Whether you are a well-established brand or just starting out, you need to increase your customer base and retain old customers at all times. The first step is to get prospects attracted to your brand, and the next step is to continue building on this interest. Onboarding emails can act as a catalyst in this process and help ease the customer journey with a brand.
Source: https://www.custify.com/user-onboarding-customer-success
But what exactly is an onboarding email? An onboarding email is an email that is sent to a prospect or customer after subscribing to your brand, either in the form of a purchase or just a newsletter. These emails can cover all things ranging from welcoming someone to your brand to activation emails to other emails that need to help your prospects and customers navigate through your brand.
When you send an onboarding email, you are building on your brand, and you want to make sure your brand adopts a few practices to make sure this onboarding process is smooth.
From choosing the ideal email signature generator for all your workforce to personalize each stage of the process to everything in between needs to be meticulously managed. Here is a guide of the 8 best tips and practices for your onboarding emails to keep your prospects and customers hooked to your brand.
Personalize everything
People like personalized messages, whether it is a chat pop up on your website to encourage subscription or an email marketing campaign. If you understand this and personalize everything by segmenting your new users and tailoring your welcome messages to their experience, you will work towards creating a rapport with your prospects and customers from the get-go.
Understanding your mailing list and segmenting them through things like their roles, industries, region etcetera will allow you to share the most relevant messages and increase the chances of them making a buying decision with your brand.
Remember about customer lifecycle
It is important to understand what the customer lifecycle is and how it can impact each part of your business process, including email marketing campaigns. For example, is this an initial contact, did you just acquire this customer, do they need some nurturing, are you retaining them, or is this the point where your customer can become an advocate? Each scenario is unique and demands a different type of contact.
Create onboarding emails for each stage in the customer lifecycle. The goal is to keep track of your customer journey with your brand and to send relevant onboarding emails accordingly.
Create an email signature
When you are building a brand, you want each contact to act as an opportunity for brand familiarity and recall. An email signature is a great way to achieve this through an email marketing campaign.
Create professional email signatures across all employees that build trust and connect you with your customers. In doing so, each email that you and your company send out (onboarding emails and beyond) will create a connection with your brand while also retaining the authenticity through the individual email signature holders. So, it is important that you create an email signature that each representative of your brand uses.
Make it for mobile
Smartphone usage has been on a constant rise. With the increase in smartphone usage and application usage, the number of people engaging in all online activities through mobile devices is also rising.
As of 2019, 47% of internet users open their emails on their mobile devices. If you look at the statistics of millennials and Generation Z, this number becomes higher. What does this mean? It means that your email marketing campaign, including onboarding emails, need to be compatible with mobile devices. Make sure your design is responsive and looks like you made it for mobile as well as other browsing options. While there is an obvious skew towards mobile email browsing, there are some people (26.9%, data of 2019) who still used desktops.
Engage users
The process from establishing an initial contact to making a buying decision has many stages in between. For example, if you stumbled upon something that intrigues you versus something that is very bland, what would you prefer? Chances are, you will continue to explore something that is intriguing.
Understand the biggest strengths of your brand and give your readers a glimpse into that during each contact. Whether it is an onboarding email or a webinar promotion, give readers a compelling reason to do what you want them to do. Engage users and create a situation where your prospects become customers and customers become advocates.
Make it fun
Your marketing strategy should be built around the simple fact that associating with your brand is fun. It is a simple way to make readers feel good about supporting your brand. Whether the fun component is through the brand product or the experience, the fun needs to continue at each stage.
Getting a customer or prospect interested in your brand thing, but keeping them engaged is another. If you have an interested reader in your email list, that is a great first step. By sending out a fun onboarding email, the reader will get a feeling that your brand is fun, and they will want to continue association and possibly make a buying decision.
Use a simple CTA
A call to action or CTA needs to be simple and to the point. The purpose of a CTA is to draw your readers towards something in the brand you want to promote. Whether your goal is to promote a webinar or to simply take your readers to your landing page, do not place too many CTAs in an onboarding email or any other email, and confuse your readers.
The purpose of each contact, including an onboarding email to build a connection with your prospects and customers and build on it. If you make this process simple and to the point, it will likely yield the results you are looking for.
Test and optimize
After drafting a stellar onboarding email that is responsive and follows all of the above rules, the last thing you want is for your email to bounce. In order to mitigate your bounce rate, run A/B tests. When should you send your email? How often should you send your email? What is the urgency? These are things you need to understand in order to test and optimize the consumer journey with your brand.
For example, if someone signed up for a free two-week trial, you want them to get a glimpse of your services at the earliest. However, this does not mean someone who has made a paid subscription should get any less or more. Test the design, gather feedback, and create a system in which you understand the footfalls and have ways to optimize the customer journey.
Once someone has expressed interest in your brand, they get an onboarding email from your brand. Take this seriously and engage in practices that will highlight the strengths of your brand while making the customer journey with your brand enjoyable and insightful. Be mindful of these 8 best tips and practices for your onboarding emails and win prospects and gain advocates in no time!
