Wearable fitness tracker Whoop bills itself as the personal fitness coach for athletes. Unlike other wearables that purely measure clearly understandable factors such as steps, Whoop goes further and lets athletes know their Strain, Recovery and aspects such as their Heart Rate Variability. Whilst this helps differentiate their product, it makes introducing new users to the product more difficult as new concepts need to be learned.

Whoop’s onboarding is a lesson in how to think about delivering value to your users over time to drive engagement with the experience. It begins before you’ve even received your physical Whoop band, post purchase you’re asked a number of questions on why you are buying the whoop, which they tell the user is designed to better personalize their experience. Once the product arrives its a fairly typical experience to get you into using it, but for the app to deliver you analysis around your Strain, Recovery and Sleep you need to use the product for multiple days in a row.

To ensure that users do this Whoop takes a two-pronged approach, in app areas of the product are blank and in app communications message that you need to continue to use the product over time to unlock them. This is a relatively standard approach for similar digital experiences, but it’s on email its the way that Whoop’s content strategy is integrated into its onboarding that stands out.

Over the first 7 to 14 days of using the product users are delivered value based product and merchandising content educating them around key features and stimulating them to use aspects of the app they may not have yet engaged with. These emails will be a mixture of scheduled and trigger based communications, meanwhile editorial content is mixed in to ensure you have a grasp of the wider brand story and how the product can deliver around your interests.

Whoop has built multiple journeys into their CRM strategy which include transaction, product and trigger based emails. The heavy lifting is done by how they have mapped these journeys out upfront, ensuring that the right email is delivered as part of the onboarding process.

These emails are designed to both show the user the value they a can experience if they continue to use their Whoop and drive engagement with the features that are available at that point in time that are critical for Whoop’s understanding of the customer’s behavior.

Once the user has gone through the initial phases of the onboarding the Whoop app has other two key elements that help increase the users engagement over the first month. A weekly and monthly performance assessment can be unlocked. In the first month of use unlocking these becomes a priority for the user and ensures they use the product for the first 30 days at which point the full calibration of the product occurs.

THE TAKEAWAY

• Onboarding isn’t a one and done, think about how you can stimulate engagement over time.

• Ensure you have a robust content strategy to enable your brand to have a multi-faceted communications approach to driving the first 30 days of engagement.

• Where possible include in your experience a feature or benefit that can be unlocked over time.

  GO DEEPER

• Explore a timeline of the first 30 days of a Whoop experience here.