Onboarding That Sticks: Ramli John's Guide to Turning New Users into Lifelong Advocates

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Mark Evans: Welcome to Marketing Spark, where we have conversations with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and marketing leaders about the strategies driving today's most successful businesses. I'm your host, Mark Evans. In today's episode, I'm speaking with Ram Lee John, founder of DelightPath, an expert in customer onboarding and retention, and author of the bestselling book, led onboarding. Today, we'll be diving into one of the most critical elements for business success, keeping customers not just satisfied, but excited and, as important, fiercely loyal. We'll explore actionable strategies for building relationships that last because after all, it's not just about making sales, but keeping your customers by engaging, educating, and continuing to show them how to get value from your product. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Ramly.

Ram Lee John: I'm very excited to be here, Mark. I appreciate you for the invitation.

Mark Evans: As someone who has written three books, I was intrigued by the recent announcement that you've got an upcoming book project. Can you tell us more about how it expands on the ideas from product led onboarding and how it focuses on retention?

Ram Lee John: The the first book I wrote, product led onboarding, as the name suggests, it's really mainly product led. It's about building a self serve experience. The challenge with that is often that as you big companies scale, it's not enough to have a self serve or product led approach. A lot of companies that we think are product led like Slack and Zapier, they have a person even AppCues, where I used to work at, which is pioneered and also was a a leader in the product led space, has a human onboarding approach to it. So Eureka, the new book, will be covering more of two other aspects that I didn't cover as much in the book. First is a one to one. When does a human when does a customer onboarding or customer success team or even the sales team, when is it the right time to approach and really help a a customer? What you said earlier, get them excited and become a fierce loyal fan of your product, but the other approach is one to many. So things like customer education and courses and things like that, all of this, there's three things. There's one to one, one to many, as well as self serve approach. How do they work together to to build that habit forming experience that really gets customers excited about your product and stick for a long time. Before we hit

Mark Evans: the record button, we were talking about book writing and how, in some ways, it's getting that tattoo. You forget that it's quite painful, and then you think about it and go, hey. This tattoo looks pretty good. Maybe I'll get another one, but you forget about the fact that it took months and months to write the book. I know a lot of people are interested in writing a book. It's a daunting proposition. What are the lessons that you can offer people writing a book for the first time? As important, what are some of the things that you're gonna change now that you've got experience in writing book one? Okay. What what lessons will you or best practices will you bring to Eureka?

Ram Lee John: That's something that I've just been thinking about as well. What will I change from the first one? For people interested in writing a book, the first advice I have is in terms of the topic, when you say your name Ramly John, what do you what would be known as an expert for? Ramly John, expert in x or whatever your name is, what are you expert in y or whatever that is. Once you write a book and you know this, you've written three books, people attach that topic to your name now and maybe forevermore as long as there's books around. I think that's the first thing that you help out, which topic is it too deep or too a thing. The the other thing that I've seen work well is teach the concept first before you you start writing. So that's what I did for a previous book we had when I work when I was working with product led at West Bush, we taught a product led onboarding cohort course. Now I'm doing the same with this book. I have a core course launching with Maven starting next week where I I'm gonna teach them the concept about this. The reason why it's so valuable is you first of all, you get instant feedback. You're telling your frameworks, your stories. There there are people are responding. You're seeing Zoom over Zoom or in person, how people are reacting to it. The second thing is that you're getting a way to figure out the structure because building a course is providing you structure and it's also giving you a deadline. It's I gotta teach it next week. You don't have a choice versus writing your book could be, oh my goodness. I have some time. I can relax. That's what worked well for the first time that I'm doing this time as well. Things that I'm changing. I wish the first time I announced it sooner, so that's what I did eight months before it launches. I've already announced it. But second thing is I'm creating an early readers club, like, earlier on, like a private community for people who are interested about the book. I think that's great for providing not just feedback about the book, but when the book launches that people have you have a launch crew, people who can help promote it. They have some vested interest because they provide their feedback. It's something that I didn't do the first time around. It was over email. People applied, but I've seen really great product books come out where that's the approach that they did, and they really helped with there's a book about OKRs. I'm trying to figure out who wrote it, but that's what they did when they wrote the book, and they had the two authors got some great feedback from the book itself. So that's one thing I'm trying to do this time around that I didn't do the first time. If someone

Mark Evans: is thinking about writing a book, one of the things is the Nike approach, just do it. It is a lot of work, but it's satisfying. Would say

Ram Lee John: Yeah.

Mark Evans: That it's a labor of love. One of the things that I would be clear about is what you're gonna get from writing a book. In many cases, a book is not gonna generate revenue. You're never gonna get royalties from because you'll never sell enough copies. So you can stop thinking about a book as a revenue tool. You may get lucky and change things, but it's great for other things. Thought leadership gives you credibility if you're a consultant and you're looking to attract clients or you're trying to get a new job if you want speaking opportunities, a book is a great vehicle to have. One of the other things you should think about is what are your goals? What does success look like? I think that. If you've got an itch, then you should probably scratch it. Let's turn our our sights to the topic of the day, which is retention. In some cases, retention is as complex or more complex than onboarding. Couple questions. What do you believe are the key elements of a successful retention strategy? And as important, what are some of the common mistakes that companies make in the retention efforts?

Ram Lee John: We can start about their retention efforts. I'm surprised if any company has any retention efforts until there's a problem. That's what we face at AppCues where if you often companies, they approach retention problems, not as problems, but, oh, no. We need to acquire more customers. Let's go acquire more customers. That's great when the economy is doing well, you have funding, you're able to generate leads quickly. It doesn't seem like a problem until everything slows down, and it's all about, oh, dang. We're losing customers. We need to keep as many as that we have as quickly as possible. That's a challenge where if you're not thinking about retention from the get go, then especially in recurring products, recurring revenue products like SaaS or even membership, that's even ecommerce where it's much cheaper to get a existing customer to come back and make a purchase than it is to try to convince a cold buyer who's never heard of you to purchase again. And thinking about how and where and when you you're to get them to come back is super, super important. That's the problem I think a lot of companies have in terms of retention is it's not a priority until it's an emergency.

Mark Evans: That's a great tagline that a lot of companies should embrace. One thing that I do wanna ask you about retention is that the strategy, the playbook for a lot of companies when it comes to retention is we're gonna issue a monthly or quarterly newsletter, and it's mostly gonna be about us and our product and the conferences or the awards that we won. That's it. That's the end of their retention strike. Well, it's the start and the end of their retention strategy. What does a ideal retention strategy look like? If you had a playbook, I'm sure you have a playbook for this type of thing, What kind of levers are you pulling? As I said off the top, you're engaging your customers. You're educating them and showing them that, yes, you made the right decision, and we're gonna reinforce and validate that decision as you continue to do business as well with us. What does that secret or that recipe look like from a retention point standpoint?

Ram Lee John: There's a a few ways to approach retention. I think the first is you mentioned newsletter. That's great. But we were talking about books earlier. What is the why behind that? Let me give you a great example of why and how you fit into their retention strategy. I got a chance to talk to the former head of customer marketing or community at hub HubSpot. But one of the things he said was their strategy for retention was, let's just not help our customers level up how they do work, how can we help them become better versions of themselves? Not just at their current job, but in their career. They started offering as we know, HubSpot Academy pioneered the academy space, but started producing courses that is all around leveling up, becoming a better marketer or a social marketer and helping them get the promotion sometimes. Where like HubSpot was not even in the conversation. They're teaching courses about that's such a great emotional connection where there's people behind your customers. They're often in in b to b, we're just serving businesses. But there are real people who have jobs. They're going through layoffs and they're looking to get make more money and they have kids. How do you level those specific people up? Because when you're thinking about retention and loyalty, when they go to another company, they love what you did so much that I don't know what CRM we have, but we gotta bring on HubSpot because they're great. They help me get a job and level up. That's really what it's all about. I would ask if you're thinking about content newsletter, who are you leveling up? How are you leveling them up? How do you build them up in ways that sometimes goes beyond your product? And you can really help them with their what they're doing in their jobs specifically.

Mark Evans: That's a great point. It's easy to forget that companies don't buy products.

Ram Lee John: Mhmm.

Mark Evans: People buy products. Yeah. It's a people to people relationship. When you're trying to retain somebody, it's a very personal relationship that you're building. A lot of it has to do with emotional connections and recognizing, being empathetic, and that your customers have their own aspirations, their own goals. Yeah. The one thing that you mentioned that stood out, and I was talking to a client recently, was that people do change jobs. Mhmm. And that if they have a good relationship and with your company and they trust you and they like you and they feel that you're played a role in helping them advance their careers, they will take you to their next job. It's easy to call it referrals, but, really, it's retention. It's a retention dividend for lack of a better term. That's probably something that's not part of the retention mix because we just overlook people, and we're just focused on serving customers. I'm glad you mentioned that. Wanted to see if we could connect onboarding with customer retention. I'm sure you can because you're the expert in both of these areas. But what role does onboarding play in retention? Where do companies typically miss the mark when they're trying to align

Ram Lee John: the Think about it like onboarding is the early stages of a newborn. I have a two year old kid, and my wife is an educator. And she always says in her study as an educator, the very first few months and years of a child sets them up for how they're gonna learn, their character, and their ability, and the desire to learn. That's the same thing here where the first few minutes and even the first few days of customer is really setting up the future of how they will have a relationship with your company or not. It's really about building that foundation for them to really be excited about what they're about to learn and what they're about to do. One of the mistakes often is that first few minutes of somebody signing up or buying a product is an exciting moment because they just they believe in a promise that your product can do something. The question is, will you deliver? What often happens if they don't see value right away is that they start wondering, did I make the right choice? They start getting buyers remorse. I've purchased something before. I don't know if I want this. Amazon makes it easy for you to return stuff, which is why I love often buying stuff from Amazon because, oh man, I don't know if I wanted this. I just thought it was cool. I get it and I was, oh, I'm just gonna return it. That is not what you want. How do you make people feel comfortable, your customers feel comfortable at that point so that they feel good about what they're about to do with your product or not? And really, how do you amplify that excitement, that early excitement? How do you reduce any kind of fears that they might have? And how do you show them value really quickly? That is what all great onboarding handles and really get some excited and sets them up for the foundation of retention what we're talking about.

Mark Evans: Conceptually, that sounds great. The idea that you deliver value out of the gate. A lot of people will recognize that when they sign up for a SaaS services, you'll get the obligatory welcome message, then you might get a follow-up message with your login information. But that's about it. Like, there's nothing that helps you get into the product to immediately get value from the product. In your experience, what should a company do after someone clicks on purchase? And that welcome email has been fired off. What should happen the next hour, the next day, the next week, the next month?

Ram Lee John: Within the first seven minutes. I this is something that studies have shown you got seven minutes or less to get as soon as somebody signed up. This is something that I've heard companies like Canva and other companies were, let's nail the first seven minutes. What needs to happen in the first seven minutes? That sounds like it's not a lot of time. It it isn't. I think first, understand what is success for this person who just bought this? Why did they buy it? And if you're doing this one to one, that's great. But if you're doing this at scale, how do you do that? Sometimes during the sign up or setup process, just asking a question like, what brought you what is just asking straight up, why did you sign up? What is your main goal for signing up? And then give them three options. Simple example with AppCues. AppCues is an easy way to onboard users, but that's not their only use case. So when I was working there, one of the questions that we added was, why did you sign up? First, I'm trying to onboard my new users. Second, I'm trying to make announcements to my customers to let them know about new product releases. And third, I'm trying to get feedback about my new features that I'm trying to release them. Asking that straight up now helps guide you to tell you, I need to show this person, this customer exactly what they told me that they wanted. So removing any kind of flows, any kind of any kind of paths or any kind of distractions that could block them from seeing and experiencing that is the key crucial moment right there. So I think if I had to break it out steps first, find out why your customer bought your product. Second, guide them there. How do you get guide them there and remove any kind of distractions? And then third, I think I would reaffirm that and ask them to do that action multiple times. That's what people call the habit moment. How do you get build a habit around something is when there's a little bit of repetition. So how do you encourage them with email and communication to continue to use that value? Because there's studies that show it takes, you know, x number of days for you to do something before it becomes habit. I think it's thirty days. I'm not entirely sure if if I recall, but that's the kind of really what you wanna be doing during the onboarding. It's not just to show them the value, but how to build habits around that particular value.

Mark Evans: When I look at the many onboarding emails I've got, and over the years hundreds, if not thousands, the ones that stand out to me basically say, hey, Mark. Welcome to our service. Here's three things that you should do right now. Do this and do this. It's prescriptive. It guides me. It gives a roadmap in terms of how I can get myself into the product. Three easy use cases or free three user friendly ways that I can get into a product. It's guidance that makes my world easier, eliminates friction between me and the product. If you can do that, then you're off to the races. I I did wanna ask you about how companies can build a seamless transition from onboarding to retentions. I've signed up for the service. You started to onboard me in a very best practice way. When does it flip over to retention? At what point? Is it during the seven minutes that you talked about, or is it during the first week? But at what moment does that arrow go from onboarding to retention?

Ram Lee John: That's the hard part about activation and retention, onboarding and retention. It's just a huge overlap between the two of them. You can argue that the first seven minutes is, like, early retention. Short term retention is between, you know, the first few days that somebody signs up. How do you keep them engaged during those those few days? Something I've heard is long term retention is how do you get them to continue using the product ninety days and beyond? Often, what happens with teams is when you're thinking about breaking it up into onboarding versus activation versus retention, is figuring out when it crosses over to the next level. With AppQueues, what we did was that the onboarding team held on to the customer for the first ninety days. It was arbitrary because ninety days sounds good. Three months. Mhmm. You can make that day mark a specific day. Then after the ninety days, it gets handed off to the customer success team as more of a retention plan and getting them engagement engaged throughout that. That's something that the team needs to decide on and discuss of, like, how at what point it does cross over to another one. I'd like to break it up into three stages. How do you retain the customer in the first seven minutes? Because this is a huge drop off usually for product led companies where somebody signs up, seven minutes, they never come back. How do you get them engaged there? The next is how do you get them engaged in the next seven days? So that's where communication and email kicks in. That's seven day retention. The next is how do get them engaged in the next ninety days? That's all about ninety day retention. How do you get them continue using the product? Maybe start using advanced use cases and things. And beyond would be long term retention. How do you get them to stick around for a long time? That's how I think about breaking it up.

Mark Evans: That's great insight. The big hairy beast, the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to retention, is churn. Churn is a reality. No matter how good your product is, no matter how well you treat your customers, they leave for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they leave because they have no use for the product anymore. Sometimes it's a shiny new object. Maybe it's one of those fancy AI tools that captures their attention, but they do stop doing business with the company. Couple of questions. How should companies approach customer churn, and is there a point where it's better to let a customer churn rather than focusing on retention?

Ram Lee John: That's a really insightful question. There is times when, especially as companies evolve and they're expanding into more different markets or different enter maybe larger customers. In that case, maybe the product is not particularly useful for them anymore. An example a classic example is at a previous company I was working at, we were using Intercom for some time to both in onboarding emails, but at that point, I it wasn't that app use. We're using it for their product tours as well. And at some point, they increased their price to the point where it's obviously we're targeting enterprise. In that case, we churned out, and it's probably what they expected because they're hoping that enterprise deals would make up for the smaller businesses that was using the product. In that case, if it's strategic, then it might make sense, especially and even a shift in your in your customers, in your market might might require some churn as well. That's something that needs to be considered where churn is is often oh, this it is welcome, I think, in in some ways where in in the case where you're moving to another place to another market as well. And it's also being very clear about who your target audience is. I know as as both of us being consultants, we have we we know who our our target customer our target companies are. And when there's a company that's maybe a mobile let's say a mobile app approach me right now. I don't have any experience in mobile. Right? And they maybe we sign up for a few months of advising, it would not be a fit. At some point, would be, this is not my bread. This is not my expertise. If it's not in your the company's zone of expertise, then in that case, then it totally makes sense for it to shift over to another place.

Mark Evans: Related to churn, from a quantitative point of view, what are the key metrics for retention? I'm also curious about the qualitative side of things, the underutilized retention metrics that a company should be tracking, and how they're part of the overall mix. Can you talk to qualitative and quantitative churn metrics?

Ram Lee John: Let's talk about qualitative. I think that's very helpful as well figuring out what are the reasons why. I think that's why it's often churn interviews are quite helpful. What changed in their business? Maybe they outgrew you. In that case, that is at a expected churn. When there's unexpected churn, that's when churn surveys I've seen could be very helpful. In terms of quantitative, obviously, you wanna be looking at churn rate. How many people who in that cohort stop becoming a customer. There's also something called net recurring retention. Often, when we talk about churn, it's not necessarily customers itself, but it might be the revenue dollars. You might have a few customers fall off, but because bigger companies have joined in, you have a net positive net recurring retention in terms of your in terms of your dollar that you have. That's quite a good thing where maybe your current customers in that space expanded to higher plans, but that's something that I you'd wanna take a look at. Obviously, you also wanna be looking at engagement rate. Maybe there are certain red flags. One of the biggest red flag is you have a customer and they've stopped logging in or stopped using your product. In that case, that's a really big problem that you need to send in people. Are they pausing it? Are they doing something there? That should be something that should be red flag. Some tools like Braze, which is all about that, helping you figure out any kind of retention issues can help you flag those kind of engagement issues. That's a few things I think I would definitely take a look at in helping you. Obviously, in terms of Net Promoter Score, if somebody gives you a poor score, that's a red flag. That could be another reason why this is a signal that somebody's not really happy with your product itself. Mhmm.

Mark Evans: On a side note, I recently wrote a LinkedIn post about digging into why cost why prospects say no and not being a for not being afraid of no and trying to uncover the reasons for no. No is often as important insight as yes. Yeah. One of the big questions that that was raised in the comments was how do you get customers or, in this case, prospects to give you honest feedback on why they churn. Because people feel awkward when they leave. Some people like to do it quietly. They unsubscribe or they simply let their service expire. But when you are trying to discover the reasons behind churn, do you have any recommendations on how you get to the root of the problem, how you get customers to be honest and forthright in terms of why they decided no to no longer do business with you?

Ram Lee John: There's definitely some churn analysis that you can take a look at. So of all the companies that churned, there would be some that obviously, as soon as somebody churns, asking what this is something that I think Zencastr that we're recording or even Riverside. I recently turned out of out of Riverside because I'm putting my podcast on hold while I build out the light path. I as soon as I left, they asked me why are you leaving? Sounds like begging. Yeah. Straight up in the moment, they ask and there's options, and one of them is my project is done. It's easy for me to give that feedback in that context. Obviously, I don't know their response rate to that, but anything contextual as quickly as possible is super helpful because after the fact, after they've already left, it gets much, much harder. So sending out churn survey like you mentioned, you might not get a truthful response even in I've seen some companies incentivize their churn customers with some kind of gift card to do a quick interview, making sure that, hey. This is just for our research. We'd love to donate. Whether you want a gift card or us donating to your favorite charity, we'd be happy to do so for thirty minutes of your time for just to understand what changed in your business and, you know, what exactly why. That coming from the product team rather than sales team or even customer success team could be helpful as well. It would make people feel comfortable that, hey. Did you're just doing this free search and trying to understand that on its own. K.

Mark Evans: You would be remiss if I I didn't ask you about the impact of AI on onboarding and retention. In your experience, it's early days for AI. How do you think that it has changed the rules of engagement or the ways in which companies can approach onboarding and retention? Are there any tools that you're excited about? Do you think that there is ways that companies can embrace AI internally to do a better job of onboarding and retention?

Ram Lee John: Definitely, I'm seeing some companies use new chat AI to create generate content. Think I've seen a company you create their own GPT and plug in their customer data and help that build email sequences and things like that. What I'm really excited about, and I'm seeing some tools. I I I don't have any recommendations specifically for for this yet. But creating it'd be cool. What AI will really bring to retention and activation is hyper personalization. Right now, personalization is all about bucketing people into specific cases or use cases or personas and crafting experience for that. But people can only do so much to craft that messaging or that the buckets. Hyper personalization is about having AI understand you and what that customer is doing and has done or has served their surfing habits and their engagement and crafting an onboarding and retention plan and executing it right away. This is something that I heard Duolingo does, where they based on your engagement and what you do, they send you different prompts on your phone to get you to come back to learn a language. So depending on they have thousands, I think five to 10,000 messages that they can send you depending on who you are, where you're at, what stage of learning you're at. They know what message would work best for you at that time and it shows you they have AI that decides what message will be shown on your phone notification, get you to come back to learn something, which is like, what? That's really amazing. Obviously, they have a ton of data to back that up. That might not be the case for b to b companies where they only have a handful of maybe enterprise customers, but that is imagine creating a whole learning path or sequence for somebody to be onboarded, but also to continue to engage with your product. That hyper personalization and that's not something somebody can do. It'll take them years or months of work, which is not something a lot of companies would invest in. But if AI was there and you they know your customer, what the customer has done, then they can create a sequence for them specifically.

Mark Evans: I'm glad you raised personalization because I think that could be the real thing that companies could embrace when it comes to leveraging AII, which has so much potential, but there are there's low hanging fruit and personalization could be one of them. Final question or final questions would be where can people learn more about you, what you do, and as important as your new your not your new book, but your upcoming book.

Ram Lee John: People can find me on LinkedIn, first of all, to find my some of my content, Ramly John. As well as all my book content, what I'm doing now both on activation and retention side, people can find me on delightpath.com. So there's delight, the emotion, and path like shape path. So delightpath.com and people can sign up for the wait list for the book there.

Mark Evans: Thanks, Ramli, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate subscribe via Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a b to b or a SaaS company with 1,000,000 to $10,000,000 in revenue and you're looking for traction and to scale, we should talk about how I can help you as a fractional CMO and strategic adviser. You can reach out to me via email, mark@markevans.ca. Connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.com. I'll talk to you soon.