Did you know you could lose 75% of your members the first week after sign-up?
Truly, the first 24 hours after a customer visits your membership site are some of the most critical for customer retention, and the best way to beat the odds and maximize your first impression is with a solid onboarding strategy.
But developing an onboarding flow is arguably one of the more frustrating parts of running a membership or subscription business. It takes careful planning to turn a first time visitor into a loyal repeat customer, but without a process in place, you run the risk of losing business permanently.
- On average, you will lose 75% of new members in the first week.
- 40-60% of members with a free trial will use your product or service once and never renew.
- Over two-thirds of SaaS companies experience churn rates higher than 5%.
- Most revenue comes from existing customers.
- Happy customers become your top referral sources.
- Customer retention lowers acquisition costs and increases revenue.
Your onboarding process can immediately increase customer satisfaction, reduce long-term churn, save you time, and even create new opportunities to upsell or cross-sell.
In fact, free users who complete the onboarding email prompt within 24 hours are 80% more likely to convert to paid customers than those who don’t!
So having an onboarding process is key. Think of it like a compass — a good one will guide your members to a final destination, otherwise known as their first win with your product or service.
But what makes a successful onboarding strategy? Let’s delve into the key elements of a successful customer onboarding strategy and how each element can be personalized for maximum ROI.
Important Considerations for Onboarding
Before we dive into the specific onboarding elements, let’s look at the key considerations that may impact your final strategy.
1. Your onboarding process needs to reduce friction
“Nobody cares about the thing you’ve designed, unless you can get them past the beginning.” – Julie Zhuo, Product Design VP at Facebook.
To the customer, friction means poor customer service. Friction is what makes customers leave your site or abandon your product and never come back. In fact, studies show that 78% of consumers will not make an intended purchase because of a poor customer service experience.
In other words, don’t create a three-page opt-in form when two questions will do. The easier the process, the higher the conversions.
At the same time, you don’t want to stop at sending one welcome email without any other follow-ups or check-ins during their first week.
Think of onboarding like a series of romantic dates. The first date is the most important, and you absolutely want to make a good first impression, but if you want things to keep progressing you need to “make plans” for what’s next. And you need to make those plans relatively quickly.
Most businesses have two key milestones for success:
- When a customer signs up for your product or service
- When they achieve their first success with your product or service
A large percentage of your customer churn takes place between those milestones, which is why the first few hours of interaction are crucial.
Ideally, your onboarding process should:
- Make sign-up and user registration effortless
- Create new opportunities to engage with your brand
- Promote trust in your brand and your customer service
- Give you valuable insights into user preferences and buying habits
Onboarding is a significant part of your customer experience, and customer experience initiatives have the potential to double your revenue and boost your reputation with customers. So before you finalize your onboarding process, make sure you can eliminate any unnecessary friction.
2. SaaS companies have different onboarding needs
In the SaaS world, engaging early is mission-critical for delivering the best possible customer experience. Your product is designed to solve a problem, and consumers want to know how to use your product to solve their problems as quickly as possible. Though you’ve probably designed your software or app to be user-friendly, there’s almost always an initial learning curve that may seem daunting to the new user.
Having a product tutorial or virtual walkthrough is a vital step to your SaaS onboarding process, one that other membership or subscription businesses may not think about.
Pay attention to empty states — those parts of your app or platform that welcome and instruct new users — as well as feature callouts, continued product education, and check-ins. They will be especially important to your onboarding.
3. Setting goals and tracking metrics is vital to customer retention
A successful member onboarding strategy has measurable outcomes, but as we’ve written before, measuring success isn’t just about one specific activity or metric. There are dozens of ways a customer might interact with you during the first weeks of onboarding, and you need to know which of those interactions are most meaningful.
Your ultimate onboarding goal is probably to get the customer to their second key milestone (their first successful ‘win’ with your product or service), but that’s not the only goal that matters.
Many products or services take longer to measure customer success, making a customer “quick win” unrealistic during the onboarding phase. Google Analytics can make “setting a goal” an onboarding milestone, for example, but not “running a report,” since that requires at least a few days or even months of data tracking to accomplish.
While the onboarding process can last for several months in some cases, you will probably benefit more from setting achievable goals.
4. Consider your approach: self-service, high-touch or low-touch
Your onboarding process provides a level of customer service and support, but that support comes in three flavors: self-service, low-touch, or high-touch.
Self-service is good for straightforward products or services or those with customers who love DIY (think startups, SMBs or mid-market). The self-service approach means having the majority of your resources available for customers to use on their own, like knowledge bases or forums, online courses, webinars, and so on.
High-touch is good for products or services that require a lot of personal attention from your team. Think of it as a “white glove” approach (usually embraced by mid-market or enterprise) for products or services that are more complex or personalized. Instead of a welcome email, perhaps your onboarding process includes a personal phone call or remote video conference with a customer.
Low-touch (or mid-touch) is a step above self-service but below high-touch. It’s a good option for the majority of membership or subscription products or services, especially if you’re a brand new business or startup. You usually have some form of self-service option but customers can also contact someone from your team if they need extended help.
5. Don’t be afraid to modify or change your onboarding process
Ultimately, your onboarding process will be unique to your business and should reflect your style, tone, and audience needs. While there are certain elements that are necessary for most businesses, don’t feel beholden to any specific method if it doesn’t work for your business model.
Don’t overthink it. Remember that the goal is to introduce your business to the customer and show the next steps in a frictionless way. That’s it.
Like any business process, your onboarding will evolve over time, particularly as you scale. Setting and keeping track of your goals and metrics can help you refine your strategy over time while ensuring you remain focused on the big picture. But don’t be afraid to modify the onboarding process as you receive feedback or implement new technology or tools.
Elements of a Successful Onboarding Strategy
The customer onboarding process generally looks something like this:
Sign-Up → Kick-Off → Education → Adoption → Retention
Sign-up is the initial contact you have with a new member or subscriber. Customer experience elements include opt-in forms, a greeting message and/or a welcome email.
Kick-off is the next phase where you introduce your platform, app, product, or service to a new member. This is where you can set expectations for the remainder of the onboarding process and/or provide an immediate next step, like account setup.
Education can come in many different forms, but the goal is to further educate members about your product or service. For example, a gym could have a video knowledgebase about using the equipment while a SaaS business might have a platform walkthrough or product demo instead.
Adoption is the phase where customers really start to use your product or service and are hopefully starting to see results. This phase includes nurturing actions, like drip campaigns, feature callouts, or upsells to new features or membership tiers.
Retention is both a part of the onboarding process and also what happens after the process is complete. This is where you monitor activity, track metrics, end send check-in emails to ensure that they’re still happy with your product and achieving their goals. This phase may also include customer feedback.
Nail Down Your Onboarding Elements
With the above in mind, here are the basic elements of a successful customer onboarding process:
- Opt-in form
- Welcome email
- “First login” greeting
- Account setup (empty states)
- Product demo and/or walkthrough
- Feature callouts
- Upsell opportunities
- Check-ins
- Customer feedback
Again, this may be different for a SaaS company than it will be for another membership or subscription business, but generally speaking, these steps will create the easiest path for customer onboarding success.
Create Your Onboarding Timeline
“If you hold a customer’s hand for 90 days, they’ll be loyal for life” – John Jantsch
You will need a clear outline of your onboarding process. While there is some room for experiment, a good rule of thumb is to prioritize communication immediately after the first contact, once within the first 24 hours, and then strategically over the first 30-60 days.
For instance, if your onboarding email drip campaign looks like this:
Your timeline might look something like this:
It’s important to keep your customers at the forefront of your mind when creating your timeline. Consider different triggers for active users versus inactive users, and watch your data to see if customers are using your product or service, when or how often they’re logging in, and whether or not your self-help solutions are being utilized.
And for larger companies that have to work cross-functionally, remember to ensure your timeline meshes with your other marketing initiatives or product launches. Work together to ensure all of your necessary touchpoints are understood by everyone involved.
How to Measure Onboarding Success
One final piece to consider is how you will measure the success of your onboarding. There are roughly four steps:
- Step 1: Define your goals
- Step 2: Create onboarding milestones
- Step 3: Choose your metrics
- Step 4: Collect feedback and refine
Step 1: Define your goals
After a new user signs-up to become a member for the first time, what do you want them to do next? And how long should it take them?
Those are the questions you need to ask when considering tracking metrics. If your goals is to get free trial users to convert to Tier 1 members in the first month after onboarding, then you probably want to include upsell opportunities as part of your process. On the other hand, if your ultimate goal is to get them to use your product in the first few days after sign-up, you may need to send feature callout emails instead.
Before you start tracking and crunching numbers, be sure to define the primary goal of your onboarding process. That will dictate the elements you ultimately include.
Step 2: Create onboarding milestones
Once you know what you want them to do, you need to decide how soon you want new members to do it. The timing here is critical because 40 to 60% of users who sign up for a free trial will use your product once and never come back. Only 2.7% of them will stick around after day 30.
As HiverHQ points out, most people stop using a product NOT because it’s not useful or doesn’t have the capability to solve problems, but because it takes a lot of effort to get started. By developing onboarding milestones, you speed up the learning curve.
The major onboarding milestones for most businesses include:
- First sign up
- First login
- First action or quick win taken
- First successful outcome achieved
Each milestone will have its own set of metrics to track and each will trigger an action as part of your onboarding process. For example:
- First sign up → Triggers welcome email
- First logon → Triggers welcome message and empty states
- First action or quick win → Triggers product or service education emails, feature callouts, etc.
- First successful outcome → Triggers feedback surveys, follow-up emails, etc.
Once a milestone has been hit, you can send a new email that builds momentum to the next actionable step. This creates a cycle of customer nurturing — triggered by user behavior — that can be fully automated.
To take this a step further, you can turn your milestones into a checklist that can help new users understand the onboarding process. For example, Toast has an onboarding guide that outlines their milestones in a clear, concise way, and specifies that their team will “do the heavy lifting” to get the customer onboarded.
They’ve reduced friction and outlined the next steps for new users with what is essentially one piece of documentation. This is a particularly effective way to do your onboarding milestones if you’re a SaaS business. But in order to create helpful content like this, you will need to create your milestones first.
Take some time to think through the most important steps and what you want new users to accomplish in their first few days.
Step 3: Choose your metrics
Once you have a clear understanding of your overall goals and your specific onboarding milestones, the next step is determining which metrics you will track.
Onboarding success is often measured by time and user behavior. As in, how much time does it take for users to complete different onboarding milestones?
Generally speaking, there are five metrics that your business will need to track:
- Time to complete onboarding — This measures how many days it takes to complete all of your onboarding milestones.
- Customer progression — This measures the quantifiable time taken to complete individual milestones, such as first logon, first quick win, etc.
- Customer response rate — This measures customer response to onboarding, which may be tracked with customer feedback, surveys, number of forum questions or support tickets, etc.
- Escalation response time — This measures your response time between the logging of a member complaint and its resolution.
- Product adoption rates — This measures how often and how effectively the customer is using your product.
The goal of measuring is to see the effectiveness of your communication and instructions. If done right, it will alert you to any potential bottlenecks or pain points during the onboarding process.
You might also include metrics like:
- Welcome email open rates and click-through rates
- Other milestone email open and click-through rates
- Customer logins to your platform or website
- Customer churn rate
- Customer lifetime value (LTV)
- Other customer retention metrics
Be sure to check out our recommendations for the best tools for tracking member engagement to learn more about these success metrics.
Keep in mind that although these metrics might matter less overall than, say, your product adoption rates or customer response rates, they can also point to key issues with your onboarding emails or your SaaS product/platform itself. If your email open rate is low, you may need to tweak your welcome emails, for instance.
Step 4: Collect feedback and refine your process
During the later stages of onboarding (usually once members have completed their first login or have been using your product for a few weeks) you will need to collect feedback. There are several methods for collecting feedback, including creating a customer feedback forum, sending surveys, or using more high-touch methods like calling customers directly.
Your goal should be to collect customer feedback by asking pertinent questions. For example, if your customer hasn’t completed the first key milestones in your onboarding process, find out why. HiverHQ has some great examples in their onboarding guide of questions to ask, including a “How was your first week” email touch-base:
And a quick feedback survey:
If you’re a SaaS subscription business, you can (and should!) include feedback opportunities in your platform or product itself. Welcome messages, pop-ups, and empty states can help with this, although sending out customer surveys outside of your platform is a good alternative to save time.
But what if you’re a new business or your members don’t respond to surveys?
To collect customer feedback data without directly involving your customers, there are several other strategies you can employ, including:
- Heat maps — Heat maps show you how customers behave on your site or platform and provide details on areas viewed, links clicked, and more.
- Session replays — These tools record and replay customer interactions with your site or app and can provide valuable data on time spent on sections of your site or even on your onboarding process. time customers spend on each section of your onboarding process. Popular session replay tools: mouseflow.com, luckyorange.com
- Funnel analytics — Tools like Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, and other sales funnel analytic tools can help you identify other issues that may be hindering your onboarding process (or vice versa), such as customer experience, churn, and so on.
Remember that the feedback part of your onboarding process can come later. The most important things to get set up first are your opt-in forms, welcome emails, and any messages you will send in the first week of contact.
After a few months of running customer through the process, you will have a better idea of what metrics to measure and what feedback matters most. Take it a step at a time.
Next up, we’ll go through each element of the onboarding process to give you an overview of what to expect and provide some tools and resources to refine your process more.
Opt-In Forms and Welcome Emails
Let’s look at the first two touchpoints of your onboarding strategy — your opt-in form and your welcome email.
Opt-In Forms
While the welcome email is a staple of your onboarding strategy, the first step actually begins as soon as a site visitor decides they want to be part of your business — it all starts with the opt-in! This is why you should also pay attention to how your opt-in forms are performing.
Ideally, your opt-in forms should offer a frictionless way to “come aboard.”
According to Marketing Experiments, friction is the “psychological resistance to a given element in the sales or sign-up process… friction is the aggravation factor.” Basically, site visitors will only give you their information if they trust you, and the more you do to “prove” you’re trustworthy, the less resistant they will be to sign up.
Trust, and subsequently trust signals, are therefore major factors for conversion. When it comes to opt-in forms, building trust means minimizing complexity and showing value. There’s a reason most forms today are short forms with nothing more than a headline, one or two form fields, and a CTA.
The best opt-in forms are fast and easy to complete and lead to a clear-cut next step. With that in mind, let’s look at the elements of a successful opt-in form.
Trust-promoting opt-in forms:
- Have a headline and/or subheader that shows the value (what’s in it for members)
- Ask for only the absolutely essential information upfront
- Offer multiple ways to sign up, including social autofill
- Have a clear CTA (what to expect next)
Take a look at some examples. WordPress.com, for instance, has several opt-in forms on their homepage, all of which have a clear value proposition (a free account that can “do it all”), a single CTA that explains exactly what to expect (“Start with free” — you know you’re signing up for a free account)…
… and multiple options for sign-on to make it fast and easy to opt-in.
Here’s another example from Canva of a frictionless account creation opt-in form:
What’s notable about Canva’s opt-in is that they don’t even ask for your name. You either start with social login (one-click), or you give your email. And they use multiple steps when more information is required, so you never have to “give too much away” at any one time — another trust signal.
Having an optimized opt-in form doesn’t mean you can’t provide more information, however. Copyblogger, for example, shows plenty of value on their opt-in form landing page, but keeps the form itself relatively simple:
There are plenty of ways you can optimize your forms for trust. Consider these best practices when creating your opt-in forms. Or, consider using a tool designed to generate trust and drive qualified leads, like Sumo, which will help you build high converting forms with a low-code tool.
Welcome Emails
“The moment that someone opts in to your email is the best possible moment to contact them.”–Dave Shrein
After opt-in, the next essential touchpoint is the welcome email. Getting your welcome message right is paramount to onboarding success, especially considering how important it is to reduce customer churn.
The average open rate for a welcome email is 50%, which means it’s 86% more effective than other forms of communication, and users who receive a welcome email show 33% more engagement with a brand over those who don’t receive one.
So what makes an effective welcome email? Ideally, your welcome message should:
- Welcome and thank the new member for signing up
- Encourage further engagement with your brand
- Explain next steps and provide a clear CTA
To that end, your welcome email should follow some necessary best practices. Pay special attention to these key components of your welcome message:
Timing — When will you send out the message? Your welcome email should ideally trigger soon after opt-in, although experts disagree on the “best” time to send a welcome email. In fact, 76% of people expect to receive a welcome email immediately after subscribing, although some may see an automated message as less than genuine.
According to Mario Peshev, a good rule of thumb is to send a welcome email about an hour after opt-in:
“My good rule of thumb is in 45-60 minutes. Sending an intro (welcome) email right away seems incredibly automated and may come out as off-putting. An hour later appears more genuine. It’s not too late and the subscriber still remembers the initial interaction.”
Personalization — Who is the message from? Who does the message address? Consider how you will personalize your message, as it can impact open rates. In fact, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. Whenever possible, include your subscribers name, and send the welcome email from a real human at your company.
Design — What branding, tone and style will the message convey? The visual appeal of your welcome email does matter for conversions, although ultimately a simple, well-written email with minimal design can be equally effective.
The goal is to follow your brand’s aesthetic without pulling focus from the message itself.
Don’t be afraid to play around with the design. Fashion designer Steven Allen has a beautifully hand-lettered typographic design for his welcome emails, for example, which looks more like an invitation to a fancy party than a traditional email:
However, SaaS subscription companies like Headspace often sticks to their trademark style, in this case, fanciful illustrations and copious amounts of white space:
If you’re still working on your branding, don’t hesitate to play around with multiple designs and A/B test your emails. Here are some A/B tests you can run on your welcome emails to refine your process.
CTA — What action is expected of the receiver after reading it? The CTA is arguably one of the most important elements of your welcome message. Although you want to greet new users, you also want them to take a next step. Consider what action they can take, whether that’s finishing their account setup, achieving first login, or hitting another onboarding milestone.
Headspace, for example, encourages users to “start with the basics” and run through a few of their beginner lessons:
It’s an incredibly actionable CTA, especially for users of the service who are there to engage with their courses.
In addition to timing, personalization, design, and CTA, you should also follow these welcome email best practices when creating your welcome emails:
- Begin with a “thank you”
- Include whitelisting instructions
- Explain the benefits of being a subscriber
- Offer a personalized incentive
- Educate new subscribers about your brand
- Set expectations about communication frequency
- Include relevant links and information
- Leverage interactivity to encourage engagement
You can find more information about creating engaging and effective welcome emails in the Onboarding Tools and Resources section of this guide.
First Login, Account Setup, and Empty States
After your welcome message, the ball is in your new member’s proverbial court. The next interaction with your business is completely up to them, although for most their first action will be to log in and begin creating their account. First login and account setup are both important milestones in onboarding.
First Login and Account Setup
If you want to reduce churn, take a good, long look at your login experience. What actually happens when they hit the Login button for the first time? What options or instructions are they presented with? ChartMogul offers some key considerations for a new member’s login experience, especially if you’re a SaaS subscription business.
Some things to think about:
- Empty UI — In some cases, members will be presented with a wealth of information on their first login (doubly true if they’re logging in to your app or platform). But how will they know what to do first? What cues will point them in the right direction?
- First action — What do you want users to do first? Complete their member profile? Fill out their business information? Add a photo? Decide their first action and then provide users with a clear path to achieve their first win.
- Celebration — How will you celebrate success? Take a chance to thank them and remind them of why they’re members of your business.
Part of the first login experience will depend on the tools or plugins you use to manage your member backend. For example, we recommend using MemberMouse — a powerful turn-key WordPress member management platform — for their customizable member area and unique member login pages.
MemberMouse is made to work seamlessly with your existing WordPress themes; including optional Built-in CSS on Core Pages to help better integrate MemberMouse pages and allow you more flexibility in your Checkout, Login, My Account, and Forgot Password page appearance.
As for the actual design of your login, the same considerations as your opt-in forms apply to your login process. Keep it simple, make it frictionless, and focus on highlighting core features or benefits first.
If free content is one of the benefits of being a member, make sure members know where to find it. Copyblogger, for instance, recaps the benefits of being a member and instructs users to “get started” after the first login.
The landing page also includes quick links for core benefits, like relevant content, recent announcements, and notifications:
There are additional UI prompts when you first login that explains what to look for, what to do next, so there’s no confusion about how to interact with the member’s area.
The goal is to design a customer onboarding process that directs new users to your core features or benefits on their first login. Tell them how it works. Show them how to complete their account profile. Point them to their next steps in using your product, service or platform. Your empty state design can help with this process.
Empty States
Empty states are screens in your UI that are not yet full of information, but which will eventually be filled by data from the member. For example, if you’ve just joined Instagram as a new member, and you haven’t filled out your profile or posted any content, then you will see this:
That’s an empty state. Traditionally, empty states are overlooked as part of the design process, as most designers focus on how best to display content or data. But it’s a good idea to use design elements such as text, arrows, or other cues to show people how to use your platform as part of the onboarding process.
Here’s a good example of empty state design:
Or take Salesforce’s handling of their first login empty state as an example:
A pop-up appears triggering a tour of the core features, with further instructional and educational prompts:
Empty states are part of your product whether you design for them or not, so you might as well take advantage of them. Any screen on your site designed to be populated with user data that has a default empty state should be viewed as an opportunity to educate and engage members.
Consider the difference between these two examples, the first of which looks like this:
While the second looks like this:
If you’re a first time user of this app, and you only had the first example to go on, would you automatically know what to do next? If you’re a digital native, maybe. But that brings in a lot of assumptions about your users.
Never assume a brand new member knows absolutely anything about your product or platform.
As Just In Mind points out, empty state design is an opportunity to make your users’ experience even better. Pay close attention to empty states as part of the first login experience, as well as the onboarding process as a whole.
For more information on empty state design, check out AppCues guide here or find more resources in the Onboarding Tools and Resources section.
Product Demos and Walkthroughs
For membership or SaaS subscription businesses that have products, platforms, or apps with any sort of learning curve, having product demos, walkthroughs, and other low-touch options as part of your onboarding strategy is more than just a nicety — it’s essential.
The goal of a product demo or walkthrough is to break things down.
One of the most common onboarding mistakes is to ask users to learn your entire platform or product right away, especially if you have a complicated SaaS platform or app. Information overload can send new members running for the hills, but you still need to educate them. So what’s the best strategy?
Start by breaking down your product education into easy-to-consume bites of information. This can include but is not limited to:
- Empty states with gamification elements
- Product or platform demos or tutorials (walkthroughs)
- Low-touch self-service options (knowledgebase, support center, etc.)
Empty states with gamification
For example, Dropbox uses its empty states as an opportunity to educate members on how to upload files, share links, and more.
Rather than having a pop-up that says “upload your files,” their onboarding prompts guide the user through granular steps. For example, Dropbox offers tiny “assignments” like sharing a file:
This is a type of gamification — games, quizzes, or other interactive elements, such as Dropbox’s “assignments” designed to educate — and it’s an easy way to introduce users to your product while encouraging them to engage early and often.
Product or platform demos
New users to your product or platform will need help learning how to use it. For SaaS, this means creating a demo that allows users to experience it firsthand and play around with its features.
For example, Gravity Forms has a free (personalized) demo site that allows you to test almost all of their basic and advanced features:
Of course, this might be overkill for your business. In fact, the one downside of the Gravity Forms demo is that while they provide copious amounts of support in the form of a knowledge base (and customer service), the demo itself doesn’t give you many instructions. It’s a useful tool for showcasing the full power of the tool itself, but some users may need more or different education.
If you can use your own product to show how it works, that’s even better. Trello, for example, is a project management tool that built their onboarding guide directly into their product, with cards that both show and tell the user how things work.
The bottom line is that it doesn’t have to be complicated, but you should create something that shows users how your product works.
Keep in mind that your members have different learning styles and/or accessibility needs.
Consider:
- The complexity of your product/service — How steep is the learning curve?
- The technical knowledge of your audience — Are they usually tech-savvy or will they need expert advice?
- The types of media they enjoy — Would they prefer a video to a PDF guide?
The point of your product demo is to TEACH as well as to show off your product. If your product has a particularly steep learning curve, consider going above and beyond with your onboarding education.
If you are not as technically savvy as others but you want to create helpful video tutorials and product walkthroughs for your business, consider using a DIY service like Adobe Spark, a free service that lets you create short videos using stock images and video clips.
Low-touch self-service options
In addition to product demos and video tutorials, a great way to provide help is through low-touch self-service customer support options, such as a knowledge base or resource center on your website.
Take Mailchimp’s knowledge base as a perfect example:
They have guides and tutorials for almost any feature of their platform located in an easily searchable section of their site.
You can create a knowledge base for your WordPress member site using either themes or plugins.
Plugins are good options for DIYers who understand code and basic CSS styling. Using a knowledge base plugin is good if you need to integrate with an existing WordPress install. But because the plugin isn’t designed specifically to work with your theme, you might need to add some custom styling and theme-specific functionality.
Themes provide more assurance that your knowledge base will look and function better off the bat. If you don’t know code, the theme will handle the heavy lifting for you, making it a good option for those who are DIYing but don’t have a lot of technical knowledge.
However, if you already have a WordPress website you probably have your theme chosen, and you should be careful with premium WordPress themes anyway, as they can slow down your site.
Check-ins and Upsell Opportunities
Onboarding is a finite process, but it shouldn’t end directly after the welcome email. In fact, user education should never really end, and the last stretch of onboarding is the best time to send additional educational emails, call out new features, and capitalize on sales opportunities.
Once members have completed the first initial milestones of your onboarding process, it’s time to create a plan for continued education. This might include:
- Celebratory messages — What have members achieved during onboarding so far?
- Feature callouts — What features might members might not know about right away?
- Member benefit callouts — What member benefits have been ignored or overlooked?
- Continued education — What else do members need to know to hit their milestones?
- Surveys and check-ins — How has their experience been so far? Do they have any other feedback or questions you can help with?
In addition to planning out your welcome email, you should plan to touch base with users during the initial few weeks and months of membership.
Celebratory messages
A celebratory email, for example, can thank the user for completing a milestone or for hitting another goal. This is different than a “thanks for signing up!” welcome message, as it highlights an action that a member has taken or marks another significant moment, such as an onboarding anniversary.
Headspace does a great job of sending out thank you messages when members hit specific milestones, even if they’re not part of the onboarding process:
While these emails don’t always fall under the purview of onboarding, you can still plan ahead to send thank you’s as part of your onboarding strategy, especially if your milestones stretch out over a significant period of time.
Feature callouts
Feature callouts are not only great for increasing member engagement but also for creating new upsell opportunities.
Grammarly, for instance, is a free subscription service, but they limit some member benefits for free users. To keep free users engaged, Grammarly will frequently send emails checking in on them and asking if they’re using all of their free features:
They also send out similar emails asking if users want to upgrade to Grammarly Premium to get even more features. By regularly pointing out what users are missing, they increase the odds that a free member or free trial member will become a lifelong paying customer.
Member benefit callouts
Like feature callouts, benefit callouts can show members what they’re missing and drive them back to your site. They can also be opportunities to upsell members on more benefits. Take this example:
Not only does it highlight member benefits that the user received during their free trial, but it also mentions features that they could receive if they came back.
Continued education
What else do members need to know to hit their milestones? Just as you should never assume your audience is more technical or tech-savvy than they are, you should never assume that they’re using your service, product, or member benefits to their full potential.
Sending “continuing education” emails doesn’t have to be complex. Like feature callouts, these messages are designed to offer tips, advice, and additional customer service opportunities so customers don’t leave because they feel lost or confused.
Most shoppers won’t ask you for help, they’ll just walk away.
It helps to send out tips and recommendations, especially during the initial stages of onboarding where confusion (and lost revenue opportunities) may be higher.
Take this email from Evernote as an example:
You’ll notice that it’s:
- Short and easy to read
- Clearly points out a key piece of information
- Offers a clear CTA that leads back to the website
- Has an additional feature callout (Evernote Web Clipper)
- Is the first in a series of “tips” sent by the brand
It’s also an email that could be sent at any time, not just during onboarding, although the fact that it’s included in the onboarding stage is better since it points to features that new members would want to explore.
Surveys and check-ins
Finally, surveys and check-in messages can help you solidify your relationship with new members, as well as provide valuable feedback on your onboarding process, your product, your customer service, and even your brand. Surveys and check-in emails should always be a part of your onboarding process!
Here’s a perfect example from Instapage of a short check-in email based on a lack of user engagement:
It’s not pushing the user to come back, but it is reminding them that they have the option as well as offering a chance for feedback if their experience was rough. More than half of Americans have scrapped a planned purchase or transaction because of bad service, so it pays to follow up.
Sending a check-in email will give you the chance to not only recapture a potential lost lead but to refine your business further. Otherwise known as a win-win.
Onboarding Tools & Resources
Want to learn more about developing an effective member onboarding strategy? Check out these tools, guides, and resources.
Onboarding Tools
- UserGuiding — Create interactive product tours in minutes with the most non-technical friendly tool, without coding.
- AppCues — Deliver a frictionless onboarding experience with AppCues’ Product-Led Growth framework and customer experience platform.
- Intercom — Drive loyalty and growth at every stage of your customer lifecycle with the best in a real-time business messaging system.
- WhatFix — Whatfix is a performance support platform for businesses to ease onboarding, improve support and reduce training effort for its users.
Customer Success Tools
- Crazy Egg — Use Crazy Egg’s tools to monitor member engagement and track onboarding success, including heatmaps, recordings, A/B testing & more.
- Mouseflow — Mouseflow lets you replay the full visitor experience to identify pain points, boost conversions, and optimize your site using heatmaps and more.
- Lucky Orange — Quickly compare historical statistics and see what keywords, locations, referrers, tweets, languages, etc. are driving traffic and behaviors on your site.
- Kissmetrics — Kissmetrics’ cost-effective, user-based analytics can lower churn, increase sales. and drive more revenue per customer. Use People Search to identify new members and track engagement from a single dashboard.
- Gravity Forms — Build powerful customer engagement surveys with Gravity Form’s low code drag-and-drop form builder.
Opt-In Forms Tools and WP Plugins
- Sumo — Sumo’s suite of tools, previously known as SumoMe, can help you add many useful features to your WordPress website, including optimized opt-in forms and pop-ups.
- OptInMonster — Create visually stunning opt-in forms using pre-built templates designed for maximum conversions, or start from scratch with a blank canvas. Fully customizable, no code needed.
- WP Notification Bar — A freemium option from MyThemeShop, this WordPress plugin helps you create notification bars to build your email list.
Welcome Emails Tools and Resources
- Mailchimp — Mailchimp has email marketing, ads, landing pages, and a CRM tools to grow your business. Create high converting welcome emails with their drag-and-drop builder, or customize your own.
- GetResponse — Send welcome emails, online surveys, and follow-up autoresponders with this simple and easy-to-use interface.
- Active Campaign — Use Active Campaign’s predictive sending to ensure your welcome emails are sent at just the right time for each recipient when they’re most likely to engage.
- Campaign Monitor — With Campaign Monitor, you can automate your testing, tracking, and email optimization with interactive analytics from an industry-leading company.
- Nutshell Email Templates — Roll out the red carpet for new customers with these customizable welcome email templates for every business.
- 7 Welcome Email Examples: How to Write Emails That Make a Splash (Instapage)
Empty State Design Resources
- 106 Design Inspirations for Empty States (UI Garage)
- Getting past the empty state: How 5 popular CRM tools onboard users (AppCues)
- 3 Good Practices for Displaying Empty States (User Guiding)
Product Demo Tools
- Nickelled — Create step-by-step guided tours of your software with a point-and-click interface that makes product walkthrough easy.
- Animoto — Animoto makes it easy to create videos to showcase your products or ecommerce site. Make how-to videos, product demos, and more.
- Upscope.io — Upscope’s Co-browsing, the no-download, effortless, interactive screen sharing built for onboarding and support.
- Design Wizard — Design Wizard is an excellent demo video maker for effective online visual content creation. Leverage over ten thousand high-quality video and video templates available in their library.
- Adobe Spark — Adobe spark is a free tool to create demo videos using a low code platform. Make custom videos in minutes. No design skills needed.
Onboarding Guides and Tips
- The Ultimate Customer Onboarding Guide (HubSpot)
- A Guide to SaaS Customer Onboarding (ChartMogul)
- Customer Onboarding: How 4 Leading SaaS Companies Design the Experience (Medium)
- Matt Sornson, Head of Growth at Clearbit, on Personalizing User Onboarding (Amplitude)
- 76 Tips to Optimize User Onboarding (AppCues)
- 10 Great Examples of Customer Onboarding That You Can Learn From (GrooveHQ)
- The Art and Science of Effective Customer Onboarding (video) (Amity)

Joanne Penn
Joanne is a content strategist at MemberDev. She helps B2B and SaaS companies promote their message and drive engagement through well-researched content marketing.