville:

• Create in-product experiences throughout the user journey in order to drive activation, adoption, and retention. A common example of this is creating educational resources to serve consumers before they even turn into customers.
• Use an email autoresponder to guide new signups on how to get the most benefits from your products or services.  
• Publish videos for quick product introductions. It helps see how valuable your offerings are in the most efficient way possible.
• Do a comprehensive product tour where you point out all features and do a quick one where you highlight only the key features. Some people may not have the time to go over a 30-minute tour while others would want a detailed product walkthrough. Survey to know what works for your customers.  

• Provide a way for customers to ask questions through in-app chat. They want answers right away so this will boost their onboarding experience.  
• Use webinars to help users understand how to use your products or services. This is a great way to increase user engagement, enforce brand authority, and push out content that attracts new customers looking for educational content.  
• Provide live or personalized demos, especially if your products are complicated.  
• Publish training docs and other self-serve materials for support.  

3. Help Users Understand the Value of Your Product Right Away

Instead of making it difficult for users to get to the "Aha! I need this" moment, remove the barriers so they can feel it as quickly as possible.  

To remove the barrier, here’s what you need to do:

• Assess what’s stopping them from realizing how valuable your offerings are. Is there a problem with the signup? Would they want a free trial first? Determine the product friction and get rid of it.  

• Don’t require interested customers to create an account before trying your products or to access a promo.  
• Ask for user information in the later part of the process.  
• If you don't offer a free trial, you can use marketing initiatives such as testimonials, a dedicated landing page, videos, and other visuals to help users get to the "aha!" moment.  

4. Reinforce Your Brand  

You want to be memorable, which is why it’s important to make your brand obvious straight away.  

Use your brand colors in your marketing materials to reinforce brand recognition and identity. You can also create a playful copy and even include pop culture references to create an impression with your onboarding content.  

Your brand plays a vital role in making your products stand out and convincing them to sign up or buy in the first place. It can also be the factor that keeps them loyal.  

Here’s how to reinforce your brand in your onboarding content:

• Use your logo, color palette, and design elements consistently across your onboarding materials.  
• Send quarterly onboarding newsletters and seasonal greeting cards to create an emotional appeal to your customers.  
• Communicate regularly through social media to increase brand credibility and customer service.  

• Incorporate core brand values that represent who you are and what you believe in as a company.  

This leading digital marketing agency in Nashville recommends that you go all-in on branding with your onboarding content. It will reinforce your brand and help convince customers of the value they’re getting.  

5. Use Behavior-Based Customer Onboarding  

Personalize your onboarding experience based on each customer’s journey to help them get to value as quickly as possible.  

You want to get users into your product and show them what it can do right away so that they’re motivated to buy without having to go through the entire sales cycle.  

But to help your customers get to that “aha” moment quickly, the first thing you need to do is to map out your user onboarding flow.  

What are the main steps to onboarding and activation of your product?

Next is to identify the separate action steps that best capture getting value in your product. These are the actions that provide the strongest signal that a customer is using your product to do something important for them.  

This will guide you in personalizing your onboarding experience for each customer.  

For example, both customers A and B sign up at the same time. However, user A needs your product right away, so he immediately spends time watching video tutorials and onboarding guides.  

User B, on the other hand, has signed up with the intent to dive into your product later.  

You want to be able to cater to different needs.  

As your go-to digital marketing agency in Nashville, we recommend you run a drip email campaign.  

Creating an automated welcome email series where you send emails depending on their behaviors is one of the best ways to personalize your onboarding.  

Doing this also allows you to guide experienced users towards additional features and the new customers to the “aha” moment.  

User-based onboarding also allows you to upsell and cross-sell effectively. This enables you to tailor the experience even further and sell the right add-ons to the right customers.  

6. Track Results and Optimize

To succeed in improving your customer onboarding process, make sure you monitor results and optimize as you go.  

Identify key metrics and gather data to gain insights on what works and what doesn’t.  

Identify how many users engage with your onboarding materials and use this to inform how you drive new customers to adopt your product effectively.  

Here are the top customer onboarding metrics you need to track:

• Time to complete the onboarding process. Find out how many days it takes for your customer to start using your product independently.  

• Determine the time it takes for customers to find value in your products.  
• If you’re a subscription service that offers a free trial, measure your ability to convert free trial customers into paid customers.  
• Measure how fast a customer can work directly with your product. This metric will help you understand if there are any problems in your onboarding process.  
• Observe how much customers are engaging with your product. Find out how many times they log in a day, which features they’re using the most from your product, and at which part of the journey they’re using certain features.  
• Use customer satisfaction metrics to better understand your customers’ immediate impression of your product and brand.  

Looking for the Best Digital Marketing Agency in Miami?

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that customer onboarding is the end of your relationship with a client.  

Use it as an opportunity to start a long and mutually beneficial relationship with customers who will be valued members of your community.  

To keep your business thriving through all seasons, make sure you grow your customer base and invest in creating a strong and lasting relationship with them.  

At Digital Resource, our digital marketing specialists will work with you to create a custom onboarding content and marketing plan that will help you retain customers and keep them loyal, repeat buyers in the years to come!

Contact us today for a free consultation!

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