3 Ways to Use AI to Improve User Onboarding

User onboarding is hard to get right.

An eye-popping 90% of customers feel that the companies they buy from “could do better” when it comes to onboarding. I'll admit, I’ve completely given up on products with poor user onboarding far too many times.

That’s problematic for a number of reasons. If you have a poor onboarding experience, users are disappointed before they even get to use the product! Word-of-mouth, which is the most trusted marketing channel there is, will also suffer from a poor onboarding experience, and you’ll lose out on potential new customers.

In short, poor user onboarding is like having a leaky marketing bucket, so focusing on lead generation without nailing onboarding is simply inefficient.

Here are three ways to leverage Artificial Intelligence to improve your user onboarding:

1. Analyzing Sales Data

CRMs, or Customer Relationship Management tools, can be a powerful tool to improve user interactions by keeping things organized. Not only that, CRMs are a goldmine of data that can be used to fuel predictive AI models.

HubSpot and Salesforce are perhaps the most popular CRM options. As HubSpot writes, good CRM data includes quantitative data like how many purchases a contact has made, their average order value, how many times a contact visits the site, and even data around things like customer satisfaction.

Any number of these data points can serve as a KPI — or a Key Performance Indicator — which is simply the fancy term for any important metric that you track and optimize. One of the most common KPIs is conversion rate, which is how many visitors convert to a trial, demo, or other goals, or how many free trial users convert to a paid offering.

The no-code AI tool Obviously.AI has direct integrations with both HubSpot and Salesforce, which means businesses can connect their software to automatically analyze and predict their KPIs.

For example, suppose you have a column named “conversions,” and you want to figure out what the major drivers are. You can connect your Salesforce or HubSpot account (or even just upload a CSV or Excel file), select the “conversions” column, and machine learning models will automatically discover the major drivers.

By understanding what kind of users convert the most, as well as what marketing and sales strategies work the best, you can optimize your user onboarding flow.

2. Take Advantage of AI-Driven Email Marketing

20 years ago, Mailchimp was just an email newsletter service.

Recently, however, they’ve entered the AI foray in a big way. For the past four years, Mailchimp has been working on AI tools, including forecasting tools for behavioral targeting to see which users are most likely to buy something, tools to write better email subject lines, AI-driven visual design tools, and more.

Having managed over 2 billion marketing activities, Mailchimp has a wealth of data to fuel its AI models, so it’d be wise to take advantage and create a more pleasant, optimized email onboarding experience.

Simply sending a confirmation email isn’t going to cut it, especially if your competitors are creating different email onboarding sequences, leveraging personalization, and even creating AI-optimized subject lines.

3. Leveraging AI Chatbots

It seems like the chatbot hype came and went — but the reality is that there’s never been a better time to implement chatbots.

Big companies like Facebook and Google announced AI assistants in 2016, but AI has come an extremely long way since. With the recent debut of OpenAI’s GPT-3, the conversations you can have with a bot are incredibly lifelike and intelligent.

It’s also extremely easy to launch a chatbot to answer user questions, as tools like Landbot enable anyone to stick a chatbot on their site by just pasting in a line of code.

What used to take teams of software and AI engineers months can now be done by one person in a day.

Final Thoughts

Artificial Intelligence tools are making good on the promises of the last decade, and it’s now easier than ever to implement AI-driven onboarding strategies, as it is with any other part of life.

You must keep track of this evolving technology and its uses across various industries, to get the best out of it for your business.