Make your new customer's onboarding experience as seamless as ever with these Best SaaS Onboarding Emails!
Plug the Hole in Your Leaky SaaS Onboarding Bucket
Acquiring customers for an early stage SaaS startup is hard enough as it is. It doesn’t make any sense to invest more time, effort, and limited resources in acquiring new customers at the top of the funnel until your customer onboarding flow is air tight. Otherwise you are throwing good money after bad if churn is high and customers are not converting. A well-crafted, thought out onboarding experience is key and email is a big part of that. We’ve compiled some of the Best SaaS Onboarding Emails and approaches in this guide.
Customer Onboarding: What It Is?
The term "onboarding"relates to the procedure of acquainting a new client (or a potential customer if customers are using a free trial) with your company's offerings and how they work.
Typically, you will get an email saying, "welcome." But it shouldn't be the end of it. Customers must be walked through the steps of using the program for you to keep them as clients.
Customers that are familiar with the functionality of your products and make consistent use of them seem to be the ones you should prioritize retaining. They are also the customers who are more likely to switch or acquire things sold as add-ons.
Therefore, client onboarding has a variety of activities and processes:
- Offers warm greetings to your new client and gets the relationship-building process underway with them.
- That makes it easier for them to begin using your SaaS and get to value (the ‘aha’ moment) in your app as quickly as possible.
- Identifies various training materials and reference guides, and tool tips within the flow of the app.
- Transactional emails to track and nudge users along if they drop off at specific stages of your onboarding flow (for instance they haven’t uploaded a client list, completed a critical integration, etc.
- Make sure customers have a mechanism to get in touch with your organization if they want assistance.
Why Do You Need an Onboarding Sequence as a SaaS Business
Most SaaS businesses place a premium on client acquisition and retention. However, attrition rates are quite high, especially among smaller companies.
Based on data provided by 99Firms, businesses with yearly revenues of less than $10 million lose 20% of their consumers every year. The situation is much direr for new businesses, which record turnover rates of up to 60 percent.
How can you reduce customer attrition and keep as many new clients as possible? The best time to reach a customer is just after they have subscribed to your products and when they are particularly interested.
Your welcoming email and onboarding sequences will have a significantly higher open rate than the software industry average of 21.29%; many businesses claim open rates of 40% or more.
This implies that the onboarding process is where you can most effectively communicate the value of your product to new users.
Once you've got them to start utilizing your services frequently and confidently, you've got yourself a client for the long haul. Need advice? Hire one of the best SaaS Content Copywriter Services to build a customized onboarding email sequence.
The Anatomy of a SaaS Onboarding Email in FOUR Ways
Whether your SaaS is new or has been around for a while, our SaaS onboarding practicing checklist will come in handy.
✅ Complement Other Actions That Improve User Experience
Although it should go without saying, we will anyhow. For your SaaS onboarding to be effective, your product must operate well and be intuitive. If this doesn't, people will stop caring about your service and stop using it.
Using a product analytics tool, you can learn where users are dropping off throughout the onboarding process and whether you have a UX issue.
Redoing the product, including an in-app instructional, and sending out letters to clients and prospects are all viable options for addressing UX issues.
✅ The Timing of the Onboarding Email Holds Massive Significance
The subject of when to initiate contact with new users through email onboarding is a common one. Using a business analytics platform lets you know when it is ideal for delivering onboarding messages to your customers and how to communicate with them effectively.
Using a product analytics platform, you can find the typical time it takes customers to go through the onboarding procedure and identify any outliers.
✅ Keep in Constant Communication
Trial users should still be contacted through email even if they don't switch immediately. The internet portal Skillshare excels in this regard (without nagging users).
Regardless of whether the first normal onboarding campaign is unsuccessful, you will still get helpful communications (such as invitations to webinars and updates on upcoming courses). Until subscribers choose to opt-out, you can continue.
✅ Segment Users Based on Individual Activity
Users can be categorized in several ways depending on how they use your program. Then, you can formulate a plan of action based on their actions.
Segmenting your audience is crucial so that you can target them with relevant material at just the appropriate moment. This ensures that every email you send is useful in some way.
User information and personas can be developed using information gleaned from your CRM and eCommerce platforms.
Five Ideal SaaS Onboarding Email Examples
💡The "Buy Now" Option in Xero's Onboarding Email
Xero convinces not everyone after trying the demo. However, the recommendation or marketing asset has already persuaded others. Visitors to the Xero price page have the possibility of making an immediate purchase, or they can sign up for a free trial.
After signing up for a free trial of Xero, you will be brought to the onboarding interface. Customers who view this and then check their email are presented with a buy button in the form of a welcome message. Once they have things put in place, they can't imagine leaving.
You'll need to contact your banking institution and accountant to integrate this year's monetary operations. It's a huge job. It stands to reason that several trial customers would be prepared to jump and buy the product the moment they finish the trial.
💡Calendly
It's easy to schedule appointments using Calendly, a leading SaaS based calendaring tool. Calendly first develops their ethos as part of the onboarding flow, demonstrating why they are the best option before delving into the specifics of the product itself.
Thanks to this, customers can rest easy knowing they've made the greatest purchase and are in for top-notch support. The easy access to potential solutions and providers also saves client time.
This facilitates the product's use and serves as a helpful reminder to the consumer of all the features and benefits to which they are entitled.
💡Sleeknote
Sleeknote reports a 121% increase in click-throughs and an increase in open rates of 52.41% after modifying their onboarding routine. Sleeknote's complete onboarding process is based on segments. Therefore their primary objective was to gather as much information as possible on each new member right from the start.
They have also done an excellent job of explaining why segmentation is beneficial to their readers and why this should lead them to act. The email's layout is simple and pleasant, while the language is warm and conversational.
Seeing the Chief Marketing Officer's face helps customers relate to the company more personally. Additionally, there is a distinct call for action; the reader knows what they should do and why.
💡 SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey has some serious brains. They understand individuals get several emails daily. By interrupting the reader with the inquiry, "Ready to find solutions to your queries?"they sidestep the overused "Welcome to X."
This email's header is designed with the recipient in mind rather than the sender's business. Puts the users at ease by reiterating the product's capabilities.
Displays the company's "voice" via its branding. Underneath the email's header, SurveyMonkey's welcome email describes three ways the software is often used: collecting feedback from clients, staff, and end users.
💡 BrowserStack
Websites and apps can be tested on demand across a wide range of operating systems and browsers with BrowserStack, a cloud-based online and smartphone assessment platform.
BrowserStack recommends a straightforward and eye-catching design when communicating its key message to customers. Your clients can be engaged with your product, but if you use an onboarding email technique like BrowserStack's, you can win over their trust.
Customers are more likely to believe and stick with you if they know that "2 million+developers" use the same solution (BrowserStack) as them. The fact that areal person on the team writes the message helps reinforce the warm, welcoming tone that BrowserStack aims for.
How to Schedule SaaS Onboarding Emails
If you are using an app development platform like Firebase, there is often built in functionality to schedule SaaS onboarding emails. This will save you the trouble of all the tedious manual work. To schedule emails, you can execute them at certain times and write pubsub. schedule(). onRun() in Firebase to ensure that your procedure executes at the specified intervals. This practical way establishes a Pub/Sub subject and then utilizes Cloud Scheduler to trigger events on that subject.
Scheduler logic can be included directly into your functions' code in Cloud Functions for Firebase, eliminating the need for any additional steps at deployment time.functions.pubsub.schedule('your schedule') will provide a procedure that will run at a specified time. onRun((context)).
Other UserOnboarding tools like App Inbox, Customer.io and Intercom can be set up to trigger transactional based emails to guide your users through the signup and onboarding journey.
Emails in the onboarding sequence should be sent to new users depending on their past behavior. Therefore, it's important to think of every conceivable action a reader can take following getting an email. Personalizing and tailoring your emails to each unique reader will boost your open and click-through rates.
The Bottom Line: Get Ready to Scale Your Email Onboarding
It does take a little bit of work to design a customer onboarding process with well designed SaaS onboarding emails that considers the preferences of all your potential recipients. However, we found that the appropriate approach can increase your customer conversion rates and reduce churn.
For early stage SaaS companies, it doesn’t make sense to spend money on outbound paid ads or bringing on a B2B SaaS outsourced sales provider until the new customer onboarding sequence is solid. Otherwise you are putting water into a leaky bucket. Invest the time to build a seamless onboarding sequence for your SaaS first.
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