Provides a walkthrough to the new members and explains the starting points of the community.
The explainer content should be easy to understand and highly specific so as to show the new members the clear benefits of doing certain tasks.
Eliminate any kind of ambiguity from the beginning.
Create a short video that explains all things that your community stands for.
The Dos and Don'ts of the community.
That provides information about the POCs of the community.
It should provide information about how things are done in your community.
You can create a superuser program comprising of some of the most active, friendly and engaging members of your community.
Since they know all the ins and outs of the community they can guide the new members and get their questions answered.
This is a great way to forge networks within the community.
You can also arrange a webinar specifically for the new users to have real-time interaction, solve the queries, share how your community works, and understand them better.
If you are starting out with the community consider having personalized calls or chats with the new members.
Try to learn why they have joined your community, their goals, their special skills, and figure out if they can add value to the members.
David Spinks creates a fb post each Monday mentioning the new members that joined the CMX community the previous week.
Now that you have an onboarding process in place. It is time to take note of the effectiveness of the process by analyzing the metrics.
Onboarding new members to your community is a critical process as it is their first interaction with your community.
The experience is very similar to going to a new place and meeting new people. Therefore it is necessary to have a proper onboarding process to remove the fear of socialization of new members.
The primary goal is to thwart off the fear of socialization and provide an engaging experience from Day 1, so as to make them come back as regular participants in the community.
Making people feel special with giveaways that would make them feel recognized. For example: hand written cards
Do something personal and do not worry too much about the instantaneous ROI
You could give every attendee a thank you note. Basically something non-attendees wouldn’t get.
In short, create moments. At CMX, they started giving hugs when people used to enter their events.
NPS
CES
Generate Heatmaps and Take screen recordings to verify whether the newcomers are moving in the intended direction of onboarding flow.
Set up micro goals and gamify those goals, for eg. how many people are completely furnishing their profile data.
Set up 30, 60, and 90-day check-ins to understand if the members are on the right track and how much your onboarding process has influenced the same.
Also look at the below page to get more ideas about which metrics to track.