Email Onboarding Series Essentials | The Kickbox Blog
- Updated on: 2024-05-22
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An onboarding series is your chance to make a strong first impression and to share important information about your brand and products with customers and potential customers.
When crafting an onboarding campaign, some elements are easy to overlook. Don't miss these essential elements and factors for creating a high-converting campaign that keeps your clients coming back for more.
This month, we asked email marketing experts from dotdigital, Benchmark, Email Uplers, icontact, emailmonday, eFocus Marketing, Customers Who Click & Everlytic to share their tips for making a good impression with clients from the very first onboarding series.
Here's what they had to say...
5 Email Marketing Essentials for Your Onboarding Campaign New customers are more likely to renew their contract or replenish their order if you take good care of them. While it’s often tempting to focus on new sales, your existing client base is more likely to spend more with you because they already have a relationship with your brand. Email marketing is key for a great customer experience. By 2025 there will be 4.6 billion email users worldwide. When you’re onboarding a new client, you can have your series of email campaigns already set up and ready to go – giving your new customer everything they need to hit the ground running. Plus, it’s a great opportunity to introduce new complementary products to pique their interests. Welcome your new customers Customers have invested time and money in your brand, so a thank you is in order. It’s also the perfect opportunity to introduce your brand properly and develop the relationship – make your brand more familiar and special, make them feel lucky they’re a customer. Go Daddy’s onboarding email is informative, compelling and on brand. What action do you want your customer to take? How can they make the best use of their new product or service? They’ll appreciate any tips you can give them – whether operational, technical or practical. Add value to the proposition It’s important to diversify your content. Your customers are used to a lot of noise in the inbox, so include something fun rather than functional. This could be about any social causes you support, business values or ideals, as well as seasonal campaigns and events. Headspace adds relevancy and value to their customer experience. The timing of this campaign will depend on your customer lifecycle and what you sell. Whether a specific add-on or a complementary product, include popular and customized recommendations that customers will love. The Glenlivet knows how to tailor its products and content to customer tastes. Whether B2B or B2C, your customers are busy people with busy work and personal lives. Be as simple as you can in terms of design and content, without compromising your brand, product and message.
The job of a marketer is never done. There’s always something to add to our to-do list, and it can feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get things done. This is why once an onboarding campaign is created, marketers get consumed with other tasks and strategies they often forget to revisit it. Neglecting to revisit an onboarding campaign after a few months can be a huge detriment to your nurture efforts and is a disservice to your prospects, as these campaigns can go stale quickly. It’s important to regularly review your onboarding series to ensure you’re not using old articles or expired promos. It’s possible you could be sharing dated blog posts or whitepapers that no longer apply to your industry, brand, or customers and not even know it. While the basics of your onboarding sequence may rarely change, there may be places it makes sense to mention new features, products, or services. Also, it’s important to remember that you may need to update the “from” and signature information in an onboarding campaign as employees change roles. At Benchmark Email, we recently reviewed our onboarding campaigns so we could update and add a link to our new Smart Content feature. This new feature helps users create or rewrite email and landing page content, and since we all know how hard it can be to create compelling content, we wanted to make sure our users knew about it. Ensuring this was added to our onboarding series was essential in showing our customers we have their best interests at heart and are always trying to improve our software to meet their needs.
Make it Easy for Potential Subscribers to Sign Up Instant gratification is part of consumer culture. If you are not giving consumers what they need when they want it, you lose. When it comes to welcoming or onboarding new prospects or customers, it needs to be done right. Those that are new to email marketing do not think to set up a nurture series and those that do might only use a welcome email or set it up long ago and forget to go in and update the content. Let’s chat about some best practices. First, emails need to be sent out right away. No one wants to wait. They may forget about you if you wait a month to send them something. This can also lead to unsubscribes and spam complaints. The welcome email also helps set expectations of when and how often subscribers will receive emails from you. I remember going to a sporting goods store and seeing a sign that told me if I sign up for their newsletter, I will get a 20% coupon. I signed up and waited. Nothing happened for the 20 minutes I waited. I decided to leave and buy what I needed elsewhere out of principle. I received the “welcome” email three days later. Next, have a series of emails that go out over a period of time, say about two weeks. A couple of days after the welcome email, the next email can include information about what makes your product or services great, tell them how to get service or support, or maybe include some general information about your company. Another email in the series can include information about what your company does in the community, or maybe something about your employees, customer testimonials, case studies, or what makes you better than your competition. Toward the end is where you include a strong call to action, such as signing up for something, booking a call, or making a purchase. You can also ask subscribers to follow you on social media. Later, you can also set up another series asking for testimonials, case studies, or better yet, user-generated content to share in your emails and on social media! Here are a few examples of welcome emails I like.
An effective email onboarding series is all about the 3 Es - Educate, Entertain, and Engage. → Educate the user about your services. Demonstrate the usage of your products with a clever visual that adds to the aesthetic appeal of the onboarding email. → Entertain the readers by taking them through your journey. Share stories about your humble beginning and how you touched the heights of success. → Keep the user engaged to encourage them to purchase again from you. Highlight your USPs and incentivize the customers with attractive offers they can’t say no to. When implemented correctly, it works like a virtual hug and strengthens your relationship with the readers. Let me explain with an example: I recently launched a website through Namecheap and they sent me a series of onboarding emails. The first email included a welcome message from the CEO. It talked about the USPs of using Namecheap and their rockstar customer support team. The entire email reinforces trust in the reader’s mind and assures them that they have made the right choice. The second email explains how their product works and encourages the user to set up their account and take action. The third email explains to the user about WordPress hosting and how the readers can make their website live in no time at all. The fourth email requests for the customer’s feedback. It helps in bringing user-generated content and testimonials for the service. They have incentivized the reader to prompt them to share their response. To sum it up, an onboarding email series should welcome the customer, explain how the product works, thank them for their purchase, and work as a cheerleader for the customer’s success.
5 Often Overlooked Factors You Should Include in Your Onboarding Series “All aboard!” There are many ways an onboarding series can assist and boost your marketing program. Here are five factors that are often overlooked in an onboarding series. Onboarding starts earlier than you think. Make all the steps in the onboarding process work together. Emails shouldn’t have to do all the heavy lifting. Once you have your goals identified, start with the order page, checkout, and thank you page. Think about what you can already do there: Present upsell and cross-sell offers, pre-inform on what to expect, ask for essential preference and profile data, etc. Additional ideas to improve chances of a successful onboarding: Include SMS Marketing for reminders and alerts, make the login easier, print inserts into product packaging (if physical) and use focused landing pages. Tune the onboarding to different types of users. You’ll likely have different types of users going through the onboarding. These can be segments but also think about new versus returning customers, discount versus full price buyers, or even different SKUs. Use these differences to improve your onboarding with some customization and dynamic content tuned to the user. Image source: 8 Transactional Email Tips to make you stand out The example above I like very much. It is a bit of preference discovery combined with product and invited to actively explore. This can be similar for other brands but with content profile etc., in mind. You CAN update those transactional emails. What I often hear is that certain automatically generated transactional emails are super ugly and can’t change their email template or content because they come from a different system “owned by IT.” Well, more often than not, they can perfectly be changed – even if it seems impossible. For instance, by shooting an API call and not sending that initial email at all (or send it into a black hole) or by sending it through a different SMTP provider or email address that can update the template and content. Ask, but don’t over-ask. There is no problem with presenting additional offers. Your subscribers even expect it. Just make it so it matches with the outcomes and efforts you can reasonably expect. A bit of that will come from experimenting and looking back at customer behavior that is already there. Oddly enough, if you start with some really good offers in the emails, people will like it more than if it sort of comes off as an unwanted excuse later. Show some personality. It is well known logical fallacy in advertising (not per se a bad thing) that people buy from people they know and like. It is one way we quickly sort where we can safely get a good purchase. Onboarding is a perfect place to show some of your personality. So if you have a fun, smart, or another “stand out” part of your brand voice? (if you don’t, you should!). It will allow your customers to get a bit used to the way of communicating and the tone-of-voice that goes with it. So there you have it, the elusive onboarding email series. There are many ways to do this right. What type of series you go for will all depend on what type of outcome you want to go for. So don’t forget, start early, tune it, get transactional, ask, and show some of that shining personality. Jordie van Rijn is an email marketing consultant at emailmonday and founder of emailvendorselection.com
The first 24 hours and 30 days after a user subscribes to your email list are your critical times to nurture and inspire your audience to initial conversion. Your initial welcome email should welcome and thank the new subscriber and provide the next action you want them to take. Remember, when someone has first subscribed, they are at one of their most engaged moments in your relationship. Build on this and give them product/category inspiration, explain your USP’s and link them back to your products/services, for example. With an extended onboarding series after this welcome email, you have the opportunity to build on this engagement. Consider how you build up your brand story over a series of messages during this time, and use each to highlight key information the subscriber needs to know and inspire them with your products and services. This series of emails aims to: ✔ Treat new subscribers differently and provide the specific information they need at this stage in their journey ✔ Move the subscriber through the steps needed to bring them to a point of conversion or complete a set up ✔ Initiate a positive and meaningful experience with your brand ✔ Ensure you don’t bombard the subscriber with too much information in one email – break up different messages and focus on them specifically to draw attention to key information ✔ Further, build the relationship with the subscriber ✔ Focus on educating the subscriber - on why they need your products/how they can benefit from them Collect behavioral data throughout the series (from email engagement and web behavior) and use this to adapt your product/content recommendations and content focus to better engage, excite and move your subscriber through the mindset process needed to make an initial purchase. Subscribers who opt-in as part of the purchase process should be sent a different type of program. One that welcomes and thanks the new subscriber and sets expectations of the email program but also focuses on informing the new subscriber about their purchase, educating and supporting them to make the most of it, and encouraging a repeat purchase.
The biggest opportunity for me is in personalization and being personal with emails. Too many brands just ask you to drop your email in for 10% off or start emailing you after a purchase, but there’s absolutely no personalization beyond using your first name (which doesn’t count). So not only are the messages generic, but they just come from a faceless brand. It’s not engaging for the customer. It’s not interesting. The best onboarding series I see involves capturing zero-party data, and using that data to personalize the content of the emails. But they also include that one-to-one feeling of a personal email. They’re written as if someone emailed you personally. It might even be a plain text email, but even if it’s HTML, it’s written by someone and signed off by them. This works well because it’s written as if a person is speaking to you, so you’re more inclined to read it than a generic paragraph of text about the business. So, my advice would be to capture some zero-party data on sign up. Ask your customers what they’re looking for, what styles they like, their budget, when they’re looking to buy, maybe whether it’s for themselves or a gift - any questions that will help you create relevant emails for them. And then include that one-to-one written approach to really engage them.
Don't Make These Common Mistakes When Onboarding New Clients The customer experience is a key brand differentiator, and onboarding is an important part of fostering this. But many marketers follow a standard sales-funnel model, stopping the conversation when the lead becomes a client and missing onboarding entirely. To optimize the customer experience, the conversation should follow more of an hourglass: The period when a prospect becomes a client is critical because this is when opinions about your brand and product are defined. It’s also why onboarding is so important. Customers must learn how to use products and services to the best of their ability ASAP, or businesses risk losing them. Here are some common mistakes organizations make when onboarding new clients: Their Goals Aren’t Aligned The goal of an onboarding journey should be to establish relationships with new clients and get them onboarded quickly and pleasantly so they’re thankful for their purchase. Some brands jump the gun on this, missing what clients really want. Instead, they should put themselves in the client’s shoes and aim primarily to meet their needs. Onboarding Takes Too Long Customers typically need a solution to an immediate problem, so they need to get up and running ASAP. If onboarding takes too long, brands could lose them. They Don’t Have Client Visibility If businesses don’t know where customers are getting stuck, they won’t know how to support them. They can track delivery metrics, message engagement, and product use, so they can step in to help clients when needed. Clients Don’t Get Enough Training Without sufficient training, customers may unknowingly underutilize your product or service. Onboarding journeys must support customer training so they can maximize the value they get from the brand. There Are Too Many Bottlenecks Client onboarding can’t just be the responsibility of one team member. All relevant teams must be aligned on how the onboarding process works and how its managed so clients get seamless support. Bottom line? Effective customer onboarding is essential. By making the experience intuitive and supportive to the customer’s needs, brands are more likely to retain happy, satisfied clients for the long run.
Stay tuned. We'll be posting more No Bullshit Advice soon. Catch up on the entire series here: No Bullsh*t Advice From Email Experts.
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