Optimize Your Onboarding Program

For most digital subscription-based businesses, the first 90-120 days of subscriber tenure are critical to profitability. This is particularly the case when a business uses introductory acquisition offers. That’s why it’s important to optimize the onboarding program for engagement, business intelligence, and ROMI. Let’s use an example to illustrate how this might work.

Scenario

An online media company charges $20.00 a month for full online access. To drive revenue the company sends an acquisition email with an offer to get the first 3 months free. For arguments sake, let’s assume that the subscriber contract is month-to-month with minimal marketing costs. With those basic assumptions, the company needs to retain a new subscriber for 6 months to achieve break even.

The subscriber onboarding program consists of four email communications:

1. Purchase confirmation / welcome sent immediately after the transaction

2. Online user guide sent on day 7

3. Online user guide sent on day 14

4. Online user guide sent on day 30

Optimization

Start with the end in mind: At a minimum your onboarding dashboard should have a scale of retention rates and/or churn rates with LTV by start date (i.e., January, February and so on). To take your analysis a step further, you can add month over month average engagement metrics such as number of logins, time on site, tool usage etc…

This insight will then allow you to:

• Determine baseline retention and churn rates and LTV across the first 90-120 days of tenure.

• Link retention and churn rates and LTV with key subscriber engagement metrics. For instance, you may find that during the first ten days of tenure, a subscriber logs in an average of 3.4x per day, but this drops 20% from days 11-20.

• Set measurable retention and engagement optimization goals. For instance, increasing logins in by 5% during days 11-20 results in a 25% increase in LTV.

Find pain points, prioritize and fix them: One way to determine obvious pain points is to analyze email and site click behavior. Are there trends in the click behavior and keyword searches that point to a poor login experience, customer service issues or UX problems? The next step is to prioritize pain points based on their impact on retention. For instance, fixing a mobile login issue would be a major pain point, while making subscribers re-enter their password could be more of a routine ache.

If you have the time and resources you can enhance your pain point data analysis to drill down on root causes. This is achieved by integrating other data sources including, preference center, VoC and NPS data, customer service interactions, online reviews, and social media. At the very least, you should include a contact mechanism in all your communications and have a daily recap report on responses. I also recommended two or three short online surveys at key drop off periods across the first days.

Deliver timely and relevant re-engagement messaging: Once you’ve fixed critical pain points, you need to leverage your subscriber data to test triggered messages at key points of tenure. Let’s use the goal mentioned above: increase logins by 5% during days 11-20 of tenure.

Therefore our goal is to identify subscribers that have decreased login activity during the first 10 days of tenure and treat them with a relevant re-engagement message. For instance, this could be a triggered SMS, email, or in-app message at day 10: “Hi Larry, we hope you’re enjoying your digital subscription. In case you missed it, we’ve updated our coverage on last night’s political debate. Login to access the stories. If you any questions or issues accessing your online subscription, please contact us at help@media.com or 1-888-888-8888 FREE.”