Customer onboarding is a lot like meeting the parents.
Remember the first time your significant other brought you home?
The whole experience was probably overwhelming, stressful and set your expectations on how future visits would play-out. If things went well, you probably felt at ease, comfortable and may have even enjoyed your experience (gasp!). However, if things went horribly, you probably re-thought your relationship’s potential or, at least, faked a business conference the next time you were invited over.  
You want to make sure every single user’s onboarding experience makes them excited about their future with you (but if they start sending you love notes and locks of their hair, you may want to be concerned). Successful onboarding generates long-term customer relationships, which, in turn, increases profits. Repeat customers become influencers and generate more leads, and they are easier to sell to than new customers (Ka-Ching!). According to Help Scout, not only is it 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than keeping a current one but also, loyal customers can be worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase.
Consequently, a positive customer experience can make or break your business. Here are 5 tools to help you nail your first impression, and build strong customer relationships (pun intended):

1. Optimizely

Optimizely allows you to test and personalize your customer’s journey, through experimentation. Through every level of your customer onboarding experience, this digital tool offers easy-to-use A/B testing, and multi-page experimentation. This function is available across multiple platforms, including mobile. Optimizely also lets you deliver targeted content in real time, reducing bounce rates and increasing users time on your site. You are able to build specific user personas through their browsing behaviour, demographic information and third party sources. By combining your targeted content with your most successful experiments, you are able to completely personalize and optimize the total customer experience. As such, you can effectively increase user engagement and, consequently, develop long lasting relationships with loyal customers. Furthermore, all this valuable information enables you to make better decisions faster, driving up your overall revenue.

2. Intercom

Intercom is an online tool that connects customer messaging for product sales, marketing, and support teams on one platform. You are able to target messages specifically to your users onboarding needs, chat with users in real time (and continue conversations with leads over email), and re-engage users whose activity is declining. All of their products are integrated onto one platform, making using it as easy as possible. Intercom offers a free trial, and afterwards, products are available for as little as $49 a month.  

3. WhatFix

WhatFix simplifies onboarding, improves support and reduces user training efforts. This digital tool allows you to create structured and interactive guides for users to follow. Their onboarding task list helps introduce users to important platform features you wish to highlight. You have the ability to personalize the onboarding experience to certain customer segments and gather data on how each user engages with your platform. Additionally, WhatFix has multi-browser support and multilingual support.

4. Auth0

User’s want to take the path of least resistance, they want their experience to be as straightforward and simple as possible. Auth0 provides practically every social login option without having you do any extra work. Users are able to sign up by the click of one button, rather than filling out long and intrusive forms. According to CXL, 86% of users are bothered by having to create new accounts on websites, and 77% see social login as a good alternative. Additionally, utilizing social logins also gives you valuable information from the users social profiles, allowing you to personalize their onboarding experience. Auth0 also lets you A/B test different configurations to optimize conversion rates.

5. Kissmetric

Kissmetric can increase user engagement, conversion and retention rates. This digital tool shows you overall audience behaviour, and more importantly, why visitors convert. You are able to take this audience behaviour, and set certain triggers to send nudges to users who exhibit certain intentions. With this information, you are able to optimize your site, and improve your overall marketing strategy and decisions. An added bonus, these analytics can be set up without writing a single line of code. Kissmetric can be easily integrated with any apps or platforms you are currently using. This tool can be a bit expensive, with starting plans at $220 per month, but with a proven 49% less churn rate, it just might be worth it.
Unsurprisingly, more and more companies are also integrating easy customer onboarding applications into their core services. For example, Signority offers its customers customized templates for simple onboarding and to avoid the tedious back-and-forth that customers often seek to avoid. Take advantage of all the services/tools available to you, and never scare away a customer again.
Like meeting the parents, customers want an onboarding experience that will make them feel welcome and comfortable. Utilize these tools and you’ll definitely be seeing your customers again and again.
Looking for seamless customer onboarding? Sign-up now and get a 14-day free trial to a Signority eSignature Plan.