Using Customer Journey Mapping to Automate Your Customer Onboarding Process

How well do you know your customers? Can you identify their intentions, behaviors, challenges? Do you know why they would choose your brand over other competitors?

Understanding the needs, goals, and emotions of customers can be challenging. Customers have different needs, skills, and goals. It can be hard to identify each of them and deliver a positive customer experience. This is why a customer journey map is crucial to have a clear grasp of your customer’s journey on their path to purchase.

In this article, you’ll learn what a customer journey map is, the benefits it provides and how to use it to improve your onboarding process.

Ready? Let’s dive in!

Table of contents

1. What is customer journey map?
2. Why is a customer journey map important for your business?
3. Using customer journey mapping to improve your customer onboarding process
4. Wrapping up
   

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is the visual representation of every interaction a customer has had with your brand. It includes various touchpoints such as web, social media, ads, that customers use to communicate with your brand during their journey.

The goal of the customer journey map is to provide a clear understanding of the needs and challenges of customers. So, you can use the insight to improve customer experience, reduce customer churn and increase retention rate.

Why is a customer journey map important for your business?

A customer journey map is what helps you gain a bird’s eye view of your customer’s journey. Simply using a marketing and sales team is not enough to attract your audience to your brand. The customer journey is actually more complex than that.

For example, a typical customer path may go like this:

A prospect visits your website>> downloads a guide>> speak to a sales rep>> signs up for your product.

But it doesn’t end there. What about the prospect’s emotions? What is your customer potentially thinking about at this point in their journey? What possible actions is your customer taking?

You need to understand your customer’s behavior, attitude, and thoughts during each touchpoint with your brand. Otherwise, all you have is a process flow. If you just write down the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand, you're missing out on a great piece of the entire customer journey.

With a customer journey map, you can gain a deeper insight into your customer’s journey. This way, you can identify the steps customers take (the ones you see and don’t see when they engage with your brand).

Another important benefit of a customer journey map is that it enables you to optimize the customer onboarding process. This brings us to the next section, you’ll learn how to use the customer journey map to automate your entire customer onboarding process.

Using customer journey mapping to improve your customer onboarding process

Most people think that they’ve won a customer when they sign up on the software. But this is far from the truth. Have you ever signed up for a tool, used it once, and never logged in again (except to cancel a subscription)?

Chances are that you have. This is the reality for most SaaS users.

As Des Traynor states,

“Typically customers gradually stop using products, from using it every morning to every week to once a month … At some point down the road you’ll remember you’re paying for something you don’t need and don’t use, and then you ‘churn’, even though the decision was made months ago."

In summary, customer churn is a major obstacle to most SaaS companies. 99 Firms reported that 30% of SaaS companies reported their churn rates have increased in the past year. One major reason is failing to meet customer expectations and poor onboarding.

All users have different needs, skills, goals, and challenges. You need to understand your users on a deeper level so that you can deliver a personalized experience during the onboarding process.

So how do you use a customer journey map to automate the onboarding process?

Here are 6 ways you can achieve this:

1. Identify and understand various customer segments

As we mentioned earlier, data from your customer journey map can help you understand your users on a personalized level. For example, your new users are at different stages in their journey. Some new users would have logged in and started exploring your product while others may have not launched your app after installing it.

This means that you need to create various segments of users and nurture them during the onboarding process. You can segment users based on actions that they have performed within and outside your product.

Use Engage's powerful segmentation feature to build user segments. This way, you can use the insight to deliver personalized messages during the onboarding process.

2. Deliver personalized welcome emails

The fact that a user signs up to use your product doesn't make the onboarding process complete.

As Kyle Racki. CEO of Proposify writes,

Dumping a new user into an empty dashboard is a sure way to make them close their browser tab and never come back. People trying out a new product need to be guided from the very start.

In other words, you need to show your new users how to make the most of your product.

A welcome email provides the opportunity to provide value to your new users and help them get the best use of your product right from the very start. Using an automated welcome email sequence, you can send personalized targeted emails to different customer segments. Also, include the best resources to help them understand the product features that will solve their problems and help them achieve their goals.

Here is an example of a welcome email from DocSend added to its onboarding flow:

3. Provide integration/customer data imports support

The onboarding process involves more than getting your customers to learn how to use your product. Data from your customer journey map can give you an idea of other tasks that your users hope to achieve. For example, you can discover that your users have challenges with integrating with other tools that they already use and importing data from other sources.

Automate much of the process as possible. Using a marketing automation tool like Engage removes any obstacle that may prevent your new users from getting the best use of your product.

4. Use in-app notifications for relevant updates

Another way to improve your customer onboarding process is by delivering tips and updates through in-app notifications.

For example, data from your customer journey mapping shows that users require contextual tooltips as they navigate through the interface. You can use in-app notifications to deliver tips and pointers that will help them get familiar with your product features during the onboarding process.

Here's an example of how Slack overlays onboarding instructions within the app.

5. Deliver follow-up emails

After your welcome email, you need to deliver follow-up emails that offer tips to help your customers get the best use of your product and encourage them to log back in.

Here are some best practices for sending automated follow-up emails:

• Break things down: you don’t need to overwhelm your users with too much information from the outset. Send short automated follow-up emails focusing on product features or use cases at a time.
  
• Include ways users can benefit from other product features: For example, when a user has gotten comfortable using the most important product features they need, you can show the user how other features complement what they are already doing.

In summary, you need to ensure that the emails you send deliver value to your users and help them achieve their goals with your product.

Here is an example of a follow-up email from Zapier:

6. Build the relationship

To ensure your customer onboarding process progresses in the best way possible, you need to understand what success means for your users.

How do you do this? The best way is to simply ask your customers. Using survey data from your customer journey map, you can uncover user motivation and successes. As a result, you can learn the product features that can be used during the first few user sessions.

Once you understand this customer data, you can use the insight to improve your onboarding process and over the long term as your user needs change.

Wrapping up

Once you gain a clear understanding of your customers, you can use the insight to improve your entire customer onboarding process.

Your customer journey map is key to visualizing every stage and touchpoint in your user’s journey. While there are factors that influence the journey map (customer pain points, emotions, and goals), your job is to understand each of them and use the data to reduce churn and increase customer retention.

With Engage, you can map your customers' journey using your product or service, and create unique customer segments or groups. Then, use that data to send personalized messages right from their onboarding process via email, SMS, Push Notifications, and In-App messages.

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