Onboarding new customers is a very important process - you want to make sure your first encounter with them is a good one. Many may be under the impression that as soon as you've won them over - aka, they've made their first purchase - that's all that needs to be done, but we beg to differ. Did you know that 40-60% of digital users will open an app once and never log on again? If you want to truly win customers over, you need to establish an effective onboarding plan. Here are a few tips to help get you started!

Define Your Expectations

Decide what your expectations are for your businesses’ onboarding process. Once you know that, you can start looking at what steps need to be taken so you can accomplish your goal. You want to show your customers what they need to do to get started with your business, which gets them motivated to get through the process. Etsy does a great job with this by showing their customers exactly what each step looks like.

Don't Overwhelm Your Customers

If you give your customers too much information at a time, they might start to feel overwhelmed and jump ship altogether. Breaking the steps down will make onboarding a lot easier for your consumers. For example,Dropbox gives its users one task at a time, with easy-to-follow instructions. By utilizing a smaller and simpler approach, their consumers have a much more manageable experience and are able to finish the process with ease.

What's Most Important?

You can tell your new customers what buttons to click on and what they need to do, but showing them exactly where to go in very helpful as well. Slack is a great example of this. If you’re not sure how to optimize your onboarding process for this step ,Appcues and Nickelled can help you add instructions directly to your website.

Your onboarding process should feel like an easy journey. The businesses that choose to improve this process tend to see a better turnover than those that don’t. Give your business the best opportunity to get more customers!