Do you want to increase your customer and subscriber retention rates? An automated onboarding experience can be the perfect way to help educate your customers and turn them into lifetime clients.
Using Groundhogg? Take the Customer Onboarding Masterclass and create your onboarding funnel!
What is Churn?
When you buy a product, especially a subscription product which is where many businesses are trying to head towards, often times a customer will leave within their first few months if they do not extract value from the product right away.
This is called Churn, and specifically, it is the percentage of people who discontinue their subscription within the first few months of signing up.
If you rely on subscriptions, free or paid, cracking the formula to make your churn as low as possible is vital.
Churn can also affect product-based businesses. If you rely on repeat orders from your customers the same strategies for subscription-based companies can also be employed.
What are the different forms of churn?
Churn takes different forms for different businesses. We’ll call it the Churn Cycle.
For businesses that depend on subscriptions, the Churn Cycle is as follows.
- Signs up for product/service
- Starts using the service
- Customer does not experience initial signup value within the subscription period
- Cancels subscription
If you are a product-based business, your churn cycle may look like this.
- Purchases product/service
- Consumes product
- Forgets about vendor
- Never comes back
Fortunately, there are super easy strategies that you can put in place to stop the churn cycle from taking its full course.
Use marketing automation to stay in constant contact with customers!
Our strategy involves using Marketing Automation to communicate with our customers regularly.
Why do we need to keep in touch with customers?
Many times in the Churn Cycle a customer can be left feeling overwhelmed, disenfranchised, and frustrated because they feel they are not being communicated to by the company with which they signed up.
This often results in the formation of a toxic relationship between the customer the business resulting in the cancellation of service!
In order to combat this, we just need to keep in touch with our clients! We can use marketing automation to do just that.
What is marketing automation?
If you are unfamiliar with marketing automation, it’s the practice of automating basic everyday tasks related to your business.
You can automate sales, communications, fulfillment, and more by using automation which allows you to focus more time on your business instead of in your business.
There are many tools that allow you to automate different aspects of your business. For example, Groundhogg allows you to automate…
- Sales
- Fulfillment
- Membership
- Communications
- Appointment Schelling
- Followup
- and more…
All from your WordPress site!
If you want to implement some of the strategies we talk about in this article you can install Groundhogg for free on your WordPress website right now!
Okay, now we can finally talk about some strategies!
Here’s how to automate your customer onboarding experience.
One of the easiest ways to ensure that your customers do not become overwhelmed by your products is to have a proper customer onboarding experience.
What is customer Onboarding?
When someone signs up for your business for the first time they do not necessarily know everything there is to know about it.
Your customers need to be educated about your service offerings so that they do not become overwhelmed, and eventually leave.
On-boarding is the process of educating your customer so that they feel comfortable using your products.
What makes a good onboarding experience?
Here are some tips that will help you design a good onboarding experience.
- Do send out regular daily emails (or every other day) for 7-14 days. This will provide opportunities for customers to stay in touch with you and ask any questions they might have.
- Keep emails short and concise, it is imperative that we do not shower our customers with too much information as that will lead to them being overwhelmed.
- Provide how-to guides that will help your customers use your product or service
- Consistently ask how you can support your customers
- Provide links to supporting resources for your product
- Explain how to navigate your community or website to find anything they might need
- Make yourself available, ensure that customers can feel that they can reach out to you
Keeping these tips in mind, we are ready to design our onboarding process.
Already using Groundhogg? Take the Customer Onboarding Masterclass and create your onboarding funnel!
The Template:
This is our onboarding template, you can use it to design your own onboarding experience.
Day 1. Welcome Email: “Thanks for signing up! Here’s what to do next…”
First thing’s first, let’s send them their welcome email so that we can introduce ourselves! This email should be sent right after someone signs up for your service.
Hi {first}, welcome aboard! Here are your next steps.
Hi {first},
Thank you so much for signing up, we appreciate your patronage!
Before you get started using our products we just wanted to let you know that if at any point you need a little help or guidance we are here to support you.
We’ll be sending you some articles and resources over the next few days so that you can get acquainted with our products and ensure you get the most value out of them as quickly as possible.
But for today let’s just jump in and get to it!
That’s all for today!
– Your signature
Day 2-5. Send additional resources: “We thought these might help get you started!”
If you have supporting documentation, how-to’s, and guides that can help your customers now is when you send them.
We thought these resources might help you get started…
Hi {first},
How are you making out with our products? If you need help just let us know!
We thought that this resource might make life a bit easier for you. it shows you how to do this thing with our product which is beneficial to you.
link: Check it out here!
That’s all for today!
– Your signature
Let’s send them some additional resources to look at which might help them in using your product. You can send this email multiple days using different resources every time.
Day 6. Cross promote other useful products: “Since you’re using this, maybe this might also help?”
By this point your customer is becoming very educated with your product, let them know you have other services as well that they can use to enhance their experience.
Increase your performance by using this…
Hi {first},
Now that you are well on your way with using our products, we wanted to let you know that our other customers are increasing their performance by using this other product we sell.
It will help you do this really cool thing in a short amount of time.
Interested? Check it out here >> link to thing,
That’s all for today!
– Your signature
Day 7. Let us know if you need anything!
This is your last email to let them know that the onboarding is over. Let them know they can always reach out to you and ask questions. You can also ask for reviews or give them additional steps.
Let us know if you need anything!
Hi {first},
We’re just checking in to make sure you’re making out alright. Your onboarding is now complete and we’re sending you off on your own.
That being said, with us you are never truly alone and if you ever need support please feel free to reach out and ask us your questions.
If you found that our products are helping you then please consider leaving us a nice review!
Thank you!
– Your signature
How do I implement my own onboarding experience?
Install Groundhogg today on your WordPress site and you can start implementing your perfect onboarding experience right now!
Take our free Customer Onboarding Masterclass and set up your funnel in minutes.
To recap…
Having an onboarding experience no matter what kind of business you operate is essential to ensuring your customers stay customers! You can use any tool to implement your onboarding experience, but if you want it done for free and quickly, give Groundhogg a try.
