Providing a delightful onboarding experience can potentially be a gamechanger for your community-building strategies.
This is why it’s very important for you to define your onboarding flow to be as flawless as you can.
In this guide, we shall take a look at how you can define a detailed workflow to automate the onboarding journey for new members of your community.
Creating the workflow and adding a trigger
From the Automation Dashboard, Create A Workflow and give a name that you think best describes that workflow. For this example, let’s name the workflow as - New Member Onboarding.
As soon as you create a new Workflow, you’ll be asked to set up an automation trigger for this workflow.
Since we’re setting up a workflow for onboarding new members, select the automation trigger for when a New member joins and hit Save.
On your screen, you’ll see that a trigger has been set.
Setting up the workflow
Now that we have a trigger in place, we need to define what happens when that automation is triggered i.e. when a new member joins.
Ideally, we should wait for about 5 mins before we slide in their DMs. So, the next step would be to add a Delay of 5 minutes after a new member joins.
5 minutes after someone joins, you should send them a message welcoming them to the community. Here, you should also nudge the member towards introducing themselves, getting more comfortable with the community, and being more active.
How to effectively use the Split feature
What separates a good onboarding experience from the rest of them is adding a little more gentle encouragement that eventually gets a member to interact.
What if a member doesn’t interact after you send your first message? You should make a few more attempts to activate a member. However, you also have to be careful enough to not send the same message to someone who has interacted after the first message.
This is where you can make use of the Split feature by adding a condition.
You can add the condition where if the messages posted by a member is equal to zero, then the automation is split into two -
Yes - if the condition satisfies, that means the member hasn’t yet interacted and you can send them another message, gently asking them to interact in the community. Also, you wouldn’t want this message to go out immediately, so, we’ll add a delay of 3 days before the message goes out.
📌 Note: Here, we’ve only sent out 2 consecutive messages to activate a member but of course, this is just an example of what onboarding looks like in a nutshell. You can add more delays, messages, or conditions over a course of a few days to a few weeks, depending on what your onboarding strategy is like.
No - if the condition doesn’t satisfy i.e. the member has posted message(s) in the community, then they shouldn’t receive another message when it comes to onboarding. However, you can send them a thank you note, or something which is specific to your community as a way to express gratitude.
