Onboarding Emails Examples for your Online Course

This week on the podcast we're talking about onboarding emails examples. Are you a course creator? Do you have an onboarding sequence? Or is it just one of those things that get pushed to the side at the end of a busy launch?

Well, if you want to find out exactly how to use your onboarding emails to wow your customers, turn them into fans, and make more sales, we've got your back! 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

(3:23) What are onboarding emails?

(4:30) Use onboarding emails to show the value of your product.

(5:52) How to counteract buyer's remorse.

(8:52) How onboarding emails help you build trust with your customers.

(10:16) A sneak peak into our own onboarding emails.

(13:00) How to use onboarding emails to hightlight the most foundational pieces of your course.

(16:45) How to use the onboarding sequence to set the expectation there's more to learn from you.

(18:43) How to make sure your onboarding sequence reflects the style and framework of your other emails.

(20:44) Don't confuse your onboarding sequence with your welcome sequence.

(23:12) Subject line of the week.

What are onboarding emails?

Onboarding emails are those emails you send to someone who's bought your online course or product. Why are we talking about onboarding email examples today? Because we know what it's like to launch something new. There's so much work that goes into it that often the part that follows the sale gets overlooked and forgotten. 

But onboarding emails are important. And you want to be doing a little more than just thanking your customer for buying the product and giving them the username and password to access it. 

So here are a few things that your onboarding emails can help you do. 

Show the value of your product

The very first thing onboarding emails allow you to do is to encourage your customers to look at the value of the product they bought from you. With these emails, you want to prompt people to take action and consume the content you've painstakingly put together. Because of course, you want them to get the results you promised them, right?  

Counteract buyer's remorse

Another reason why onboarding emails matter is because they help you counteract buyer's remorse. I'm sure this has happened to you - you bought a product or downloaded a lead magnet, and when you did you felt excited.

But then at some point remorse kicks in. You worry that for some reason you've made a bad decision and wasted your time or your money. Maybe you shouldn't have bought the thing in the first place. You've been there and felt like that, right?

So this is where your onboardg email sequence comes in. You've got to use your onboarding emails to get your customers excited about their purchase. Why? Because this is your chance to reassure them they made a good decision, and sell them your product once again. 

You can do this by talking about the transformation they'll experience and the results they'll finally achieve. You can show them testimonials and case studies of people just like them. Because this helps you reinforce your subconscious reputation with that buyer and helps them see how they’re now closer to the outcome they want. Your job is to show them they made a great decision!

Build trust with your customers

Another reason why we swear by onboarding emails (and we want to share some onboarding emails examples with you) is that they help your customers build trust with you and your business. By sending out emails after they bought from you, you show your customers you want them to succeed. A lot of business owners will sell something and then move on to the next thing. And there’s nothing wrong with that inherently, but it’s also important to make your customers looked after.

Show them that you're not just about getting their money and leaving them to themselves. You put together the best content in this course and now you want them to use it and get the results. Because let’s face it – when people buy online courses, a lot of the accountability is on them. If they don't consume the content and implement the strategies you teach them, they won't get results. But you can (and should) definitely still play a part in this process by encouraging them to use your product. 

Some onboarding emails examples

For example, when people join our membership, The League, we send them a detailed email showing them how to access it. We don’t just give them the URL, username, and password - we also include an animated GIF of where they go and click into the Members area. Because even if people haven’t accessed the content yet, we still want them to feel like they've already received value from it. 

Similarly, if you opt-in for one of our free lead magnets, we send you an email with the username and password with an animated GIF that shows the screen recording of a user accessing the resource. We do this because we want people to be able to access the content we promised them and do it easily. This is a critical piece of your relationship with your customer. They’ve given you their email address or their money, so don't make it difficult for them! 

Highlight the most foundational pieces of content 

Your onboarding emails will also help you highlight what you think is important for your customers to know right now and explain what it will do for them. When you sold them the course, you sold them the benefits and the transformation, so now you want to give them clarity on what to do. Now they have the course, you can be more granular and detailed in your explanations. You can pull out the particular lessons you think are important. Now you get to sell to them from the inside. Before you could only say what the course looked like and what it would do for them without giving away too much. But now you can be more specific. 

And it's important you do this because you can't leave your students to decide what parts of the course are the most foundational - they're not qualified to do that. They might go for the shiny parts that seem the most interesting and resonate with them the most right now, but that might be different for everyone. So it's up to you, as the course creator, to point to what's important. And don't forget to explain why. Because psychologically, anytime you communicate something, you have to give them the reasons why, or what you say will never resonate with them.

Set the expectation that there’s more to learn from you

Your onboarding sequence should also help you set the expectation with your customers that you can teach them more - there's more to learn here! Because let's face it - you want your onboarding sequence to serve the customer. But it needs to serve your business as well. So start sowing the seeds and talk about other courses you have. Because while you're telling them that what they have is really good, you also want them to know they don't have the full picture just yet.

Make sure your onboarding emails reflect your style

Another thing to bear in mind when it comes to looking at onboarding emails examples is that you want to maintain the same energy and style from the emails you sent to your list before they bought your product. You don't want to suddenly turn into this person who just emails them robotically about going to page 12 of your workbook, do you? In fact, you want the opposite. You want to make your subscribers feel excited about what they just bought. Your emails should be so good that if you were selling something new, they would go and buy it straight away!

If you use our Daily Email Strategy from the Complete Daily Email Strategy course, you'll be familiar with our framework of Story, Lesson, and Offer. You tell a story, you make a lesson out of it, and then you make an offer. You can follow this same framework in your onboarding emails. Except that now they bought your course, you tell the story, make a lesson out of it, and then the call to action is not to buy, but to go and access your course. So make sure that people who buy from you receive the same style of emails as part of their onboarding experience. 

Don’t confuse your onboarding sequence with your welcome sequence

Now, there's one last point worth making. And that's that each of your products and lead magnets needs its own onboarding sequence – we’ll call it a consumption sequence. And it's not a welcome sequence! Different onboarding emails examples have something in common - they invite your customers to go and consume your content. 

Your onboarding or consumption sequence is a separate automated campaign. You might be familiar with our Getting to Know You Sequence, which is the welcome campaign we teach inside The League. Your new subscribers only go through it once when they first come into your email marketing platform. The onboarding sequence, on the other hand, is something a customer goes through for each one of your products. So that's how it's different from your welcome sequence.

Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line of the week is “Boring for two hours?” Now, regardless of what the content was, the reason this worked so well is that no one wants to be boring. Or anything that’s negative, for that matter. The subject line would have worked with any other word that has a negative connotation - simply because people don't want to be associated with anything negative.

But also, adding a number in the subject line helps. That’s because numbers give specificity. And the fact it was asked as a question makes it even more engaging. Remember this - any time you turn a statement into a question it triggers ambiguity and curiosity in people. And often that drives open rates up. So there you go! 

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How to amplify email campaigns, Clate Mask from Keap spills the beans.

Testimonials – how to write and collect them automatically to bring in more sales with Monica Snyder.

Writing The Perfect Welcome Email – Saying Hello With Gavin Bell.

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