As a B2B tech marketer, it’s a bit of a no-brainer: without successfully communicating the value of your product and educating users on how to get the most from your offering, your customer activation rate may slip by the wayside. So how do you do it? Here are four customer onboarding considerations that every tech marketer needs to think about.
1. Determine your new customer activation rate
It’s a given that you’re already tracking conversion rates. You’re probably highly focused on your ‘website visit to trial sign-up’ conversion rates. And you probably track closely your ‘trial to purchase’ conversion rates. But what percentage of buyers go on to become active users? This is your activation rate and it’s a crucial metric you need to have locked down.
To define your new customer activation rate, you’ll need to first have a clear definition of what an active customer actually is. This may be frequency or volume of activity, for example.
It’s crucial here to ensure your marketing team has access to the analytics or user data it needs. You’ll need to know your current new customer activation rate and you’ll need to set a target rate.
2. Work out what your new customers’ expectations are
Before you can deliver on your customers’ needs, you should be clear about what their expectations are:
- What do your customers perceive they have bought?
- What do they expect to be able to do with your platform/service?
- How quickly do they think they’re going to get there?
Customer surveys
- Incentivised customer surveys across multiple media – online, postal and telephone – are an important tool in gathering the insight you need.
Focus groups
- A deeper dive than a customer survey, focus groups will enable you to really get under the skin of your customers and formulate hypotheses around their needs that can be tested through wider customer surveys as a follow-up.
Your sales team
- Speak to the people at the coal-face: your sales team. They may have the clearest understanding of your customers’ expectations, and the benefits your customers are signing up to.
Your support team
- Your first line support team may know better than anyone what your customers’ main issues and expectations are during the new user window. Speak to them.
3. Define a successful customer
Achieving success in a short time is crucial for new customers. But what does that success look like?
- Will a successful new customer have completed a set number of tasks using your product?
- Will they have completed a particular key task?
- Will they have delivered a set ROI against their total spend with you in the first month?
4. Get to grips with the customer success roadmap
This is the step-by-step journey the customer takes to achieving the success or successes you have identified in the previous bullet point. Check out the example customer journey below (for a marketing automation platform).
Success milestone: Activate and report on a simple triggered email programme based on a web form completion.
