Onboarding 102: Going Beyond Best Practices and Getting Personal

— October 18, 2018

Posts about mobile onboarding tend to focus on campaign planning – how to highlight your app’s value, educate users on app functionality, etc.

For this blog, let’s shift the focus to actionable opportunities. Below I’ve outlined three ways to make the most of the behavioral and profile data you capture from your users during an onboarding flow.

But I’m not capturing any user data in my current onboarding flow

Why not? The first session is a golden hour primed for setting new users on the happy path towards long-term loyalty and engagement. An onboarding strategy is worth investing in, especially considering the fact that one in five users will never launch an app again after one session. If you are just getting started or are looking to revamp your onboarding flow, see the bottom of this post for additional resources.

How do I make the most out of my onboarding campaign?

Back to the action. You and your team have a mobile onboarding campaign in place that is capturing behavioral and profile information. How do you make the most of this data to positively impact downstream metrics across users’ full lifecycles?

As promised, here are three opportunities you should consider implementing…

  1. Personalize app UX: Use the onboarding data to personalize user experience, starting with the first session.
  2. Personalize mobile messages: Use the onboarding data to personalize your mobile messaging campaigns via liquid templating and rich segmentation.
  3. Personalize other channels: Use the onboarding data to fuel personalization and segmentation in your other engagement channels.

Next up are visual examples and a breakdown of how to execute these strategies.

How do I execute on these recommendations?

This section is catered towards enterprise mobile teams that leverage the Localytics platform, but guests are also welcome!

Challenge: How do I personalize app UX using onboarding data?

Solution: Hard code your app UI to display relevant content on users’ first sessions

Onboarding 102: Going Beyond Best Practices and Getting Personal

Nike has one of the most comprehensive onboarding experiences I have ever seen on mobile. Nike combines a traditional “value prop” carousel with a survey flow to create a custom experience starting with your very first session.

Onboarding 102: Going Beyond Best Practices and Getting Personal

Clarisonic recently launched their mobile app and their onboarding strategy is impressive. Similar to the Nike App, Clarisonic puts their value prop front and center, while giving users a wealth of opportunities to customize their experience throughout the onboarding process.

PRO TIP: If you use Inbox, consider leveraging this channel to customize home screens, news feeds, etc. with personalized content.

Challenge: How do I personalize mobile messaging using onboarding data?

Solution: Use profile and behavioral conditions to create rich segmented audiences

Onboarding 102: Going Beyond Best Practices and Getting Personal

ESPN knows it’s target demo is opinionated, with preferences splintered among cities, leagues, individual teams and even viewing habits. By intelligently segmenting their audiences from the start, they can deliver personalized UX to users right out of the gate.”

PRO TIP: Take personalization a step further with liquid templating — use profile information to customize message content, rich media, and deeplinks!

Onboarding 102: Going Beyond Best Practices and Getting Personal

Liquid Templating — also known as dynamic content or personalization tokens — is a language that allows you to quickly and easily reach customers in a highly personalized way. This allows you to insert profile attributes into your messages, and shows users that you’re listening.

Challenge: How do I personalize other channels using onboarding data

Solution: Take advantage of the suite of APIs available to pass data gathered from onboarding and beyond

Here is a quick overview of some of our Export APIs:

      • Audience Exports – Empowers you to use the rich and granular Localytics audience segmentation in non-mobile channels like email or online advertising. Audiences can be created off of both behavioral and profile conditions.
      • Profile Exports – Allows you to export, in bulk, preferences and behaviors of users associated with your app for engagement and analysis in other platforms.

PRO TIP: Take your multi-channel strategy a step further with our integrations with marketing cloud partners like Salesforce and Oracle.

Screen Shot 2018-10-12 at 9.01.02 AM

Remember – your users, your app, and your brand are all unique. While there are proven best practices on how to engage mobile users, the strongest strategies we have seen are a direct result of teams being open to and proactive about experimenting, testing, and learning.

If you have any questions or would like to connect, please do not hesitate to reach out.

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