To keep your community growing, there are a few vital things you need to do. First, you have to create a seamless signup process for your community. Your signup process is how new members join your community, so you need to optimize it and make it seamless.
Everyone is busy, and the more complex your signup process is, the less likely it is that a prospective member will complete the process. For this reason, you have to design a stress-free sign-up process.
With a stressful signup process, three things happen to your community. First, you reduce your chances of acquiring new members. Second, you can get incomplete or wrong data from new members. Third, you lose money when a prospective member abandons the signup process.
These are all things that you don’t want to happen. You’ve put too much effort into building your community to watch it go down the drain. So, how do you design a seamless signup process that improves member acquisition?
In this article, we’ll look at what makes up a good signup process and how to optimize yours so you get more members completing the process.
What is a signup process/flow?
A sign-up flow is the entire process a prospect goes through to become a part of your community.
The difficulty of this process is known as “friction.” Therefore, sign-up flows can be categorized into a flow with friction and frictionless flows. A flow with a high degree of friction means that the signup is quite complex. The user has to go through many steps before they can join your community. Frictionless signup flows, on the other hand, are simple and direct. They don’t have so many steps before you get a member signed up.
What is a signup page?
A sign-up page is a landing page where you collect vital information from prospective members. It’s on this page that visitors are converted into members of your community.
This landing page is the most important stage in your marketing conversion funnel. Without it, no new members can join your community, and worse still, you don’t have the necessary information to reach them. Therefore, you must pay attention to it because it’s where the conversion magic happens.
Understanding your customers helps you design a better community experience for them. An infographic by Tractionwise reports that 64% of companies believe that their brand community helps make better decisions. 86% of Fortune 500 companies also report that their communities provide them with insight into customer needs.
This is why you need a great sign-up page, as it is where you start capturing the necessary information you need to build a better community and give members a sense of belonging.
Why you should create a good signup process for your community
Creating a good signup process for your community is vital to increasing member acquisition. Here’s why you need a seamless signup process for your community.
Improved Member Acquisition and Retention
Your signup process is an important factor that affects member acquisition and retention. If your sign-up process is smooth and easy to complete, you’ll have more members sign up, and you have a better chance of retaining them.
The larger your community grows, the richer the experience for your members because there is a potential for more interaction and communication.
Improve your member’s onboarding experience
Onboarding a new member is vital to membership retention. You need to show your members the benefits of joining your community and get them to start using the features of the community. With a seamless signup flow, you can gauge their expectations and prepare an onboarding process tailored to meet that expectation.
Capture necessary data
What you know about your community members determines how you’ll relate and engage them. Your signup process should capture the necessary data you need to identify each member’s needs.
For example, if your community has a job board, you want to determine if a new member wants to receive job alerts or is already settled in a position. With a simple Yes/No checkbox, you know which members would be more interested in job alerts and related content.
Take a look at how Raklet’s customizable forms help you collect all the necessary data you need.
How to improve your signup process for your online community
Improving your signup process is non-negotiable if you want to grow your community. Here a few ways to simplify your signup process for your community
Request only relevant information
When registering members, there’s the tendency to want to collect as much information as you can. But that can often be counterproductive. Ideally, you should only collect necessary information.
A good idea is to aim to make the signup process complete in 5 minutes or less. Your onboarding process can have a more robust data collection process, but your initial sign-up form should be as short as possible.
Make all fields on your form required.
If your signup form is short and precise, you need all the fields filled in. Therefore, set each field as required so that your prospect has to fill in that information.
The advantages of this are twofold. It ensures that you get the necessary information from a prospect and keep the signup form short. If you don’t feel like a specific field should be required, you shouldn’t have it in the form at all.
Schedule a demo today to see how Raklet helps you create special customized forms.
Use clear descriptions and CTAs.
A big part of a seamless signup process is clarity. Prospects need to know what you need and why you need it, if possible. Therefore, you should give very clear descriptions of what you need entered into each field.
For example, if you need a work email address rather than a personal one, state that and give an example of what a work email address looks like. Any extra time your prospect has to spend figuring out what you require increases the likelihood of them abandoning the entire sign-up process.
Optimize the signup process for your community with Raklet
Raklet helps you optimize your signup process by creating a user-friendly sing up page. You can create customizable and branded forms that allow you to customize the data you receive. You also get a custom dashboard that displays all the information you’ve collected in an easy-to-understand manner. What’s more, with Raklet, your signup process is optimized for improved user experience, whether on desktop, mobile, and your branded mobile app.
With Raklet, you have all the tools you need to grow your community. Join the Raklet family, and let’s start building!
To read more about memberships and how to make the best of them, check out our comprehensive article: Making the Best of Memberships.
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