Automate welcome emails, segment messaging, and develop in-app tutorials with these tools
They say you only get one chance to make a good first impression. For many businesses, this begins with customer onboarding. A good onboarding experience can lead to a long-lasting relationship. Or it can lead to frustration, causing new customers to stop using your product. However, developing these processes can take time and effort that many businesses don't have.
Luckily, customer onboarding tools can aid organizations in improving their processes to optimize retention. The following tools can help you nudge your customers in the right direction, ensuring they have an optimal experience with your company right from the start.
Want to connect new customers to first value faster and more reliably? Check out our guide, The Complete Guide to Customer Onboarding.
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Why your business needs customer onboarding tools
Landing a new customer is only the beginning of their journey with your company. A good customer onboarding process will help to reduce the friction between the user and what they want to do. This could mean downloading software, setting up an account, or buying something. Customers receive this onboarding in several ways, such as in-app tutorials or welcome emails.
While it's possible to build these processes yourself, many small businesses need more time or internal resources to do so. This is where customer onboarding tools can help. These tools offer specialized features designed to maximize onboarding effectiveness. They can help you automate personalized messaging and delivery to your entire customer base. They provide avenues to test onboarding flows to remove pain points. Many also offer third-party integration to improve process efficiency.
To learn more about optimizing your customer onboarding process, download our free ebook The Essential Customer Onboarding Checklist today.
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5 best customer onboarding tools
Best guided experience: Salesforce
What it is: Salesforce is a powerful, configurable CRM and sales automation suite. Since its creation in 1999, the platform has added many features to its general customer management offerings. These include application development, Internet-of-Things, and cloud integration.
How it helps customer onboarding: Within Salesforce’s product offerings is a tool called Marketing Cloud. Here, businesses can send emails, measure engagement, personalize messaging, and track customer loyalty. Journey Builder is a content planning and customer onboarding tool within Marketing Cloud. It's designed to help marketers create automated on-ramps that lead to concrete results.
It also allows teams to automate reactive steps to customer actions through a visual flowchart. For example, if a customer doesn’t complete account set-up after receiving a welcome email, Salesforce can deliver a follow-up email to these users after a set amount of time to nudge them in the right direction. By leveraging these automated conditional tools, Salesforce can reduce the pain points customers experience when moving to the next step in their onboarding journey.
Cost: Salesforce includes Journey Builder within corporate Marketing Cloud Engagement subscriptions. Pricing starts at $4,200 per month per organization.
Best industry-specific onboarding: PipelineDeals
What it is: PipelineDeals (also known as Pipeline CRM) is a customer management platform. Its goal is to help businesses discover, nurture, and close sales leads. It also includes automated sales and marketing email capabilities.
How it helps customer onboarding: PipelineDeals offers solutions that meet specific industries' demands. It touts itself as “the CRM of choice for companies in manufacturing, transportation, construction, distribution, logistics, and professional services.” PipelineDeals also provides specialized solutions for many other industries, like plumbing and real estate.
Cost: Plans start at $25 per user per month. PipelineDeals limits access to more powerful automation features in its most expensive plan. Pricing of these plans starts at $49 per user per month.
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Best optimization tools: HubSpot
What it is: HubSpot is a popular all-in-one marketing platform. It combines customer relationship management, content management, marketing, sales, and customer service. It also contains powerful tools for tracking and optimizing how people interact with your content.
How it helps customer onboarding: HubSpot’s Marketing and CMS Hubs come with robust A/B testing and optimization capabilities. These tools allow you to create two versions of the same webpage or email. Once created, the A/B test will funnel traffic to one of these two options. Once your test is complete, you'll receive a report informing you which option performed the best. Then, you can expand the winning option to your entire audience.
Cost: HubSpot’s CMS Hub starts at $360 per month, while the Marketing Hub starts at $800 per month. Bundles that include both of these and other services are also available.
Best email-centric tool: Mailchimp
What it is: Mailchimp is an email marketing and automation suite. It’s designed to help you improve your email open and clickthrough rates.
How it helps customer onboarding: If your onboarding occurs through email, Mailchimp is a perfect fit. Its CRM will help you get the most out of email messaging (as well as SMS text messaging through optional add-ons). Pre-built templates help get you started. Personalization and predictive segmentation help hone your messaging for individual needs. And if you take an omnichannel approach, the Campaign Manager enables you to manage your messaging through a single pane of glass.
Cost: Mailchimp offers basic email delivery for free for up to 500 contacts. Its recommended plan starts at $20 per month. This plan includes SMS text messaging, A/B testing, segmentation, and its helpful Campaign Manager tool.
Best no-code platform: Appcues
What it is: Appcues is a customer experience platform providing bespoke onboarding, surveys, and other events within your app through its JavaScript SDK.
How it helps customer onboarding: Appcues relies on a no-code creation engine. This engine allows anyone to create their own in-app onboarding process. It allows users to create branching paths based on customer interactions. It can segment users based on various criteria for specific targeting. And you can get instant feedback on where users experience friction so you can further enhance onboarding.
Cost: Pricing for Appcues’ Essentials tier starts at $249 per month for 2,500 monthly active users.
Our recommendation: fi-8170
Those in the market for customer onboarding tools have no shortage of options. We take great pride in having spent the last 50+ years researching, designing, and developing some of the most advanced and powerful electronics in the world, including our professional grade fi and SP series of scanners.
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