Successful Customer Onboarding
Congratulations! You have a successful lead for your great product. Definitely you put lots of effort and money to earn it.
Maybe some ads on Google or targeted social media marketing, well prepared inbound marketing or some secret sauce you own anyway seems like you have a working funnel, great!
So what’s next?
Here most of the first time startups or startups which backed by technical teams confuse and lost these hard earned leads during their unplanned onboarding process.
Onbarding is a complex process, you should try to optimize and engage every step of your customer’s activity. For more detailed discussion I suggest ‘From Imposibble To Inevitable‘ by Jason Lemkin, It’s a must read book.
In this blog post I want to discuss more about very first interaction with your customer.
Welcome Messages: It’s time for great first impressions
Alright this is something important, you should remember that any average tech savvy user, customer mostly expect an introduction/welcome email. It’s kinda defacto standart set by all big tech corporations. Even some users (myself especially) can confuse about status of registiration. Did I successfully register? Everything is alright? and etc. So first lets remove the confusion here.
Second this is more important for you to deliver your message to customer directly. What kind of message you should share with your potential customer?
1. Introduction
It’s the first impression, welcome them friendly. Introduce your company and your product shortly.
2. Expectations
What can you do for them, what should they expect from you? Be humble and honest. Don’t set expectactions on false claims. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
3. Focus on benefits
Restate solid benefits which your product/service can provide.
4. Keep Open Loop
Don’t finish your message with a final period. It’s the very first time communication with your life long (hopefully) potential customer. Prepare them to expect your second message or call.
The Human Touch
Well in the first section we applied great welcome messaging strategy to our funnel. Set up expectations for our potential customer and ask them to wait for our next move. Great lets give your customer some time to understand your value proposition but don’t forget them for weeks. Couple of days should be alright.
Actually human touch still is important for a closing a deal. If you sell a product or platform which is expensive than xxx$, you definitely need to convince your customer. So skipping this step can kill your business.
Maintaining your customers and keeping information and interactions updated, well you definitely need a CRM tool. If you have sales team, customer success team; it will help you a lot to resolve communication, delegation problems between team members.
There are great CRM products outside, provide different features. You can go check alternatives.
Here in Herogi we use Hubspot and we love it. First of all it’s free and it has slick ui and integrations with well documented API. Last one especially important for us so we can actually create a workflow in Herogi.
Alright now we have our customers in our CRM tool, so one of our customer representative or sales developer can contact with customer and try to close deal by setting up follow up emails, calls, meetings.
Another benefit of this approach also now you have visible workflow to measure your success and find and fix broken steps quickly.
Automations
In this article I try to explain very first steps of successful customer onboarding process. But setting up all this flow can be costly. You need developers to implement this workflow in your register flow. And if you want to experiment more, probably you need to rework on this functionality. In fast paced and ruthless competitive world, It’s not agile.
Herogi can solve this problem for you. With couple of lines code integrations you can have your own onboarding process, completely automated and realtime.
Our onboarding process also works like this; if you register you’ll get a welcome email and then one of our team members will contact you via CRM and we’ll try to understand your problems and help you to grow your business.
To achieve this, we have defined two scenarios called WelcomeScenario and CRMScenario. These two scenarios accept same event called RegisterEvent. Welcome scenario is sending an email via Amazon SES api, meanwhile CRMScenario is registering customer and company on Hubspot via Http api.
You can find more about these scenarios in this post. We discussed more about automation itself and how we send email, how we connect to crm and so on.