Blogs » Customer Onboarding Strategies for Converting New App Users Into Loyal Customers
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With a new customer, you may spend 5 to 25 times more time attracting them compared to the time spent to keep an existing customer. A study found less than 25% of app users even open up the app again after initially downloading it.
Here’s a related article on what triggers the stickiness of apps: Beyond the Download—Why Are Some Apps Sticky While Others Are Forgotten?
How do we encourage our clients to stay awhile? It starts with providing an excellent customer experience through successful onboarding.
Check out this ultimate guide to customer onboarding:
What is Customer Onboarding?
Customer onboarding is the process of helping a new customer better understand your product or service. This usually involves some kind of training or education, so the customer knows how to use your product/service and get the most out of it.
Additionally, customer onboarding can involve customer support and other forms of assistance to ensure the customer has a positive experience with your company. Ultimately, successful onboarding is all about helping a new customer become a happy customer and a loyal user of your product or service. By providing a smooth and enjoyable onboarding experience, you can increase customer success, retention, and conversion rates, while also reducing churn rates.
In the digital age, this is important for businesses, especially SaaS businesses. Whether it’s a web app, desktop app, or mobile app, it’s important to have a great customer onboarding strategy in place.
Customer Onboarding Process
There are a few different steps involved in customer onboarding to help customers learn about the use and value of your product or service. User onboarding typically occurs when a customer first begins using a product, but it may also happen when a customer upgrades to a new version of the product. For customer onboarding across an enterprise, the process typically involves IT personnel helping to get the system in place.
Identify the Support New Customers Need to be Successful
This will vary depending on the nature of your product or service, but could include things like:
- Tutorials or product walkthroughs
- How-to guides
- App introductions
- Live customer support
Develop a Plan for Delivering an Effective Onboarding Experience
Once you have identified the type of support needed, you need to make sure customers engage with your product. This might involve creating educational resources, setting up customer success teams, or automating key parts of the process.
Track Customer Onboarding Metrics
One of the most important aspects of customer onboarding is tracking the results. This allows you to identify areas that need improvement so you can make changes to the onboarding process.
There are a number of different metrics or onboarding goals you can use to track the results of customer onboarding, such as customer satisfaction, customer churn, and customer retention. By tracking these metrics, you can get a clear picture of how well your customer onboarding efforts are working and how you can continually improve.
If you see that customer satisfaction is low or that customer churn is high, then you know you need to make some changes to your customer onboarding process. By tracking the results of your customer onboarding efforts, you can ensure your customers are getting the best possible experience.
Customer Onboarding Best Practices
To ensure proper onboarding, businesses should follow certain best practices. By following these customer onboarding best practices, businesses can ensure customers are properly onboarded and set up for success.
Improve the Sign-up Process
Customers interact with your app for the first time during the sign-up process, so it is important to make sure it is always a positive user experience.
Heap conducted a survey of 79 SaaS companies and found that the average conversion rate for their sign-up process was 36.2%. That means for every 100 people who start the sign-up process, only 36 actually end up signing up for the product.
There are a number of reasons why someone might not complete the sign-up process, but one of the most common is that the process is too long or too complicated. By making the sign-up process simple and streamlined, you can increase your chances of converting more customers.
Another important consideration is the overall usability of your product. If customers have a difficult time understanding how to use your product, they are less likely to sign up in the first place. Make sure your product is intuitive and easy to use, and you will be more likely to convert more customers during the sign-up process.
Automate the Welcome Email
A welcome email sequence is a series of automated emails that are triggered when someone subscribes to your list. They usually contain a mix of content and promotional material and are designed to welcome the subscriber and to start building a relationship with them.
There are a few key reasons why you should automate your welcome email sequence:
It is easier for you. Automating your welcome emails frees up your time so you can focus on other aspects of your business. Plus, it takes the guesswork out of what to send and when to send it.
It is more consistent. When you automate your welcome emails, you can be sure that every subscriber will receive the same high-quality content. There is no risk of human error, and you can be confident everyone is getting the same great experience.
It builds trust and credibility. By providing valuable content from the moment someone subscribes, you are demonstrating that you are committed to helping them succeed. This helps to build trust and credibility, which are essential for any successful relationship.
Welcome email sequences are a powerful tool for user onboarding, so if you are not already using them, now is the time.
Integrate With Other Popular Apps
The goal is to make it as simple and painless as possible for customers to gain value from your product. Automate integrations, invitations, and data imports to remove extra steps — it will be worth all those minutes saved when you have higher conversions!
Showcase Products or Services With Product Walkthroughs
Product walkthroughs are a great way to showcase your products and services in high detail. Product tours allow customers to customize their experience by adding or removing items that were initially offered, which allows them more freedom than simply viewing an overview video of all features without any capability for customization.
If new users don’t feel confident enough to complete their sign-up after the product walkthrough, make it easy for them.
Keep in mind that not everyone will want or need a full-length session right away; some may only need limited exposure during the recruiting stage of the onboarding processes. Make tutorials and guided tours accessible at anytime via the menu navigation.
Make sure your new customers can find extra support if they need it.
For some users, the walkthrough may not be enough and you will want to provide contact details for your team or offer live chat features. There should be no confusion about how to find help when necessary.
Wrapping Up
We have covered a lot of ground in this post, but there are a few key takeaways we want to leave with you. First, customer onboarding is an essential part of the customer experience and should be given just as much attention as any other stage of the customer journey. Second, effective onboarding can help reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value. Finally, there are many different ways to approach customer onboarding, so find what works best for your business and start implementing it today!
And don’t forget – if you need help getting started, we are here for you! Our team of experts can assist with everything from designing a custom onboarding experience to creating training materials that make learning easy for your customers.
