8 Tips for B2B Customer Onboarding Success
So, you have successfully acquired a new customer. What’s next?
You might send a welcome email, give them a product tour or simply leave it for the customer to decide what to do with your brand. The chances are that your customer might leave your brand and shift to a competitor’s because, as a brand, you failed to compel them to make a purchase.
That’s why it’s essential to create a positive first impression because you don’t get a second chance.
Today, brands cannot afford to overlook customer onboarding, and it’s obsessively necessary to perfect your customer onboarding process.
To ensure that customers understand your product and the value they get from it, provide a seamless onboarding experience.
Seems difficult?
Let’s dive in to explore!
Tips for B2B Customer Onboarding Success
Here are a few tips for a successful customer onboarding process:
1. Use customer onboarding tools
Did you know applications and businesses can lose up to 80% of their users within the first week?
This is primarily because users could not derive value from products and services they’re using. It means that tens of thousands of new users never become paying customers. Users prefer to abandon a product or shift to a competitor if the product’s learning curve is steep.
Creating an effective user onboarding process can be your success mantra. Why?
A user onboarding process makes it easier for new users to understand and receive the value from using a product. When your B2B customers receive the value they’re looking for, the higher are their chances of sticking around a product.
Every user onboarding process aims to get to the ‘aha’ or ‘Eureka’ moment, and this happens when a customer realizes the benefits and value they get from your product.
To make the onboarding process seamless and deliver value from day one, focus on using any of these 29 user onboarding tools to drive growth and retain customers.
2. Leverage the power of videos
In general, videos are a preferred and more effective form of marketing than written content. In an onboarding process, videos are a powerful way to grab your audience’s attention. Most onboarding videos are welcoming and instructional.
So, focus on creating high-quality videos that enhance ROI and customer retention rate.
According to research, demos and how-to-videos justify the above claim.
Create a short, concise, and powerful tutorial video that hits the customer’s inbox a few hours after purchasing your product.
However, don’t overwhelm your customer with too much information in a single video. If the need arises, split the videos across multiple days. When customers learn many things from a single video, it lowers your retention rate.
In such a situation, you cannot convey the desired information, making user onboarding an inefficient process.
3. Personalize your onboarding experience
When it comes to employees, an organization leaves no stone turned to make them feel comfortable at their home. The same rule should apply when welcoming and onboarding customers for the first time.
When you consider your customers as valuable partners, focus on offering a customized onboarding experience that they would remember.
Customization and personalization of emails and content help you increase customer retention. Focus on self-customizing the experience and making customers feel at home.
Regard your clients as actively involved in doing business with your brand. Also, focus on interacting with your customers to solve their services and products queries.
There are two types of customers in an onboarding process, one who requires a step-by-step process to use your services and the other who wants to use your services fast. So, give customers an option to skip the product tour initially. You can even give customers the freedom to choose the duration and length of a product or service tutorial.
The more customization and personalization you offer in your onboarding experience, the better it would be for your customer onboarding experience
4. Automate repetitive processes
To ensure customer onboarding is a success, focus on creating a repeatable framework.
Having to tow a customer or user onboarding process every time a new customer joins in can be challenging. So, automate parts that can easily be automated.
Focus on videos to onboard new customers and make them aware of your services and products.
According to research, 86% of users are likely to stay loyal to a brand that makes an investment in the onboarding content for welcoming and educating customers, and 97% of people think that videos are excellent for onboarding new customers.
You can even set a sequence of emails to send some instructions about the user onboarding process. Keep a line open for special requests and questions customers have in mind through your emails.
5. Consider gamification to engage customers
One exciting way to improve your customer onboarding experience and increase conversion is by turning the process into a game for your customers. Gamification is an excellent way to improve the learning process and engage your customers.
Offer rewards every time a customer reaches a milestone in the game.
You can even ask fun quizzes with questions related to what new the customers learned at the end of every milestone. Offer a reward for high scores.
Engaging customers in your onboarding process is essential because sticking to the traditional methods might not be enough to increase conversions and retain loyal customers.
6. Refine and improve your process
After the user onboarding process is over, ensure that everything goes as planned. Focus on getting answers to questions like:
Were there any unanswered questions during the onboarding process?
Is the client unsure about the details regarding your product and its timeline?
Did the client like and interact with the onboarding process?
You can measure customer experience with the onboarding process using a net promoter score or NPS. It helps you gauge customers’ sentiments and allow you to collect valuable feedback.
Remember that your onboarding process is a constant work in progress, and it’s essential to make changes whenever possible. Leave no stone unturned in collecting qualitative and quantitative data to improve the overall experience.
7. Continually assess your customer’s requirements
Customer onboarding aims to give customers what they require to reach their goals. So, it’s essential to understand whether your current onboarding process is practical and relevant to the customer’s goals.
Only when you know the ‘why’ of your B2B customer can you further help your customers. The first thing is to understand the requirements of your customers. You can guide customers on how and what to do to maximize the use of your product or service.
Also, it’s essential to stay in constant touch with them until they have utilized your services.
There might be an instance where your customer requires changes in the middle of the onboarding process. If you don’t alter your onboarding process according to the customer’s changing requirements, your customer churn rate will increase.
You can avoid this by conducting customer surveys on time.
8. Create a B2B onboarding checklist
B2B customers are less likely to stick to your product if your user onboarding process is not at par. But knowing what to do and how to do it might not serve any purpose.
A checklist helps you focus on checking each requirement of your onboarding process. It would be best to build a practical client onboarding checklist that takes the tiniest details into account.
Focus on including the following in your checklist:
- Create welcome emails with a CTA button
- Send a follow-up email to inactive customers
- Create feature popups for new users to start their setup
- Build a FAQ and help center for your customers
- Schedule online appointments with new customers
- Give them achievable and straightforward tasks to accomplish during the setup process
While this might seem a lot of work for a single client, it becomes a breeze once you have a hang of it.
Taking so much pain is completely worth every effort because it will yield fruitful results.
Key takeaways
Your customer onboarding process is the first and most essential step in your customer’s
journey because it lays the foundation of your relationship.
A good customer onboarding process helps you with customer activation and ensures customer retention.
To ensure a successful onboarding process, keep your fingers on the pulse of every step to know what’s working and what’s not.
Pay close attention to the time a customer takes to complete your onboarding process and the issues most of them face during this process. It helps you address each issue on time.
Remember that your customer onboarding process is an ongoing endeavor. You might have to rework every time you add a new feature.
A thoughtful customer onboarding process improves your overall customer experience and helps build loyalty for a company.
The truest measure of a successful onboarding process is whether a customer logs back into your product days or weeks after they first used your product.
