How we’re going to onboard new users.
Not sure what this is, start here with our README, or catch up on last week, VRBTM Diminishing Returns | WK VIII.
As with everything on this project thus far, on-boarding is coming to be more involved and a larger undertaking that anticipated.
I’d like to say that one day I’ll stop coming to this realization but I doubt I ever will. I know things will take longer than I expect, though there’s an optimism that overrides it each time. Not that timelines are affected, only there’s more to consider than initially thought.
Anyway. On-boarding people to a product and a way of working that they haven’t used before… There are a lot of questions: What’s the best way to do this? Is there a template we can follow? Do we need a bespoke solution? If we need to put a lot of effort into educating people on how the product works, does that mean the product isn’t as good as it could be? Should we re-work the product so it’s even more intuitive and we don’t need instructions?
The answer to each of those questions is yes in some way or another. However, we don’t have the luxury of resources to do it all right now. Most importantly we don’t yet have enough of a user pool to know what the best solution is. Therefore, we’ll look at what other people are doing, emulate, and craft an on-boarding program that we can finesse as we find out what the pain points of adopting the platform are.
Ok, as far as I can tell every product uses email for their on boarding campaign. We’ll do the same and as I’ve noted before I think these will be the five points we need to hit on once someone signs up as a new user:
- Welcome
- Setting up your team and preferences
- How you can work with and onboard your clients to the platform
- How other people are using the platform (best practices)
- Thanks again and we’re here for you
Part of creating these is figuring out the delivery cadence. They need to get to the user and answer their questions just as they would be asking it. They also need to be quick, easy to understand and provide value. Everything is about providing value.
We’ll figure out the cadence after they are written as the info that goes into each will make a difference for when it should be sent out.
Welcome Email
Subject: You’re in! | Plus, a quick question…
Body:
Thank you for joining us.
We’re building VRBTM to help content creators and production teams simplify the approval workflow between them and their clients, and I hope we can achieve that for you.
If you don’t mind, I’d love if you answered one quick question: why did you sign up for VRBTM?
I’m asking because knowing what made you sign up is really helpful for us in making sure that we’re delivering the value that you want. Just hit “reply” and let us know.
To get started we’ll be sending a few emails over the coming days to help you transform your approval workflow. We’ll be sharing some tips, checking in with you and showing you how some of our customers use VRBTM to create a happier team and more trusting client relationships.
Thanks!
Wes Jones (CEO) & Nick Dandakis (CTO)
I re-wrote the welcome email a number of times and landed on this. I took a lot from this article and GoodEmailCopy.com which has a bunch of real world email examples. I’m realizing that as much as I change things around now it’s quite arbitrary until we get some actual stats behind these to inform the changes. Because of that I’m going to try and knock out the remaining 4–5 on-boarding emails by next week giving me some extra time to set them up in MailChimp as well as let me move onto some Financial Modeling before the year’s out.
Read the other half of this week with Nick’s vrbtm.co development stream | Week IX where he implements content status and starts to look at versioning.
We’d love to hear from you…
Get in touch at Founders@vrbtm.co, talk with us on twitter @vrbtm.co, and read our story on medium.
Wes Jones is on Twitter @WesJonesCo
Nick Dandakis is on Twitter @Dandakis
