More than a year ago I was tasked to further develop the very basic onboarding journey for new digital subscribers at Denník SME in Slovakia. At that point, new supporters got two emails – one being basically a confirmation email after the successful payment and a second one written by the editor-in-chief.

Obviously, the first questions that came to my mind were how to design such an experience, where to start and who could share their own experience and results.

One of the early recommendations I received was to build a robust onboarding experience (like in this blog by Grzegorz Piechota describing how The Wall Street Journal overhauled its onboarding program for new subscribers). So, not two or three emails, but rather a journey that takes one or two months to get through.

If you were to search for similar experiences or takeaways today, you might come up with a super comprehensive guide for subscriber onboarding by Jack Marshall of Toolkits. Although, it misses an example of steps a publisher has designed.

Or you might have found Dan Oshinsky’s blog on how he built a welcome series for his monthly newsletter about newsletters called Not a newsletter (yes, you read it correctly). It’s better in terms of practical examples, but as Oshinsky’s product is not subscription-based and very simple (a newsletter), this is more of a basic guide if someone doesn’t have any idea.

Don’t get me wrong, all examples listed above will give you some idea of how to design a series of welcome emails or an entire onboarding experience, including on-site prompts.

Still, I wanted to present something practical from my experience, which I think could be useful to other people.

Why should you listen to any advice given here? New subscribers who have gone through the onboarding journey which I present below have a 40% higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) than the average CLV of all digital subscribers, many of whom haven’t gone through the onboarding experience, and also lowered churn.

I’m not trying to say here this will work if you copy the same approach. Rather, this should be a case to rethink your existing welcome emails or set up a comprehensive onboarding experience if you don’t have one for your users or paying supporters.

Step 1: Laying the groundwork

Let me borrow this definition from Jack Marshall of Toolkits on what is subscriber onboarding because I think he really nailed it: “Onboarding is the process by which a new customer is initiated into a subscription or membership product: It’s the experience they’re met with in the moments, hours and weeks after their initial purchase is made.”

In order to do that you need to have an answer to at least these two questions: What are the priorities for your onboarding experience? Can you currently set it up with the email platform you are using?

The first question is obviously the more important, the email can be changed anytime (although it can be painful if you are using a super outdated one, I’ve been there).

Building a sustainable reader revenue-focused organisation means keeping subscribers or members paying regularly for a long period. To keep them paying you need to have them engaged with you, and there are a couple of ways to do that. Get them subscribed to your newsletters and podcasts, or download a mobile app if you have one. Also, if you have non-news content like puzzles or sudoku, that’s a welcome addition that keeps subscribers hooked.

The most important is to have great journalism or great content, but that’s not enough if you want to monetise via subscriptions or memberships. Then you need to have news or non-news products that serve as habit-building tools – newsletters, podcasts, mobile apps etc.

Before you get to the point of creating user journey steps for your onboarding experience, you need to make sure you have at least some habit-building tools at your disposal to work with and also be sure they are up to date.

For example, it’s not enough to have any newsletter to promote it to new subscribers as a habit-building tool. Can subscribers get hooked on that newsletter? Does it bring value? Or is it just a list of links to your content? The same goes for a mobile app and others.

Before I started working on the onboarding experience for my newsroom, I had to build up a newsletter strategy, make sure the news mobile app is a pleasant experience for subscribers and also collect hints from the subscriber acquisition team on how to promote subscription upgrades as the news outlet has several tiers of subscriptions.

*Newsletter user dashboard, podcasts and mobile app of SME.sk. Source: SME.sk*

Step 2: Map out all the features, benefits and hidden gems

The next step is making a list of all the features that can be considered habit-building or bringing value to a subscriber that are maybe under-promoted or not accessible easily. It doesn’t matter if your organisation is a big one or you are a small blog, at this point anything flies and should go on the list. Then comes selection.

As I mentioned above, there is strong evidence for building a robust onboarding experience. Not just one or two emails.

I have recently spoken to a small newsroom regarding their welcome email (singular). It was a pretty long email with a lot of links and information without visual cues or stressing the importance of one link over the others. All had the same weight in the eyes of the recipient.

Once I explained the purpose of an onboarding journey, the editors quickly picked up on how to build it. Split the first email into smaller chunks, make it more visual and always have a clear call to action for each step.

Let’s say you run a membership program, you only publish new content once a month or biweekly, but you have a weekly newsletter, podcast, community and organise events (online and offline) for your paying supporters. All of those products can represent a step in the journey and merit a deeper explanation than just a bullet point in a single welcome email.

Also, think in terms of what will bring immediate value to the subscribers – breaking news notifications in the mobile app and a cleaner user experience than on the mobile web, access to paid newsletters or podcasts without ads, you name it.

You have to then decide which of them can go to the final list, turned into individual emails that will be part of the steps of the onboarding experience.

Side note: I’m focusing here on the email onboarding experience mainly because it is the most convenient to set up for small and big organisations alike. Of course, you should consider adding on-site, in-app or messaging to the mix.

Step 3: Designing the onboarding experience

Below, I list a 10-step journey that new subscribers are going through when they become subscribers at my news organisation.

The overall design is quite simple. There is a kind of promo card with the main call to action at the top, so if someone doesn’t scroll through the whole email, they will get the main message. Below is a combination of text and images.

We didn’t want to create image-heavy emails because email clients are increasingly blocking images by default, and the aim was to create as future-proof a concept as possible.

Also, another takeaway: make the sender a specific person, not just the organisation. We tested sending marketing-like emails (new mobile app, new subscription promotions, etc) with one batch signed by a person from the newsroom leadership and another batch signed by the news brand. The results were striking – emails where the sender was a person got a 75% higher open rate.

So, each of the emails in the onboarding experience has a real person sender with the brand attached.

Here are the steps:

1. Thank you for payment + newsletter push (arrives immediately after purchase): Instead of an invoice-like email, the new subscriber gets a very short overview of benefits. The main call to action is for them to subscribe to one of the newsletters.

2. Download our news mobile app (2 days after the previous email): Introduction of the main features of the mobile app. Users logged in the app don’t get this email.

3. Subscribe to our daily news newsletter (3 days after): Introduction of the daily morning newsletter which provides the summary of the top news for the previous day.

4. A thank you note from the editor-in-chief + upgrade push no.1 (7 days after purchase): A thank you letter from the editor-in-chief. If a subscriber is subscribed to a lower tier, this newsletter will ask them to support the newsroom even more by upgrading the subscription.

5. Listen to our podcasts and watch the daily talk show (5 days after the previous email): Introduction of the daily news podcast and a couple of others the subscriber can listen to and also push for the daily talk show.

6. Upgrade push no.2: No ads (4 days after): Promotion of the highest subscription tier with the main benefit of having access to content without ads. No ads on the website, in the app or in the videos (podcasts to come).

7. Non-news content no.1 (7 days after): The first batch of promoting non-news products like recipes, sudoku and the weather forecast that remembers the location and shows the correct forecast anywhere on the website.

8. The ability to post comments (5 days after): Only subscribers can post comments. Anyone can read them.

9. Upgrade push no.3: Access to e-paper and e-books (5 days after): Only received by subscribers with the basic tier of the subscription. The idea is to introduce some other benefits of the premium subscription such as access to the e-paper of more than 40 different titles of the publishing house and access to hundreds of e-books.

10. Non-news content no.2 (7 days after): The last email in the experience promoting magazine content like health, history and hobbies.

*Two examples of onboarding emails from SME.sk. Source: SME.sk*

Step 4: Monitoring, experimenting and tweaking

To be clear, all of the above is still being tested and iterated on. Things change within the organisation and features keep evolving, so you need someone in charge of the onboarding experience who will keep an eye on changes and update the emails.

Also, I wanted to share that after the introduction of the onboarding experience for new subscribers we have set up a similar albeit slightly shortened version for newly registered users. Around 5% of the newly registered users become subscribers within 5 to 6 weeks. This is being helped primarily by the newsletter strategy that also nudges newsletter subscribers to become paying digital subscribers in order to get the full newsletter experience.

Obviously, this work is never over, and the number of ways it can be pushed forward is almost unlimited. We have yet to experiment with setting up goals to be reached so that some of the steps can be repeated (e.g. send several different “download the mobile app” emails until the subscriber downloads it or indicates it is really not something they are interested in).

The good news is the basic setup of an automated series of welcome emails can be nowadays set up by a number of email platforms like MailChimp.

I really recommend setting up at least a basic dashboard that will monitor the changes in subscribers or members who have gone through the onboarding process and compare the numbers to the overall subscribers or members.

I would say CLV, churn and how far in the onboarding process did they get are the main metrics I was looking at (happy to hear other data points that are as important, though I like to keep it simple).

To sum it up, an onboarding experience is a crucial part of keeping subscribers or members supporting you longer, and staying loyal and engaged. It also serves as a way to introduce your core products and features. And even a basic three-step process is better to have than none.

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