Instead, by answering a series of questions you’ll be able to determine the content that will most help your new customer. This means you or your support team will have less how and why questions to answer, your customers will find using your product or service more frictionless, and sales is happy because there’s less churn.
Here’s the questions to answer:
This is where you ask the most basic of things: what do your customers absolutely need to do first. If you have a social media publishing tool, it’s connecting their accounts, if you have an accounting service, its’ getting their financials. What is the MVP version of their interactions with you? What are the quick wins to establish that relationship post-sale?
If you have a kick-ass support forum where fellow customers can answer frequently asked questions, then you need to point that out to new customers and get them to go there. If there are certain ways your software works best then your customers need to know that. These are things they don’t necessarily need to do, these are things they need to be aware of.
Your support team and sales team are vital for this question. What are the FAQ’s? If there are questions that keep bubbling up, it means your website content isn’t doing its job. Long-term: fix that so this question stops popping up. Short-term: teach your customers the answer via their onboarding process.
This is a no-brainer: when your customers have questions (and they will!) where do they go to get those answered? If they have a dedicated account manager, this email should come from them. If there’s a special channel for paying customers versus a freemium product, how do they access that?
While not strictly a “help the customer” email at first glance, it’s possible that your customers are now using your product or service but are also interested in other offerings that enhance the first. What if you have a website hosting business, but also provide content creation, or SEO audits? As we said in the retail world, WITTDTJR, or what it takes to do the job right. (That’s right, I worked at AutoZone). What else could the customer use to make their experience better?
Obviously, every customer onboarding series is going to be unique, and sometimes even the onboarding series within your different personas will be unique. The goal is to identify what they’ll need before they ask, and provide it before they need it.