Published on: 26 Aug , 2022
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A successful customer onboarding strategy is simple if you think about it. In the onboarding stage, both you and your customers want the best for them. The only focus here is to get your customer maximum value in a minimal amount of time.
While some companies are acing onboarding and conversions, why are other companies losing customers to the dark void between onboarding and product adoption?
Does this have to do with the company's size or the product's ease of use? But what if you do not have enough people to shed towards your onboarding teams?
What easy tricks do successful companies do to make their customers stay, and most importantly, can we get the cheat sheet?
You can skip to the segments you want to explore first.
Let’s look at two companies with different operating models and simple onboarding practices with fewer human interactions.
Dropbox, the cloud storage platform, uses an elaborate email sequence to help with customer onboarding. Recently they even added videos to this mix, giving them an average 10% hike in open rates. This approximately correlated to a $24M increase in revenue, depicted by a smiley-faced onboarding team hand-in-hand with their sales teams.
Duolingo, the language learning app, turned ten this year and has become a social media sensation for its UX. It uses a customized approach to onboarding its customers. They use interactive visuals that make learning a new language easy and fun.
While Dropbox prefers sending their customers collateral to learn and use the product, Duolingo lets them learn the tool by using it. These companies blend passive and active learning methods through their onboarding approaches to fit their audience and product complexity, directly impacting the bottom line.
While people glorify the impact, they seldom notice that most companies have taken entirely different approaches to reach the same destination.
Considering there is no silver bullet to make you an overnight billionaire from onboarding, where do we start if we want to set up an easy customer onboarding flow?
Lincoln Murphy from Sixteen Ventures says that successful customer onboarding depends on the initial success of the customer and how soon they realize the value in their relationship with you.
We can break down the process of customer onboarding into three stages and take the analogy of a race here to simplify the different steps involved in setting up an onboarding flow.
In a race course, this points the racers to be ready near their starting points (the mark). In onboarding, your mark would refer to setting up things essential to gear your customers for launch,
Any successful onboarding has a mission that mainly revolves around educating your customers on how they can get their first win out of it.
At Trainn, as a video-first customer education tool, we onboard our customers with the help of videos by Trainn about Trainn. We spoke to Vivekanandhan Natarajan, co-founder of Trainn to further understand the process behind Trainn’s onboarding goals.
He says,
“In Trainn, we identified important product activation goals that we want our users to do for effective production adoption. In our case, the goals were 'installing extension', 'recording a video using that extension', 'editing the recorded video', 'sharing the video with others' and so on”.
While this method can be easily used for self-serve businesses, a certain level of human interaction is necessary for complex products. It is essential to arrange a team of people with clearly defined goals who oversee the onboarding process from start to finish.
Depending on the size of the organization, your team size would vary. But to see success with onboarding, your team needs these three archetypes.
Now that the team is aligned near the mark, it’s time to prepare them for their first customer who steps through the product onboarding gates. The onboarding team’s goals act as their north star, which decides their course of action at this stage.
To design the customer onboarding journey, you can bring in all the customer-facing teams and build a consumer experience map. Ask your teams about the different elements they would bring in to impress newly onboarded users.
Would you go for an email sequence like Dropbox? Or, would you add colorful UI elements like Duolingo to appeal to a broader audience?
Here is an example from Trello of its customer onboarding template that highlights the roadmap for their customer, leading them to take their first move within their product in chronological order.
The complexity of your product and the level of your customer knowledge would decide your customer journey. Hence there is no one-fit solution for all. Instead, it is better to try out different mediums, from emails to videos, and then double down on what works.
As discussed in the first point, successful onboarding is when the customer uses the product and gets their first win. But it continues with their repeated use and slowly morphs into customer success.
Setting milestones not only helps push the customers to achieve the objectives you set and makes your product integral in their lives.
How often have we been motivated to finish something because we are only a couple of points away from the finish line?
Below is an image of Craig Morrison’s screen when he shifted to AWeber, an email marketing tool. Curious about the percentage icon, he realized upon clicking on it that it was slyly keeping track of his onboarding progress.
Users who haven’t finished their onboarding journey are given a visual reminder when the milestones are marked. This can help them become repeat users in the long run.
The flag has swung, and the race has begun!
But are we there yet?
The best way to test anything is to initiate pre-launch. Your product gets to have a pre-launch and a long-tailed waiting list. Why not your onboarding flow?
Test everything from spelling to grammar to UI. Invite your grandma for tea and make her go through the launch sequence. Allow the beta users, employees, and long-time users to test the onboarding flow.
The goal is to make users understand you care about their needs, tweak the flow based on their usage, and familiarize them with the product.
The moment of truth has arrived. It may look like all your hard work comes down to this point, but it is just another drop in the ocean of your business.
Constantly measure how your users are performing your key product activation metrics and keep tweaking them for better conversions. For example, at Trainn we also came up with a plan to measure our onboarding goals and established a product activation funnel.
The idea here is to constantly measure how the users are performing these goals and make the necessary adjustments in the onboarding journey to make the end user see value in the product.
Successful customer onboarding doesn’t demand international teams. Instead, when the basics of customer onboarding are covered, it reflects in the bottom line.
If you are currently re-thinking your onboarding flow and customer interactions, we are curious to know if you include videos in your onboarding. You can write to us at support@trainn.co and share your thoughts.
If you are curious, you can create your first product video here.