How to onboard users with Pushwoosh
Create highly engaging onboarding campaigns with Pushwoosh Customer Journey Builder
As the first personal touch, user onboarding must be perfectly tailored, seamless, and gently engaging. Run your onboarding campaigns with Pushwoosh smoothly and easily – Customer Journey Builder lets you create mobile and email onboarding campaigns with a simple visual editor.
Prerequisites
- First, adjust your onboarding flow based on your app's value and what you want to engage users with at these first steps.
- Prepare content for your onboarding campaign – In-Apps and push notifications presets. Let your creativity free – you can customize the pre-built Rich Media templates, build your own Rich Media pages with HTML syntax, try out the AI composer for pushes, or create your tailored content from scratch!

Example of an onboarding campaign
Here are a few steps to onboard users who recently joined your mobile app with Pushwoosh Customer Journey Builder.
Define the event the journey starts with: it might be the first-time app launch, registration in the app, or first in-app actions.
You can, for example, enable the "Registration in the app" Event in your Pushwoosh Control Panel and configure it in your app or add your custom Event.

Registration event

Setting the journey entry
2.1. Create a Rich Media greeting the user and announcing their experience with the app. You can use the Welcome Newcomers template or create a new one fitting your app look&feel.
2.2. Add the In-App element following the journey's start event and select the pre-created welcome Rich Media.

Welcome In-App
On the next journey step, let your users tell a bit about themselves: ask journey travelers a few questions to personalize their further experience.

Creating a list tag
3.2. Create a Rich Media page containing the list of options a user can choose. In your Control Panel, you'll find the Rich Media templates you only need to customize with your branded images and texts, or you can build your own from scratch and upload the HTML file to your Pushwoosh account.

Creating Rich Media from template
For the built-in template, the default WishList tag is populated when a user interacts with the In-App. For your own Rich Media files, make sure to set up the Tag properly.
3.4. Follow the first welcome screen with the In-App element containing the Rich Media you've created.

First onboarding steps
Help users get the most out of your app with push notifications – show the in-app subscription prompt to encourage users to sign up for your messages.4.1. Create a Rich Media opt-in prompt. You can use the Pushwoosh template or upload your HTML.

Opt-in RIch Media template
4.2. Add the In-App element to your journey to display this Rich Media. Once a user subscribes to push notifications, the Pushwoosh SDK sets the default Push Alerts Enabled tag for this user to 'true'.

Opt-in prompt on the canvas of Pushwoosh Customer Journey Builder
Set a delay for a couple of hours to give users some time to explore your app and sign up for pushes.
Split the journey travelers into branches based on what they've decided: for those who enabled push notifications, it's time to get their first one! For those who have not, one more In-App can help consider all the value of your push notifications.

Creating a segment
6.2. Add a Segment Splitter to the canvas. Select the segment you've created6.3. Follow the segment branches with corresponding communication flows:
- send a first push notification encouraging opted-in users to open the app and continue exploring its features;
- show others one more In-App on their next app launch.

Completed onboarding campaign
Do not overwhelm users with too many onboarding steps – let them enjoy your app after the essential onboarding is completed and start your engagement campaign!
To onboard users via email messages, the basic flow is quite the same:
- Consider the onboarding steps the newcomers should take first.
- Prepare the engaging onboarding content: build Email Templates and save Email Presets for your onboarding campaign.
- Make sure to integrate all the necessary Events, for example, signing up for emails or leaving the email address in a registration form.
- Create audience segments needed for your onboarding campaign splitters based on your onboarding goals and communication flow.