The missing link to design a perfect community email onboarding flow

Onboarding new members into your circle community is an important part of any member experience.

If you use this one extra step in your community email onboarding your members will feel more invested in it. Ignoring this step is a missed opportunity to encourage the member to engage with the community from the get go.

In this post, I will you the step and how it fits with your overall email onboarding strategy.

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What is this missing link you're spruiking?
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The juiciness of this step is that it happens before you even get an invite.

It's the time when you're laying the foundation of your relationship with a new member.

I call it the pre-invite step and as a member, I swiped it from Tatiana's fabulous community BAAC.

How does the pre-invite step work?

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The pre-invite step should be something that's easy to do, but takes a little bit of time and effort. The goal is to make sure your community members are committed enough to take action before they can join.

This translates into one or multiple emails with a task. (i.e. take an action on a web page, watch a video)

After completing the task they get an invite! Yay!

Below is a high-level process of the flow that we used for our own Circle Community The Expert Author Academy

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The onboarding emails are designed to get the member started. They include links to your welcome video and other resources. The goal of this step is to get members engaged with your community right away.

It's a standard email flow but the tricky bit to note here is it fires after the member joins your community. More on this later.

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How do I make this happen for my community?

Share this post with someone who is versed in Active Campaign and Zapier.

If you happen to use Active Campaign, get in touch with me, and I can share the above flows as Automation Templates to make your job a little easier.

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Hopefully, this post has provided you with some food for thought on how you can use this in your community. If so, please let me know!

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