8 powerful onboarding email examples from the pros

Your acquisition strategies have paid off, and you’ve gained a new customer! Now what? Your next touchpoint sets the stage for your entire relationship moving forward: your onboarding series. From onboarding emails to mobile onboarding messages, the content and timing of these communications can transform a customer from an uncertain newbie to an enthusiastic power user. 

Careful attention to the onboarding email sequence often gets lost in the shuffle between marketers focused on lead generation and customer success teams on problem-solving. But this stage is a crucial opportunity to activate new customers, so take advantage of it!

Here’s what you need to create engaging onboarding emails:

• Understand the difference between welcome and onboarding emails
• Write an onboarding email following these six best practices
• Get inspired by eight awesome onboarding email examples

What’s the difference between a welcome email and an onboarding email?

A welcome email is the first message after someone signs up for a product or subscribes to a newsletter, and it’s often the first touchpoint in an onboarding email sequence. Onboarding emails offer a set of next steps for customers to get familiar with your product and start seeing value.

A welcome email is used to make a great first impression. It’s your first opportunity to open a dialogue and start building relationships. After that, your onboarding email sequence is designed to engage people more deeply with your product. It might include how-tos for setting up their profile, learning the core functionality, and any other activities that lead the customer to activation.

How to write an onboarding email: 6 best practices

A successful onboarding process drives customers to take the actions that make them stick. So, your onboarding emails will be unique to your brand, audience, product, and industry. For example, the ideal onboarding series for a fintech business will look different than the best SaaS onboarding emails. 

We analyzed emails from some of our favorite brands and identified six traits that create an engaging experience. 

1. Personalize your message 

A strong onboarding email sequence is personalized using demographic and behavioral data. While you theoretically can welcome and onboard all your customers with the same messaging, speaking to each individual’s unique experience is much more effective. 

With Liquid, you can use your customer data to create tailored content for each customer. When crafting your email content, consider attributes like time zone, location, specific events, status, subscription type, and company name.

For example, Bitly’s onboarding email personalizes a to-do list based on the actions recipients have taken and have yet to take. We don’t know for sure, but imagine Bitly leveraging dynamic content to change what the to-do list says based on customer actions.

>>> Want to see personalization in action? Learn how Notion’s personalized onboarding resulted in a 49-51% open rate

2. Proactively address common concerns and blockers

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Where are they in the onboarding process? What are they familiar with? What don’t they know? Look through support tickets, frequently asked questions, and your most commonly accessed documentation for insight into where customers typically hit friction early in their journey.

Each message in your onboarding email sequence should push people further into your product experience—and this is the ideal time to help them overcome hurdles they might encounter. The best onboarding emails explain why someone should move forward and provide exactly what they need to do.

Perplexity overcomes new customers’ concerns about AI in this onboarding email sample by providing up-front, sourced information and resources. The goal is to push those who’ve signed up but are still skeptical into action.

>>> Seeing a lot of customers drop off in the middle of onboarding? Check out our on-demand webinar on how to diagnose and fix drop-off

3. Educate people about the value of your product 

People often evaluate multiple tools at once. They may sign up for free trials, demo different options, or even pay for a month to see how they like it. They’ll move on if they don’t have a good experience in that initial get-to-know-you period. Your onboarding email sequence should educate people about how your product solves their problems. Provide resources that demonstrate your value to customers. 

Riverside makes it look easy in this onboarding email. They offer three different types of educational content: their knowledge base, YouTube channel, and blog. However, their main goal is to drive their audience to use the product, which remains the primary CTA. 

4. Focus on the benefits for customers, not your product’s features

A feature is just a feature until your customers understand why they should care. You think your product is awesome, but your onboarding emails need to connect the dots for people by focusing on their needs, pain points, and desires. 

Typeform emphasizes its value proposition with benefits-first headlines and copy paired with case studies in this example. The company shows customers what they can achieve with the product and builds trust with proof points from well-known brand names.

5. Offer a clear call to action

Usually, onboarding emails should have just one primary call to action. You may want your customer to do all the things, but too many choices can make it more likely they won’t do anything at all. That’s because choice paralysis is kryptonite for purchasing decisions. 

How does this apply to your onboarding email sequence? The answer is in the idea of a sequence: craft a journey in which each message leads to the most important action to take next. Then, continue to follow up with timely, relevant additional steps. 

For example, the growth marketing team here at Customer.io uses this trial expiration email to reinforce the urgency and key benefits of upgrading. With only four days left in a customer’s trial, we ensure the CTA is clear: upgrade now, or risk letting the magic slip away.

6. Show, don’t tell with video content

91% of people have watched an explainer video, and when asked how they’d like to learn about a product or service, 44% say they’d most like to watch a short video (source). This technique is especially useful when you have something complex to explain or must show people how to complete a specific series of actions. 

Wistia effectively uses video in its onboarding sequence—particularly appropriate for a video tool! They make it personal by responding to what a customer has already done and showing people what to do next. Bonus? Video is ideal for showcasing your brand’s personality and building an emotional connection with your customers.

8 of the best onboarding emails

It’s helpful to see those best practices in action as you put together your onboarding email templates.. That’s why we’ve selected eight of our favorite onboarding email examples to inspire you. 

Onboarding email example #1: Coda

Why we love it: This tailored onboarding email sample guides people through one of Coda’s most popular use cases—taking notes during meetings—and provides a template to get customers started. Clear language and informative graphics walk the recipient through the how and why of each feature, culminating in a single, strong CTA.

Onboarding email example #2: Poshmark

Why we love it: Poshmark is a clothing resale app. This email continues to educate people as they move through their journey. A Poshmark customer can be both a buyer and a seller, and this email educates buyers on how they can sell (or re-posh) items they’ve purchased before. Instead of pigeonholing their audience into either buyer or seller segments, Poshmark intertwines those journeys with a personalized message based on the customer’s previous activity, leading buyers to become sellers as well. 

Onboarding email example #3: Bubble

Why we love it: The best SaaS onboarding emails break things down into manageable chunks and help people take action over time with a logical onboarding email sequence. Bubble does just that with their onboarding welcome email. Simple, clear, and focused, it doesn’t include anything that distracts from the core message. 

Onboarding email example #4: Canva

Why we love it: Canva is an image editing and design tool. In this onboarding email, they take a choose-your-own-adventure approach. Because Canva has many different use cases, the email highlights four possible starting points for a customer’s journey with the platform. Customers get just enough choice to customize their experience without being overwhelmed with options—and Canva gets valuable intel about each person’s interests for future campaigns.

Onboarding email example #5: Shopify

Why we love it: Shopify is an online storefront, and its customers have a wide variety of expertise in setting up an e-commerce business. This onboarding email arrives early in the journey while people are still in their free trial period. Customers can jump right into adding products to their online store, but if they haven’t yet created a website or snagged a custom domain, the email helps them take those crucial steps. 

Onboarding email example #6: Sonos

Why we love it: This onboarding welcome email from Sonos is personalized based on the specific speaker model the recipient has purchased. Sonos isn’t trying to get people to take action on a website or in an app. Instead, they focus on pure education: effectively using your Roam speaker. Each section addresses a common hurdle people may run into and provides targeted resources.  

Onboarding email example #7: Jasper

Why we love it: Jasper is a B2B AI tool, and customers have just a week to explore the app with a free trial. So, the platform’s onboarding email sequence needs to help people get started quickly. This email is laser-focused on inspiring customers to take a single action: setting up the Jasper Brand Voice feature. With a clear how-to and a single CTA, the goal is to ensure the recipient sees value immediately from this feature (and continues using their tool).

Onboarding email example #8: Asana

Why we love it: This is one of the best examples of video used in onboarding to guide people toward a crucial next step. Asana, a well-known project management software product, aims to encourage new users to collaborate with others in their workspace. While the message provides a couple of educational links for a deeper dive, it strategically focuses on the video—likely because it does the best job explaining how to use their tool for collaboration. Plus, noting the length of the video is a nice touch: it sets expectations so people know exactly how much time engaging with the content will take.

Start building more effective onboarding emails

Your onboarding emails are an opportunity to connect, educate, drive product use, and start building relationships. At the end of the day, the best onboarding emails feel like an extension of the product experience, helping people actually get value from a tool they’ve just begun getting to know. The examples here should give you lots of inspiration to begin crafting your own onboarding campaigns. 

Ready to get started? See how you can create sophisticated, personalized onboarding flows with Customer.io Journeys. 

Don’t forget, your email campaigns are never truly finished. Once you’ve built your onboarding email sequence, the next step is experimentation, iteration, and ongoing improvement! We’ve got inspiration for you on that front too: download our eBook, 10 data-driven growth marketing experiments.