Setup automated User Onboarding Journey for your Product’s Growth
Creation and Importance of the initial user journey stage.
The experience a user has shortly after they install your app can make or break things for you. You can get insights into the health of your app by analyzing what happens during the days following an install. Not to mention, engaging users with an effective onboarding journey can solve one of your biggest problems — reduce churn for your product(mobile app).
The key to reducing churn is to engage users early in their lifecycle. So, it is essential to create across-channel user journeys to optimize the onboarding experience of new users.
But how will the onboarding journey help in reducing churn?
Educate users and help them get the most out of your product.
Take your new users through a series of informative steps from the first install to the first purchase/conversion.
Your product might include features that offer a lot of value. But if they stay hidden in some dark corner or are hard to discover, most users may never know they exist.
Set up tutorials and cues to show them around. Make useful features easy to discover and make sure users have a seamless experience navigating your app. You can use contextual push notifications to enable discovery and drive adoption depending on the features a user has already tried.
Customer journeys are increasingly becoming more dynamic and interconnected in nature.
You need to create a series of integrated cross-channel campaigns that targeted users with messages across owned and paid channels such as Push, Email, SMS, and Ad-retargeting.
Onboarding journey should engage the user for the first 7 days of his/her installing your app(Day 0 — Day 6 ).
Taking a deeper look at the Day 0 flow, it should include a Welcome message to the user, making the user a part of your family, so to speak.
Engage users from the very first day he/she installed your app, reach out to him/her through various channels available at your disposal.
Take, for example, a Day 0 flow I have created for an app —
Step 1: The moment user installs the app, give the user some time(say 10 minutes) to signup.
Step 2: Check if the user has successfully signed up.
Step 3(a): If the user successfully signups, start sending them communication-based on the channel available at your disposal. Users must have provided one of the following information during signup — email or phone number. Use these channels to Welcome users.
Tip: Try to create a welcome email that will have a message from the Founder of the company welcoming the user to the product, this will add a personal touch and will help a user in empathizing with your product.
Step 3(b): If the user doesn’t signup, check if he/she is a returning user, whether he/she has logged in. If the user is a returning user(eg. app reinstall), then the onboarding flow is not for this user, so the flow stops for this user.
i) If the user is not logging in, then you try to help the user in signing up, by sending them some helper app pushes since push token might be available once the user successfully installs the app, so its the only medium available to reach the user.
ii) Once the signup helper app push has been sent, wait for some time for the user to look at the app push, click on it and then sign up(say 1 hour, at max). Now,
iii) Now, check if the user has done sign up or not, if yes, then the user enters the successful sign-up branch we have already setup. If no, then we keep sending user 1–2 more app pushes to help him/her signup over the course of 2 days.
iv) If the user signups successfully in the middle of the flow, then he/she is sent the communication, if the user doesn’t sign up even after repeatedly sending a communication to help user signup, then you have to accept the fact that the user is probably not going to sign up in the near future either on his/her own. So, you can stop the flow there.
Once the user successfully installed the app, performed sign up, and received your communication, you have successfully retained the user on the very first day and made the user aware of your product. This will significantly reduce your churn.
Now, keep sending users some communication for the next 6 days — informing users of your product features, some product tutorial videos, etc. At the end of the week, you can even pitch user a discount coupon to make his/her first purchase.
It is imperative to send the right message to the user at the right time otherwise its a lost opportunity.
An automated user journey will help you in mapping customer responses in real-time to decide the next best action towards nurturing your user in achieving the desired goal. Its quite shocking to know that even though its a common practice but still missed out by a lot of major products in their user lifecycle.
