How to map out an onboarding plan that converts

Onboarding does not end after the user signs up. It’s a journey that keeps refreshing at each level of subscription and product goals.

Like customer journey maps, onboarding journey maps are designed to help organizations better meet their users’ needs. A successful SaaS onboarding plan typically reduces the amount of time it takes for them to get value and focuses on converting faster.

Contents:

• Developing a template or roadmap for the onboarding process

• 7 key elements that should be included in a onboarding journey map

• How to reduce churn rates by perfecting your client onboarding process

• How to prevent voluntary churn

• Is there a difference in B2B and B2C churn rates?

• Why does B2C have higher churn rates?

How to map out an onboarding plan that converts. Like customer journey maps, onboarding journey maps are designed to help organizations better meet their users’ needs. The best plan is created over a time of testing and accepting what works.

Developing a template or roadmap for the onboarding plan optimized for conversion:

1. Simplify your workflow

2. Help align teams around common priorities and goals

3. Improve the outcomes of the customer onboarding process

1. Simplify your workflow:

Too much information on the onboarding screen that clutter the learning process, runs the risk of scaring new users away before they’ve even started. Get users to experience the 'aha' factor in 3 steps or faster through an onboarding post. Ex: 'Congratulations, now you can start; <publishing content>/ <sending emails> <making sales>

One question you should ask yourself is is it really necessary that the user learns about this feature right now? How can I simplify this message further?

You need to remember your onboarding goals and drive the user smoothly towards the aha moment while hitting those goals without overwhelming.

How much is too much clutter? To get the message across, Four or five onboarding screens and not more. using an image, animation, product storytelling, or even a 1-on-1 demo would work wonders.

Touch points to intentionally be aware of clutter: Multiple CTAs, Website, Emails, Onboarding posts, Social media creatives, Ads, Videos

6 elements of Simplicity (Fogg)

1. Time: how long till the solution

2. Money: is it 'worth'

3. Physical effort: are we there yet

4. Brain cycles: complexity

5. Social deviance: is it celebrated

6. Non-routine actions: helpful?

2. Help align teams around common priorities and goals

76% of the companies use progress bars to visualize the progression, 74% of them have a dedicated customer onboarding team, and 60% of them use 4-6 tools for customer onboarding.

3. 10 steps to Improve the outcomes of the customer onboarding process

1. Start early

An onboarding process starts right after a prospect becomes a lead. From giving free information, product tours, Demos and trial packages or asking for feedback, they are all part of onboarding. Essentially, ensuring the prospect feels welcome and has value in the product.

Your product might have a premium or free trial at the most basic stage. Either way, an automated onboarding process, which is relatively easy to set up will elevate the entire onboarding experience toward improving conversion. Make sure customers know where they can go with their questions, or give them occasional tips in their inbox to provide them ongoing support.

2. Give Customers a Proper Handoff to CSMs

If your product is more of a B2B SaaS, or a product that includes larger implementations where sales teams function separately from customer support, a proper handoff will need to be put into place. At no point should a user wonder what the next step is.

This handoff should also happen as soon as possible. Or, at the very least, the customer’s kickoff call should be scheduled early in the onboarding process, as soon as the agreements are signed. Using the right onboarding or CRM tools can help make the transition easy for the user.

3. Personalize the Process for Each Customer

As a lead goes through the sales process, they’re answering questions (via web forms or surveys) about company size and whether they’re a decision-maker. Use this information, and anything else the sales team gets about customers, to personalize the onboarding process that could be used to improve the initial product experience and would ensure conversion

Every new user will download your product for two or three core features. Within the onboarding experience, the user will need to move towards this feature as fast as possible. Once a customer is comfortable with using those features, the user can be transitioned towards the more complicated features using further onboarding emails, and interactive walk-throughs. The high level of confidence in using the product, within the existing flows will ensure conversion when the trial period has ended or are renewals

4. Give Your Users Quick Wins

Consider working with the product team on the onboarding process to set up an interactive training session within your app or product. Let’s say you offer a social media scheduling app. Having a pop-up that asks a customer to create their first post and publish will be a part of the initial hook created that would lead to a conversion. Include arrows and instructions. After a customer completes each task it could be a trigger for a follow-up email or post.

5. Create a Self-Serve Onboarding Process

Quite in contrast to the previous tips for guided and automated onboarding guides, the self-service type of onboarding is useful for customers familiar with the product territory and having worked with traditional versions of the software. Ex: A graphics designer or video editor having used CorelDraw or Adobe illustrator will find tools like Photoleap or Videoleap. These users may prefer to figure it out on their own

For these users, give them a checklist in an email or within your product of things to do, but don’t hold their hand through it.

Many users prefer to find the answer to a question they have on their own—more than 90% of customers watch videos to help them understand a product or app. If you don’t already have these support sections on your site, consider adding them: Not only will these be useful for customers who are familiar with the concepts, but customer support and sales teams can use them for troubleshooting.

Here are few examples:

• Knowledge base of how-to articles
  

• FAQs with the most common questions and answers
  

• Search function
  

• How-to videos for every feature of your product
  

6. Show Customers Their Progress Through Onboarding Whether your users prefer the DIY approach as above or they want help along the way, an easy way to make sure customers feel you value their time is to offer an update on their progress through onboarding.

7. Reach Out at Milestones & Offer One-on-One Meetings

showing users their weekly or monthly achievements is a deeply underrated element on a journey map, particularly when expecting activation and retention. Let the users know how much they have achieved so far. It would typically translate to be a KPI from their perspective. The key to setting milestones is understanding the customer’s desired outcome, or what they’re hoping to achieve with your service or product.

So, if your ideal customer needs your email app to send bulk emails to their clients. Work backward to create a roadmap for them toward the first bulk email they’ll send. Once they do so successfully, congratulate them on a well-crafted bulk email. From there, encourage them to use additional features to make their emails even better.

8. Consider Gamification to Keep Customers Engaged in Onboarding

How to improve the customer onboarding process and potentially increase conversions? Turn onboarding into a game for your customers. Gamification has a lot of promise in various ways, including the learning process. It’s a great way to engage customers and you can offer them rewards for completing tasks or reaching milestones.

LMS’ such as Eloomi can translate to onboarding for customers making it fun and rewarding for your customers to achieve their goals.

Consider trying these gamification ideas:

• Let customers create an avatar that looks like them and includes a progress bar that shows their avatar going milestone to milestone ex: Linkedin, Facebook.
  

• Create a point system that allows users to earn points for completing tasks in onboarding—in the end, they can redeem their points for branded gear or an extension of their trial ex: FourSquare, Google Reviews.
  

• Add fun quizzes at each milestone with questions about features customers learned about during onboarding and offer rewards for high scorers
  

9. Ask for Feedback About the Product & Onboarding

Improving your customer onboarding process is going to be tricky if you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t.

engage users in a survey for feedback after the onboarding phase. Using language/market fit to make your product resonate better will encourage honest responses, as well as inspire marketing to structure better content strategy.

There are many ways to ask active customers for feedback:

1. Net Promoter Score

2. Looking at customer that use/ don’t use/ stopped using a feature

3. When customer/affiliate gains a new user

4. General check-ins

5. Replacing welcome/ set up completion with onboarding surveys

6. At the halfway point of the customer onboarding flow

7. After using the product for n time.

8. Just before the end of their trial when asking users about upgrading their service.

Based on their response, you could with extend the trial period, give a better discount or target help responses. Once you get the feedback, make sure to act on it. When ever you get a positive review, ask them for permission for publishing them on social media. This way your marketing team will not need to revisit the user for permission.

Even if a customer has stopped using your product altogether and has essentially churned, you still might want to reach out. Some of the most valuable information comes out of a churned customer interview. Plus, you can throw in a few questions about the product or features to help out the product team.

10. Track How Your Customers Use Your Product

Hopefully, you’re tracking how customers interact with your product or service. Keep an eye on the last time customers logged in and how long they were active. Are they using all the features?

These data points will help you personalize outreach to customers who are struggling with a tool or to find value in the product at all. In addition to helping individuals use your product or service, the data on a whole can help identify the biggest pain points and improve the onboarding process.

7 key elements that should be included in a onboarding journey map

1. Opt-in and sign-up forms. Opt-in forms and sign-up forms are the point of transition when prospects convert into customers. These forms are part of the larger customer journey as users transition into the long-term customer life cycle starting with marketing and moving on to sales. They should be simple, easy, and painless, like every other part of the onboarding journey.

2. Welcome emails and follow-up emails. These emails are designed to start the relationship off on the right foot and keep customers engaged. They should be crisp, ideally free from too much detail.

3. Surveys and Feedback forms: engage users in a survey for feedback after the onboarding phase. Using language/market fit to make your product resonate better will encourage honest responses, as well as inspire marketing to structure better content strategy.

4. Initial training and walkthroughs. Once new customers start using the software, they should be offered a quick in-app tutorial. Using automated email marketing tools and onboarding specialists can provide these introductory lessons quickly, efficiently, and without the need for human intervention.

5. Reminders and nudges posts: Reminding to update app or the showing the option to upgrade will feel the need of inclusion and prevent them from an involuntary churn

6. Achievements and milestones: showing users their weekly or monthly achievements is a deeply underrated element on a journey map, particularly when expecting activation and retention. Let the users know how much they have achieved so far. It would typically translate to be a KPI from their perspective.

7. Customer support and technical support. In some cases, new customers will need to contact support staff. They should have fast access to customer support through, for instance, pop-up chat software or easily accessible contact forms. And when support is necessary, support staff should focus extensively on improving the product experience.

Each touchpoint on the onboarding journey map should have descriptors such as:

• Users’ goals, or what they want to accomplish at each stage

• Goals for the onboarding team,

• Descriptions of the users’ mindsets and feelings

How to reduce churn rates by perfecting your client onboarding process

What is churn rate and how to calculate it

A basic churn rate is determined by taking the total number of customers you started with in a given time period and then tracking how many you lost by the end of that time. It’s also worth tracking how many new customers decided not to renew during that time. This is your company’s churn rate.

The main reason for churn is non-payment of subscription.

However, there could be a greater opportunity, with the at-risk customers: those who are close to leaving but haven’t yet.

They are the users who on a CRM tool will be marked as 'slipping away. Here are some reasons as to why it would be so:

1. Has a competitor approached your client?

2. Have you lost focus on the goal?

3. Are there delays to address?

4. What can you do to rebuild the relationship and trust?

A proactive approach may thwart customer churn this time, but it requires better communication and an improved process to ensure mistakes don’t happen again

Churn rate by industry B2C subscription businesses experience higher customer churn rates than B2B businesses.

How to prevent voluntary churn

Shorten Time-To-Value

Client onboarding should start with one question: What is the client’s goal? Whatever it may be, that response is your opportunity to project how your product or service will meet those goals.

The sooner your customer sees the value your product adds to their company, the more likely they are to extend their relationship with you

Increase Customer Engagement

First, develop resources that show customers how to use your product, then make these resources accessible in your knowledge base. Allocate clear team tasks and timelines to publish help articles, videos and demos. Have less of overlap of these multiple goals to one team member, as this would be overwhelming.

Next, communicate expectations to team members about roles, expectations, timelines and other features in the onboarding process in advance. If there are KPIs attached to any of these deliverables, they should be communicated in advance along with an outlet for help for the creators.

Consider using an automated, centralized digital platform that allows your team to share information, assign tasks, attach documents, post status updates and communicate with your customer in their preferred form of correspondence (e.g., email, text, phone, online chat, etc.).

Having an internal alignment shows externally, so teams should be empowered and inspired instead of draining them.

Be Clear About The End Date

Customers with specific requests would work towards a deadline. If your product is easily replaceable, relationship alone will not prevent them from switching to the next best option. Set clear tasks and deadlines within the product and customer support teams. Communicate product roadmaps to customer support teams in advance so they would be able to attribute a churn over a specific issue.

Is there a difference in B2B and B2C churn rates?

The average churn rate for B2C subscription companies is around 7.05% - considerably higher than that of B2B companies. The common challenges faced by a B2C Saas company is higher competition, payment problems and weavering levels of interest.

Why does B2C have higher churn rates?

• Lower prices. consumers are more likely to make an impulsive purchasing decision, which is likely to result in hitting the "unsubscribe" button down the road.

• Simplicity. Individual B2C customers don't need to get approval from the boss before subscribing to a service. Similar to lower prices, the simplicity of making a purchase can lead to impulsive buying.

• Higher volume. B2C companies sell more - which leads to higher churn rates.

• Better onboarding. An organized and effective customer onboarding process will build trust and ensure customer loyalty from early on.

• Long-term pricing. Annual subscriptions can help you retain customers longer and ensure recurring revenue.

• Showcase your “best” features. Every online tool has a core set of features that users use more than others. Figure out which features these are and ensure that customers are onboarded into seeing their value.

• Engagement. Customer engagement is an ongoing interaction between your business and its customers. Focus on improving user experience and resolving customer complaints and queries as soon as they arise.

• Better cancel flows. When your customers are leaving, you can make the most out of it by creating a proper customer offboarding process.

65% of SaaS B2B services experienced a decrease in their overall churn rate subsequent to taking steps to reduce both voluntary and involuntary churn. Furthermore, companies can reduce customer churn by 67% if they focus on customer solutions during the first interaction with a new client. In fact, having an onboarding experience, moves customers across the buyer funnel and were three times more likely to purchase.