Nurture loyalty from day one with effective customer onboarding 

So you’ve captured someone’s attention, appealed to their interests, and scored an initial signup—success! However, that initial conversion is just the beginning; once a lead converts into a new customer, onboarding is crucial to transforming them into a brand advocate.

Customer onboarding is the process of introducing someone to your brand and product. By using a series of well-crafted messages, you can help new customers quickly see value in your product, reinforcing their decision to sign up and setting the foundation for a lasting relationship. That’s why the early days of onboarding are so critical—as the saying goes, “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”

Let’s dive in to learn customer onboarding best practices across various industries. From fintech and edtech to SaaS, marketplaces, and healthcare, you’ll learn how to craft an onboarding experience that resonates with your new customers.

The customer onboarding process begins when customers transition from prospects to paying users of your product. That’s why creating a welcoming onboarding experience is essential—it sets the stage for everything that follows.

Well-crafted new customer onboarding campaigns lead people to the aha moments that inspire activation and loyalty. And on the flip side, inadequate customer onboarding leaves people hanging. They’re less likely to engage or get value from your product—and, therefore, more likely to jump ship.

The most effective approach for onboarding customers varies based on your industry, audience’s needs, and the particular characteristics of your product. Remember these customer onboarding best practices as you begin developing your strategy.

Guide customers through each stage of setup with structured, milestone-based messaging. Identify and focus on essential steps, walking them through each one to maintain momentum and drive engagement.

💡 Pro tip for fintech: Fintech companies often have complex, know-your-customer (KYC) standards like identity verification that need to be met for onboarding to be successful. Tackle verification one step at a time, only moving forward once each key requirement is completed.

💡 Pro tip for marketplaces: The complexity of managing multiple buyers and sellers creates more potential friction points where people are likely to disengage. Look at the new customer experience from both the merchant and consumer side to identify and address drop-off points during onboarding, and leverage behavioral data to target relevant messaging at just the right time to keep people engaged.

To keep customers engaged without creating friction, balance essential onboarding steps with a minimal number of information requests. Focus on delivering immediate value first.

💡 Pro tip for healthcare: Ensure complete compliance from the start by embedding HIPAA standards throughout your entire tech stack and onboarding program. Begin with a thorough audit of all tools and processes to verify they meet privacy standards, safeguarding patient data from the moment onboarding begins.

💡 Pro tip for SaaS: Since SaaS platforms can be time-consuming to get up and running, you need customers to feel that value quickly during the onboarding experience. Emphasize first actions that help customers see immediate value, like starting a campaign or completing a setup task, over detailed configurations that can wait until later.

Leverage customer data to make each onboarding journey hyper-relevant. Segment based on roles and behaviors, and tailor content that aligns with each customer’s unique goals, keeping them engaged from the start.

💡 Pro tip for edtech: People come to you with a desire to learn something specific, so reflect their interests from the moment customer onboarding begins. Personalize your onboarding email with dynamic content based on a customer's interest—e.g., Spanish courses for a language-learning app, Python classes for a code-learning platform, grade-specific curricula for a K-12 education platform.

💡 Pro tip for marketplaces: Start by clearly defining the different sides of your marketplace: buyers and sellers, companies and job seekers, service providers and consumers, etc. That forms the basis of segmentation, but don’t stop there! Dig into the details of each group to identify more granular levels of segmentation based on the unique characteristics of different groups of customers on each side.

>>> Check out how Notion tailored onboarding campaigns to customers’ location and language for a localized experience.

Give customers an initial overview of the steps they’ll take. Show their progress along the way and celebrate milestones to keep them motivated.

💡 Pro tip for SaaS: Provide in-product guidance through “show, don’t tell” methods. Visual tours, video explainers, and checklists walk customers through the process intuitively, helping them reach value milestones faster.

💡 Pro tip for fintech: Emphasize the importance of KYC compliance for security and reassure customers that their data is protected. This turns necessary compliance steps into trust-building moments.

Harness real-time data to dynamically tailor each customer’s onboarding journey, ensuring they receive the right guidance at the most impactful moments. A customer data platform (CDP) can unify data from multiple sources to create a 360-degree view of each customer. This comprehensive perspective enables you to respond instantly to real-time behaviors and preferences.

💡 Pro tip for fintech: Use real-time data to monitor each stage of identity verification and KYC processes. If a customer pauses during a specific step, trigger an automated reminder or offer assistance to address potential concerns immediately.

💡 Pro tip for healthcare: For onboarding compliance steps like consent forms or privacy agreements, use real-time data to track completion and intervene with reminders or additional support as needed. This approach ensures essential requirements are met promptly, helping maintain engagement and trust.

Craft a holistic onboarding experience with multi-channel messaging that taps into the unique benefits of various channels. Email is ideal for long-form educational content, while push and SMS get short, time-sensitive info in front of people quickly. In-app messages, on the other hand, can meet people with relevant, personalized information while they’re actively learning to use your product.

💡 Pro tip for edtech: Use multiple channels to make onboarding as educational as it is engaging. Share tutorials through email, send timely push notifications that gamify achievements, and use in-app messages to deliver personalized learning tips. This multi-channel approach helps students get comfortable with your platform while staying motivated and on track with their goals.

💡 Pro tip for SaaS: In-app messages are especially effective for delivering real-time guidance, as they allow you to engage customers while they’re already engaged. Use these messages to highlight key features, share quick tips, and provide step-by-step walkthroughs for tasks like adding a teammate to their new account.

Once you’ve launched your customer onboarding strategy, it’s time to start measuring the impact. You’ll need to continuously monitor key onboarding metrics to understand what’s working (and where you need to tweak). You’ll likely have specific KPIs based on your unique business goals, but there are a few foundational customer onboarding metrics every business should be measuring. These numbers reveal how effectively you onboard customers and identify specific engagement points that drive success.

Ultimately, the goal of new customer onboarding is to bring people from initial engagement to actively using your product. Your adoption rate is the metric that tells you how many people actually succeeded in that journey.

Adoption rate is calculated as (number of customers who used the product or service / total number of customers in onboarding) x 100.

Keep in mind that adoption rate is a high-level onboarding metric; it gives you an overall picture of onboarding success but doesn't reflect the specific tactic and customer behaviors that drive adoption. If your adoption rate is low, it’s an opportunity to reevaluate your customer onboarding strategy. This is where you might dig into more downstream metrics—like click-through rates or content engagement—to ensure you're not missing opportunities or keeping ineffective messages in your workflow.

The sooner customers get value from your product, the more likely they are to stick around long-term. That’s why time to value (TTV) is a crucial onboarding metric—it reflects whether people realize that value during the early stage of their customer journey.

TTV is generally measured as the time between initial acquisition and the moment of activation. You’ll need to define what specific customer behaviors represent your product’s start and end points. Then measure how long it’s taking people to complete that process.

So how do you know what number equals success? A good TTV is generally “as soon as possible,” and the “as possible” part depends entirely on your industry, product, and customer expectations. You’ll need to dig into your data to determine what it means for you.

💡 Pro tip: Create a cohort of your best customers—those who’ve remained loyal for the longest time, generated the most revenue, provided a lot of referrals, etc. Calculate the average TTV for this cohort to establish a baseline against which to measure future success.

With some high-level onboarding metrics in place, you can begin to drill into specific components of your customer onboarding strategy. These data points will help you identify where your customers are getting stuck, and where they’re seeing success.

• Message click-through rate: Customer onboarding messages need to inspire action. Assess the click-through rate of each message in your campaign to see how well it’s prompting the behaviors that lead to product use and activation.
• In-app engagements: When you send in-app messages, are your customers clicking or skipping? In-app messages aim to meet people with timely, useful content while they’re actively using your product. In-app personalization is critical to success here.
• Content engagement: If your customers are clicking to content, are they actually reading/watching it all the way through? Use these engagement metrics to understand the types of content and topics that resonate with your customers during the onboarding journey.
• Product use: The ultimate test of successful customer onboarding is whether people are actually using your product. Throughout the onboarding process, measure key product use metrics like frequency of use, the length of sessions, and feature adoption.

Don’t underestimate the power of a well-built customer onboarding process—it's the foundation of your customer relationships. Start things off on the right foot with an experience that gets people to that aha moment quickly so they can start seeing value. An effective customer onboarding strategy can help you reduce churn, improve profitability, increase word of mouth, and create the kind of long-term relationships that drive growth.

And once you’ve launched your customer onboarding campaigns, remember to keep experimenting! Get inspired with our growth marketing experiments playbook, packed with user onboarding examples from our Customer.io team.