4 Simple Welcome Messages to make the Most of User Onboarding
First impressions matter. When attending a meeting and seeing new people, you try to make a good impression, right? That’s so obvious. The same applies to tech products. For example, welcome messages are the first impression users get from your app. The more positive the first impression is, the more chances you have for a higher retention rate.
The best thing about welcome messages is that you can use them on multiple channels like app/web screens, push notifications, and emails.
Below I will be talking about a few outstanding welcome messages I have seen.
Gmail
As we all know, Gmail is an email service developed by Google.
As soon as you create an email with Gmail and click to view the inbox, you are welcomed with a personalized onboarding flow. See the last screen of the flow below:
Then, as you press to check your email, you get a welcome email, too. See it below:
Gmail has personalized the onboarding, you see your name at the top while you are reading the message “Andy from Google” has sent to you. Andy welcomes you personally with the first person! He then jumps to introducing a few products and features of Google, namely the Android and iOS apps, Google Drive and the rest. The feature descriptions are not cluttered and each of them is accompanied by a nice icon respectively.
The downside is that you have to scroll to view the whole welcome message which basically includes Andy’s huge signature and the Android and iOS buttons at the bottom. Oops! user experience design, have you heard about it, Google? (lol)
Basecamp
Basecamp is a project management and team communication software.
It has got such a cool landing page. Just look at it:
Unlike the most gorgeous landing page and the nice onboarding flow, the email welcome message leaves much to be desired. While the message in itself is clear and it also contains all the necessary information, it lacks the spark. To me, it looks like just another annoying email in the inbox. No illustrations, no colors, no buttons, nothing. Strange, Basecamp, pretty strange!
Trello
Trello is a web-based project management application.
Unlike Basecamp’s welcome message, the one that Trello sends if more visualized. This is what you see on your web screen once you have signed up for Trello:
Once you confirm the email, you are taken back to the web to see finally see the welcome message:
I like it that the onboarding flow is kind of optimized here. You confirm your email to be taken back to the web tool and the best part is that you don’t see yet another welcome message here since the welcome message and the onboarding are blended together. As you can see in the screenshot, I am asked to start creating a board right away. Awesome, isn’t it!
Crisp
Crisp is a customer messaging tool for startups.
The good thing about Crisp is that it welcomes you both on the web once you sign up and also sends you a personalized welcome email. See below:
Neat and clean. Could not be better!
Well, I wouldn’t say that Crisp has got any downsides. Like Gmail, it sends a pretty long welcome email so that you have to scroll to see all of it. But the good news is that at the end of the message, there are two video tutorials attached. So, you will have to scroll down anyways and the scroll is not useless!
I am not sure why but it’s like as if one welcome email is not enough. And Crisp sends you yet another welcome email. This time, the tutorial video is right at the beginning. These guys want to make sure they teach you how to set up the tool properly. Not too bad, anyway!
This is it, guys. What’s your favorite approach? Tweet me @RafaMkrtchyan to let me know your thoughts or shoot me a comment below.
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By the way, I’ve recently worked with a strong group of software engineers for one of my mobile applications. The organization was great, and the product was delivered very quickly, much faster than other firms and freelancers I’ve worked with, and I think I can honestly recommend them for other projects out there. Shoot me an email if you want to get in touch — rafayelm@playengine.com.
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