You know your target audience better than anyone else, but when a new product comes into play, it can be difficult to know exactly how to approach the onboarding process. Perhaps you’re looking to engage existing customers and encourage them to add to their current plan, or maybe you want to expand your reach with your new tool? While every launch is different, there are some key factors that should be considered by every business, regardless of specifics – so we’ve put together some best practice tips for you in this article.
The key to onboarding is to ensure that your customer’s experience using your product fulfills the promises you made in your marketing. Get your user acquainted with all the best features of your system and provide a seamless experience from sign-up through trial and beyond.
Show your customers that they made the right choice choosing your product and create a positive ongoing relationship with them. This will reduce churn, increase customer lifetime value and turn new users into brand advocates.
More than two-thirds of SaaS companies experience churn rates over 5%, and this is either due to their users not understanding their product or not seeing the value in it. A successful onboarding process will tackle both these issues, and it all starts with creating your first user account…
Create your first user account
Creating an account is super simple and takes no time at all.
Select White Label Admin from the left-hand side of your dashboard and click Create account from the options that appear. Next, fill in the form with the relevant user details.
Then untick the Add account to existing Brand box and fill in the areas provided with the information about the Brand you’re adding.
Click Create account and you’re all done!
Now all you need to do is provide your user with their login details and start your onboarding process.
Customer onboarding process
It’s best not to overcomplicate the onboarding process, especially in the beginning. Having a few simple measures in place to help your customers get acquainted with your system and show them it’s true potential should be all you need to get them invested – after all, the white label scheduler pretty much speaks for itself!
Here are our tips to getting your first customer on board:
Send a friendly welcome email
Your first email to a new customer should be positive, above all – the aim is to get them as excited about your product as you are. Congratulate them for taking the first step to an incredible experience and thank them for their interest.
Sometimes gauging the tone of this first email can be difficult – you want to be friendly but professional, thankful but confident, and excited but not desperate. Find the balance between being grateful for their interest whilst also assured that they’ll benefit from this relationship just as much as you will.
A good first impression can be the difference between an uninterested stranger, and a lifelong, loyal customer – so make it count!
Help your customers get started
Once you’ve welcomed your new customer and they’re all set up with their new social media scheduler, your goal is to help them use your product and all its features as soon as possible. Once they’ve scheduled a few posts, uploaded their media and added their team, it’ll be much harder for them to turn their back on your tool or switch services.
Take your customers through the setup process and teach them about all the key features. This may be in the form of a face-to-face walkthrough, a video tutorial or a series of Getting Started guides.
If you’ve read through our pre-launch checklist, you’ll know that we use Mailchimp campaigns as part of our onboarding strategy. This is the perfect way to share our guides with our customers at the times we think will be most valuable to them. Delivering all these useful and engaging materials right to your users’ inboxes will show them that you care about their experience and have put effort in to help them get the most out of your system.
Provide ready-made answers to all the usual questions
A well-stocked knowledge base is ideal for allowing customers to self-service and saving time. Often, you’ll be asked the same questions by different users, and it’s far easier to point them in the direction of a ready-made article, than answer them all individually.
Nevertheless, there’s no getting round it, building a knowledge base from scratch will take time. That’s why we offer the ability to embed our end-user Help Centre into your own website, so that all our ready-made FAQs and How-tos are instantly available to your customers too.
Provide full support to all your customers quickly and conveniently – read our simple guide to find out how to embed our Help Centre into your own site.
Check-in throughout the user journey
Your new customers should feel like you care about their progress. Check in with them at regular intervals to see whether they’re getting stuck with anything or to help them get more value from your product.
Automation tools like Mailchimp can simplify this process by triggering certain emails when there’s been inactivity, or when a user performs a certain task. You can also tag your users, so once they’ve been using the system for a certain amount of time they’ll receive an email checking in on them.
This is all part of developing a positive relationship with your customer and showing them that its not just at the beginning that you are, but throughout their journey with you.
Send milestone emails to keep customers engaged
Marking milestones with a celebration email is a great way of getting a customer fully engaged with your white label scheduler. It will also remind them of what they’ve achieved, which in turn will emphasise the value of your product.
For example, after they’ve sent their first post with your tool, or created their first customised Post Group, send an email congratulating them on this milestone and encouraging them to progress.
Not only will this excite your customers, as it shows they are one step closer to their goal, but it will also indicate to them that you’re invested in their success.
Performing these few simple onboarding tactics could make all the difference to the success of your product and will pave the way to better relationships with your customers. Set yourself clear goals to aim towards, such as getting your users to post more than once in the first week to establish a pattern of usage from the get-go. Remember, the sooner your customers are using your system, the sooner it’ll become an indispensable aspect of their lives & work.
