Steps to Creating a Customer Onboarding Email Template

What Components Should Customer Onboarding Email Templates Contain?

A customer onboarding email template includes a series of emails (email sequences) created to introduce new users to your SaaS platform by guiding them smoothly through its key features. If crafted well, they encourage continual engagement and ultimately boost customer loyalty.

• A welcome email
  • It should contain a warm welcome to your platform, an introduction to it, an explanation of why users love it, and a step-by-step guide to setting up the account. Don’t forget to offer assistance if there is a need for it.
• Tutorials and tips emails
  • They should provide educational materials to shorten users’ time to value (TTV). Include self-service resources, tutorials, and other useful materials.
• Special feature promotion emails
  • These serve as a presentation of your SaaS product’s key features that provide the most value to users. Explain how these specific features work, present real-life use cases and benefits, and provide tips to maximize their efficiency.
• Advanced tips and support emails
  • Support email is customized for those users who have already taken time to explore the product and are ready to make the most of it. Present them with the hidden gems and some advanced features, share best practices for optimization, and teach them how to leverage support resources.
• Check-in emails
  • Check-in email should contain a few questions about your customers’ experiences, like what has been more valuable for you, do you need help with anything, and do you have any suggestions or feedback? By having insight into their experience, you can refine future onboarding emails to ensure their journey remains exceptional.
• Expiry emails
  • They should remind users about the upcoming end of their trial period to encourage them to try out the features they missed. Include compelling CTAs like annual plan discounts or subscription upgrades to motivate users to continue using the product. A helpful tip – do this a day or two before the trial expiration date! If you remind them 10 days prior to trial expiration, they might simply forget about it. 
• Re-engagement emails
  • These are tailored for inactive users who need a little push to re-engage with your platform. They should focus on the product’s main benefits, offer discounts, and include clear options to unsubscribe.

This is just a starting point for structuring effective SaaS customer onboarding email templates. To ensure your users a seamless onboarding experience, your main goals should be the personalization of the messages to fit the customer’s needs and customer empowerment towards successful and more efficient product usage. Check out other tips for improving onboarding.

Steps to Creating an Email Onboarding Sequence

After providing you with customer onboarding email examples, let’s see what an effective email onboarding sequence should involve.

Determine the email onboarding sequence objectives

Set the exact goals of your onboarding sequence—should it educate users, promote specific key features, or encourage certain actions?

Segment your customers

To understand your customers’ preferences and behavior, you first need to segment them into specific groups based on demographics, platform interaction, behavior, etc. With customer success platforms like Akita, you can build targeted segments by filtering on the imported traits of contacts and their KPI modifications. Then, you can monitor groups’ performance via visualized metrics and refine your onboarding strategy as you go.

Transition users to the next steps

Once the customer reaches a certain milestone or completes a sequence, transition them to the next stage by sending instructive emails.

Monitor and optimize your onboarding email sequence

By analyzing open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates regularly, you are getting an in-depth knowledge of the sequence’s performance. In case the rates are not satisfactory, you can optimize subject lines, CTAs’, and, of course, content. Also, analyze their feedback to identify areas for improvement. By keeping the customer onboarding email sequence relevant and engaging for your users, you are one step closer to creating an effective onboarding experience! To go a step further, think about automating the onboarding process (not the whole process!).

Benefits of Email Onboarding

By delivering meaningful content that addresses customers’ needs at every point, you are one step closer to creating a strong bond with them. Personalization in onboarding is vital for customer loyalty, and if customers get a grasp of the product’s value in the early stages, they will most likely stick to it. Therefore, well-crafted customer onboarding templates can reduce churn, which is one of the greatest email onboarding benefits!

Also, onboarding emails give you an opportunity to gather and analyze user feedback to gain an understanding of customer behavior and tailor effective onboarding strategies. This is how you can improve the customer experience and satisfaction and, ultimately, boost customer retention.