Onboarding emails are one of the first things a new user sees when they sign up for a service. To some, they’re helpful, while others see them as a nuisance — like instant spam mail. That being said, user reception is typically based on how good the onboarding email is.
In this article, we’ll teach you about the importance of such emails and how you can improve them.
Why onboarding emails are important
You might be wondering why so much thought is put into an email that customers will only look at once, then move into their trash folder. Well, it can make a big difference in customer retention for your startup.
This is your sole opportunity to get a customer locked into your service, by reassuring them that they made the right choice in signing up, walking them through any next steps they may need to complete.
A poorly constructed onboarding email can lead you to lose users who would’ve otherwise stuck around. Today, we’re going to go over some of the tactics and practices to keep in mind when writing your next onboarding email.
Related: 7 Common Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Highlight the value your product provides
The first thing that any onboarding email should do is highlight the value that your product or service provides. This doesn’t necessarily mean features; we want you to talk about the actual value that you bring to your customer.
Let’s compare the difference:
Features
- Invoicing
- Time tracking
- Task management
Value
- Easy-to-use invoicing functionality that saves you time on payday.
- Time-tracking feature helps you see how many billable hours each team member has accumulated throughout the month.
- Task manager ties in with the invoicing and time-tracking systems to make it easy to assign projects and pay for them once they’re done.
When detailing your services with a value-over-features tone, you’re sharing how your product makes customers’ lives easier, and helps ensure that your newly-acquired customer sticks around long-term.
Attach informational resources
Providing value goes beyond reminding new users of how each feature of your product or service makes their lives easier. Attaching resources that they may find educational or useful can also keep them engaged and ensure that they stay on your mailing list.
There are many things that you can include in your onboarding email. For one, you could embed links to various guides and articles on your company blog. In addition to increasing the value of your onboarding email, you’ll also drive more traffic to the website itself, turning this tactic into a double-win.
Lastly, adding a link to your FAQ page and YouTube tutorials (assuming you have a channel set up) will reduce the learning curve for new users and may even get you more subscribers in the process.
Include customer service
Speaking of learning curves, you can nip most problems in the bud by giving new users easy access to your customer service department. Contact should be clearly displayed in your onboarding email, along with a link to your live chat — if you have one, that is.
We highly recommend that you implement a live chat feature on your website, since statistics show that this form of communication has a 29 percent higher satisfaction rate than phone support.
Stay concise
Another thing to keep in mind when writing your onboarding emails the importance of remaining concise. If your onboarding emails are too long, then the recipient will most likely just skim through it and miss important details.
Try to stick to a range of 50 to 150 words. Any longer and your new users won’t read all the way through. Make use of bullet points and headlines to keep your email brief without sacrificing comprehensiveness.
Use a single CTA
Analysis paralysis isn’t just a catchy rhyme, it’s a real effect that can be observed in various situations across all industries. When the human brain is faced with too many decisions, it deems the choice too resource-intensive and thus puts it off for a later time.
If you bombard your new users with multiple CTAs, they’ll click off your onboarding email and forget to revisit it in the future due to the surprisingly short attention span that plagues our species.
Less is more in this case, since you’ll immediately raise your conversion rate by focusing on a single CTA. Once you’ve locked your user in, you can make use of future emails to compel them to perform other actions, but keeping things narrow initially is the safest bet.
Sign Up: Receive the StartupNation newsletter!
Send at the right time
The last thing that you should pay attention to is the timing of your email. Sending the onboarding email too early or too late into the day can decrease open rates.
Studies show that 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. CST (or 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. EST) is one of the best times to send out emails to your users. Your onboarding email is bound to be read promptly if you send them during this window.
Conclusion
As you can see, onboarding emails are your chance to get your foot in the door with new prospects and turn them into loyal customers, when you use the six tactics we covered above.
That’s all for now, and happy emailing!
