10 Tips on How to Create the Best Customer Onboarding Process

Customer retention is critical for the success of your business as the cost of acquiring new customers is higher than retaining existing customers. Loyal customers are also more likely to engage in word-of-mouth marketing or become brand ambassadors, thus increasing your brand awareness and reputation. In other words, being able to retain customers enhance customer lifetime value (LTV, also called CLV, or CLTV).

The success of the customer product onboarding plays a central role in determining whether a customer will make secondary purchases, become loyal, provide a great product review, or none of the above. It can prepare your clients for future transactions and build a healthy rapport when done correctly. To retain your customers and avoid attritions you need to provide them with a heightened experience.

Customer onboarding is the process that new customers go through to get set up and start using your product. It covers the whole journey: from initial sign-up to product activation and first use.

If you want to increase your customer retention rate, you need to create an excellent onboarding process. We are here to help you in doing so. In this article, you will find 10 tips that will help you improve your customer onboarding experience.

Pre-onboarding activities

The onboarding process starts when the customer decides to buy your product. But, for this to happen, the potential customer has to be convinced that your product is worth buying. For this reason, before the customer onboarding process starts, there are some activities that are important to carry out in order to lead your customer to buy the product.

Leverage each touch point with your potential customers to introduce your USP (unique selling proposition) and what sets them apart from others. Explain to them the benefits they can expect from your product and present the most valuable features your product has to offer compared to the competition’s products.

Pre-onboarding is important to create an interest in your client's mind. You can also tell them how your product will resolve their pain points. The more specific your descriptions are, the higher the chances of getting them on board.

10 tips on how to create the best onboarding experience

Once you have convinced the potential customer that your product is worth buying and the purchase is completed, the onboarding process starts. It is important to remember that to design an effective onboarding process, collecting data about your customers is fundamental. Once you have a clear understanding of your customer persona, you will be able to design an onboarding experience that perfectly fits your customer’s characteristics and needs.

With Layerise collecting data about your customers has never been easier. With Layerise, you can get an in-depth view of your customers based on geographical, demographical, preference, and behavioral variables. Understand what your customers do and track their satisfaction. This will help you better understand your customers to design an onboarding experience that is tailored to them.

1. Customer registration through QR code

Once customers receive your product, the onboarding experience starts. Thanks to Layerise, you can make the registration process way easier for your customers. They just need to scan a QR code on the packaging or directly on your product and register their product ownership quickly.

For some functions, the customer will need to add the phone number. That way, you will unlock the possibility to communicate with them through SMSs and create SMS marketing campaigns.

2. Make the setup easy and intuitive to complete

Create a setup wizard to take your customers through the setup process, step-by-step. Guided setup is most commonly needed when there are multiple steps or when steps need to be taken in a particular order.

With Layerise you can create an excellent setup guide, using videos and animations. It is important to make the setup process as easy and intuitive as possible. The customer should be able to start using the product as soon as possible without wasting too much time.

Remember to make it possible to set up from any device keeping it clear and straightforward. Customers registering from different devices should have the same experience.

3. Provide all the information needed

When customers start using the product, it is important that they have an enjoyable first experience. Make sure you provide them all the information needed to get the most out of the product. In this sense, it can be useful to add a Tips and tricks section where customers can learn how to use your product in different ways, to get the most out of it.

However, do not provide too much information all at once to your customers. Make your information crisp and concise as no person will spend their whole day reading or watching product details. Use product-specific keywords as people often skim over when reading, and these words will catch their attention.

Too long content can make a person feel bored, and they even feel that you are trying to oversell your product.

4. Use video tutorials

In your product guide remember to leverage the power of video. Nowadays, video is the preferred format as it creates more engagement among the users. Videos are eye-catching. When users see videos online, they naturally stop scrolling. And even if they pay attention to your video for only a few seconds, most of the time that is enough to get your message across.

So, let video editors help you to make amazing videos that both help your customers and echo your brand. Videos can be made about how to use a particular product or service or navigate your site for placing an order, returning, or exchanging a product, which can lead to a better customer experience leading to more repeat purchases and a better post-sales experience.

5. Celebrate Small Achievements

When the customer starts using your product, put in place a system that creates an incentive to use your product even more. Send a notification when a user first signs up to welcome her/him and celebrate this new start. Reward the consumers once a certain number of uses have been reached, for instance, by giving them a discount code to use on their next purchase.

Customization is often the best way to improve customer retention. Everyone loves feeling special and acknowledged. For this reason, personalizing your messages or notifications it’s a great way to improve the onboarding experience.

6. Personalize the Experience

When communicating with a customer, you must ensure that they get a customized experience. To develop an ultra-personalized onboarding experience, you need to gather more information about users. Before starting the onboarding process, make sure to collect relevant data about your customers. For example, you could ask them their name, the date of their birthday, or their favorite color, and personalize the experience accordingly.

Thanks to Layerise, collecting data about your customers to personalize the experience has never been so easy. When the customer scans the QR code and registers, all the information provided will automatically personalize the experience, in terms of notifications, language, videos, etc.

7. Provide a good after-sales service

To make your onboarding experience effective and enjoyable for the customer, it is important that you accompany them throughout the process. Customer onboarding is not just limited to the checkout phase, but it continues when the customer starts using the product and discovers the different functionalities. In this stage, it is crucial to offer good post-sales assistance.

Ensure to provide effective self-service support and, also, that your support team is ready to assist customers as they explore your product during the onboarding process. This will make the customer's onboarding process easier and more pleasant.

If after the purchase the customers are abandoned by your company, they feel duped and will most likely never buy from you again. To increase your customer retention rate you have to keep an ongoing relationship and offer an excellent post-sales experience to your customers.

With Layerise Virtual Assistant you can provide the best post-sale experience. In fact, with layerise you can create a brand-safe product-specific Assistants for your customers to access. This Virtual Assistant will help your customers in case of problems in the usage of the product. Any Assistant you create can be easily downloaded to a phone or any other device supporting PWA's. Any update or change will be automatically pushed to your customer's device without any required actions.

8. Take Feedback from Your Customer

During the onboarding process, make sure that your customers are having a good experience. Ask them to give you feedback on the product, but also on the experience and the support your company provides them throughout their user journey. For example, you can send them notifications asking for a review after they have received support. Also, asking for feedback right after they have completed the “set up” step, could help you to understand if the instructions are easy and intuitive to follow through. Try to get more feedback on the onboarding process and build strategies to perform better.

9. Build a relationship with Your Users

To build relationships with your customers it is important to listen to their feedback and work on them to show that they have an actual impact on the product you are offering them. Also, engage with them on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, etc. It is important to create a community around your product to increase loyalty and customer retention.

A good idea to build relationships with your customers is to introduce testimonials. Asking your customers to be testimonials will make them feel special. On the other hand, customer referrals are one of the best ways to promote your product and get new customers on board.

1O. Measure your performance using KPIs

Different metrics or KPIs can be necessary to measure the performance of your onboarding experience and introduce improvements over time.

To measure customer onboarding, you need to follow a 4 steps guide:

Create a map of the user journey,

Plot the onboarding funnel using an analytics tool,

Find where the maximum number of people drop off,

Make modifications and experimentations to understand what works best.

Some key metrics that you can monitor are:

Daily and monthly active users,

Retention rate,

Churn rate.

Thanks to these KPIs you can monitor customer satisfaction with regard to the onboarding process and improve the experience accordingly.

Benefits of Client Onboarding

Customer satisfaction

According to market research, the first few months are crucial because this is the period when customers may get churned out. So give your effort in the initial months to hold them by giving offers and good services. An excellent onboarding process will help you increase customer satisfaction and this will determine your company’s success.

Customer retention

Gartner Group found that 80 percent of a company's future profits are quite literally derived from 20 percent of its existing customers.

However, the majority of business owners focus more on customer acquisition than customer retention. A better user onboarding experience enhances customer retention rate, contributing to your business growth.

Increased Efficiency

Client onboarding will benefit both you and your clients. It puts all of the information you need at your fingertips, putting your company in the ideal position to start working for a customer. With the information you collect throughout the onboarding process, you can learn what your customer is looking for. Consequently, you will be able to avoid making mistakes and save time, thus boosting efficiency.

Growth & scalability

Customers that are happy with your product will refer your name to their personal and business networks. Having an excellent customer onboarding experience will increase customer satisfaction thus attracting more customers and boosting growth.

A suitable onboarding procedure is scalable, meaning that you can gain significant benefits while keeping the costs steady. You can automate your procedure once you have determined how the onboarding process should look in order to be effective.

Conclusion

It's a widespread misconception among new entrepreneurs that once a deal is made and money is exchanged, the work is finished, and you can go on to move other prospects further down the sales funnel. The reality is that you are just halfway there. Getting new clients is excellent, but your firm will not last long unless you take care of customer retention too.

Layerise helps provide a unique customer onboarding experience and helps brands to build a fruitful and ongoing customer relationship that brings continuous revenue streams. Additionally, through Layerise platform, you can gather first-party customer data, which will help you create effective marketing campaigns and personalized user experience.

If you want to see how layerise can help your business, book a demo with us now!