How to Automate Your Onboarding Email Sequence

An outreach campaign is a lot of work. Even when you have the best outreach tool, and a massive list of high-quality leads, the job isn’t done until you gain new customers!
‘Real’ conversions happen when you turn your free trial users into paid customers. And for that, you’ll need some help from onboarding email sequences.

What’s an Onboarding Flow? Why Should You Automate It?

If you run a SaaS business, onboarding sequences help you increase user engagement. Read: they encourage product stickiness and make users interact with your product more, so they don’t churn.

An onboarding flow is the sequence of steps to guide your new users to get started with your application. It starts when someone signs up for a free trial of your product and ends when a customer decides to stick with you for a long time.

For example, at Super Send, we have an onboarding flow that requires new users to follow a couple of steps to get their campaigns up and running.

1. Users need to create an app password in their Google workspace.
2. You need to set up their Super Send account, which mainly involves syncing your business email account with Super Send.
3. After setting up, you can create a new campaign and add sequences.
4. Once done, you can add the leads by uploading a CSV.
   

We’ve found it’s critical for new users to have this information before they begin using our app to ensure they know how to use Super Send correctly and generate results for their business. And to achieve that, we needed to automate the entire sequence, so users get the right information at the right time.

Think of it as following up: you’re following up with your leads while answering their queries and handling their objections.
As soon as a new user signs up for your application, add them to a 3 or 5-step welcome sequence to shortlist the users who will use your product regularly. Your onboarding sequence will encourage them to use your app to its maximum during the free trial. If you’ve provided enough value, they’ll convert into paying users.

Automating Your Onboarding Sequence With Super Send

Use Case 1: Make Free Trial Users Take the Next Steps

Opting for a free trial is one thing, and using and engaging with the software is another!

Often, users end up ghosting or never using your app after opting for a free trial. You need to have them take specific actions inside your application—for example: finishing setting up their account or adding their list of leads to the application.

For Super Send free trial users, we create automated sequences to encourage users to:

• Set up their account
• Create new campaigns
• Write email copy
• Add leads to the campaign and an email account to send those emails from
• Automate their outbound campaign

Use Case 2: Increasing Product Usage

In this case, the goal is to make your existing users spend some time exploring your app so you can retain them.

The best way forward is to send personalized automated sequences to these users based on the actions they perform.

For example, if they created a campaign a week ago but haven’t written the email copy, we send them emails based on that event to check on them and help with the next steps.

Use Case 3: Assessing Interesting

When we first launched Super Send, we had an early access program for the newest features.

When a user signed up for our Early Access program, we’d add them to our database. But we’d also add them to a sequence of 3 emails to see if they really want to join or if they're going to ghost us.

We used NodeJS to automate this process. We used one API call to add the lead to Super Send and another to mark it as verified. (You can pull all the variables from the Admin page.)

const fetch = require('node-fetch')

// add a user to a campaign automatically
const addUserToSequence = async (email, first_name, last_name) => {
  try {
    const CampaignId = 'xxx'
    const TeamId = 'xxx'
    const ApiKey = 'xxx'
    const url = 'https://api.supersend.io/v1/auto/contacts'
    const body = {
      TeamId,
      CampaignId,
      contacts: [{ email, first_name, last_name }]
    }
    // add the leads to a campaign
    const response = await fetch(url, {
      method: 'post',
      body: JSON.stringify(body),
      headers: {
        'Authorization': `Bearer ${ApiKey}`,
        'Content-Type': 'application/json'
      }
    });
    const contactsAdded = await response.json();

    // mark all leads as verified
    const verify = await fetch(`https://api.supersend.io/v1/auto/contacts`, {
      method: 'PUT',
      headers: {
        'Authorization': `Bearer ${ApiKey}`,
        'Content-Type': 'application/json'
      },
      body: JSON.stringify({
        CampaignId,
        TeamId,
        markAll: "verified",
        markAs: true
      })
    })
    const contactsVerified = await verify.json()
    return true
  } catch (e) {
    console.log('add user to sequence e ', e)
    return false
  }
}


module.exports = addUserToSequence;

How to Create Trigger-Based Conditions for Your Onboarding Sequence

All it takes is an API call inside Super Send to add a user to your email sequence or send a particular sequence based on a trigger. We have custom message variables that help you call these APIs based on different events:

For example, if a user added a sender account to their email campaign, we add them to a sequence that guides them from that particular step onward.

This way, the user knows the actions they need to take next, and how to maximize every minute they spend in Super Send.

Similarly, suppose your users’ free trial is ending soon. You can create a custom message variable for the end date and add a trigger nudging them to take action. For that, you need to add a liquid syntax to your email to trigger an action based on events:

Syntax: {{% if hasEvent == false %}} or {{% if hasSender ==false %}}

Win More Customers With Automated Onboarding Sequences!

Automating your onboarding flow is the best thing you can do to bring in more conversions!

It’s a great way to engage your new users, nurture them and stay on top of their minds as they explore your app. It doesn’t matter how involved they’ve been with your app; if you meet them at the right time with the right context, you’ll get their attention.

Sending highly personalized automated sequences will help turn your lukewarm audience into loyal customers.

Increase your users’ lifetime value. Automate your email sequences with Super Send!