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THIS WEEK'S ASSIGNMENT
Your onboarding series, also known as a drip campaign, is basically a welcome package to your new members. The welcome email – which is different from the payment confirmation email – is your opportunity to say an enthusiastic “Thank you!” to your new member. The series of emails that follows is an opportunity to orient them to your publication and their new relationship to it.
MPP strongly discourages newsrooms from treating onboarding like an afterthought. They’ve started a relationship with you – and now it’s on you to take them by the hand and lead them through the membership journey. This week’s assignment is to launch or make improvements to your member onboarding process.
Step 1: If you already have an onboarding series, take a look at your open rates
Do they stay steady, or do they drop off?
If your open rates drop off toward the end, that could indicate a few things: your first email or two wasn’t very valuable, so people stopped opening them; your onboarding series is too long; or you’re having deliverability issues. Make sure the most important items are in the earliest emails to lessen the chance of new members missing them.
Step 2: Make sure you have the simple things set up right
Send your onboarding emails from a personable email address. This is not the place to use noreply@[domain]. Many organizations use hello@[domain] or members@[domain]. If they can come from your membership point person specifically, that’s even better.
Your onboarding emails should be written by and signed by recognizable individuals in your organization, such as the founder or a well-known reporter, or the person members will hear from the most often, such as your membership editor. Consider including a photo of the writer. And since you have members’ first names from their registration, use a merge tag to address the email to them specifically.
Step 3: Make sure each member onboarding email has only one “job”
You should limit the number of “jobs” each onboarding email does to one or two. If you’re introducing new members to your team and how you work, don’t also enumerate their benefits in that email. Make the onboarding emails simple to digest and act on, especially if there’s an action needed (such as filling out an onboarding survey). If you give them more than one action to complete in an onboarding email, they’re more likely to skip one of them completely
When Outride.rs in Poland created an onboarding series for their flagship newsletter, The Brief, they originally had just two emails. The first, written by the editor-in-chief, welcomed them, reiterated Outride.rs value proposition, and explained what to expect from the Brief. The second one explained more complex processes, like how Outride.rs made editorial decisions and its financial model. After several emails from confused readers, they realized that they had packed too much into that second email and split it into two separate emails.
Step 4: Add a new member survey to one of the emails
If you’re not already using your onboarding series as a way to get to know your new members, you’re missing out on an opportunity to serve them better. Black Ballad in the UK asks members what three topics they’re most interested in and how they want to have an impact on the world, which informs the team’s decision about what topics to focus on in their editorial campaigns.
Some organizations extend their “onboarding” through the whole first year, and use those later emails in the series to ask members how their experience has been so far. De Correspondent in the Netherlands surveys new members about how their member experience compares to their expectations within 30 days of joining, and then surveys them on a quarterly basis about their experience and what they would like to see on the platform. They send their last onboarding email as the member’s one-year anniversary/annual renewal date approaches.
Something to keep in mind: Because your onboarding series simply runs in the background, it can be easy to forget to keep it current. Each time you make a change to your membership program, whether that's how members will access a benefit or who their main point of contact will be, you need to update your onboarding series accordingly. Consider setting regular reminders in your calendar to check that it reflects the most up-to-date information.
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