You’ve spent hours training new users only for them to ghost you a month into the relationship. You try your best to get them back. It doesn’t work, they weren’t invested in the first place. Now the rest of the lifecycle will be firefighting. Ultimately, “poor onboarding” will get blamed for their inevitable churn.

Does that sound familiar? It’s happened to me many times over the years.

So, let’s look at what you CAN do to subtly influence new customers to be more engaged with the onboarding process.

🧠 The Theory: Choice Architecture

It’s the practice of designing the way choices are presented to influence decision-making. The aim is to guide people towards making better decisions without restricting their freedom of choice.

Be aware that there are some ethical questions about manipulation and autonomy with this theory. But the key is to use it transparently and ethically.

Choice Architecture offers a way to influence outcomes positively without resorting to coercion. If you guide the customer towards decisions that ultimately make their experience enhanced, it can be a huge positive for everyone involved.

👀 The Example: Amazon 1-Click Ordering

Think back to the last time you purchased something on Amazon. Did you make use of the 1-Click ordering system?

It’s enabled automatically if you’ve set up your preferred payment method and shipping address.

When purchasing, you have the option to “Add to Cart” but also a very obvious “Buy now with 1-Click” option. This button immediately places the order without going through the full checkout process.

It’s purposefully easy to use. It’s a default setting. It reduces the number of decisions in the checkout process. Reduces the chance for cart abandonment. It also provides some quick wins and instant gratification for the customer.

Ultimately, it’s a much better customer experience.

🧪 The Project: Design Choices

Let’s use Choice Architecture to design ways to help with product adoption and increase engagement during customer onboarding. Here are some ideas you can experiment with for your own onboarding program.

Step 1: Create a tiered challenge

I’m going to start by referring you back to a previous newsletter on how to use anchoring to influence customer engagement. The project showed how to influence customer behaviour in a tiered challenge when talking about anchoring. It can also be used when thinking about Choice Architecture.

The idea is to get the customer to commit to a particular level of engagement during the onboarding process. You can design your efforts depending on the tier they choose. It can help to identify red flags early on but also give the customer ownership over their experience.

Step 2: Deliver quick wins

Guide new customers towards quick wins in their first week of using your product. Identify 5 easy and high-impact actions. The architecture of the flow is important. Consider what you NEED customers to achieve in order to see value quickly.

The faster the value realisation for individual users, the stronger the engagement. To solidify the achievements, you can create a checklist and/or add notifications into the app if you have that capability.

You’re guiding and influencing actions by giving a clear checklist to follow and following up with small rewards for instant gratification.

Step 3: Create a success story quiz

It’s highly likely that you already have a number of customer success stories. But are you doing anything with them?

Instead of sending a link of wide ranging stories to your customer, try personalising the experience to match their needs. This can create a sense of a tailored experience, which increases engagement.

Create a simple quiz that matches new customers with relevant success stories by industry, use case, or individual achievements. Not only is this informative but it also offers some social influence on decision-making. Work with your marketing team to consider this when writing the success stories in the first place.

Think strategically about when to present this quiz to your customers. You can use it as a tool to motivate or to re-engage customers at any point.

🤓 The Analysis: Make Good Choices

Remember that customers are new to your product as well as your onboarding experience. Guidance is welcomed by new users. Choice Architecture can be a subtle way of manoeuvring customers down the best path. There will be plenty of choices during the onboarding experience so why not think more carefully about how to present them?

What you will notice with this project:

• More predictable customer behaviour

• Stronger product adoption

• Consistent engagement