Woven email onboarding: a brilliant sequence to drive engagement

Woven makes it easy to see the value in using their calendar app.
Read on to find out how they do it

In Onboarding Lessons series, I’m showing you how to apply great onboarding ideas to your SaaS onboarding drips,
what not to swipe, and how to drive signups for paid plans by showing the value of your product from day 1

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Disclosure:

In this series, I’m writing about email sequences I sign up for and like.

Woven is not a client, and this post does not represent a full and accurate picture of their onboarding campaign. Rather, my goal is to show how looking at an onboarding sequence “from the outside” can help you experience it the way your new users experience it and see new opportunities for optimization.

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“Zoom fatigue” is now part of our vocabulary.

Scheduling, re-scheduling, updating invitations, and keeping track of all the online meetings is an additional time-consuming task we’d like to not have to deal with.

Enter Woven: “The best calendar app for busy professionals”.

There are some really cool things that Woven does in their onboarding drip and on their website that you can use to help your new users go from “meet cute on our landing page” to “happily ever after.”

Here’s the breakdown.

Keep reading, and you’ll learn:

1. TL;DR: Techniques from Woven’s onboarding drip that you can use in your onboarding sequence
2. Lesson 1: show your different customer segments why they should care by adapting your copy
   1. Drip breakdown: 6 emails from Woven to take you from “Welcome” to power user — and one effective way to increase adoption rates
3. Lesson 2: Woven did — and so should you: adding feedback/ customer research emails to your toolbox
4. Lesson 3: What *not* to copy from Woven: all. the. CTAs. all. the. links.
5. Bonus points. Part 1: Customizing email sequences based on user roles + adding behavior-based triggers
6. Bonus points. Part 2: adding behavioral triggers and doing more customer research 🎇

TL;DR: techniques from Woven’s onboarding drip that you can use in your onboarding sequence

1. Help people with overflowing inboxes get things done: don’t just send a welcome email and walk away

2. Make your onboarding sequence personal: for example, by setting up a one-on-one onboarding session

3. Keep onboarding emails coming regularly, so that your new users don’t forget that they wanted to change the status quo and make their lives better (and remind them why they signed up in the first place)

4. Even non-adopters can help you — you just have to ask for their feedback. When you ask and how you ask will depend on your goals. The main point is: do your customer research, whatever it takes (even sales calls)

It all starts on a landing page: a trick from Woven you don’t want to miss

Lesson 1: show your different customer segments why they should care by adapting your copy

Your website is all about setting expectations for your new users — and showing off your stuff.

Your onboarding drip is built on those expectations (and refers back to the information you have on your website, such as how-to guides and use cases).

If you’ve been focusing on one group of users, then your copy and your onboarding drip are likely to be aligned with their wants and desires by definition.

But what if your solution can be valuable for similar, but different groups of users?

“The most common denominator” approach to copy can work for an established company (“work more collaboratively and get more done,” anyone?).

If you’re not a world-renowned SaaS company, answer the most important question of all — “What’s in it for me?” — in more detail.

Woven is doing a great job answering a question every potential new user finds themselves asking: “Is this tool right for me?”

Even though its website is a little light on social proof, Woven is doing a great job answering a question every potential new user finds themselves asking: “Is this tool right for me?”. They created separate feature pages for different types of users, from startups to nonprofits to remote workers.

The features are presented differently for each role, focusing on the most relevant benefits (“the executive assistant you didn’t know you could afford” for entrepreneurs, “you’ll never have to hunt down important meeting details at the last minute again” for remote workers).

This makes it so much easier to imagine exactly how you're going to use Woven.

Drip breakdown: 6 emails from Woven to take you from “Welcome” to power user — and one effective way to increase adoption rates

Woven is not leaving its new users on their own when it comes to learning how to use their product.

When I signed up, they were offering personalized onboarding sessions to their new users.

Assuming you have the time and capacity to do that, it’s a win-win-win-win situation:

• Your new users are much more likely to start using the product because you showed them the ropes

• You start building a personal relationship with your new users (like a personal letter from the founder that’s frequently used as a welcome email in a drip)

• You get a better understanding of sticking points and frequently-asked “Can I do that?” questions to build out or update your onboarding sequence

• If you’re really good at customer research, you can even sneak in some additional questions that’ll help you with everything from messaging to sticky copy for your landing pages

Personalized onboarding: assuming you have the time and capacity to do that, it’s a win-win-win-win situation

In addition to a welcome email, there are 5 more emails highlighting specific features, coming out every day.

And, in case you don’t start using Woven even after all that, you get a behavior-triggered request to fill out a survey.

More on that later.

But first, let’s walk through the onboarding emails step by step.

This is the basic outline:

Woven onboarding drip flow (click on the image to view the full flow)

1. Welcome email: reminder of the most powerful promise + calls to action: personalized onboarding session, tutorials, support email address, and invitation to join social media groups

2. Re-stating the most powerful benefit
   Call to action: jump right in and set up Woven: either with our help (onboarding session sign-up), or by following these steps

3. The most powerful feature & how to use it
   Call to action: start using the feature, or your one-on-one onboarding session

4. Another useful feature - use it
   Foreshadowing: this is what we’ll cover in the next email
   Also, schedule your one-on-one onboarding session

5. One more useful feature: find out how to use it (tutorials, help center etc.)

6. Features for power users — you’re ready for them now! Additional resources and support email address

The 6 emails from Woven are more than enough to help you set up Woven and start saving time.

However, they are not customized for different types of roles (at least, this has been my drip experience).

Would it have been easier to get new users to start using Woven if the top 3 features and examples had been customized for that particular group and their pain points?

Quite possibly (according to this post by Roman Zadyrako on Userpilot, personalization by user role is one of the 4 ways to personalize onboarding experience).

Moreover, given that functionality stays the same, and that the role breakdown is already on the website, it won’t take a lot of work to customize the flow and the copy, and help new users choose their own adventure.

Lesson 2: Woven did — and so should you: adding feedback/ customer research emails to your toolbox

The last Woven email is all about asking (hard) questions

The email I’m most excited about in the Woven drip is the “Why did you stop using our app?” survey.

Probably has to do with my general research geekitude.

But also with the fact that across all the different products I’ve been signing up for, this is one of the few email drips that is asking this important question.

In the 2-question survey, the Woven team asks:

1. “Why did you stop?” — with several multiple choice options
   (no input option for “Other”, which is a shame: Woven’s missing out on some important customer info by not letting survey participants add info on what “other” actually is; the “other” option can be quite eye-opening)

2. “What is the problem that you’re trying to solve?” — also a super-useful question (although in this case, since it goes out to detractors, it might be useful to know how exactly Woven didn’t live up their expectations — and whether or not this was the reason they stopped using it — there might be some people who quite simply never got around to setting it up *raises hand*)

Lesson 3: What *not* to copy from Woven: all. the. CTAs. all. the. links.

Too many links = not clear which action to take first

The high number of links and CTAs in the sequence emails is not something I’d suggest that you copy.

Here’s why.

Even for the most determined user, it’s not clear which action to take first (with the exception of the personalized onboarding session button).

The average number of links is overwhelming and may be preventing new users from doing even one simple task.

Ways to go around this:

• Video embeds for a “just do this one thing and start saving time immediately to get away from your desktop”

• Breaking down emails with multiple CTAs into several emails with one CTA per email

• Adding behavior-based triggers, especially for users that sign up for a personal onboarding session (are they good to go, or do they still need additional information?)

• Focusing on one goal (The Rule of One, well, rules): encouraging busy professionals to take the time and set up Woven (am I likely to join a Slack group before starting to use this new product? Probably not).

Bonus points. Part 1: Customizing email sequences based on user roles + adding behavior-based triggers

Adding a “choose your role” drop-down question in a sign-up form does not create a lot of additional friction.

At the same time, it helps you make sure that the copy in the onboarding sequence speaks to the same pain points and frustrations that compelled your new user to sign up for your product in the first place.

As long as you have “Other” as an option - and a corresponding drip copy, you’re also going to be getting additional insights into who’s signing up (bonus points for asking them about it as part of your onboarding flow).

Bonus points. Part 2: Adding behavioral triggers and doing more customer research 🎇

In an ideal world, Woven is gathering feedback across all of the different user groups:

• power users

• users who needed a little nudge but got there in the end

• people who signed up and forgot about Woven, and

• people who stopped using it for some reason

And yes, once you take into account that all of the new signups are ideally sorted into different onboarding sequences, this can get very confusing.

If you tag the new users right, break up automations and set up conditions to keep the emails from becoming one big hot mess, this can automate some of your feedback-gathering activities (get survey responses while you sleep!).

I help B2B SaaS startup founders and marketers get more traction with research-driven conversion copy — without slowing down their growth initiatives.

Hire me for:

• Customer research to ramp up your growth

• Website audit to find & fix conversion blockers

• Day rates to optimize your landing pages, web copy, or email sequences for more clicks and signups