During any onboarding experience you have access to several customer data points that, when used correctly, will set your customer up for success. These data points will help you create a highly-personalized and powerful onboarding journey.

We are going to break down the data points most crucial to each phase of the onboarding process. Since some products are more complicated than others, onboarding journeys can differ in length. . The three phases we’ve outlined can be easily adapted to expand over days or weeks, depending on the difficulty of implementation and onboarding.

The best part? When you use Ortto, your data and marketing automation are all in one platform, making highly-personalized journeys incredibly simple.

Phase 1 - Implementation

This stage is about setting up your new customers for success. Using key data points and gathering further customer information will help you understand what they are hoping to achieve and the kind of content, product features and communication style are most relevant to them.

Data from forms

Forms — those you use including lead capture and sign-up forms — are a valuable tool to collect information about your customers. It’s likely you have more forms than you realize. They may be used as part of the book a demo process, to start a trial, or popups prompting the website visitor to sign up to your newsletter, download an ebook, or attend a webinar.

Lead capture forms will be the starting point of your customer’s profile. With each data point added through your forms, your CDP will be automatically updated, creating a robust profile.

Sign-up forms should be as short and sweet as possible, but even a single field asking your new customer ‘What do you want to achieve with our product?’ can go a long way to helping you personalize their onboarding journey.

For example, perhaps your product is a project management app. The sooner you can determine whether your customer is an individual looking to organize a life event like a wedding or a business looking to manage a major project like a rebrand, the better your onboarding journey will be. Getting this information upon sign up is essential to their success, and in most cases they’ll be happy to answer the question if it means receiving relevant content and information.

Demographic and firmographic data

Learn more about your customers by using demographic and firmographic data to build out your customer’s profile. The more you know about your customers the more you are able to speak to them on a more personal level.

The collection and collation of demographic and firmographic data within your Ortto account, allows you to then segment your audience (among other uses) so you can target them with the right message, at the right time, in the right place.

Segmenting your audience will give you access to personalize your message, content and channel use to best suit that group. Plus you can further add to your customer’s data profile by using a data enrichment platform like Clearbit. This program uses millions of data points to automatically refresh your customer records once change is detected. This integration ensures that the information that you’re working with is reflective of the current situation. For example, if your customer gets promoted or moves to a different company, their information will be automatically updated.

The more data you have, the more you are able to create hyper-personalized content to better engage with your customers. This is especially helpful in the early stages of onboarding, where customers will favor brands who understand their needs, wants and pain points.

Product data related to connecting integrations

During the onboarding process there may be certain integrations that are necessary for your customer to connect to in order to reach their aha moment. This in turn may impact the type of onboarding journey they require, accessing this product data will help you to personalize their experience.

For example, when signing up to Notion, users can integrate Evernote, Google Docs, Trello, Asana and more. Each of these integrations reveals technographic data that will help you personalize the customer journey. If you have a user who signs up and integrates Evernote, you can automate an email sharing ‘Ten things you can do with Notion and Evernote.’ This way, you can piggyback on an app they already use and love, increasing the chance they’ll stick around.

Here at Ortto, we offer solutions for ecommerce, SaaS, B2C and B2B industries. There are specific integrations that will categorize customers to fit into a particular industry. So if a new customer comes in via our Shopify integration, they will receive a welcome email that's skewed towards ecommerce and how Ortto will solve certain ecommerce pain points.

Phase 2 - Pathway to value realization

This is where your new customer has passed the implementation stage of the onboarding journey. Your aim here is to inspire regular use so they can see the true value of your product. The following data points will allow you to build on the information gathered in phase one to create a far more personalized experience.

Content and campaign data

Here we are talking about key metrics that will show you what your customer is interested in. We’ve outlined a few metrics to start looking at:

• Webinars attended - Those who attend the webinar (or register to watch at a later date) can then be sent further relevant content, product features or invites to future webinars ensuring that they can see the value not only with the product but for the company itself.

• Emails opened - Know exactly which emails are engaging to your customers. This will provide great insight into what interests your customers, what they find useful and relevant. This information can be used to inform the follow-up emails your customer receives, or to help success and sales teams during check-in calls. Ortto’s new subject headline tool can help you find the best subject line for your email to ensure you have the best chance of driving opens.
  
  

  

• Blog content read - This data is perfect for your sales or customer success team when talking to your new customer. If they have a check-in call scheduled with a customer, they can get a complete picture of what the customer has read and actions taken. This can give them the head start in speaking further about the topic and the brand's product features that relate to it.
  
  

  

Product data related to custom activities

Each business will have differing actions or behaviors that are critical for value realization. Try setting up custom activities in Ortto and track these data points to give you better insight into where your customer is on their journey while also enabling you to personalize their experience going forward.

For example, you can set up a journey for your onboarding customers based on their behavior in successfully reaching your company’s critical event, i.e. inviting 5 team members to join the platform.

Create your custom activity in Ortto, then design a journey to account for the action or inaction taken by your new customers. If they reach the milestone of inviting 5 team members then they are sent on a new customer journey relevant to them. For example, the next email could go into further detail of all the group features available now that 5 team members have joined.

If no action has been taken throughout the onboarding experience, then it's time to prompt them, or have a customer success team member reach out.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Custom activities provide endless options for personalizing the onboarding experience for your customers.

Phase 3 - Feedback and value realization

It’s coming to the end of your onboarding experience, so it’s time to check in with your new customers to see how their experience was and reinforce the true value of your product.

Data from feedback surveys

Utilize each phase of the onboarding experience to find out as much as you can about your customers. Feedback surveys, whether sent via email or in pop-ups, can be used to get a better understanding of how your customer found the process, any pain points they encountered, and what they are interested in learning more about going forward.

This information will allow you to send them any further relevant content or show them more advanced features that could help them reach their goals. Remember — all feedback is good feedback. If your new customer was on a free trial and decides not to sign up, the feedback provided at this stage could help you nurture them back to life or give you insights on where the onboarding journey needs improvement.

Product data related to value realization

Drive home the point that your product has made your customer's life easier or helped them achieve a milestone with a value realization email sharing product data. For example, at Ortto we send an email celebrating the amount of revenue that has been attributed to a customer’s campaigns to reinforce the value of our product.

Grammarly famously shares a weekly recap including stats like number of words checked and comparing individual user’s performance against other Grammarly users. This starts in the onboarding period and continues throughout your time as a customer to continuously reinforce the value of the product. Plus, a little friendly competition can go a long way.

Final word

When you're a marketer, data is your greatest ally when it comes to creating hyper-personalized experiences for your customers. If you’re looking to stay competitive in your field then it’s time to ensure you are utilizing the mentioned data points. Ortto is here to help with all your data and marketing automation kept in one platform. Try Ortto for free today to make your data work for you.