How to Create an Outstanding Onboarding Series

How to Create an Outstanding Onboarding Series

August 17, 2022

One of the most powerful automations you can create is the welcome or onboarding sequence. Ensure new customers or members are properly welcomed with a series of helpful messages. Keep them informed about new products and services as they move through the customer journey.

This automation helps businesses promote their additional products and services, and in turn increases up-sells and retention among their customer base. It also helps associations provide new members with the information they need at the right time. This helps subscribers appreciate the value of being a member and builds loyalty as well.

Onboarding Benefits

After someone signs up for your email lists, a great welcome series can lead to long-term brand loyalty. Greeting new subscribers with a series of welcome messages shows that you are dedicated to building a relationship.

Your welcome email also provides a preview of what lies ahead. Use this opportunity to let them know what to expect from future emails and why they’ll want to open them. Continue to build excitement for your emails by entering them into a welcome message series, informing them about your association or brand. The onboarding series can make a great impression, so don’t miss out on this important opportunity.

Best Practices

1) Personalize the Messages

The more you personalize your emails, the more it’s like you’re having a conversation with your subscriber. The more personalized, the more human your brand appears, the more trust you build with your brand. The more trust you build, the stronger your sales and retention.

You may only know a small amount of information about subscribers when they first sign up to receive emails. If that’s the case, personalization can be as simple as adding the subscriber’s first name to the greeting of your email.

Personalizing content can also be more complex, based on the information you have gathered. For example, you could send new members helpful answers to FAQ’s that you typically receive from new members. This helps them know that you care about them within the context of their journey.

See related article: How to Boost Clicks & Conversions with Email Personalization: 3 Actionable Tips

2) Wow Them With the Welcome Message

The welcome message is the most important part of your onboarding series. This high impact message typically receives the highest open/click rates, due to the high interest of a new subscriber.

Use the welcome message to set the tone of your communications. Offer helpful tips to help them succeed, so they look to you for guidance. Highlight the benefits that you offer, instead of just listing features. This builds your reputation and value with the subscribers, so they know to turn to you as an expert in the industry.

The welcome email is also a great place to encourage subscribers to follow you on social media channels, to stay up to date on events and news.

3) Focus on Great Inbox Placement

Your subscribers are most interested in your messages right after they sign up. So this is the time to ask them to mark you as a safe sender or add your from address to their contact list. This can help the inbox placement and delivery of all future messages from you. For example, you could have a call to action like the following:

  1. For best delivery, please add [from address] to your address book or Safe Senders List.
  2. Don’t miss out on future offers. Add [from address] to your address book or contact list.
  3. Remember: if you want to ensure our newsletter always ends up in your inbox, add [from address] to your address book or safe sender list.

4) Say Thank You

Someone entrusted you with their email address, so it’s always nice to start by saying thank you. Include text in your messages letting them know how thankful you are that they are now on your list. It may also be appropriate to offer assurance that their email will only be used for weekly or monthly messages, and will never be sold.

5) Automate It!

There’s a huge list of the benefits to automation beyond the fact that it’s automatic and will save you time. When you employ effective email automation and consistent messaging, you are building a strong relationship with your subscribers that leads to brand loyalty and retention.

By automating the onboarding series, you ensure that they receive the welcome messages as soon as they are added to your lists. You only have to set up the automation once, and then let the automation welcome new subscribers without manually scheduling sends.

The Critical Impact of Automation

Critical Impact software provides a simple automation builder and advanced automation that is touted as one of the easiest to use on the market. We’ll give you all the tools you need to easily create, automate, deploy, track, and refine your email marketing campaigns for optimal efficiency and optimal results.