Client Onboarding for Freelancers and Shop Owners

Katie:
Hello and welcome to Biz Chat at Do the Woo. I’m Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins, and today we’re going to be talking about onboarding, whether you are a freelancer wanting to improve the onboarding for new clients or whether you are an e-commerce store owner, needing to onboard customers who buy your products. To help us with this, we’ve got special guest Laura Elizabeth. Welcome, Laura.

Laura:
Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Katie:
So can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do to start?

Laura:
Yeah, sure. So as of right now, I have a WordPress plugin called Client Portal, but my background is actually in web design. I worked at an agency for a year or so and then I branched out and did freelancing for about 10 years. Client Portal was made out of the work I was doing with my freelancing clients. So it was sort of like a mix between a project management tool and really having nothing at all. I started that back in 2016. I still take on the occasional freelancing project, but it’s pretty rare these days.

Katie:
And tell us about onboarding. Why do you think it’s so important and what got you into that as an area particularly?

Laura:
Yeah, I’ve always loved what onboarding can do for you. I was quite insecure back when I was a freelancer and I felt that having a really good onboarding process really set the stage for how the project was going to go. You can make it really repeatable and reuse it with all your clients. It just helped me because I didn’t want to go into the full agency route. I wanted to stay just as a solo freelancer. It helped me juggle multiple clients. If I had a really solid onboarding process in place, it helped my clients trust me a little bit more. When you start a project with somebody, really the beginning sets the tone for how everything’s going to go. So if I had a really solid onboarding process, it just started the project off, and by having a system in place, things started going a lot more smoothly. My clients were happier, I was happier. It just worked out a lot better.

Katie:
That makes a lot of sense because when people hire a freelancer or even an agency for their website, they’ve made the decision based on lots of things like your portfolio, the quality of your website, possibly a recommendation. But ultimately, it’s not like hiring a doctor where there’s a specific qualification. You have to prove your credibility in the early stages of the project. And I suppose if you’re kind of all over the place at the beginning and you’re not providing clear onboarding, then that might make them doubt the decision they’ve made to hire you.

Laura:
I even find that now. So now I’m more on the other side of things where I’m the client and I hire freelancers. It really does make such a difference if I hire someone and I can see they’ve got some kind of process in place. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, but if they have things they can give me where they tell me how they work, answer maybe commonly asked questions, or things like that, it just feels like they’ve done this before. Nobody wants to feel like a guinea pig or a test subject when you’re doing a client project. If I’m hiring someone, I want to feel like they do this all the time, they know how to handle the entire project no matter what it is. It could be a website project, it could be consulting, marketing, whatever. I just feel like onboarding throughout the course of the project really helps gain that trust and it just sets the whole project off from the start.

Katie:
Since we are talking about the freelancer and agency side of onboarding, let’s focus on that a bit more first, and then later on we can talk about onboarding for e-commerce store owners. So can you walk me through an optimal onboarding experience for a new client project? What should that include?

Laura:
Yeah, so it kind of starts slightly before the onboarding when you are qualifying the client. I like to put quite a lot of effort into qualifying my clients because I’m sure everyone’s experienced this: you get on calls with a potential client, you give them a ton of advice, things are going really well, and then you send your proposal and they say, “Oh wait, I have a budget of $500.” And it’s just completely wasted. I feel like everyone has to learn that the hard way. So it starts with qualifying the client, and you can do that with things like intake questionnaires, the discovery call, the proposal. I actually did a lot of paid discovery sessions with my clients. I was doing it before a website redesign project. So, paid discovery is where you do essentially the whole proposal stage as a productized service. So your clients will pay you to do a proposal, which might sound a little crazy because you can imagine what client would want to pay for a proposal. But it’s kind of a consulting thing. You work with them to figure out everything they need in their business, you deliver them a report where they can take it, implement it themselves, get someone else to do it, or ideally get you to do it.

I found that had a ton of benefits overall, both for me and my clients, but specifically with the onboarding, it really helped because almost every client went through that same process. So it was really easy for me to create reusable assets that I would use with them. I would have a VA who would help me send the right things at the right time. It would be things like a contract, like an NDA or something like that, and then we would send different questionnaires for their business, gathering all the data, send them a getting started guide, what to expect, the payment, everything was a lot more automated. So I always think with onboarding, if you can have some kind of fixed scope project that you do at the start, it makes your job a lot easier. But even if you can’t do that, what I tend to recommend is there’s no one size fits all with onboarding. It’s really a case of laying out your process and figuring out what your client needs, what problems your clients tend to have.

A lot of people have issues with clients maybe micromanaging projects or scope creep or things like that that crop up during the project. Are there ways in your onboarding to help solve those? So could you say something like, it’s quite likely with big custom projects that the scope is going to change? That’s absolutely fine and we expect that. Here’s how that will work. And that’s just an example of something you could include in your onboarding to help you later down the road. I know for me, scope creep was a particularly difficult one, but I also liked to set them up in a system where they could access everything at one time, and this is kind of where Client Portal came about. I tried onboarding them into different project management tools and I would find that they were really useful for me, particularly if I was working with contractors on their project or if you’re an agency, project management tools are pretty great. But then when I’d add my client to it, they didn’t want to learn a new system, they didn’t use it, they didn’t log in. And actually, like I was saying earlier, now I’m more on the client side. I also hate being added to a project management tool because I don’t want to change anything or post anything in it because I don’t want to mess up their already perfect-looking system and I just can’t be bothered. So you end up resorting back to email.

Katie:
Yeah, I totally agree. I hate it when I hire someone like, I don’t know, an SEO agency or something like that and they put me on their project management system. There are so many, it’s probably one I’ve never used before. I don’t care what their internal systems are as the client. Things like notifications become a nightmare. You don’t know how it works. You’ll ask for an update and they’ll say, “Oh, it was on this card here.” Well, I didn’t know that. And also, alternatively, you get a notification for everything. And I feel that generally adding clients to your internal project management tool is not in the client’s interest. So yeah, it’s good to have an alternative.

Laura:
And you also get that if your team is quite big, your client won’t really know who they’re supposed to be talking to. They won’t know, “Am I supposed to be replying to this? Are they not?” It just gets really overwhelming for them. And I’m similar to you, I hate being added to different project management tools, it’s just hard. I felt like project management tools weren’t really working for me. They were working for me internally. I didn’t want clients to see the kind of things I was talking about with contractors. And I’ve heard loads of horror stories as well of people who have accidentally posted something that the client can see that they maybe shouldn’t have posted. Maybe it’s about the client, I don’t really know, but there’s always the risk that’s going to happen. You’ll post something that they shouldn’t see.

So I thought, well, I’m not going to bother adding clients to my project management tool. But then when you take that away, if you have all these onboarding documents that you’ve created, so these getting started guides, these questionnaires, the contract invoices, whatever it might be, if you take the project management tool away, you don’t really have anything. So you tend to send these files through email. You have these really long email threads, but that really didn’t feel polished and professional enough either. And I also had the problem where clients would come back to me and say, “Where’s this file? I can’t find it. I didn’t save it, blah, blah, blah.” And that would be really complicated. So I created a portal where they could sign up on my website, log in, and just have everything there available to them. And it was totally separate from the project management tool. So it would only have the very few things

that a client actually needs to see and would need to access on a regular basis. And that really helped because it was sort of the middle ground between nothing and a project management tool. And I just created that in WordPress with private pages and all that kind of thing. I did eventually turn it into a product. It can be just something, a private area on your website that they can log into. And I found that was super useful for my clients.

Katie:
Is that more work for the freelancer or agency because they have to populate that with, do they do things like project updates in it or simply the onboarding information?

Laura:
You can do either really. I personally prefer to keep it very simple and repeatable. So I would set up a template and it would have all their onboarding documents that were the same for every single client doing that particular project. So it would be an onboarding template or a project template for a paid discovery, for example. And then I would have a separate one if I was doing a website redesign or I would have a separate one, maybe, I don’t know, copywriting or whatever services you offer, and you just put in the stuff that is common to pretty much every client as a template. So you don’t have to recreate all that. And then however you store your deliverables, you would just link to what you’re already using. So I wouldn’t spend a lot of time uploading things to the portal. The way I thought of it at the time was like a bookmarks bar that was in a branded portal on your website that your clients could log into. So at the time I was doing websites and I would use Envision for my prototype, so I would just link to Envision. So it didn’t really take an awful lot of time, but it is something that if you do have a VA, which I pretty much recommend almost all freelancers have one if they can because it just makes life a lot easier. It’s something that they can just go in and add the odd link to it. But I always recommend keeping it as simple as possible, actually having as little in there as possible, but making sure that what’s in there are the things that your client needs to access time and time again.

Katie:
That makes sense. So you’ve referred to VAs a couple of times. It’s slightly off topic, but virtual assistants can be really useful. Do you have any tips on where to find one? Because a lot of freelancers can’t afford to hire somebody freelance, and so what are the different ways you can find somebody to help with those tasks?

Laura:
I’ve hired VAs from a few different places. The best one I had was from a website called Hawkey Handbook. I don’t actually know if it’s still around. I haven’t checked, but I think that’s what it was called. Gina taught people how to become virtual assistants and then she had a pool of people where you could post a job, and I had a virtual assistant there for years and she was really great. I’ve also tried hiring just from people I know because they’re kind of tasks that really anyone can do as long as you’ve got good processes in place. But yeah, my favorite one was the Hawkey Handbook place where I hired a VA. It can take a little bit of trial and error and hiring a VA is actually a lot of work upfront because if you don’t have systems and processes and things documented, it takes a long time to get that in place and it can take a long time to train a VA. But once you’ve found that rhythm and they work with you, they’re really invaluable, especially when working with clients. Because if you are like me, I was mostly solo but would just work with contractors. It was really hard doing the actual work, which is the bit I loved, and then dealing with new lead inquiries, keeping up to date with current clients, or even following up with leads that didn’t work out, or doing outreach, all that kind of stuff that you need to do constantly. It just takes that off your plate to have somebody as a middleman managing. For me, it was mostly email and client communication. So yeah, I think VAs are really, really important, but a big investment both time and money upfront.

Katie:
Definitely. I used to use a company called Remote Staff for a VA for years because as a plugin company, I have a support team and one of my support engineers spends half her time doing VA tasks, which might be finance or marketing or general admin or whatever. So I found that good. They were already trained in our products from doing support. They do VA tasks as well and it gives them more insights into different parts of the business and things. So there’s lots of ways you can get them without doing a traditional job advert to hire someone if that’s not in budget.

Laura:
And you don’t even need to hire full-time as well. I only ever had one full-time VA, and I found it was actually a bit much. At the minute, I’m similar to you. I have a support person who does some VA tasks and I think they only do a couple of hours a day and really that’s enough to just get through your inbox and do whatever recurring tasks need to be done. I think two hours a day minimum will get you through most client communication things that you might need to do.

Katie:
Yeah, I find it really helpful to write a list of what I actually do before hiring somebody, because sometimes when you group your tasks, it’s not what you think. So when I do it, actually I need a finance assistant and a marketing assistant and very little general admin. So I might go for a general VA when that’s not the skillset I need. So it is useful to actually write down what you do. You may not have an understanding of that.

Laura:
Yeah, that’s a good point actually. Time track maybe.

Katie:
Yeah, exactly. All of that.

Laura:
Yeah.

Katie:
So let’s get back to onboarding. We went on a useful tangent then. We’ve talked about onboarding for clients who you are providing services for. So let’s move on and talk a bit about onboarding for e-commerce stores. And it’s something you may not really think of because let’s say if someone buys a pair of shoes or something on a website, they probably don’t need any onboarding, but there are e-commerce products that do need some kind of support and communication from that company after making a purchase. An example might be a membership site where they’re joining some kind of a club with an ongoing relationship. It might be that they’ve booked an event and they need information in the run-up to that event and the date of it or any kind of product that needs some kind of special advice or instructions for the customer to use it, which aren’t shipped with the product, which happens in various industries. So do you have any advice about the email side of things? I know you and I have previously talked on a different podcast about your expertise in email marketing. Do you have any advice about how email might play a part in onboarding for e-commerce store owners?

Laura:
Funnily enough, I recently bought some shoes and their onboarding was pretty good. They were running trainers or sneakers.

Katie:
You needed onboarding for shoes, fine.

Laura:
Yeah, it’s funny because you say they didn’t need onboarding for shoes, but these were specifically running shoes, so it kind of makes sense if they were just regular shoes, probably not. But it was quite nice because they sent a follow-up sequence of just different things about how to care for running shoes, how often to replace them, and tips on running as well because presumably if you’re buying running shoes, you’re probably a runner. And so I thought that was quite helpful. But I think with onboarding for emails, it’s actually a really difficult thing to get right, because as you know, inboxes are just full right now and everything you buy, there’s a lot of emails that come after you always get added to the newsletter. It’s quite overwhelming. So the first thing I would say about that is to make sure you’re not sending a newsletter at the same time you’re sending onboarding. But with onboarding emails, I think one thing I really like that I’ve seen, this is more for SaaS software, are people who send the odd email. I think it’s maybe once a week I would say getting the timing right is important and it’s very, very short and it’s one very small tip that I could read in a few seconds about using whatever software that I’ve just signed up for.

And I think that’s really great. That’s actually something I want to put into my own onboarding because I have, for Client Portal, I have a getting started guide and a few little things like that. I have a new customer survey because it’s always good to try if you can, to learn about people who have just bought. So it’s finding that balance between things that you would find useful as the business owner, plus what your customers would find useful. But yeah, I really like these new SaaS companies who are just sending these little tips specifically in software that are probably really obvious to the founder or people who use it regularly. It could be like a keyboard shortcut or just some really basic feature that just makes your life a lot easier. I think that’s really nice because I don’t think people are reading emails, they’re getting so many and I don’t think they’re reading them. They’re as focused when they’re reading them as they maybe were a few years ago, at least in my experience. So yeah, that’s something I would try, but I haven’t tested it, so I don’t actually know.

Katie:
I really like that. Keeping it short, as you say, people do get email overwhelmed, but it is an opportunity still. With our plugins, we’ve created a unique sequence in MailChimp for each of our plugins, similar to what you said, but probably not as brief. So I will look at that. For example, if someone buys our WooCommerce product options plugin, then we’ll send an automated email straight away with instructions on how to set it up. After three days, we send a check

-in email, how are you getting on? Here’s a video, here’s some extra links to resources in case you’re stuck, how to contact us, those kinds of things. With running shoes, if you’re happy with them pretty quickly, you’re going to keep using them and when they wear out, hopefully buy from the same company. But with WordPress, we have an annual subscription, so we need the customer to renew after one year and two years, which means that to encourage renewals, we want to have an ongoing relationship with the customer, which is largely automated of course. So our emails after the first couple of weeks slow down and there might be one every two or three months, and then they might speed up a bit shortly before each renewal. And like you mentioned, we provide tips. So for WooCommerce product options, an email after four months might talk about lesser-used features. You know, you could set a maximum quantity of how many pizza toppings the customer can buy or something like that, or did you know about this extra way of pricing your product options and things that they might not know to help them get more value out of it? And then we might sneak in a marketing email every now and then recommending a related product, but that shouldn’t be the main thing of course.

Laura:
Yeah, I do something similar. I actually have found it quite hard to time emails up to renewal time because people could maybe upgrade their license or do different things throughout that process, and I found it quite hard from a technical perspective to set that up. So I tend to have an onboarding sequence that’s the same for everybody. It’s fortunate for me because I only have one plugin as opposed to multiple, and it’s all serving a similar audience. After the onboarding sequence, it just goes into my general monthly, or it’s not always monthly, newsletter where I’ll share a new example or a new case study or something like that. But I really want to have something in place that’s more akin to when it’s getting close to their renewal date. I just haven’t found a way to actually implement that yet.

But I do also do a little bit of upselling as well because I created a sister company from Client Portal. One thing I found was people loved the portal, but they were having trouble putting together these getting started guides and these intake questionnaires, they didn’t know what to put in them. Whereas I did create portal templates, the portal templates didn’t include content. So I created a sister company that has these templates that have all the exact wording that I would use with my clients. They’re nicely designed but easily editable, that kind of thing. So after, I think it’s about six weeks or so, I do a little mini promotion for that and then give customers a discount if they want to buy that. But it is kind of a separate company, it’s still mine. So I think there’s room to upsell people. I think it’s just important to upsell them for something that they genuinely would be interested in rather than just whatever you have. Have you identified another problem that these customers tend to have that you could solve with a different product and upsell them on that? I think that’s quite a good way, and I’ve never had any backlash about doing that because, like I say, it’s something people genuinely want, so they’re quite happy to receive those emails.

Katie:
Absolutely. I’ve got, I think, 19 premium plugins now, and we only upsell closely related ones. So say someone’s bought a WooCommerce restaurant plugin, a lot of them sell things like pizzas or burgers that need extra toppings, which you can do with our product options plugin. So we’ll email the restaurant customers not saying, have you heard about WooCommerce product options? It’s great. We will say, do you want to sell extra toppings and charge for them for your pizzas and burgers and so on, and be really, really specific. And those emails get quite a good conversion rate. In fact, we have an email that we send about a week after purchase, which recommend handpicked products based on what they bought, and that does quite well at getting that second purchase in.

But let’s talk a bit about tools. So I’ve mentioned that we use MailChimp to send that, but there are other things as well. Obviously, there are many competitors to MailChimp, and whichever email marketing platform you use, you can integrate with your WooCommerce website. There’s also a WooCommerce plugin that I really like. It used to be called follow-ups, and then it got merged into a plugin called Automate Woo. It’s on WooCommerce.com, and you can use that to send different emails to your customers based on what products they bought. So if you have running shoes, for example, then instead of doing it through your email platform, you could do it through your WooCommerce store and have a different product as the trigger for each email. So that’s quite good. We actually do ours through Recapture because we sell through Easy Digital Downloads rather than WooCommerce and hardly anything integrates with that, which is really frustrating. So we use Recapture for our abandoned cart software and also for our follow-up emails that recommend related products and things. So there’s lots of tools. What do you use, Laura?

Laura:
My tooling has changed a little bit. I use ConvertKit for my emails, and then I did use Easy Digital Downloads, but I’ve actually just migrated completely over to Freemius, and that’s really nice because it has all the abandoned cart features built in. It’s actually got a lot of the email built in as well. So I’m putting a pause on my ConvertKit onboarding to just test out what they have out of the box because they say they do a lot of testing with the emails and try to time them quite well and do all that kind of stuff. So I’m just having a look at that at the minute. Talking about personalization. One tool I really like, and I have to say I’m a bit biased, this is my husband’s company, but he runs a company called Right Message, and that’s really nice because what it allows you to do is if you have, say, so I would have for Client Portal, maybe I’d have agencies or freelancers, we have law firms, accountants, all those different industries,

I can learn about different subscribers in ConvertKit and then change content on my website based on what I know about them. So for example, if I had a landing page and I was talking to an accountant via email, if they clicked through to my website, I could change the wording to speak more to accountants. And that’s been really fun to play around with just to make the whole experience more personal. One really easy example actually is if someone’s already on your email list and they go to your website, instead of seeing a popup to join your email list, which is annoying for a customer, but also annoying for you because you can end up with duplicate subscribers, they’ll see something else, so they might see nothing at all, or you could change it to be a popup for them to leave a review or join your affiliate program or something like that. So you can change what they’re seeing on your website based on what you know about them and where they are in your funnel, which is pretty nice. But other than that, I keep my tooling pretty simple. It’s mostly just Freemius, ConvertKit, Right Message, and that’s about it, I think.

Katie:
Yeah, makes sense. About two months ago, I think we had Paul Halfpenny from the PersonalizeWP plugin on this show, and we talked about different personalization strategies and there’s a lot you can do, but we talked mostly about pre-sales, but that is a good point about onboarding as well, so that when customers log in, you can show them different information based on various factors. So there’s a lot you can do with that, which is quite a kind of modern approach that WordPress is just kind of starting to discover fairly recently, I would say.

Laura:
Yeah, it’s kind of crazy what you can do now. It’s a bit scary sometimes, but it’s fun to play around with. I think the thing that you can get caught up on is sometimes you can go a little bit deep on it and do a little bit too much, and the more complexity you add, I’ve learned this the hard way, eventually something’s probably going to break or go wrong and it can be really hard to untangle it. So I really try my hardest to keep things as simple as possible, but stuff like that is just really fun to play around with and it does really work as well. So yeah, it’s good.

Katie:
Yeah, I’d suggest focusing on the biggest wins there. So not every possible customer’s use case needs to have personalized content. Maybe pick out your biggest use cases that you get the most sales from and create targeted content for those that’s going to have the most impact without being ridiculously complex.

Laura:
Yeah, exactly. And just testing it as well, just making sure it works. It should work. Anything that’s more personalized should work. But yeah, it’s always good to test as much as you can,

Katie:
Which is kind of hard because you have to replicate the environment it’s targeted for, don’t you?

Laura:
Yeah, it’s really hard. I find testing it is a lot easier. The higher volume of everything you have, the easier testing becomes just because you get to see trends. If you don’t have a ton of traffic or you don’t have a ton of customers, it can be really hard to know why certain things happen. Is it a seasonal lull, for example? It’s like July right now, so it’s historically not a great month for, well, really a lot of people, everyone’s on holiday. It’s just so hard to know unless you’ve got a really big company to easily see those trends. But it’s still good to try and keep an eye on it if you can, but just not get too focused on the details, not looking every day, looking at trends maybe across months or even years sometimes.

Katie:
Absolutely. It’s easy to panic if you have a drop in sales over the short term and you need to wait until it’s statistically significant, if I can say that.

Laura:
It’s hard because unless you track this data every year, so I’ve recently started keeping a spreadsheet of, and I’ve only done it for the last three years, but it is really useful. January is a particularly good month for me. Obviously, November is good, the summer is less good, and it’s interesting to see, and I know that every year I’ve probably had the same level of panic during the lower months that if I’d have just kept an eye on these trends, I might not have needed to panic so much. It just kind of happens.

Katie:
Definitely. Last month we had Bryce Adams from Metorik on talking about reporting and how to get better data out of your online store because people often are having to create spreadsheets and things like that, whereas you should just have it at the click of a button. It’s kind of crazy how bad the reporting and things like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads is straight out of the box, so you do need extra plugins and SaaS and so on to give you what you need or build it yourself.

Laura:
Yeah, exactly. I find it hard with Easy Digital Downloads. I felt like they changed things quite a lot and I was never sure if the numbers were the same, but I do actually find no matter how good the reporting is, I do find something really useful about putting it into a spreadsheet each month because it forces me to really look at it and see where it’s changed. That might just be a me thing though.

Katie:
Everyone works with data in different ways and so on. We ended up building our own custom system for Easy Digital Downloads to give us the data we needed because it was just so difficult. And then we found out this week that they changed something a few months ago that had broken all of our data, so we thought we had a massive drop in sales and a massive increase in renewals, but they had just changed internally how they classified sales and renewals. So it was a definition change, and we spent ages trying to work out why this would have happened. So again, never easy.

Laura:
Yeah, that’s a nightmare.

Katie:
Another aspect of onboarding, which I think people often forget about is the sequence that happens when the customer places an order and immediately afterwards. Since this is Do the Woo, I’ll use WooCommerce as an example. With WooCommerce, you have built-in emails and order statuses, and then when you change the order status, it triggers an email. I often find the default ones really unhelpful. I know Woo is actually working on this at the moment and thinking about how to improve the order statuses and the corresponding emails, but I ordered, I think it was a Woo T-shirt actually customized with the logo. So I received the email saying, thank you for your order. Fine. It said when it would ship. Fine. Then I received it, and then about a week later I received an order completed email from them. I’m like, hang on, I’ve already got it. I don’t care that you’ve marked it as complete on your system. And it wasn’t about me as the customer. I think that all store owners should think about things like these statuses. Another one is when you order a digital product in WooCommerce, it will set it to processing and send an email, and then you have to manually set it to completed, which sends another email. But of course, a digital product has been served automatically at the time they place the order, and so they don’t need another email. So you have to use a plugin order status manager to disable the completed email and all that stuff. So I’d say test it and think about your customer. Would you add anything to that, Laura?

Laura:
Just that it’s always a good idea to periodically go through and buy your own product, just do a test purchase or something and just see what happens because things do change a lot. Even like you said, with the Easy Digital Downloads changing something, you never know what’s going to change. I recently did that and I found that all my images in the emails were coming out really massive. I guess ConvertKit had changed something or something had happened, but you just don’t know until you’ve gone through it as the customer. And that’s where you can really easily find those things where you’re getting these emails where orders are being set from process to complete and then they’re getting a notification you can go in and just hopefully turn that off. But yeah, that’s probably the best way to do it. I would say, maybe every six months, just go in and do a test purchase.

Katie:
You’ll probably be surprised at how many emails your poor customers are receiving because they get one from PayPal if they use PayPal and all the ones from your website. And you might have a per-product email with instructions for that particular product all at the same time. So you need to think how annoying is that for people as well?

Laura:
Yeah, exactly. You get five emails at once that hopefully you can condense into just one email, which would be perfect.

Katie:
You mentioned earlier about the subsequent emails and making sure, say, your newsletter doesn’t go out at the same time as onboarding emails. I think that’s good advice on an ongoing basis too.

Laura:
Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot you can optimize, and it can, like I say, get messy. Even simple systems can get messy really quickly depending on different customers if they use a different email address. I know you can’t account for every edge case, but I went down the rabbit hole years ago of doing some really cool things with email marketing, but I’ve drastically cut it back now just to make sure that everyone’s getting a similar experience and that I have a bit more control over what they’re seeing. So I’m not sending any emails out by mistake or anything like that.

Katie:
It can be a lot of work to keep all your emails up to date. We’ve got hundreds of automated emails because we have a sequence for each product, and I know they’re not as up to date as they should be.

Laura:
I think a lot of people document, they have a master document of all of their sequences, and I started putting that together for mine as well, just to keep somewhere completely separate, just in a Google Doc or something, to just write down the process. This is similar to the client onboarding as well. It’s how I got started with it. Just bullet point every single touch point with either the client or the customer in as minute detail as possible, as many different edge cases as possible, and then just try to figure out what the ideal most smooth process would look like, whether that’s creating email sequences, whether it’s creating templates or even just templated emails using text expand or something like that just for these commonly repeatable tasks that happen within your process. I think it’s really useful. Just spending, it can take an hour, maybe if that, and it’s super, super valuable.

Katie:
I have a Google Doc with a list of all our emails and when they’re sent so that we can see it in one place, but that doesn’t have the content of the emails, so it’s still a big job to update them.

Laura:
And you have to remember to update when I make an update somewhere, update it elsewhere as well, which can be hard.

Katie:
Before we finish, let’s talk about measuring the success of your onboarding. Do you have any advice on how to track the effectiveness of your onboarding efforts and what you might look at to judge what you’re doing?

Laura:
On the WordPress plugin side, I mostly look at refund rates. I think if I do a good job of onboarding, my refund rates go down. I have actually found recently my refund rates have decreased by quite a lot. In part, it’s due to the fact that we did completely overhaul the product, and it now uses the block editor and it’s really, really nice. But another thing that I did was I put an awful lot of effort into the getting started video, and I used feedback that we’ve had from customers, common questions where customers have got stuck, things that seem really obvious to me as the creator of the product that weren’t clearly obvious to the customers. I’ve then included it in the video, and I spent a long time making this video as good as it can be and just improving that onboarding process.

And now, I don’t know, unfortunately, whether the refund rate has reduced because of the new product or the onboarding or a combination of both. But I have noticed anecdotally that we are getting far fewer support requests from people who are just struggling to get started with the product. So I don’t handle support myself, but I do keep an eye on it. Most days. I try and just see what people are asking, and I get my support person to do a weekly report with any issues, common themes of issues people had, and virtually none since we released it. I think in, I want to say April are how do I get started? And we actually did used to get that quite commonly before then. So that’s kind of how I measure it. Like I said, it’s quite a small company, it’s not a massive company, so I can’t do a ton with analytics and stuff. But yeah, I just keep an eye on refund rates and then just my general support in that respect. And then for client onboarding, it’s similar to that, but even more extreme.

You could have hundreds of customers, but maybe a dozen clients or something. So it’s harder to manage and to really know, but generally you’re talking to clients, so you’re getting a feel for, are there any assumptions that they had that were perhaps wrong? If so, maybe you could fix that in your onboarding. Do they say, “Wow, I’m really enjoying working with you. This is really great.” That’s something that can give you an indication as to whether it’s done correctly. One other thing I do with clients actually is I tend to send out a

questionnaire when the project’s only just started, and it’s similar to the questionnaire that you’d send at the end to get their feedback, but I do it more towards the beginning and find out how it’s going so far. Generally, clients are pretty excited, and that gives me a really good indication of how did they find the onboarding experience? Was it good? Was it great? Was there any improvements? That kind of thing’s helpful. So yeah, I just track it really, I guess anecdotally is the best way to say it.

Katie:
I think that works for clients in particular. If they’re asking questions that you should have told them, if they’re asking really basic questions about the process, expectations, anything like that, then that’s a problem with your onboarding, isn’t it?

Laura:
Yeah, exactly. And there’s always ways you can fix that, especially if it’s common things. I think I mentioned earlier scope creep for me was always the biggest one. It always happened, and I hadn’t set that expectation. I put together a proposal and it was fairly detailed, but something had changed. It may not have been the client’s fault, it may not have been my fault, but something has changed. Well, who’s responsible for taking on that extra cost? Is it me? Is it the client? And if you have these conversations in the early stages, it just makes things a lot easier further down the road when you’re inevitably going to hit these roadblocks that everyone experiences when working with clients.

Katie:
Yeah, scope creeps a good one because everybody deals with it. I find the best way to handle it is one, to make it clear what was included, as you say, through clear documentation and proposal and all of that. And then when the customer does ask for something that wasn’t in the scope, I think it’s nice to be kind of positive. Well, that’s a great idea. I think that’s a really big improvement to what we have planned. Let me cost it out for you. You haven’t said no, that’s not included, have you as a positive? No.

Laura:
Yeah, that’s exactly what I would do as well is I would say I would always start with yes. So I talk in a lot of Facebook groups with freelancers and agencies, and it’s really interesting to see it as a third party where a client, there’s a bit of scope route going on, a client needs something else, and the freelancer is already assuming that the client is going to be really annoyed if you charge them any more for it. But the client has not indicated that they’re annoyed. I’ve worked with people and the scope increased, and I have, in my head, I’m thinking, of course the price is going to go up. I shouldn’t need to say that’s obviously going to happen, but the freelancer could then go into this spiral of this is going to be a massive conflict. And they start with, I did say in the proposal it was going to include this, this and this. This wasn’t included. I’m not going to do it. Whereas if you just say, oh, great idea, yeah, it’ll be an extra blah or Let me cost it out, or whatever you say, but I think that’s a great thing to do. I think I’ve never had pushback when I just said it like that, or if I have, it would be not a conflict, but more just like, actually, let’s just wait on that and maybe do that later, or something like that.

Katie:
Yeah, the time you get pushback is when you don’t tell them straight away. So if you send them a higher bill than expected at the end of the project, that can be a disaster. And I’ve made that mistake and lost a lot of money and had very unhappy customers in the past through when we were doing web design work. So you need to be clear before there are extra costs, but matter of fact about it, they probably assumed you would charge extra anyway.

Laura:
Yeah, it’s actually very similar to how I deal with my three-year-old. I’ve noticed that if she wants something, and if I say no, if it’s a, if I say no, the second she asks for it, there tends to be not really much of a meltdown. Whereas if I dance around the subject and I sort of maybe give excuses or reasons and then eventually say no further down the line, that’s when full on meltdown happens that I think it’s kind of similar when just dealing with anyone, if it’s don’t string people along, get their hopes up or whatever. And then even if you’re in the right, dump something on them at the last minute, just be really upfront, professional, positive, calm, and just not defensive. And then things just generally, in my experience anyway, seem to just work out a lot better.

Katie:
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for this, Laura. It’s been great, and I think we’ve covered a lot of really concrete advice that people can hopefully go away and implement in their own businesses. So where can people find you online?

Laura:
I am mostly around on Twitter, so it’s @LauraLizDunn. If you want to check out Client Portal, the website’s clientportal.io. That’s pretty much where I’m at. Not on LinkedIn yet, but I am probably about to sign up. Apparently that’s the place to be.

Katie:
Everyone’s talking about it, but I just can’t bear the idea of another social media.

Laura:
I know. I do have an account. I just haven’t logged in since I was in university.

Katie:
Same. Yeah. Yeah, neglecting account. Well, thank you so much. You’ve been an amazing guest and thanks to everybody who’s watching as well or listening.

Laura:
Lovely. Thank you so much. Bye.

Katie:
Bye.