7 Customer Onboarding Email Templates That You Can Use

What happens when a customer signs up for your product or service?

A lot of people think that that moment—the signup—is when they’ve “won” the customer.

But the reality is that in a world where 40-60% of software users will open an app once, and never log in again, that’s simply not true.

For most businesses, there are two key milestones that need to be reached before a customer can reach their full value potential: First, the moment they sign up for your product and, second, the moment they achieve their first “success” with your product.

A disproportionate amount of your customer churn will take place between those two milestones.

Customers abandon your product because they get lost, don’t understand something, don’t get value from the product, or simply lose interest.

While following the right customer service email tips and using personalized support email templates can make a huge difference down the line…

Today, we’re sharing the exact scripts for seven onboarding emails that we use here at Groove to welcome new customers.

Feel free to make them your own.

Onboarding templates proven to retain new customers (because we use them ourselves)

The goal of our new user onboarding emails is to help users get as much value from Groove as possible, and ultimately convince them to become a paying customer.

There are a number of behavior-based triggers and secondary sequences in our onboarding flow. In this post, however, we’ll focus on the onboarding emails themselves.

Note that this drip is supported by some product-related guidance that we put into the app itself, pre-populating every new Groove inbox with a series of messages that show the user how the app works.

1. New signup email: Day 1

This first message:

• Welcomes the user to Groove
• Lets them know what to expect in their inbox over the coming days
• Shares a link to a video tutorial that teaches them the ins and outs of the app

But most importantly, this email asks a critical question: why did you sign up?

With this question, we’ve been able to transform our messaging based on what we learned is most important to new customers, and we’ve been able to build deeper relationships with those customers by helping them with whatever unique goals or challenges drove them to sign up.

And better yet, the answer to this email literally defines what “success” means to your customer.

For example, with Groove, some customers’ primary motive for signing up is because they want easier collaboration across their support team. For some, it’s about visibility into support metrics. There are lots of other reasons, but unless we have this insight into each customer, we can’t actually tailor an experience for them that actually helps them succeed.

Once you understand what your customers want, you can tailor the rest of these onboarding emails to help them get there.

2. Quick check-in: Day 2

The second email, which comes from Lesley, our Head of Customer Success, is short and sweet, with not much more than a short video that has some tips and tricks to help the user get more from the app.

The goal here is to get the user to take some early steps toward success (if they haven’t yet), so for your version, consider nudging your customer toward the first few foundational steps that they need to take to start getting value from your product.

3. Profile set-up nudge: Day 5

This is where we get into more advanced features and functionality.

Custom profiles (that allow the user to pull customer data in from their own internal sources and display it in their customer’s profile in Groove) are a hugely valuable feature, but can be a bit of a challenge to set up if the user isn’t technically savvy.

It’s the only feature in Groove with that limitation, but we know how valuable it can be to our users, so we make sure to address it in our onboarding flow with a step-by-step guide on how to make it work.

Once your users are in a rhythm with your product, you can introduce more advanced ideas to help them get even more value.

4. Customer story: Day 16

A lot of customer success, for us, is helping users uncover features and use cases that may not have been obvious to them from the start. To do that, we try and capture a lot of stories about how customers are using Groove.

We share some of those stories across a host of automated customer service touchpoints to give users new ideas and show them the value that they can get out of the product.

To make this email your own, share an aspirational story about another customer that will get your user excited to get back to using your product.

5. Winback: Day TBD

At this point, our onboarding flow begins to depend a lot more heavily on personalization.

For example, this email goes to any user who hasn’t signed in to Groove in five days, both to nudge them back in, and to learn about what’s keeping them away.

6. Upsell: Day TBD

If, on the other hand, your user is very active, consider an upsell:

Upselling can be one of the most powerful (and profitable) tools in your business, so don’t be afraid to use it in your onboarding emails… with the right customers.

7. Exit Survey: Day TBD

After a few weeks, if it becomes clear that a user isn’t coming back, we know that we’re unlikely to convince them to use Groove.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t still learn from their experience. So we make sure that every user who does churn gets a survey email like the one above; it helps us know how to get better.

There are a few other paths our personalization takes, but ultimately, our flow looks like this:

Our priorities are:

• Get the user to “success” as quickly as possible
• Bring back users who are slipping away
• Get as much information as we can, especially from users who are churning (or more likely to churn)

Use these emails, but never stop improving on them

Feel free to steal and customize these emails for your own onboarding campaigns.

But don’t forget: Your onboarding flow is never “done.” It’s one of the few features that’s worth always working on improving.

That’s because the entire purpose of onboarding is retention.

That same metric that, when increased by as little as 5%, typically delivers profit increases ranging from 25% to 95%.

Onboarding is a process that you should constantly be trying to improve. And as you grow and your product evolves, you’ll need to keep your onboarding optimized to focus on the most important features and success triggers at any given time.

I hope that these emails give you a good place to start improving from.

Note: Your help desk should be your best employee. And the easiest to train. If you’re weighed down by complexity—or tired of overpaying—sign up for a trial today! (No credit card required)