How to Get Customers Through Your Onboarding Process Faster

What is the Onboarding Process?

Customer acquisition is a key revenue driver and often a marketing team’s number one goal. Onboarding customers is an essential part of customer acquisition. Onboarding refers to the process of getting customers to set-up and start using your product. This can involve a few key steps which can vary by complexity depending on your product and industry.

For example, if you are a financial institution, like a bank or a credit union, you are probably trying to drive deposits through checking accounts. In order for a client to sign up for this checking account, the onboarding process will have a few steps for them to take. First, they will need to download your mobile app. This is an easily measurable metric for you to track. 

Next, they will need to create an account, or login, with an email and password. This will become their dashboard login. At the next step, clients will need to fill out required fields like name, address, phone number. 

From there, clients will need to upload documents for proof of identity and address so you can comply with KYC (a federal regulation - Know Your Customer). 

Finally, the customer will  need to verify their email. This is an important step because verified emails are a way for you as a company to keep the customer informed on transaction details, security alerts and special offers that can keep them engaged in your product. 

The onboarding process for creating an account can take many different forms, but they will generally follow the same outline as above. So, what can you do to make it all work faster and more efficiently? To do this, you need to identify where clients are stuck or have abandoned the process.

Identifying Roadblocks in the Onboarding Process

One of the more challenging aspects of the onboarding process is the potential for customers to be stuck somewhere along the way. In order to identify the steps where clients are stuck, first you’ll want to create reporting to measure the conversion rate at each step of the onboarding process (and then track it over time). This is your baseline to understand the steps and common abandonment points. Using our above banking example, it is not uncommon for clients to abandon when they are asked for identifying documents as this causes friction.

In addition to conversion rate reports, you can also use session recording tools like FullStory or SmartLook to monitor user behavior and flag any issues that may be causing these roadblocks.

After you know where these common onboarding roadblocks are, you’ll need to know why and how to improve.

Why are customers stuck in my onboarding process?

Onboarding roadblocks can be categorized into one of two types: either a technical issue like a broken button link, or a mismatch between what information you’re asking for and the customer’s perceived value of your product.

Technical Issues in my Onboarding Process

For technical issues, these become easy to spot with reporting, alerts, using the right tools and testing. Typically a major technical issue will lead to a 100% drop off at that step. Let’s go through some numbers in our banking example. If you typically get 100 accounts created each day and 50% of them complete the KYC step, you’re expecting to see 50 people complete KYC. In your reporting, today you see that there are 107 people who have created an account and 0 people who have completed KYC. This is a very clear case of a technical issue on the KYC step which you need to have investigated right away. 

Ask vs Value Mismatch in my Onboarding Process

If there are no technical issues, the second reason for clients stuck in your onboarding process is an ask vs value mismatch. In order to know that your conversion rate drop is due to this mismatch, the simplest way is to ask. 

One of the best ways to ask why they’re abandoning is by leveraging exit intent tools. This means that when someone decides to abandon the process, you simply ask them why they are leaving. You have no doubt experienced this in some form when you mouse up to exit out of a browser window, you are met with a pop-up asking you if you are sure and why you have decided to give up. While you may think that most people ignore these messages, some will participate. This gives you valuable insight on the specifics surrounding why they left or stopped. 

In the case of a mismatch in ask vs value, this is harder to overcome, but not impossible. By utilizing the information from exit intent surveys, you can start to piece it together and make plans to improve. But, you’ll need to prove the value through additional educational materials and marketing efforts. 

How To Move Customers Through Your Onboarding Process

In order to prove the value of your product, you’ll need to launch marketing campaigns to inform and delight these onboarding abandoners through re-engagement efforts. The first step to creating a re-engagement campaign is to build your target audience. 

If you’re already using Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift for your data cloud, you’re capturing all of your customers behavior and data. The next step is to build your audience based on these criteria. This is where it gets tricky for most marketers, how do you get data out of your data cloud to activate these campaigns?

Marketers utilize GrowthLoop to activate their data cloud, building audiences and sending them to popular marketing channels like email and paid media. Being able to identify users in your data cloud will allow you to re-engage recent users or even months old users that fell off.

For the example use case of the bank onboarding a customer to a new checking account, you’ll want to set up re-engagement campaigns to show the value and benefits. That can come in many different forms like targeted Facebook ads or marketing automation email in Iterable explaining the additional benefits of your checking account like no fees for 90 days or a custom debit card.

Improved Onboarding Completion Rate and Happy Customers

In the end, the main goal of onboarding is to get the customers through the process and get them to use your product. Building a well-structured onboarding re-engagement strategy will help with getting customers through your process. Helpful tips and well-written emails explaining the benefits will not only lead to higher conversion, but also higher customer satisfaction and retention. 

GrowthLoop can help you guide those who stray from the onboarding path. With GrowthLoop, you can increase the re-engagement of the customers that get lost during the onboarding process. With powerful marketing attribution like treatment control testing and seamless marketing platform integrations, GrowthLoop can help you target and engage your customers regardless of how far they made it through your process. To get started with GrowthLoop, contact us.

Interested learning more about how GrowthLoop can help financial services and fintech organizations improve their marketing value utilizing their Snowflake data cloud, join us at the Snowflake for Growth Financial Services Live Event on October 26th