How one company achieved a 55% click through rate

There’s a universal truth about people. A truth that Paul at “Circle CI” understands and has used to amazing effect in the welcome email he sent out. And it goes something like this…

When you were a child, you lived at the center of your universe. When you closed your eyes, everything disappeared. When you were hungry, you cried and food would appear. If you were too hot, you cried. Too cold, you cried.

Everything was you you you (or me me me since you’re you — boy that’s confusing).

When you became an adult you learned how to repress some of those urges. But they’re still there. YOU are still the center of YOUR universe.

Now, you and me… we’re savvy email people. When we receive emails, we don’t just care about ourselves, right? We just want cold hard facts and data and we can decide what solves our problems, right?

WRONG

If doesn’t matter how smart your audience is or what your product or service is…

You’ll want a pen and paper to write this down. I’ll wait.

People don’t care about you. They only care about themselves

Think about that next time you write an email. Everything in your email should be about the reader and their problems, not about you and your company.

Here’s an awesome (short) example of this sent in by Paul from CircleCI.com.

Hey Colin,
Here’s your invite to the Circle private beta:
https://circleci.com/?invite=12312827

In 20 seconds, your code will be set up for Continuous Integration, and your first tests will have started running on our servers. It’s that easy!

Try it now: https://circleci.com/?invite=12312827

Paul
Founder, Circle

PS I love to hear feedback, so please let me know what you think 🙂

Paul killed it with this email. The value to the user is so clear: In 20 seconds, the product will be working. And he delivers. We’re a customer of Paul’s. If you don’t know what Continuous Integration is don’t worry. It’s something that developers know they SHOULD do, but it’s a pain to set up and maintain yourself (kind of like the emails we power).

Paul’s service makes Continuous Integration easy to set up and he communicated that extremely well in the email.

As a result, Paul got a whopping 55% of people to click on the link to check out Circle CI. Pretty awesome, huh?

I want to help you achieve ridonkulously great results like Paul’s (55% click through!)

Need a little inspiration before I challenge you to apply some of these ideas?

I got you an awesome 10 minute video of Neville Medhora. Neville is a professional copywriter who writes copy for AppSumo. In the video with Andrew Warner of Mixergy, Neville breaks down and improves a company’s welcome email.

This is usually paid content and one of the videos in Neville Medhora’s Kopywriting Kourse. (There’s no referral link in there. I paid $89 for the course and it was well worth the money)

I begged, borrowed and stole from Neville to show this video to you. To respect his awesome course, you need to watch it before July 31st. We can’t keep it up forever.

Sincerely,

Colin

P.S. If you’re among the first 50 people to reply with what you changed in one of your emails, I will give you a discount code for 40% off Customer.io’s email service for 6 months to use when you sign up.

P.P.S. Neville let me use the video with permission. Please don’t send me DMCA takedown notices. The phrase “People don’t care about you, they only care about themselves” also came from Neville’s course.

P.P.P.S. Last week’s email on open rates had an open rate of 52%… our best ever!