Customer onboarding is one of the most crucial steps in your customer’s journey. A pleasant customer experience from the start establishes the groundwork for a long-term relationship and assures your consumer that they have made the right decision.
It’s likely that you already have customer onboarding in place, whether it’s in the form of welcome emails, feature callouts, interactive walkthroughs, or routine check-ins. But, in your onboarding plan, have you taken advantage of the power of video?
Video can be effective in every single part of your business’s marketing strategy. Take a look at this article to find out how it can enhance your customer onboarding process.
Customer experience management
Customer experience management encompasses the following areas:
- User/ customer onboarding
- Usability of product or service
- Accessibility
- Mobile experience
- FAQs
It is hugely important to ensure that your customers are happy with the product or service they are consuming.
It feels great when a customer likes your product or service, even better when they buy it again, and again, and again. Happy customers tend to remain loyal to your brand, product or service.
Even better, a happy customer is one of the best types of marketing out there. An intense 90% of customers say that their buying decisions are influenced by the reviews of others. Happy customers, unsurprisingly, increase bottom line sales.
It is critical for businesses to develop a friendly, pleasant, and productive environment for customers to ensure future success, so how is it done?
One of the most surefire ways to ensure customers are satisfied from the offset is through the onboarding process.
What is customer onboarding
Customer onboarding is one of the very first stages of the customer experience journey after purchase of your product or service.
Whilst it is great that your customer has bought your product, and is nearing the end of your sales funnel, point of purchase does not mark the end of the customer’s journey. A customer can abandon a product, cancel a subscription or even leave a bad review long after the point of purchase, all of which, of course, negatively contribute to profit potential.
Customer onboarding aims to welcome new customers to your brand and help them become acquainted with their new product. This is completed by proactively guiding customers through your product or service to ensure they are enjoying a worthwhile customer experience.
Onboarding should make it as easy as possible for customers to incorporate your product or service into their routines and improve the value of the existing purchase.
Whilst onboarding can and should be applied to all business models, it is hugely effective when used in conjunction with a SaaS model.
Types of customer onboarding
- Helping customer with the instillation of a product
- Assisting customers with guidance when first using a product
- Addressing initial concerns or queries, especially with complex tech services
- Driving further engagement in new features of a product or service
- Customer support (of problems that can be solved without human interaction)
- Overall minimisation of time-to-value (the measurement of the time it takes from the purchase of a product to when a customer starts deriving value from it.)
Why is customer onboarding so important?
Because of the ‘aha! moments’.
‘Aha! moments’, or lack of them, can truly make or break a product or service. Customer onboarding assists in allowing consumers to have their aha! moments.
What’s an aha! moment?
Allow me to explain…
Aha! Moments are moments of sudden insight. It is where customers first realise the true value of your product and why it is now an essential to them in their work or personal lives.
These moments are pivotal and dramatically increase the chances of someone becoming a loyal customer. It should be a moment that triggers emotion, perhaps relief or joy, hopefully, it’s even impactful enough to encourage word-of-mouth marketing.
For some products the aha moment is never reached, this is likely because the product is ineffective, was misleadingly advertised or is simply too complicated to use. Customer onboarding can solve many of these issues that can prevent your customer from reaching their aha moment.
Did you know that 55% of people say they’ve returned a product and 80% of people have deleted an app because they didn’t know how to use it?
Further benefits of customer onboarding
- Improved customer experience (retention, understanding, efficiency, satisfaction)
- Greater lifetime commitment of customers – improved lifetime value
- Reduced workload for customer service and technical support staff
- Reduction in human labour time, a good investment for the business
- Proven to increase ROI
- Decreases the frustrations of the consumer, solves problems before they even present themselves
- Directly lowers churn rate.
What is the churn rate?
The churn rate formula is:
(Lost Customers ÷ Total Customers at the Start of Time Period) x 100.
For example, if your business had 250 customers at the beginning of the month and lost 10 customers by the end, you would divide 10 by 250. The answer is 0.04.
Churn rate is a calculation which provides clarity on how well your business is retaining happy customers. Remember, it is much harder to acquire new customers than it is to encourage loyalty in existing ones.
The calculation is evidently targeted at SaaS services, however, it can be adjusted when looking at non-subscription based services, through methods such as questionnaires and review analysis.
High churn rates stagnate profits and impede growth, it can often lead to the downfall of a business. To be successful, your company must have a low churn rate and a high growth rate.
Benefits of using video for customer onboarding
Efficiency
According to McQuivey’s Forrester study, video is worth 1.8 million words per minute more than plain text.
Although its price point and production level is hugely variable, almost all forms of video offer a high ROI.
Attention-grabbing
Our eyes are attracted to movement. Customers trawling through social media or their emails are much more likely to be drawn to colourful films than bland and generic text.
Part of the struggle within client onboarding is actually getting your customers to want to onboard, video helps to secure this.
Engaging
People just love videos! Not only do they grab attention, but they retain it.
68% of people say they’d most prefer to learn about a new product or service by watching a short video. This makes video more popular as a learning tool than text-based articles (15%), infographics (4%) presentations and pitches (4%) ebooks, and manuals (3%).
This is largely because video tends to be a much more engaging form of content.
Accessibility
Onboarding content should be created in a way that everyone is able to engage with. This means that information should be delivered in an inclusive manner so that people with disabilities can access it just as readily as those who do not.
- Video content is effective at simplifying complex information, which can be helpful to anyone but is critical to those with certain disabilities.
- Video can use both clear imagery and closed captions to ensure it’s information is accessible to those with sight and hearing impairments.
Animation can be utilised to further ensure accessibility in onboarding videos. Take a look at our guide here to help decide what video format is right for your project.
Valuable
Video is of course valuable as a medium to convey information to your customers, this is clear. However, video is also highly valuable as a tool to measure the success of your onboarding campaign.
It is possible to track your goals using specific metrics, such as video drop-off points and viewer comments.
How to incorporate video in your onboarding strategy?
When asked how they feel companies could improve their onboarding process, 69% of customers say that they feel more video should be used.
Types of video onboarding:
Welcome videos
Videos that welcome customers to a new business after purchase are a pleasant way to engage with your clients and to begin to introduce your onboarding process. Welcome videos are one of the first stages of the consumer life cycle, they set expectations surrounding what they can expect in the next steps of the relationship.
Welcome videos can ensure that customers are aware that they can receive support and value from their product or service immediately. They can clarify goals, what to expect from you, speed up the onboarding process, and fill knowledge gaps.
Video is the most engaging form of media, it is also a powerful learning tool. When you need customers to absorb and understand your process of client onboarding, video is the best option.
Video is also a great medium to say hello to new customers when person-to-person meetings are not accessible, such as overseas consumers or in times of contact restrictions.
97% of people agree that video content is efficient in welcoming and educating new users.
Product tutorials
Product tutorials help customers understand and immediately get value out of their purchased product or service by clearly showing and explaining how to use it. 91% of people said they have watched a video to understand how to use a product better.
‘How to’ videos make up one of the top four most searched categories on Youtube. Why? Because videos are one of the most efficient ways to deliver complex information in a short and engaging manner.
Lengthy or complicated product tutorials are frequently abandoned by customers. Many time-starved consumers would prefer to work out the product themselves rather than read through pages of tedious instructions, this often leads to ineffective use. Remember it’s just as important to maintain customers as it is to gain new ones.
Follow-ups
Friendly follow-up videos, perhaps checking if there are any concerns or explaining newly developed features encourage customers to feel valued. It’s worth considering if these videos can incorporate interactivity for an extra level of personalisation.
As well as solidifying the relationship between business and consumer, they offer another chance to address factors that may impact churn rate.
Where to host video customer onboarding content?
- Emails
- On your SaaS interface
- In-app boarding
- On your website
- Free video hosting websites (Youtube)
- TikTok
Remember: video onboarding should be skippable
Not everyone needs guidance when they purchase a new product. Returning customers or those highly familiar with the type of product or service may be annoyed if they have to go through compulsory onboarding. This is because their time-to-value is increased. 66% of adults believe valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide a good online customer experience.
Let’s round up…
Onboarding is one of the most essential parts of your business’ marketing strategy. Instead of thinking of it as the final stage in your marketing funnel, consider it the initial step toward establishing a long-lasting and hugely valuable business-client relationship.
Over 90% of customers think that companies “could do better” when it comes to onboarding new customers. So make sure to heed our advice and get started on creating or redeveloping your most effective customer onboarding video strategy.
If you would like any help along the way give us a call, we would be happy to help!
