It is surprisingly easy to construct onboarding emails in completely the wrong way. The trick to onboarding new individuals into your SaaS app is not to bore them into agreeing, with reams of repetitive content and requests, but to persuade them with content which is as credible as it is valuable and trustworthy.

In other words, nagging will get you nowhere.

The first step towards understanding how to onboard new individuals tends to be associated with the importance of email correspondence. While online interaction is one of the best ways to increase activation rates, this level of emphasis usually results in SaaS startups spending too much time on the wrong type of correspondence.

In many ways, turning clients off with annoying missives can be just as damaging as not communicating with them at all.

Do Not Use Onboarding Emails to Harangue Clients

It is time to take the following situation as an example: a customer registers for a trial run with a brand new application. They are pretty interested in experimenting with it, but a lot of deadlines turn up at work during the day, and they forget all about it.

At lunchtime, they discover an email asking why they registered, but then chose not to go any further. It includes a plea for them to try the app immediately.

They would like to, but they cannot find the time. Now, what do you think would happen if that customer received the same email every day, asking them why they still had not tried the app?

The likelihood is that they would get annoyed at the company, and start to avoid actively their communications. It would feel being told to do your schoolwork by a teacher, over and over again.

The Tell Tale Signs of an Annoying SaaS

The following features are tell-tale signs that you might not be constructing your onboarding emails in the most effective way possible.

- Presumes that the customer is already familiar with the product

- Presumes that the customer is eager to make a purchase because they registered

- Makes repetitive requests, phrased in the same way over and over again

- Disregards the need to emphasize how the product benefits customers

- Uses cold or impersonal jargon, clearly only occupied with securing a sale

While there will be some customers who only register or sign up for accounts once they know that they are ready to buy, the vast majority will not be sure about their intentions at the time. Or, they will be concerned with giving a product a trial run before investing.

To put it simply, prospective clients will always want some proof of how your product can benefit them.

This is where skilled onboarding correspondence comes in, as it a cheap and effective way to explain the advantages of your product without forcing non-committal customers to invest first.

The very best way to convince somebody to buy something is not to harangue them into recognizing the benefits, but to let them come to the conclusion that it is a valuable product on their own.

How to Create Valuable Onboarding Emails

The following techniques will help you to avoid repetitive and annoying onboarding correspondence, and only invest time in onboarding emails that are valuable and interesting to prospective clients.

Discuss Queries and Issues Earlier – with every online missive constructed, try to think of it from the perspective of the customer. Where will this customer be in your activation funnel when they receive it? Why are you sending it to them? Will it help them move towards a purchasing decision? What are the main issues that seem to stand in the way of instant purchases?

There are various different reasons why a customer might stop moving towards a purchase.

They could be confused about how to buy, lack the drive to make a decision, or still be unfeasibly cautious about the product.

With well-constructed onboarding emails, you can discuss these issues while also making sure that customers know exactly how to move towards a purchase.

Emphasis the Benefits of the Product – if searching for new software, most customers tend to assess more than one at once. You need to make sure that your product is the stand out program, by clearly demonstrating why it poses such an advantage to them.

It is a good idea to emphasize all of the major features, but it is the unique ones that will catch the eye.

Also, you should not make the mistake of forgetting about customers once they do purchase your product.

In order to keep them in the loop and satisfied, it is necessary to continue reiterating the benefits of their decision to work with you.

You should be friendly, approachable, and informative, but never harangue existing or prospective clients.

Provide a Clear Call to Action – if you are sending onboarding correspondence, try to stick to just one clear call to action. This is the most useful approach when it comes to convincing static customers to move forward within the sales funnel.

In fact, the last thing that you want to do at this point is bewilder them a wealth of different choices because they will shy away from them all.

With the use of just one clear call to action, usually demonstrated by a single large button, you can make it unequivocally obvious what the next step should be.

A single CTA button has the potential to increase significantly click through rates if constructed skilfully.

It might sound counter-intuitive to reduce choice, but think about how difficult it is to make a decision when there are many possibilities.

The Bottom Line

The main thing to remember when creating SaaS onboarding emails is that your customers are still just people, like you and everybody else at the company.

This means that you do not have to invent their responses and reactions; you only need to think about what yours would be and apply it to the average client. If you find a repetitive email annoying, they probably will too.