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What is customer onboarding? How could it improve LTV and reduce churn?
Customer onboarding
Customer onboarding is the process of nurturing your new users and customers to make them feel comfortable using your product and make it a viable part of their life. It is vital to make your customers feel acquainted with your product with step-by-step tutorials, unlimited guidance and support, and milestone celebrations to bring a smile and a feeling of joy and achievement in the minds of your people while using your product.
Most customers in the early stage face complexity while switching from another product to yours or confuse with the UI/UX. The sense of dissatisfaction in people's minds triggers a feeling of despair, which compels them to look out for alternatives or cancel the free trial/subscription. As it is said in the start-up world, the churn rate is cancer for start-ups. In simpler terms, the churn rate is the annual rate at which customers cancel or don't renew the subscription and stop doing business with the company over a given period. It reduces the lifetime value and increases the cost per acquisition, leading to an ultimate decrease in profit for the brand. You could work with us, the leading digital marketing agency to assist you in getting more customers.
Most of the revenue for a company indeed comes from existing and loyal customers. It is way easier to nurture the existing customer and make them renew the purchase than acquiring a new customer and encouraging them to earn loyalty.
Why is customer onboarding so vital for the growth of your business?
Customer Onboarding- Benefits
If a customer is satisfied with your software product and has achieved their goal or let’s say that the product solved their pain points, then it is a no-brainer that they would return and resubscribe. On the other hand, let's assume your product was perfect, and it had all the caliber to help customers succeed. However, due to a lack of proper guidance and support such as videos, documentation, tutorials, and customer service, the customers failed to realize how potent your product was, which ultimately led them to cancel the subscription, look for alternatives, and go to your competitors. AI chatbots could help. Read this guide on PPC campaign strategy.
This paragraph sums up the importance of customer onboarding. Here are the other three main reasons why customer onboarding is so important for the success of your business:
Word-of-mouth marketing:
word of mouth marketing
Word of mouth marketing is a part of earned media. It usually happens when satisfied customers talk to their peers and network on how awesome your product is and how it could help solve most of the problems. The customer onboarding process allows you to teach your customers about your product and directly converse your value and marketing message. A proper customer onboarding process also enhances authoritativeness which makes customers stay longer with you.
Social media strategy (for example Pinterest marketing) could also help you in customer acquisition as social media is a cost-effective way of reaching a large portion of your target audience. The top CRM tools in the market could also help you segment your customers based on their behavior. Hence, you could shoot a targeted email to customer segments and leverage the most out of your emails.
Here is a complete guide on B2B lead generation.
Shorten TTV(Time To Value)
Decreasing Time To Value inCustomer-Onboarding is crucial
Time to value is a metric used by companies to measure how long it takes for a new customer to realize the value of your product. Failure in TTV means losing customers faster. The customers must realize the benefit they expect from your product and not what you want to deliver. All the optimization must be done with the customer's perspective and solving their pain points. As we have learnt from Amazon, customer obsession is the key to success in this competitive digital atmosphere. Communicate with your customers on email as email marketing is one of the most important digital marketing channels with the highest return on investment,
Recurring revenue and decrease in churn
Recurring revenue defines success
In the start-up world, recurring revenue is one of the most important forms of traction as it helps to make the company more stable and protect its operations and finances. Keeping track of your MRR or monthly recurring revenue enables you to analyze your baseline to measure your business growth and success.
On the other hand, if the churn rate is higher, then the cost of acquisition of customers eats away the fundamental revenue and works against financial growth. Hence, it is always recommended to keep it lower by either increasing effectiveness in marketing or increasing the lifetime value of a customer. Read this article for B2B marketing strategies.
Important tricks to make customer onboarding a smooth process
1. Define the desired outcome and set milestones
Focus on customer's success
In this new era, when companies have the ultimate focus to help customers get success or their ultimate goal, it becomes crucial for you to know how "your customer" defines success. You could ask multiple questions in the first few days and weeks of engagement with your customers to refine your data and achieve your product's goal. That's the purpose, after all.
The customers generally go through several steps before making a final purchase. They must have come across your digital marketing campaigns, specifically your content marketing approaches that have given them some idea of how your product could be their problem solver. That is the "Eureka signal" for you.
The next step could be to set milestones and make a plan to make them happen. You could set goal deadlines to make the same process completed in a short time to shorten the time to value metric. You should try to fix the milestones accurately every time, and it could only happen if you were real and honest with the milestones.
2. Focus on customizing the onboarding process to improve the experience
Credit(image): HubSpot
The first few days of your onboarding process sell. In our case, some of the B2B marketing tools had a poor onboarding process which ultimately led us to look for alternatives in the market. One of these alternatives had a personalized onboarding approach with a dedicated sales rep that earned our trust, and we have been using the product for three months.
If you are in a B2B marketing niche, you could dedicate exclusive sales representatives for your new customers who would help enhance the onboarding process with a personalized approach. Along with this, you could also look for UX design principles to make things visually appealing for your customer persona. You must also continuously communicate with your audience and ask them for quality checks and how is the onboarding process going for them. It would be best if you were open to questions and suggestions to improve your product and process.
3 Your customers must have the flexibility to import data, integrate with other tools and invite team members
In the B2B arena, the onboarding process is more than simply knowing how to use the product. As several steps are going on at a time in a company and several employees involved, it is generally recommended to have options where your customers could easily import the data, integrate your tool with other tools to automate and improve the workflow and invite other members to work together on a project.
At the same time, the requirements of each of your customers would vary. It means you should keep all the aforesaid add-ons optional. If your customer needs them to be a part of the onboarding process, you should introduce them to improve the overall user experience. You must have a dedicated sales and customer service team to provide plenty of support to your B2B clients. Your customers must find it easy to contact your support whenever they need it and make it a part of their daily workflow.
4. Have a knowledge base section and regularly check in to see your customers progress or problems
knowledge base section
A frequently asked questions section on your website is crucial to solving your audience's problems on a generalized level quickly and autonomously. An AI-powered chatbot could also be a great option to add a personalized touch and solve user problems.
Content marketing is crucial to earn customers and help them know more about your product and improve the customer onboarding process. Suppose you continuously check-in to see whether your customers are stuck in a problem. It increases the feeling of being valued, which helps retain the customers and improve customer loyalty. CodeDesign could help you with content marketing and SEO approaches. Have a look at digital marketing vs traditional marketing.
5 Support and congratulate your customers when they reach a milestone
In the first step, we talked about setting milestones that could help achieve a goal in a time frame. And, now is the time to celebrate your customer's journey. Everybody likes appreciation, and when you show that you value your customers, you earn loyalty and retention. You could send a congratulatory email, a quick call from your sales representative, or an in-app notification to excite your customers to be one step closer to their goals. Thank you letters, product feedback surveys, up-selling emails, etc., are other ways to increase brand awareness and gain the audience's trust.
Customer onboarding is a complex process. However, if you keep the customers at the Centre and create your goals to solve their problems and be obsessed with their problems, you get to earn loyalty. You must understand your customers and set clear expectations. If you show value, you have a good chance to retain your customers. You must stay in constant communication and create customer-centric goals. Here is how you could optimize customer journey for your business.
Customer Onboarding Plan - A step by step process
Customer onboarding is crucial for your business as it is the first impression for your customer that sets the tuning for your upcoming relationship. As a business, it is crucial to keep your customers engaged and let them use your product or service in their day-to-day life to make the process smoother and make your product or service a part of their day-to-day life.
Demonstrate the value of your offering:
It is crucial that your customer understands how your product or service would solve their pain point. But, if they don't understand the features or how to implement them, it would equate to a bad user experience.
Only when your customer is successfully implementing the process to solve their problems, do you give them a reason to log back in and choose your product again and again.
Optimize the trial conversion rate
Many software as service companies offer a free trial to their customers to showcase how such a product could be game-changing and demonstrate the value to let them purchase the subscription next time.
However, if your customers are not using your product or service till the trial period, it would mean that they are unable to extract the value. You could use email marketing to send relevant emails and the step-by-step process to improve customer experience.
Clarify what should your customers expect from your offer
Your customers should know how your product or service improves their life. If your customers have over expectations from you, it would mean disappointment in the long run, and that they could be looking for alternatives in the market.
If you are a service-based business, you should let your customers know how long it would take to get the results and how likely it is to solve a particular problem in a given time frame. When your customers have the right expectations from you, it would mean they are satisfied with your offer while they are purchasing it, which could ultimately mean higher retention.
Be in touch with your customers
As a business owner, you should know that retaining a customer is fairly easier than attracting new ones. After you have familiarized your customers with your product, you should keep in touch with them to know if they have any queries or if there is any chance to upsell or cross-sell.
Some businesses have a dedicated customer service team to inquire from customers how they feel about their services to earn brand loyalty. It is also good to send emails regarding tutorials, guides, software upgrades, or any other relevant information.
Personalized product tour
Your customers would have different needs, and if you find ways to allow them to define the success or goals, you could create personalized customer-centric goals. If you look up at companies like MailChimp, you would see that they come up with a questionnaire for you so that they could customize the product tour and make it look more appealing and dedicated towards your problem.
The customer onboarding plan should be as smooth as possible to create a positive experience and outlook for your customers. Your goal is to not only let your customers enjoy using your products but also keep on re-purchasing so that you could increase the lifetime value of customers and decrease the cost of acquisition of new customers.
Measure how well customers perceive your offer
To improve your customer onboarding process, the ultimate step would be measuring your success. Once you identify the friction points in the process, only then you could take the right steps to improve the process.
You could put up rating options for your customers to track key metrics, measure customer satisfaction, and gather customer feedback. This process is crucial because it brings insights to you on what's working for your business and which areas to improve.
Which team should be involved and responsible for the customer onboarding?
For SaaS-based companies, the process cannot be the responsibility of simply the customer support department as it involves a lot of processes. Instead, most successful companies have an organization-wide effort. Here is how different teams can participate in your customer onboarding workflow.
Product Development Team
If you take the example from the product standpoint, you would realize that the product management and development team understands the complexity of the product better than anyone in the team. As these members are involved in improving the product, they know the ins and outs of the platform and which areas need the most attention for the best results.
You could involve your product development team in the customer onboarding process to get feedback directly from the customers to brainstorm how to make the product more intuitive and user-friendly.
Technical Support Team
The purpose of the technical support is to give apt documentation and training to your customers so that they could get the results out of the product. The technical team could provide in-depth information and answer the customer's query, which could ultimately improve the usage rate and bring your customer access to a knowledge base.
In today's world, when customer support is the prime focus of most companies, you cannot just disappoint your users and let your competitors win. You could provide options for your customers to book meetings with your technical support team online to make the process as seamless as possible.
Customer Support and Success Team
Your customer support and success team could help show customers the steps for installation and configuration of your product or software, which would ultimately minimize the time to value for users. The entire purpose is to let the customers extract the most value from your product so that they could eventually be retained and increase their lifetime value. Your customer support team could also follow up with your customers after they had a conversation with the technical support team.
It is also crucial for the customer support team to find the compromised areas in the onboarding process and resolve them to improve user experience. They could also supervise the product management and customer success team and get feedback directly to enhance the overall experience and process.
Conclusion
The customer onboarding process is one of the most important stages of the customer life cycle as it sets the tone for the whole relationship. It is the process new users go through to get set up and start using your product. If the customer onboarding is done properly, it demonstrates the value of your product which sets your customers up for success and increases retention. Read this complete guide on voice search optimization to optimize your website.
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