Do You Need an Onboarding Strategy for Your Membership Site?

Yeah.

Not to be glib, but yeah, you do.

There are loads of great benefits to properly onboarding each new member onto your platform. This post will cover those benefits, and the components of a good onboarding strategy.

What is an Onboarding Strategy?

An onboarding strategy is a series of steps for welcoming a person into some kind of group or organization.

If you’ve ever started at a new company, you’ll recall your first few days in which you were shown were everything was, how to use their systems, and generally, how you’d go about carrying out your new job.

In some companies, this is a full-on training course that could last more than a week.

Similarly, in onboarding for your membership site, you need to show new subscribers where everything is, how to best find their way around, and where they can find help if they need it.

This could be achieved via a series of emails, videos, a webinar, or a comprehensive Getting Started guide.

Benefits of an Onboarding Strategy

Make New Members Feel Welcome

By taking new subscribers to your site by the hand and showing them around, you’re making them feel welcome.

This reaffirms that they’ve made the right choice and it’s less likely that they’re going to end their subscription prematurely.

In other words, a good onboarding process will increase your member retention rate over time.

Alternatively, merely leaving newbies to figure out your platform for themselves is more likely to result in them become lapsed members.

There’s no guarantee they’ll find the best features your platform has to offer on their own.

Save Time in the Long Run

If you take the time to show new members where things are, they’re less likely to ask you later.

Granted, some, if not many, people will still contact you to ask you for help with something simple, but you’ll have avoided scores more questions by providing a quick tour first.

This approach is also more empowering for your members: while some people seek assistance as soon as they’re remotely stumped, others prefer not to ask for help.

By giving them the means to figure things out for themselves, you’ll save time and effort, and so will they.

Continued Interaction

An onboarding strategy gives you a good reason to stay in contact with your members.

This could be through a series of emails, detailing the next part of the process, or a feature of your website that you wish to highlight.

As well as further demonstrating the value of your platform, you’ll be displaying your personal value to them too.

This is especially important if they’ve joined your site on a free trial, as they’re still prospects at this point – your work is not yet done!

However, even if this is not the case, having your members being accustomed to hearing from you is handy, particularly if you plan on launching other products or services in the future.

What is an onboarding strategy? It’s like a first date: you can only make a first impression once, and if you mess it up, you will most likely be going home empty handed (no pun intended). Luckily, business is nowhere nearly as complicated as human emotions, so we can easily affect one side of this metaphor.

Here we’ll focus on how to ace the first date, using 5 concepts for customer onboarding:

1. User tracking is the main tool in tracking your target’s preferences. Before you can even form a valid offer, you need to know what your target wants and is interested in. Imagine going on a date with a vegan and ordering a haggis. Actually, scratch that: you shouldn’t order a haggis for anyone.

Heatmaps are an extension of user-tracking and they help you track the movements of your target as they move around your site. They highlight the hottest points of your website, letting you know which part attracts most attention,(AKA the perfect spot to place a trap!).

2. Walk-throughs (tool-tips) provide guidance to your target until it reaches its goal. A good walk-through educates your targets on how to use your site more easily, and know it inside and out. Once someone is hooked on something, they’re hardly going to find a replacement. I am, of course, only talking about onboarding.