“A good first impression can work wonders.” - J.K. Rowlings.
The first experience with your team and product sets the tone for the entire customer journey. This is your chance to provide your first point of value. Do you miss this opportunity?
You might be asking “How do I ensure every time an opportunity closes the customer receives a welcome email? That seems like a lot of work for my team.” You’re right. It can be a lot of work for your team if you’re manually triggering each welcome email.
One of the first places to start scaling your customer lifecycle is the Welcome experience. Below, I’ve outlined a few things to consider when you begin your welcome email.
A step-by-step guide to implementing an automated Welcome Email:
1. Segmentation and Target Audience:
Define the customer segmentation and target audience for the welcome email. This should align to the decision with onboarding strategy and customer personas. When segmenting customers, consider their unique needs and collaborate with relevant stakeholders to accurately identify the specific persona or role within the customer organization.
2. Triggering Criteria:
Identify the data points to trigger the automated welcome email. This could include customer stage, key dates, or other relevant information. Leverage the capabilities of Gainsight's Journey Orchestrator to automate the triggering process based on this data.
3. Email Sender:
Choose an email sender familiar to the recipient, ideally, someone they have interacted with or a known person in your organization. Many organizations send this email to the CEO or CCO. This personal touch helps establish a sense of connection and builds trust.
4. Craft Personalized Email Content:
The welcome email is the start of their onboarding experience. Use this to align on expectations and provide valuable information such as when they can expect to hear from someone, things they should do prior to starting onboarding, and people they will work with.
5. Define your expected engagement:
Do you expect your customer to respond to this email? Is there an action you want them to take? Or is it purely informational? Depending on how you expect the email to be used, define your metric. Open rate vs click through rate. Maybe you’re even looking for response rate. If there is a specific action you are asking them to take, ensure you have follow up workflows for customers who do not take the action.
Automating welcome emails brings several benefits to onboarding:
- Ensures consistent and timely welcome experiences for new customers while streamlining processes.
- Enables personalized welcome email content based on customer-specific information, enhancing their onboarding experience.
- Proactively engage new customers, establishing rapport and demonstrating a commitment to their success.
Automating welcome emails empowers organizations to deliver a consistent, personalized, and impactful onboarding experience for new customers. Following the outlined steps and addressing the discovery questions can streamline the process, enhance customer engagement, and set the stage for long-term success. Embracing automation to optimize onboarding ensures a positive first impression that fosters customer satisfaction and loyalty.
To get started with Journey Orchestrator, we have a collection of support articles to assist.