[00:00:00] Matt Cromwell: Hey, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to another week of WP Product Talk. How are you, Katie? Yeah, good. Thanks. How are you? Good. I'm excited to talk about this today. Uh, we are, uh, WP Product Talk. We do this every week. We talk about. best practices and weird missteps and fun, uh, business insights and ideas and statistics and our experiences as product owners in the WordPress space.

[00:01:12] Um, and it's a great time for anybody who's interested in WordPress product ownership in any way, or product building, development, supporting to just come in and, um, Hear what's going on. Um, and, uh, every week it's a different topic. And every week we bring on a different guest, um, to talk with us. Um, and, um, I'm excited to bring on our guest today.

[00:01:35] Um, so, uh, we're today, our subject exactly is customer onboarding. Um, how to turn first time buyers into loyal customers. Uh, something that I'm particularly excited about. Um, and we have a great guest and we have somebody who's going to introduce us. So here it is.

[00:01:53] Matt Medeiros: Matt from the WP Minute soon to also be from the new Gravity Forms Podcast.

[00:01:59] Here to introduce Mark Zara to the WP Product Talk Show. Today, mark puts the mayor in WP Mayor at his website and wp mayor.com. He is the guy who curates the content, helps wrangle all the partners, keeps the ship moving there at the website. I've known Mark now for many years. We've collaborated on content in the past, might even work on some new projects.

[00:02:22] In the future, he's a guy who really cares about, uh, WordPress media, the type of content he puts out, how he helps his partners and how he delivers a well rounded product, uh, to his readers, listeners, and viewers across all the channels that he invests in. So without further ado, it's Mark Zara, the WP product talk show.

[00:02:43] Enjoy the show. Welcome, Mark.

[00:02:48] Mark Zahra: Hey, Matt. Hey, Katie. Thanks for having me on. And thank you to Matt for the

[00:02:52] Matt Cromwell: introduction as well. Yeah. For those who don't know, that's Matt Medeiros from the WP Minute. And the WP Minute has actually reproduced, um, uh, W W P product talk on, uh, their podcast. Uh, and so really appreciate their support over the last, uh, I don't know, almost six months or so, uh, seven months.

[00:03:13] I don't know. We've been doing this a while. Um, so thanks a bunch, Matt Medeiros and Mark. Welcome. Welcome. So today. onboarding. Mark, can you tell the world just a little bit about yourself as well? Who you are, what you do, what you're excited about?

[00:03:27] Mark Zahra: Sure. So yeah, as Matt said, um, our company is called Rebel Code.

[00:03:31] We run WP Mayor, Spotlight Instagram feeds, and WP RSS Segregator. Um, today's topic is something that's been on my mind for quite a few months. So it's customer onboarding, uh, customer experience. It's something that we've experienced with our own products, having launched Spotlight around three years ago now.

[00:03:49] Um, that was the priority that we focused on when watching that product, given the whole situation in the market at that time. I'll talk a bit about that later. And lately we've been getting sort of more into it with a rebuild of our aggregator plugin. And even with a service we're doing in WP Mayor called an opportunity analysis where we have analyzed other WordPress product companies and looking at their onboarding, their customer experience.

[00:04:14] And there's clearly a lot of room for improvement in this space. Um, there's some quick wins that people can work on and there's some bigger projects that they can work on for the future. So I'm excited to discuss them and see, uh, what we can share

[00:04:28] Matt Cromwell: with the audience. Excellent. Awesome. And for anybody who's, uh, listening in, uh, we love to answer your questions live too.

[00:04:36] So if you're on YouTube, there's a little chat on the side there, you can put in your questions or your responses and we will talk about them on the show. And we'll actually probably just throw them at Mark and have him answer all of them. Cool. But for today, um, we want to talk about customer onboarding and we always start off with why this subject is so important.

[00:05:01] Um, and, uh, I'd love if Katie, if you might tell us a little bit from your perspective, um, uh, why this subject is so important.

[00:05:09] Katie Keith: Yeah, sure. Well, the first few hours and days after a sale are the most time, the time you're most likely to lose a customer. Mm-Hmm. . They often try multiple plugins or themes at once and have a play, and if they don't get what they need straight away, you are going to lose them.

[00:05:26] And there's lots of ways to support customers during this crucial time, and you need to get the right balance. between being there when they need you and having the information and support available to them without bombarding them and annoying them, which is also going to lose them. So this is worth discussing how to get the right balance and the best ways to onboard them.

[00:05:47] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. I agree for me personally. Um, we found over the years, um, on give WP and now I'm looking into a bit of onboarding on some other products as well. Um, exactly what you're saying that, like those first few hours or days after somebody starts using your product either as a free user or as a customer.

[00:06:09] That those are really crucial times. Um, folks are really quick to just be like, nah, I'm done with this. If, uh, if they're not having a good and positive experience. Um, but how that experience happens in the WordPress space is it varies. Um, if you are a freemium product like give WP. Um, there's a free plugin and we have no interaction with those people that we can control ourselves.

[00:06:31] Uh, they install the plugin on their website. We never even know that that's happened at all. Um, but what we can help, uh, do is, is ideally give them a nice, uh, onboarding experience. And truthfully in WordPress, that whole idea. Um, it used to be kind of like people, like, especially developers used to really look down their nose.

[00:06:52] If the plugin tried to do something really unique or creative after plugin activation, um, it used to really be like not best practice among WordPress product owners to do some fancy things. But nowadays, especially if your plugin is like really drives a lot of functionality on a website, um. If you don't do it, you're going to risk losing those users.

[00:07:14] So that's a really valid point. Um, Mark, what's your take? Why is this so important?

[00:07:22] Mark Zahra: Well, what Katie said is very much in line with the way we think as well. I'd go a step further of even going in a shorter timeframe and even the first few seconds, first few minutes of actually using your product. So like I said, Matt, people's attention span is so short nowadays.

[00:07:39] That you have to grab their attention right away. I have to show them value right away. And there can't be any obvious roadblocks during that period. And that can be anything from throwing them to applying screen to confusing settings and labels. Um, so there's a lot of. relatively simple stuff which can be done to improve this.

[00:07:59] Yes, in WordPress, it's been a long time coming for a lot of products. There's been a lot of sort of what I call developer mentality where you just expect to know how WordPress works and where things are. Um, but we know that's not the case for the majority of users of WordPress, especially for website builders, as we see nowadays, who aren't developers and don't know any code and aren't familiar with these kinds of tools.

[00:08:20] So these onboarding steps, these initial steps, the initial impression that people get when they use your product, I'm giving them, um, the, the guidance they need to set things up in the first place, making it simple, straightforward, as short as possible, but keep the value in there, give them some quick wins along the way, make it exciting.

[00:08:39] Make them want to use your product. All these elements have become vital to any product led growth company.

[00:08:48] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. Um, Katie, we also wanted to tell folks a little bit about different places that onboarding can happen. Um, um, do you have something in mind there?

[00:09:00] Katie Keith: Yeah. It's kind of every possible touch point you want to be helpful.

[00:09:04] Um, I think something like a setup wizard is really helpful and we've done a lot of work in the last year or two adding them for all of our plugins. Um, because often people they'll click activate, um, and. They don't know what to do next. So you at least want to direct them and it's important not to be annoying.

[00:09:21] Like it should be first activation only, for example. And I think there is some caveats there, but in general, you can assume if they've just installed something, they probably want to know where to go next and have a quick setup kind of guide. Um, and then even the settings page as well needs to have.

[00:09:39] clear links, the documentation, um, little tool tips and things. All of that is part of onboarding in my opinion, because it's how the customer, uh, is familiarizing themselves with your products and setting it up. And then in addition to that, emails are really important. Um, they'll obviously get their post purchase emails and uh, at Barn too, we have like a receipt email, which is the obvious stuff, download link, license key, um, invoice, but we also have a product specific email, which sends a specific like step by step instructions of how to get started with that plugin.

[00:10:18] With knowledge based links as well. And that sends at the same time. So they've immediately got multiple sources of information to help them get up and running. And also obviously details of how to get a support. They can just reply to the email. And we say that in the email. Um, and then you've got the next few days, a lot of customers.

[00:10:38] If you look at the license activations, don't activate it within the first few days, um, we're talking premium plugins here, of course, and you're thinking, why, why did they buy it and not activate it? So is it because they just haven't got round to it? Do they never going to? You want them to, you want them to, uh, like the product and keep using it and get that loyalty.

[00:11:00] So we also send an email after, I think it's about three days, just to ask them how they're getting on with it and whether they need any help. We embed a video into that email as well so that they can see us setting up the plugin. And then after that, we have a kind of onboarding email sequence, which starts off being more frequent and then it goes down to every two or three months.

[00:11:25] And it sends for something like two years just to keep in touch with them. Because I know that goes beyond onboarding, but this also falls into retention. And keeping that ongoing relationship with the customer. So every few months we will send them tips on how to use a, maybe a little known feature of the plugin, or maybe something we've seen a lot of customers don't do in an optimal way.

[00:11:49] We might send them some tips. So for each plugin, we try to find something to say about it regularly over time so they can get more and more value. So I see that whole thing as an onboarding sequence, even though it lasts for two years.

[00:12:05] Matt Cromwell: No, absolutely. No, those are really good points. I mean, there, there's so many ways in which a user can interact with your product or with your website or with your team.

[00:12:16] And it is really important to Take a holistic view of the whole thing. Um, one thing I've been really passionate about over the last few years is, is what happens post-purchase. Um, like, and that's one that I'll focus on a bit, um, throughout this is, uh, just even what happens when they make that purchase, they go, come to a confirmation page.

[00:12:36] Uh, if you haven't highly customized that confirmation page, I think that's like a missed opportunity. Um, that confirmation page is their first experience at with you as a customer. Um, and I, and hopefully you make it really, really good. Um, and then, like you said, there's email automations that can happen.

[00:12:53] Um, but I, one thing I try to also emphasize with folks is that especially in the WordPress space, we're all GPL plugins for the most part, like it's free code, literally. Um, and so one thing we talk about all the time is that what are we actually selling in some ways? Of course, we're selling updates, uh, or easy updates or simple updates.

[00:13:12] Um, but we're also selling in some ways, access to your team. Um, and, uh, I, I really try to make that front and center right away is how can you get in touch with our team? Because our team is here to help and wants to guide you along the way. Um, and, um, with the give audience in particular, they tend to be a little bit more hands on types of folks, um, or, or folks who need a little bit more, uh, hands on help.

[00:13:37] Um, and so they always want to know what's the quickest way for me to get in touch with a person, uh, not just an. Not just an email or not just some automation, but like, let me talk to somebody in one way or another. So that's been really instrumental for us over the years. So Mark, other thoughts on why this is so important.

[00:13:56] Is it, do we provoke some new ideas or things in your mind? I think there's,

[00:14:00] Mark Zahra: there's one element of this, which is worth mentioning is that at the end of the day, focusing on your customer onboarding, focusing on your customer experience, it's going to help your bottom line because we can do this for the sake of just.

[00:14:11] They can get a better experience for users, but at the day, this is a business for the majority of us. So we need to look at the business perspective of it. So everything that both you and Katie are mentioning has a direct impact on your revenue. It's a better onboarding experience means better retention rates with free users.

[00:14:27] So if you have a premium model, you're more likely to convert them into premium customers. Be it as Kate was saying, even beyond the just onboarding experience, going a year or two years down the two years down the line, keep showing value in one way or another, keep giving them those small wins, those aha moments throughout their experience so that they want to keep renewing with you.

[00:14:48] All of these things are gonna help you. And at the end of the day, if you can improve e every step that a customer, that a customer has by just a few percentage points, it's gonna have a big impact on your revenue. Mm-Hmm. . So this is not just in the workplace space. I mean, if you look at examples out there, even likes of HubSpot, and they improve their onboarding.

[00:15:06] A number of years ago, you start to see the impact that they have on the revenue, because if you can have a five or 10 percent increase in retention of free users or conversion of free users to pay, um, that's going to help your, your revenue today. It's going to help your revenue in a year's time, two years time, three years time, and they keep adding up.

[00:15:23] So if you look at your ARR or MRR, depending on how you're sending your plugins, whether it's monthly or annual, you're going to see a long term impact on your revenue just from this. And that's where the idea of the product led growth comes from, where offering a good product with good support, good service, it's going to keep customers coming back and it's going to help you long term where even your customer acquisition cost goes down, that you don't have to do as much work to convince someone to keep using your product or to start using your product.

[00:15:53] They're going to be convinced more easily. They're going to enjoy it and want to keep using it for longer. So automatically with your costs going down, your revenue going up, your business will just do better. With something as you say, simple and through this more work that goes into it was something as simple as an onboarding process, um, which most people tend to neglect.

[00:16:12] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:16:14] Katie Keith: Yeah. I have an example of that because for some reason our support tickets went up by something like 36 percent between January and February this year. Um, our sales went up like 12 percent or something, but not. What you would expect to justify the support. I think it was things like that.

[00:16:33] We introduced some quite complex new plugins late last year. Um, and so naturally people were asking for new features and finding issues with different themes and new plugins often do lead to an increase in support. So this all came to a head for us early in the year. And that obviously meant that the support team got overwhelmed and there was a backlog, which we don't normally have.

[00:16:56] So people were getting back to customers, uh, much later. Um, the longest was something like four days. It wasn't that bad, but that's still not acceptable and not what we would aim. And our refund rate. went through the roof, you could really see the difference. It went from something like 10 to 15 and when we analyzed the refunds, a lot of them were that they'd just given up.

[00:17:19] They reached out for support that then turned into a refund request because they weren't getting those instant answers. So a lot of issues that we could have helped through good support became refunds. So it definitely affects the bottom line to provide good Um, immediate post purchase support.

[00:17:38] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Oh man. I, I, I'm certain that anybody listening in right now relates to that story right there. I've, I've had, I've heard so many plugin authors over the years, um, struggle with things like that. Um, so man, I really appreciate that, that, uh, story. We're going to jump into story time. We're going to tell some more stories.

[00:17:58] Um, so, but that's, that's so common and, and, and a good point about the whole thing. Um, if you're listening folks, feel free to ask your questions. We'd love to answer them. Um, story time. Let's talk about our personal experiences, um, and, uh, in this subject in particular, um, And, uh, let's see who's kicking it off.

[00:18:19] Oh, me, I'm going to kick it off. Um, so we have a customer, a dedicated customer, uh, success department at, um, give WP and recently I've been asked to take up, um, a new department at stellar WP that we're calling customer experience so that we can kind of take what we've learned on the gift WP side with customer success and account services and technical support and apply that to all the stellar brands as much as possible.

[00:18:47] So this subject for me is also super relevant at the moment, and I'm really excited about it. Um, but there was a time in which we didn't have a customer success department at give at all. And it was really just technical support doing all of the account services and customer success work. And it wasn't even my idea.

[00:19:06] Our, uh, one of our other business partners, uh, had this idea to kick off customer success. Um, and all the reasons that he cited were what we were talking about earlier about. Refund rates and renewal rates, um, all of it was provoked and, um, and, uh, instigated by the bottom line. Like we wanted our, our, we wanted our, uh, refund rate to go down.

[00:19:30] Uh, and we wanted, um, Our, uh, renewal rates to go up. Um, that was the primary motivation. But as soon as you start to dig into things like that, um, you start to acknowledge that there is a whole customer life cycle happening. There are all these ways in which customers or users are interacting with your brand and your product that you maybe aren't even aware of sometimes.

[00:19:53] Um. And so in many ways, um, just thinking about the customer experience, uh, or the customer life cycle itself, it just brings up tons of new insights. Um, well, we did recognize, uh, immediately after we, after the customer success department really started to take off, we started hiring for that department.

[00:20:14] We have four, four, four full time people there now, um, is that, uh, yeah, it definitely bolstered our renewal rates, uh, really clearly. We, we were. Um, with automatic annual renewals, um, we were seeing roughly, um, 68 percent renewals, honestly. Um, but after customer success was really up and running, we got up over 72, 75.

[00:20:37] And sometimes recently we've been up over 80 percent renewals. Um, and that's been. wonderful and excellent for us. Um, what it also led to was we recognize that we were losing some of those renewals to failed payments, um, failed automated renewals because people give you their credit card at one time and then a lot can happen in a year.

[00:20:59] Um, and you try to ding that credit card again and it doesn't work for a lot of different reasons. Um, and, uh, this was what Katie and I were tweeting about back and forth, uh, I think last week, maybe it was. Um, was, uh, the failed payment recovery effort. Um, that's another area in which, um, uh, is part of the customer experience and the life cycle.

[00:21:20] And, um, that's their first experience with their second year of your product. Um, and, um, if it starts with failure, that's super not fun. Um, and I've been really. Um, we've got some strong background noise there. I don't know where that's from, but, um, um, but, um, the thing that stood out there the most, I think, um, was.

[00:21:43] Was that, um, when we had one of our staff members actually go and, uh, pursue some of the folks who, whose payments had failed, we actually got, um, we actually got people who actually were really excited that he reached out, um, and I kept joking that he was like, uh, one of the, um, Oh, shoot. I'm going to forget the term.

[00:22:03] What's the, the, like a debt collector who comes after you and, and, and he comes to the door and you're like, Oh, thank you so much. I'm so glad you're here. That's literally the type types of responses he gets all the time. Um, I think it's really amazing. They're like, Oh, so we're so glad to be able to continue to use your service.

[00:22:19] I thought that was amazing. So, and he actually sees now roughly between 40, 45 percent of the failed payments. He's actually able to recover himself. Um, so it's, it's been really wildly successful. So I can go on and on in story time. So I'm going to leave it at that for now. Um, those are some of my, my thoughts.

[00:22:39] Um, um, Mark, how about you? Um, what is your personal experience with the customer onboarding situation?

[00:22:47] Mark Zahra: Yeah. So we. Don't have the luxury of having a larger team that can dedicate their time to this. So we essentially prioritize it when it came to spotlight. So when we came to launch spotlight and we're thinking about the product, we were looking at the competitors out there and looking at the problems we had with the RSS aggregator plugin and a high refund rate on new customers was one of the main issues of that plugin and still is today, which is why we're making changes at this point.

[00:23:14] Uh, and we realized that the highest refunds are a new sales. Most of them are. because they have issues setting things up or because they don't, they're not really sure what they need to do or how things tie together. So, sort of that user flow of what they need to do. So, when it came to Spotlight, we said we're going to prioritize customer experience, prioritize onboarding, and differentiate ourselves that way.

[00:23:35] Our competitors at that time were very much short code, short code based, long settings lists, um, nothing innovative happening in the space of sort of Instagram feeds, social media feeds. So it was also the time that Gutenberg's block editor was developing and evolving. Um, so we saw the sidebar and then sort of things were settling down a bit on that front of people were getting used to it.

[00:23:57] So we just took that approach when it came to Spotlight. And we said the onboarding experience is going to be very much similar to, um, the block editor to keep things familiar visually. at the same time have some steps in there. So there's some progression from one step to another eventually that evolved into the entire product itself being onboarding in the sense that the onboarding wizard, um, and this process of setting up a feeder, essentially the same thing.

[00:24:25] So when you're going through the onboarding, you're actually getting familiar with how the product works. Now, in our case, it was. It, we were able to do that because of the simplicity of the product and it offers. Um, and the way we, we designed it and developed it with others, it might not be possible. So there's different ways of doing that then with products, um, either wizards on their own or, uh, sort of flow.

[00:24:48] Shows you highlights the particular features that you should look at these kinds of things, but it's not spotlight. That was our focus. So then we worked hard that and upon launching, I mean, the first year at 20, 000 active installs for spotlight and the majority of the feedback was how simple this is.

[00:25:05] Uh, how straightforward to set up, nice onboarding, nice UI, essentially giving the user what they need up front. So putting a live preview of the feed that they're creating, which our competitors didn't have at the time. Essentially everything we put into Spotlight at that moment in time, our competitors did the same a year or two later, and sort of matched up to what we were doing.

[00:25:26] We kept innovating in other ways beyond that, but that also proved to us that, listen, This is the way forward when larger competitors have been there for many years before you have larger teams, larger budgets to do these kinds of things, or either borrowing some ideas the same way that we did from them early on, or just doing their own thing and taking a similar approach.

[00:25:48] It proved that this kind of, uh, this aspect of your product is as important as can be. Um, and it's something that you should give a lot of time to dedicate a lot of time to, especially nowadays, if you're launching something new, make this a priority, not just a feature set. You can launch with fewer features, but have great onboarding.

[00:26:07] And we've seen that with some of our clients in the opportunity analysis as well, where there's new products launching that are competing with products that have been out there for many, many years, some over 10 years. And they are winning over some people with the experience aspect of it and not necessarily with features yet.

[00:26:25] So I see that then their Facebook groups and their communities where people are saying sort of, I love this product. I know it needs more features, but I'm going to stick with it because right now it does what I need. The competitor does more, but I don't necessarily need it. And I prefer the experience of this one.

[00:26:39] So people are very much now requiring a good customer experience and not just a good feature. So with Spotlight, we kept developing that and now we see the difference today. So as Katie mentioned, with refund rates, uh, we see the same thing between Spotlight and Aggregator. Our support, um, our level of support, the amount of support, the amount of refund requests, the amount of refunds on Spotlight versus Aggregator is probably less than half.

[00:27:02] So we have less, less than half the amount of refunds on Aggregator. Support is minimal because The experience is pretty straightforward. There's an email sequence in there that also teaches the user how to use a product, showcase some of the benefits. So this is another way of using your email sequence as well as to keep highlighting different aspects of, um, what you're offering, reminding people of the stuff that they saw in your marketing material, which a week, a month, two months in, they might have completely forgotten about.

[00:27:31] They thought maybe. I'll work on this later, an email reminder about it, or a quick message in the UI, or an UI even. So that's something else we saw with Spotlight which, uh, helped us a lot, is that we were able to put contextual upsells within the UI, which we couldn't do in Aggregator because of its dated look.

[00:27:51] So, by experimenting there, putting some call to action buttons, putting something contextual with, hey, this feature is really good for what you're doing right now, would you like to upgrade kind of thing? And the moment we introduced those call to action buttons, we saw an immediate increase in new customers as well, so we got an increase in new sales.

[00:28:09] So then it gives you the opportunity to do the experiment. So finding different steps and different stages in the onboarding experience, seeing where you can introduce some upsells, seeing which ones work, which ones don't, and just A B test every few weeks, every few months.

[00:28:23] Matt Cromwell: Nice. I love it. What I, what I really like about all of that is just the way that you're just really paying attention to that experience and, um, and analyzing it with data.

[00:28:35] Like, so many times I just find that, like, that's the key to almost anything in product marketing, um, is just paying attention, um, looking at the data, experimenting, uh, being willing to try new things. Um, that's awesome.

[00:28:52] Mark Zahra: Experimentation. Experimentation is the one thing that. Most people tend to be scared of, uh, they not sure whether they want to do it or not, or whether they want to run this for a few weeks.

[00:29:03] In truth, there's, I don't think there's any loss unless you're making any drastic changes. Just go ahead. That's something that doesn't work. You can update very quickly with plugins nowadays. Uh, just remove what you've done, turn back to what you're doing before. You never know what you might find. It's going to be like one in every 10 or one in every 20 experiments, which works.

[00:29:22] And you don't know what kind of positive impact that can have on your revenue. Yep.

[00:29:27] Matt Cromwell: Katie, I'd love to hear from you. Uh, what have you all experimented with at Barn2?

[00:29:33] Katie Keith: Um, well, we, I've kind of covered what I'd written down for story time, so I'm going to go change direction and talk about a different element of onboarding, which we haven't covered yet, which is the relationship between onboarding and upselling, i.

[00:29:49] e. getting more value out of that customer. Um. Bye for now. A lot of companies, I would say, go too far in this area. Um, WooCommerce is one. Their originally excellent setup wizard has changed over the years, so that it's now very little setup and mostly installing their other plugins. free or paid. And you don't realize that these tick boxes you're ticking are all installing additional plugins on your site.

[00:30:19] And so I don't think that's particularly responsible. And a few days ago, I tweeted about, I tweeted about the all in one SEO packs onboarding wizard, which I'd happened to use a few days ago, where they. Pre tick premium plugins, which I think is a bit strange. Um, so I think you can go too far and annoy your customer at the time that you should be trying to get their loyalty.

[00:30:44] But at the same time, I do think there is a role for upselling where it would be of genuine value to a lot of your users. And at Barn too, we have a lot of WooCommerce plugins which are quite closely related to each other. So, often there is relevant functionality which would probably be beneficial to the customer.

[00:31:04] So, let's say they've installed a plugin that speeds up the beginning of their shopping process, like finding or adding products. They might equally want a plugin that speeds up the cast and checkout, the end of the process. So, it kind of makes sense. That you might try and upsell something else that would speed up the shopping experience because it's closely related So in that sort of case, we do have a final page in our setup wizard which allows them to do that and Oh, I was just looking at some data So in the last year, we've tracked 31 sales through this page of the setup, which is just over 4, 000.

[00:31:45] So that seems to be worth doing that is generating significant sales through upselling relevant plugins, but we don't pre tick the boxes. We let them make a genuine decision. We don't try to trick them into completing the sale or anything. Uh, so that's hopefully a reasonable balance. And similarly, Out of all of the onboarding emails we send them over the two years, a small proportion of them will be offering them related plugins.

[00:32:16] Uh, for example, we sell, we send one email a few days after they buy, which suggests two closely related plugins and it gives them a 50 percent discount. Trying to remember which plugin company I stole that from. It might've been Lifter or somebody, but it was somebody else that said it was working. Very well for them and we introduced it and that does generate quite a lot of sales as well Because people in the onboarding period like the idea of a 50 discount that they may not get any other time And that's also the time when they are actively setting up things on the website by definition because they've just bought your other plugin So I think For hopefully appropriate ways to upsell and so you're supporting them through some of the onboarding But you're also trying to increase that value from the customer.

[00:33:11] Matt Cromwell: That's excellent. Yeah, that's interesting. You're making me think of, maybe we should do a segment here. That's like, show me the data. Like we should like have everybody come prepared with like a little screenshot of some data that's like, um, we can all like guess like, Oh, there's a little dip here. What is.

[00:33:28] What, what is this data about? And then you could be the big reveal. Oh, it's about, uh, upsells. Ah, good one. That might be fun. A little segue into story time. I don't know. I don't know. Um, live, uh, creating our, our next episode right now. Excellent. Well, we've covered a few things. Um, we definitely talked a little bit about plugin, um, onboarding, and I just tweeted this out, but I don't know if either of you have seen this project before, um, it's called WP Merlin.

[00:34:01] Do either of you remember this? Um, Rich Tabor actually created it a long time ago. Um, and, uh, it's, uh, it's basically a, an onboarding wizard, a library. Um, and it's really well done. So if you go to, uh, um, the, uh. WP product talk hashtag, which I still try to use regularly. Uh, you'll see that mine up there, right there.

[00:34:23] It links to his project. Um, and it, it looks really slick, really easy. So if anybody is thinking of doing, uh, some new product onboarding wizards, this is a library which you might be able to, I don't know, it is an older project. I don't know if it's well maintained anymore. Uh, maybe Rich can chime in on the tweets, but, um, that's worth thinking about.

[00:34:43] Um, we also talked a little bit about, um, post. customer side of things, like, uh, onboarding emails. We talked a little bit about that confirmation page. Um, and, um, uh, all the different ways that, um, folks get introduced to your, to your product in different ways. So at this stage, um, that means it's time. to talk about our best advice.

[00:35:09] Um, this is where we try to give folks our best advice. If you're just starting on this subject, you've maybe you've been a product owner for a little while. You're out there building your product and doing some more work on it. And you are deciding that I need to focus more on how for how folks first interact with my product.

[00:35:30] Uh, we've got some advice for you. And, uh, we always ask folks to come prepared. And Mark brought a literal dictionary of advice. And so we kind of said that we're going to start with Mark and then we'll go around the circle and come back because Mark's got lots of advice. Mark, you're first. What's your first number one best thing?

[00:35:50] Mark Zahra: So from my experience, it's implementing an onboarding wizard. But when doing so, just keep a few things in mind. So there are some sort of gamification elements which you can put in there, which aren't necessarily complex in any way. So something as simple as checklists, something as simple as progress steps.

[00:36:08] These things will show the user that they're making progress and using your plugin. They're getting somewhere. Keep it short. So keep it to 3, 4, 5 steps max if you really need to. But give them a way of seeing progress in the moment they start. Make with a preview in there of something that's that you're going to be showing.

[00:36:26] So we'll give WP does this as well. Spotlight does this for sure as well, where you have a preview of the nation form. If you have the Instagram feed of what your end result is going to be. So use that onboarding wizard in that way. Um. You can later put in some upsells as well, similar to what Katie was mentioning earlier, I think.

[00:36:44] Something that Born2 doesn't really try to do as well from our end, is to make those upsells educational in a way. Where it's not just pushing an upsell for the sake of pushing an upsell, but make it contextual and educational in a way where, as part of step 2 or step 3 of your onboarding, You mentioned, hey, there's this other feature, other product, which is probably going to be a good fit for you based on your answers to questions one and two.

[00:37:06] So again, keeping it contextual to what the user has already pre selected. And that way you're showing there's an interest in actually, an interest in your user and in the user's experience. And you're taking care to provide some guidance to setting up the plugin, provide some guidance to implementing the final solution.

[00:37:27] And then getting the desired result at the end of those three, four, five steps right away. If they want to do more, they can do more later. So the onboarding wizard should not include everything that your product offers, most likely. Um, keep it short, keep it simple. And yeah, just, uh, put those gamification elements.

[00:37:46] So some progress indicators, some checklists. Something to give the user that little bit of a boost and sort of aha moment every time. So with every step, they see, ah, it's aha, I managed this, I managed that. And even maybe a wow element to it of the end result at the end of what they achieved within just three simple steps.

[00:38:04] So that would be my first sort of piece of advice because I had the long list, but I'll stick to that

[00:38:09] Matt Cromwell: for now. Nice. Katie, what about you?

[00:38:14] Katie Keith: Um, I would say my best advice is to put yourself in the customer's shoes and think about every part of their journey to, um, learning your plugin and being, or theme and being fully set up with it.

[00:38:29] And then think about what you can put in place to make every single part of that journey easier for them. And that will probably result in a range of onboarding measures as we've discussed. But plan them all centrally, um, from the customer's perspective, instead of just putting lots of random things in place.

[00:38:47] And think about what the customer needs at each point of that journey.

[00:38:54] Matt Cromwell: Love it. Really good advice. I'm looking for this other resource that I want to share as well. Um, but, um, my best advice, um, is specifically more like, uh, if you're a developer, um, and you're, you've built a product. Um, hire a UI UX designer as quickly as possible. I really feel like besides the onboarding, I agree with the onboarding wizard.

[00:39:19] A hundred percent. I think it, uh, it depends a little bit on the product. I will say like, if, if, if it's a really simple, like block plugin. I don't know that I need a whole onboarding wizard for something like that. Um, but, uh, making sure that their first experience after activation is really, really smooth and positive is great, but WordPress products so often suffer because their settings are just terrible to look at and terrible to navigate.

[00:39:42] Um, and, um, when, when people are actually physically interacting with your product, you want it to be a positive experience. And that honestly requires design. Uh, maybe you don't need a. hire them as a full time employee, but maybe you just need to contract that out to somebody reputable. Um, uh, one way or another, but man, focus on how people interact with your product.

[00:40:05] Um, I cannot overstate it enough. Like it might feel like, uh, an expense that you don't want to swallow, but it will pay dividends in the long run. Uh, because, uh, it just changes the whole perception of your product when, when it feels like it's really a first class citizen on the website. Um, that's, uh, that's my best advice up front.

[00:40:25] Uh, Mark's got like five or 10 other ones. So Mark, one, actually real quick, I want to share one more thing here. Um, let's see if I can, um, share my screen real quick. Well, Mark, you go ahead while I try to share my screen.

[00:40:39] Mark Zahra: Sure. Uh, just because you mentioned resources, there's also a relatively new site which also covered gifwp, called onboardwp.

[00:40:46] io.

[00:40:47] Matt Cromwell: That's what I was bringing up. There you go.

[00:40:50] Mark Zahra: So that's, uh, yeah, there's a lot of brilliant examples in there of stuff which people should pay attention to. Um, the tear downs are, are amazing. So yeah, definitely go take a look at that. Yeah, I,

[00:41:03] Matt Cromwell: it's such a good one. Um, and he's really funny too. I, I think, uh, what I, what I thought was so interesting about it is like, in this age of like video content, he's doing screenshots with little callouts on it, , and it works so well.

[00:41:16] It's really well done. I'm showing the give WP one of course, but, um, there's Yost and all kinds of folks. It's a great inspiration, um, for, um. Uh, for what you might want to think about in terms of onboarding. So

[00:41:30] Mark Zahra: I think something that he's doing well there and people should pay attention to in their onboarding and in their customer experiences.

[00:41:37] What is keeping things human? So let's humanize what you're doing, be it the messaging, be it the design. Remember that you're dealing with human beings, not with robots or computers. So I don't know that I have a bunch of examples of this, but just take some ideas. So, um, yeah, for instance, we're taking onboarding emails.

[00:41:59] The amount of times of both a product and the onboarding email is coming from a sender as product name support. So Spotlight support. That's not the best sort of first impression that you're giving. Why is support reaching out to me with a welcome email? So something as simple as humanizing it as, this is Mark from Spotlight, this is Katie from Warren too, this is Matt from GiveWP.

[00:42:18] I think that the human element to it there, uh, something else, for example, that I recently saw NinjaForms, the way I use NinjaForms, they have an upsell in there, but their upsell is also sort of humanized in a way, so it's a banner for SendWP, which is a separate service, so they're upselling another service, but the wording, which I liked, for example, was, um, getting WordPress email into an inbox shouldn't be that hard, and that could have easily been something more typical to do.

[00:42:46] Get the best email service for WordPress kind of message, but by sort of humanizing it and showing this is the pain points that everyone's facing. We all know email and WordPress and deliverability is always an issue. So they, they found this pain point. So this is the solution to that pain point and they focused on the human element of it.

[00:43:03] So you can do that throughout your UI, throughout your onboarding, throughout your email sequences. Just keep it a little bit of a human touch, make sort of, um, I don't know, this is something I saw Katie on your site on Boring2 when you get to the bottom of our product page. So the message of, I'm paraphrasing here, was of, Congrats, you got to the end, now go buy it.

[00:43:23] You know, something as simple as that. It's like a little fun element to it, which people are going to appreciate. And it's going to make them want to click and go further up again and actually look at the product again, rather than just Some generic marketing kind of

[00:43:35] Matt Cromwell: messaging.

[00:43:36] Katie Keith: Interesting. No one has ever mentioned that before and it's been there

[00:43:39] Matt Cromwell: years.

[00:43:41] Mark Zahra: It works. I looked at the website recently and I was like at the bottom and I was like, okay, I wanted to click that button and get back to the top. I wasn't buying it. I was looking for something just to have an idea of your product page, but it worked, it got me to scroll up again.

[00:43:55] Matt Cromwell: Interesting. Nice. Cool.

[00:43:58] Well, we have hit the mark and, uh, I think we've covered pretty much everything. Um, I'd love to hear, Katie, what do we have in store next week?

[00:44:07] Katie Keith: So next week we have Amber Hinds coming to talk about how, and importantly why, to make your WordPress products accessible. And we haven't, we haven't covered accessibility before, and that's obviously a really important topic for any possible product.

[00:44:24] So, um, yeah, that should be a good one. Has

[00:44:38] Matt Cromwell: it stopped working? Yeah, I think. I froze maybe, I'm not sure. Okay, yeah. Check, check.

[00:44:47] Katie Keith: Yeah, I think it's back now, I'm not sure what happened there. So did you hear me talking about the next guest?

[00:44:55] Matt Cromwell: I did. I did a little bit. It might be me that's frozen, I'm not sure.

[00:45:00] Katie Keith: Okay, so did that come out okay, Mark? To me, yes. Yeah, so hopefully that means everybody, it was just Matt who already knows who the next guest is, so.

[00:45:12] Matt Cromwell: Shoot, okay. Well, I'm gonna send us off and hope that this works. Who knows what this ending is gonna feel like. Thank you all so much. Have a good week.

[00:45:25] ​