63% of customers consider the company’s onboarding program when making a purchasing decision.
It’s critical to have a solid customer onboarding plan in place if you want to increase client retention.
What is the significance of this?
Customer retention rates have the power to make or kill your firm.
Building a long-term commercial relationship with a new consumer is 16 times more expensive than cultivating the loyalty of an existing customer.
After five years, a one-percentage-point change in retention rates can have a 12-percentage-point influence on a company’s valuation.
With this in mind, it’s reasonable to say that when it comes to onboarding and retention, you can’t afford to just wait and watch.
8 reasons why customer onboarding is so important
Customers churn for the following reasons:
- They don’t understand what you’re selling.
- They don’t get any benefit from it.
The aforementioned issues are the major difficulties that onboarding aims to prevent, thus it’s critical for customer retention.
Let’s take a closer look at how providing a comprehensive customer onboarding program can help your firm.
- Boost in customer loyalty
When your consumer continues to run into roadblocks as they attempt to understand their new expense, they will get increasingly frustrated.
Don’t just wait for your consumers to approach you for help; mostly, they won’t, and you’ll miss out on the potential to retain them loyal, repeat customers. This is your one and only chance.
With a good onboarding process, you can ascertain that your consumers get the most out of your services or products without being compelled to counter several hoops.
They’ll reward you for the easy process with their commitment, allowing you to expand your account with more sales, cross-selling, additional sales, and other options.
- Dip in customer churn rates
If you see a rise in the amount of buyers who stay with you for a long time, you’ll notice a drop in your customer churn rates.
For organizations that depend on consumers paying a regular fee, either monthly, bi-monthly, or annually, the churn rate is critical.
It might help you figure out how efficient your client retention methods are and how quickly your company could expand.
From the time they progress into a customer, you can help drastically reduce churn by onboarding them.
- Multiplied revenue and lifetime value (LTV)
The lifetime value of a customer is the total amount of money you’ve generated from a buyer over the course of your association.
It’s common knowledge that recruiting new clients is far costlier than keeping existing customers.
As a result, by putting in place an efficient onboarding process that enhances client retention, you may raise existing customers’ profits and LTV, as well as help drive additional company success while consistently managing revenue generation.
- Brand rapport by word of mouth
When a customer enjoys a positive experience from your company, there’s a good chance they’ll tell their peers about it.
92 percent of people trust word-of-mouth (WOM) or recommendations from friends and family over all other forms of advertising and marketing, according to a Nielsen study.
As a result, WOM essentially functions as a cost-free kind of marketing with a high rate of conversion. What’s not to like about that?
Begin a relationship with your customer via a positive onboarding program, and you’ll be on your way to producing satisfied customers who will become brand ambassadors.
- Decrease in customer complaints
Your support team will receive fewer messages if you give new clients detailed instructions and recommendations on how to make proper use of your offerings.
This can help you save money on overhead and make your team free to handle more difficult customer issues.
Furthermore, your consumers do not want to spend time in a live chat queue or use up hours on hold, in wait for a solution to an easy set-up inquiry.
You may help lessen the requirement for the same during the early stages of adoption by using onboarding.
- Reduced acquisition costs
You should see a continuous stream of recurring clients as a consequence of implementing a good onboarding process, but you should also see a drop in your costs of acquisition.
You won’t have to worry about your churn percentage and devote all of your resources to obtaining and converting fresh leads each month to meet your goals if you have steady revenue from loyal clients.
Instead, you’ll be able to pay less and divide your budget more wisely so that your money grows at a consistent, sustainable rate.
- A step ahead of competitors
How to keep up with the ongoing competition?
This is a common question when firms aim to launch a new product or take the help of a consulting company, who can guide them to understand their goals and launch and evolve on their onboarding process.
For instance, in case of an app launch, engagement should last long after customers have been onboarded, the early phases of the user experience are extremely critical—for both the user and your business.
Consider a time when a user signed up for a free trial or a product, didn’t see the benefit right away, and then churned without looking back.
Your users could be frustrated in the same way if you don’t do a good job onboarding them. A negative experience with your goods benefits your competition.
Hence, a well-designed onboarding experience can result in low drop-off rates after signup, high free-to-paid conversion, and a low volume of support tickets – helping you stay ahead of your competitors.
- Conversion into paid customers
Helping customers understand and experience the value of your product will ensure that they not only start using it successfully, but will also give them a reason to log back in and use it again and again.
Customer onboarding is when your trial users get to see the value of your product if you offer a free or reduced product trial.
You’ll have a better chance of converting them into paying customers if you can offer actual value during the onboarding process, right at the start of their trial.
Smart tips to design an efficient user onboarding experience
You wouldn’t start a campaign without first developing a strategy; otherwise, your marketing will be incoherent and unsuccessful.
The same may be said for your onboarding programme for new customers. Before you produce anything that your customers will see, you need a goal and a strategy for getting there.
Of course, as you learn more about your customers, you’ll refine this, but you must start with a goal in mind. Keep your aim particular to your product and customer base when you develop your onboarding plan, and make sure it includes these three essential retention goals:
- Within the first week, get users to utilize your product more than once
- Create a usage pattern
- Make your product vital to your customers
Some of the data you collect about your clients during the marketing and sales activities will be carried over into the onboarding process. When you combine the three, you’ll have the highest chance of offering a positive client onboarding experience.
While you may have hundreds or thousands of interactions with different prospects, each of your customers only has one image of you.
The more you can treat your encounters with customers as a whole, the better.
For more information on SaaS user onboarding, check out Appcues’ article.
How does customer onboarding training help?
There are multiple stages of onboarding and training can help in each step:
- Registration process
It’s easy to believe that customer onboarding doesn’t begin until a consumer signs up for your service. However, we feel that the registration process is only the beginning of that adventure.
- Email greetings
Sending a welcome email to a new customer after they sign up is the next stage in your onboarding process. This email should drive them back to your product so that they may begin utilizing it and benefiting from it.
- Login for the first time
They may have previously viewed a product demo, toured your site, and looked at a lot of screenshots. However, the first time they log in, your customer’s true impression of your product is formed.
- Data imports, invitations, and integrations
The onboarding process for B2B goods is likely to entail more than merely learning how to use the product. Your product is now an integral part of your customer’s technology stack, and it no longer exists in a vacuum.
To get the most out of your product, customers may need to set up connectors with other tools they use, import data from other sources, or invite their colleagues.
- Walkthrough of the product
A product walkthrough guides your consumer through the processes necessary to get set up and execute important tasks within your product. Starting to use your product is the simplest and most effective approach for your clients to learn about it:
In the last two cases, a detailed onboarding training program — on how to use the product can be helpful.
Your learning session can be customized to include videos, images, and content that lend a detailed insight into the product/service you plan to offer.
Conclusion
One of the more delicate aspects of marketing is customer onboarding. This procedure has the potential to make or break a company.
It allows businesses to build relationships with their clients through surveys or even phone calls, in addition to earning income.
One of the most important advantages of customer onboarding is that it allows an individual to have an extraordinary level of trust in the organization and product.
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