Customer Onboarding Process For Your Business Growth
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You have done your business marketing and generated those leads who have converted into customers. You need now to onboard them to your business to make them retainer clients for your business.
Do you know a poor onboarding process can ruin your efforts and affect your business revenue and growth? If not well onboarded you can lose those new customers to your competitors. That’s why you need to be careful with your new customer onboarding process.
What is the customer onboarding process?
But you could be wondering? what the hell is customer onboarding? Well, don’t worry it’s simply the process of incorporating your new customers into your business.
During this process, you guide your new customers on how to use your products, get the best value out of them, and how they help them solve their pain points.
Importance of the onboarding process
Increases brand awareness
Onboarding is a great way to show your customers how your business operates and help them understand it.
Your new customers are more likely to be your brand advocates when they know the value your brand brings to them.
As more customers advocate your brand and show others how awesome it is, other target customers engage with your brand, learn more about it, and probably convert into customers.
Customer retention
Many businesses lose 75% of their acquired customers in the first week of doing business with them.
This is mainly attributed to the poor onboarding process of those new customers. Well, onboarded customers are more likely to stick with one brand for a long time using their services or products.
They understand your business products or services well and know how to use them to solve their pains.
Reduces churn rate
Many reasons affect customer churn rate and one of them is a lack of knowledge or understanding of how to use your products or services.
Guiding your new customers on how to use your business can greatly reduce churn rates.
Improves customer experience
Customers are looking for brands that are giving them a great experience with their services or products. One way to help give your new customers a great experience with your business is through your onboarding process.
Many customers value experience more than the price of either products or services they want to buy. This is confirmed by the Invesp research report.
Help customers know your business value
Since you are not the only business in the market you need to give your best to let your customers know more about your business.
A great opportunity to show this is through your onboarding process. You guide your readers and show them the value your business will bring to them in helping them solve their pains.
Once your customers see the business value to them, they are more likely to use your business for a long time in solving their challenges.
Increase sales
Your onboarding process is a great way to help you increase your business sales. You don’t just need one-time customers but customers with a long customer live time value right?
Well, you can get that by giving your new customers the best onboarding experience and guide them on how to use your products or services to fully satisfy their pain points.
Improves product adoption
A great onboarding process gives your customers the real value of your business, how to use it for their needs.
Once they decide to make purchases from your brand, it brings more sales and revenue for your business.
Clients will adopt your product based on where they are in the adoption process.
Irrespective of their level in the adoption process, the great onboarding process can help you earn the trust of your new customers and add them to your list of loyal customers.
As you onboard your customers ensure you take care of the factors that can affect your new customer product adoption.
Increase customer engagement
You want your customers to engage more with your brand, learn more about what you offer and how it can help them, right?
Well, the onboarding process can really help with that. To effectively help your customers and engage them in your business you have to fully know your customers.
This will help you provide the right information, products, or services they need to solve their challenges.
Understanding your customers well makes it easy to engage with them as you address their challenges directly, win their trust, and draw them to your business.
Increase conversion rates
Most leads will convert into customers for your business from the great experience they get in your onboarding process.
As you market your brand, you use different channels to draw traffic to your business.
Target customers from these channels convert at different rates for your brand as shown by research by Episerver.
Tips to help create an awesome onboarding process
Use welcome videos
Videos have a high engagement rate. You can create videos to welcome new customers to your business.
People are more likely to engage with video content than text content. Your welcome videos can help show your new customers where to start and what to do as they engage with your business.
Apart from helping you with the onboarding process, great videos help reduce the bounce rate for your website.
Have a high-quality website
Your website design and content help customers understand your business better and in a short time.
Make sure your customers can navigate your website with ease. Also, create high-quality copies for your landing pages and blog post content.
Since you know your customers, create content that touches their pains and provides actionable tips to solve those challenges.
Your website should also be mobile-friendly. Most people are now using mobile devices to access online information and that includes your new customers.
Statista research shows that there will be more than 3.8 billion usages of smartphones by 2021.
If they can’t access your website from their mobile phone devices, you are more likely to lose them to your competitors.
Watch your competitors
You can watch what your competitors are doing and how their onboarding process is then implement it in your marketing.
Since you are in the same industry, you can know what works for your target customers for the onboarding strategy, work on it, and improve it to give more experience to these new customers.
Have a great support team
New customers will have questions at every step of their onboarding. Your business needs to have a support team to address every customer’s concerns in the shortest time possible.
Many businesses lose their customers during the onboarding process because of poor customer support.
If your new customers feel like your brand doesn’t care about them they will leave. Here is some statistics research that supports great customer service.
Use your previous customer testimonials
Customers feel comfortable doing business that is trusted by other people. They will first look for people who have used your business services or products and see what they say about it.
To help win the trust of your new customers you can use testimonials of your previous customers.
If you don’t have any reviews you can ask for them from your previous or current customers. Research shows that 76% of the customers will be more willing to leave a review for you.
Reviews and testimonials make it easy for them to trust your business as they can see other people who used your business and were happy.
Track customer experience metrics
As you onboard new customers to your business, you need to track their growth with your business.
There are different metrics you can track to help give them a great experience and increase sales and revenue for your business.
Personalize your communication
Customers appreciate brands that take their time to learn more about their needs and give them what they need.
A great way to show your customers you care for them is to personalize your communications.
Research by Gartner shows that 62% of customers make purchase deals with brands that personalize their communication.
Since you already have done your customer research and through your buyer personas know your customers better, deliver personalized content and information for them.
Best practices for the app onboarding process
Now that you have the tips to create the best onboarding experience for your new customers, here are the best practices for onboarding.
Use email marketing to educate your customers
Email marketing is still a great way to market your brand to your customers. Create a series of email campaigns to nurture your new customers as you educate and guide them.
You can also use email marketing to run customer surveys on how you can serve them better. Survey Anyplace research shows that email surveys have 30% response rates.
Run user experience tests
You want to know how your customers interact with your brand so that you can keep offering them what they need, right? Then you need to run user experience tests.
These tests will help you learn more about how your customers use your products or services to keep improving them and deliver great value.
Map customer journey
To deliver a great experience for your customers, you can map out their buying journey. Deliver the right information and help at each stage of their buying process.
Mapping your customer journey can help you improve customer targeting. Journey mapping can also help you shorten the sales cycle for your target customers and increase conversion and sales.
Run a search and choose the best journey mapping tool for your business marketing and onboarding process.
Provide your value quickly
As you onboard your new users help them to quickly see the value of your business to help them solve their challenges. In a simple term help them reach aha moments faster.
Focus on building customer relationship
You don’t want your new customers to use your business for some time and then join your competitors.
Then you should make it a priority to build a relationship with your new customers, engage them with your brand, and deliver products or services as they need them.
Collect customer feedback
Customers will have different views and opinions about your business as they use it. They will also give their feedback about your products or services.
It is important to ensure you work on your customers’ feedback and implement their suggestions.
You can also run surveys to collect customer feedback. Some customers will not leave their feedback but when asked they can give it.
Your business is all about your customer, not you. If they don’t get what they want from you they will leave your business and you don’t want to see your customers leave your business.
Conclusion
Converting leads to customers is hard and it’s far much easier to retain customers.
But you should be careful with your onboarding process because if it’s not carried out in the right way you end up losing your newly acquired customers.
Use the above information to create an amazing onboarding process for your new customers and put in place the best practices to onboard your customers and retain them.
