Kick-Off An Onboarding Email Project With Me

This post is based on a past edition of Email Cures, the free newsletter for SaaS who want to learn how to research, write, and test onboarding emails that connect & convert. Click here to get your first cure in your inbox!

*The client name has been removed for anonymity, and some details have been adjusted.
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links, and I may or may not get a commission from them.

We’re kicking off this post with two things today:

1. A sneak peek into my Research Stage for Email Conversion Cure clients
2. My strategy for increasing user engagement before writing onboarding emails

I was working with a client on new onboarding emails.

The main goal was to increase user engagement in their onboarding stage so that more users would return to the app.

Their secondary goal for the flow?

Many users skipped the tutorial to familiarize themselves with the app’s features. As a result, they didn’t know about or use the app’s key features long enough to reach their ‘AHA’.

In today’s post, I’ll explain my process and plan to increase engagement and reduce drop-off for our onboarding email project.

First, let’s start with…

The Game Plan to fix low conversions in the Research Stage

My copywriting process has five stages, the first of which is customer research. In the research stage, I don’t just go through surveys and interviews, but I also create message maps. I investigate:

• Reasons for poor conversions, whether that’s slow loading times for pages or pop-ups that appear too early
  
• Ways we could optimize the messaging before sending new emails to build desire for the app/platform
  
• How we could optimize the user experience — reducing loading times for web pages so that they see the opt-in form

Here’s what I noticed after auditing my client’s copy/customer journey👇🏽

🖥 Their website: It only mentioned one key feature, so when users signed up, they weren’t aware of other cool features.

📧 Their emails: They just started their newsletter, but I noticed they weren’t linking to their SaaS.

🖱 Their site opt-in form: Opt-in forms shouldn’t tell people they’ll get “updates” or “to stay in the know”.

To connect with the reader and increase the chances of conversion, your opt-in form should be clear about:

• The target audience for the emails
• The benefit/solution they’ll get, e.g., strategies to solve a problem or resources like ebooks
• What’s in it for them?

This is why I started researching the onboarding emails first

Before someone gets your app, they need to know if it’ll solve their problems.

That’s your website/landing page/ad’s job—the pages or touchpoints your user interacts with before getting onboarding emails.

Take it from me:

1️⃣ Don’t leave out features on the SaaS website/landing page

Imagine spending months building your app only to hear “I didn’t know I could do X” from your users.

I would kick a few stones, but that’s not important right now – it’s painful to imagine, actually😬.

The thing is, are you even mentioning your critical features on your website?

Don’t expect your users to know about stuff you haven’t told them.

2️⃣ Clarify your ideal users on your website and/or opt-ins before they get onboarded

“Our app is for everyone” is a lie.

Who is “everyone”? Address your user the way they describe themself.

An app can help more than one audience — artists, copywriters, content creators, students, marketing teams, etc. use Notion or ClickUp for project management.

Your copy should help users visualize themselves using the thing by calling them forward like this:

The second way is to get creative and use quizzes, personas, or opt-in forms to make the user experience more interactive. This method also collects their emails, which increases your leads while helping you qualify and segment them.

The third way you can qualify your prospects is by leading with their pain points/problems:

The final method I’m showing is by using their dreamstate (desired outcome/reality):

With either method, you qualify your users while helping them realize they’re in the right place with the right solution(s).

How I did customer research with a few customers

Big players like Hubspot, Salesforce, and Notion can survey, interview, and get reliable customer data from thousands of users.

However, my client was a social network startup with a few users and little customer research available.

This was also their first onboarding email flow, so I had nothing to measure against.

The plan was to mix internal research (company materials) and external research (competitor analysis) to create their message map.

Here’s what I used for customer research:

• Interview notes from previous users
• Light competitor research—they’re in a less-occupied niche
• Holistic website audit to match the messaging with the emails
• LinkedIn page audit & message mining
• Brand voice doc, mission statement docs, pitch decks, etc.

The result?

A 40+ page messaging deck (which is always included in my email copywriting package) detailing:

• Existing challenges with the current messaging
• VOC data, which was arranged into three core buckets
• Value proposition problem/solutions
• Primary motivators
• Short-term & long-term desires
• Sample opt-ins and email footers for the emails to drive users back to the website
• And everything else in my SaaS email message mining/customer research template!

What I recommended before we started writing onboarding emails

1. 10x their features and benefits with fascinations

Reject short copy. Embrace specific copy.

This is especially true for SaaS, which deals with intangible things you can’t touch, taste, or throw when angry.

For example, I can’t touch/feel an AI creating cold email pitches, but I can sign my next premium client with its suggestions.

For SaaS copywriting, you should relate the SaaS’s critical features to solving the reader’s pressing problem.

Then, they’ll be more excited about using the app and will know what to expect.

I use fascinations to connect the features to their specific benefits.

Fascinations are bullet points on steroids. Instead of listing what makes your solution great, you build anticipation for the reader and keep them reading.

A few examples of some of my most used formulas:

• [Feature] helps you [solve pain point]
  • Connect with recruiters to land your next job on LinkedIn
  • Create sharable docs with Google Docs
  • Design high-quality graphics without design experience on Canva
    
• [Feature/product] is [detailed description of what it is]
  • MarketGenius is an advanced marketing analytics dashboard that tracks real-time customer behavior, offering insights that boost conversion rates by up to 40%.
  • Proposify is the proposal management software that creates, tracks, and lets you e-sign your business proposals so you can close deals 30% faster without missing a detail.
    
• [The ____est way to]
  • Zoom – The fastest way to connect with your team, no matter where they are, with crystal-clear video and audio.
    
• [Better than]
  • Asana – Better than sticky notes and to-do lists, Asana keeps your projects organized and your team on track.
    
• [How to]
  • HubSpot – How to attract, engage, and delight customers with an all-in-one marketing, sales, and service platform.
    
• [Why]
  • Salesforce – Why thousands of businesses trust Salesforce to manage their customer relationships and grow revenue.
  • Dropbox – Why you should never rely on your hard drive alone—Dropbox keeps your files safe, accessible, and shareable from anywhere
    
• [What you should never]
  • Shopify – What successful eCommerce businesses use to manage their online stores and increase sales effortlessly.
    

2. Use email marketing to build desire for your SaaS and drive more users to your product

For users already in your email management system, you should send other types of emails, such as newsletters, product feature announcements, or updates, to build interest in the app before they are onboarded.

In your entire email marketing funnel, you can optimize the following parts to make sure your messaging is consistent:

• The opt-in form(s): Make them appear after the user spends some time on the page, accessible, and easy to read.
  
• The opt-in value proposition: Clearly define the target audience, what you offer them, and how you will solve their problem.
  
• The emails: Build relationships with subscribers/users with topics like the founders’s story or showcasing results from past customers, or show how they can use the app and its key features to solve their problem
  
• Email CTAs: Include more links to the app in your emails and make them relevant to the topic. For example, a snippet of this Notion email showing off their new features:

​

3. Create onboarding milestones

Milestones in onboarding flows shouldn’t be limited to welcome emails or congratulatory messages for completing a few things.

Think, “You’ve completed 3 courses!”, or Grammarly’s weekly reports:

Milestones can help you track your users’ progress and ensure they use the essential features to get the most out of your product.

They are not the same as email goals, which are what emails should do. In this post, I explain more about the difference between milestones and goals and how I use them in my projects.

So, if you hear “I didn’t know about X feature” often in your feedback/interviews, you’ll know where they skipped, and then you can optimize it.

That’s it for today! I hope you enjoyed today’s post on my onboarding email project.

That’s not all. If you’re…

👉🏽 Thinking about working with an Onboarding/Trial Email Copywriter?

I can’t wait to write your emails for you! Select from DIY or DFY options :

1. Free email audit: In 48 hours, you will get a free review of your first two onboarding or trial emails in your inbox. 2. Email Journey Audit: Can’t figure out how to get more opens and clicks from your new users? I’ll send you a 45-minute video review & report showing you how to fix it. 3. Email Copywriting: Hire me to write onboarding and trial emails. Every project comes with a message map slide deck, too!