FREE CUSTOMER ONBOARDING TEMPLATE

What is the first step in the customer onboarding process?

According to growth marketer Ramli John, better user onboarding in includes 3 crucial steps:

1. Understand user success
2. Help them achieve that quickly
3. Celebrate their success with them

Step 1 is the most important but often overlooked step.

According to John, if you miss that step, two things usually occur:

1. You overwhelm users by pointing every feature out.
2. Users get lost because they have no idea what to do next.

Whether they came in from sales or marketing, transitioning your customer from a lead into a product user is an important transition.

We’ve already sold them on the final destination and now we’ve earned the right to help them get there.

What is the customer onboarding process?

The customer onboarding process isn’t just about product adoption.

Having a smart customer onboarding process is key to retaining users and reducing the amount of customer churn your product experiences.

Most people think of the customer onboarding process as a chance to show off what your product can do, whether it’s software or a physical product.

And it’s that narrow focus on the product that, counterintuitive to what you may expect, causes more customers to leave than you’d think.

Why is that?

Because even though a customer has paid you, they still don’t care about your product. They care about themselves.

They care about the transformation that your product can help them achieve.

Key things to remember in your customer onboard process are:

• Focus on the value, not just the features. People don’t buy your product for its shiny features – they buy to solve a problem. So the way to convert your new friends into new customers is to emphasize what benefits your product will bring to them. Your product can still be pretty and shiny, but that’s not your selling point.
• Give social proof. In Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence, he writes “we view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.” People decide what to do based on what other people are doing. Include relatable customer stories and product testimonials to encourage new subscribers to buy.

Don’t just ask – incentivize. A welcome email series is not the time to be hard selling your customers, but you can be more creative in your onboarding series. Offering a first-time purchase discount can be all the push a customer needs to convert.

Get a free customer onboarding template

There are a LOT of steps to remember to go through for customer onboarding — especially as you scale and, potentially, your customer base becomes more diverse.

Onboarding is where you not only show them what your product can do, but what THEY can do with your product. It’s also your best opportunity to upsell, cross-sell and turn them into raving product evangelists.

That’s why a template is so helpful. Finally be free of that nagging feeling that you forgot something important, or wondering how to reduce your customer churn.

This customer onboarding template includes important steps to carry you through every phase of your customer relationship.