Designing an Effective Email Onboarding Campaign

This is a guest post courtesy of Kenny Schumacher from Delesign

Designing an effective email onboarding campaign is one of the most important parts of your marketing strategy. With effective onboarding, you can expect higher retention rates and greater revenue by aligning the value your product or service provides with the customer’s needs.

Your sales development & marketing teams have done a great job and you’re getting a bunch of new users trying out your service. But you shouldn’t celebrate just yet, at least not until they return or continue paying for your service.

A lot of research and hard work goes into targeting interested users, but after signing up, many don’t find the value they were looking for before they get distracted by everyday life.

How then do you increase conversion rates? How do you manage to get new users to stick around, use your product and achieve their first success?

A highly personalized and customized customer on-boarding email campaign can help. In fact, it can be the difference between getting your new users to become deeply invested in your product or service or losing them forever.

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Designing an Effective Email Onboarding Campaign is Easy!

In this article, we will help you uncover some tips on designing an effective email onboarding campaign that will improve your product’s adoption and new user retention. Just by reading this and taking away a few simple lessons, you can prevent interested users from turning away and start creating happy, satisfied and loyal customers.

1. Know Your Goals

How do you know you’ve succeeded if you don’t have a goal?

Your first goal is to show your new users the value of your service. Your second goal is to persuade them to pay for your service, which will occur as long as the value of your service is less than the price they will have to pay. You can make additional goals unique to your product or service.

Assign one goal for each onboarding email in your campaign. Make sure each email’s goal works towards your campaign’s first goal of showing the value of your service. Think of your emails like steps in a ladder – lead your new users towards your goals.

2. Understand Your Customers - Ask For Feedback!

Every business has different customers. Designing an effective email onboarding campaign involves researching and understanding your customers before creating an email sequence. The easiest way to know and understand them is by define what success looks like to them.

3. Relevance is Power

Make it easy for your users to understand how your service will provide them with value and improve their life. When you show your user how your app benefits them, your likelihood of converting skyrockets.

It is your responsibility to be persuasive on your onboarding emails. Focus on getting your new user their first success.

4. Keep Emails Short and Simple

It’s not necessarily a bad thing if the onboarding email is detailed, but they should be easy to comprehend. Keep your email concise and include attractive visuals to guide readers through the email and to your CTA.

5. Make it Fun!

Eliciting positive emotions causes higher engagement and positive brand recall. Messages like “Let the fun begin” or “You’re in!” are simple ways to make your readers feel good and excited about supporting and using your service.

6. Don't be Afraid to Sell

Designing an effective email onboarding campaign should have an end goal. For most, this is to convince them of the value of your service.

Don’t be timid or shy about selling your service. If you don’t pitch for a sale, your emails will never convert.

Offer your service clearly and avoid using barriers that would confuse your users like multiple CTAs in a single email, hesitation in selling or not showing the positive outcome of using your service.

Let's Look at the Must-Have Messagings in Designing an Effective Email Onboarding Campaign

Now that we have tackled the best practices in designing an effective email onboarding campaign, we’ll now discuss the emails that your onboarding campaign must have for success.

1. The Welcome Email

Welcome emails are the most important email you should send to your users. They usually have the highest open rates of any marketing email. These are the first conversation users have with your company as a user of your service and will make a lasting impression. Make it count!

2. The Motivational Re-Engagement Email

Often times new users need a little motivation to continue to explore your service and this is where your motivational re-engagement email becomes handy. Getting them back to your service can be challenging, but not impossible. There are a few simple ways to motivate your users with an email. You can email them when:

They don’t discover a key feature of your service
They sign up to your trial but don’t use it.
They get an error message more than once.

Here is a sample of a re-engagement and motivational email:

3. The Proactive Help Email

Some users can get lost or overwhelmed with a new product, which is to be expected. A proactive help email (for example, listing FAQs) can help remove users’ confusion by addressing common questions and concerns, without users needing to first ask for help.

One of the ways to engage with your users is to review data from the user onboarding process to determine where your users get stuck or drop-off. These friction points can help you identify users that attempted a key action but did not succeed, and you can then address this step, goal or action.

Conclusion

Designing an effective email onboarding campaign is important. Companies that implement these best user onboarding practices see higher engagement rates, increased conversion and better overall customer experience.

About the Author

Kenny Schumacher is the Founder & CEO of Delesign. Based in the San Francisco area, Delesign is the go-to partner for marketing departments and startups looking for ways to delegate & accelerate content creation, website design, video production, and more. Be sure to pay a visit to the Delesign site and learn more about their great work!

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