How do you create a valuable welcome email? The “Hello! Hi! Welcome!” part is clear enough, but what else should you consider?

Welcome emails aren’t just a formality but a crucial opportunity. Minutes before, your customer was excited enough about your service to sign up for an account. A good welcome email capitalizes on the momentum of that sign-up, rewarding customers for their behavior and enticing them to stay engaged.

We analyzed 50 welcome emails to figure out how to best guide customers along their customer journey. Let’s dive into the data we found.

The Anatomy of a Welcome Email

We looked at welcome emails from 50 subscription services, with a mix of B2B and B2C. We learned that every good welcome email has these three things:

• Welcome Message. This is where you welcome, invite, and inform your customer. (Tip: use the goof-proof Princess Bride welcome copywriting formula!)
• Images. Appeal to visual learners and provide brand context.
• A call-to-action. Invite your customers to start getting value from your service. For example, if a customer just signed up for your survey tool, you’d invite them to make a survey.

Check out this welcome email for Dropbox Teams, which includes all three components.

• The welcome text explains your new benefits now that you’ve signed up.
• The image breaks up the text, makes the email visually appealing, and promotes the message of collaboration.
• The call-to-action prompts you to “Get started” in Dropbox Teams with a clear next step.

Let’s dig into some of the data to discover best practices for each component.

Welcome Text: Engage Your Customers Immediately—Or Lose Them

A study from the Nielson Group about email newsletters showed that recipients only allocated about 51 seconds to read each email, and often just glanced at the content.

Even though newsletters don’t serve the same purpose as welcome emails, the takeaway is the same: no one will pore over your email’s flowery language. Customers should get your most valuable information right away, from day one, and that can help retain them down the road.

Optimize your word count

In our findings, a good majority (65.4%) of welcome emails had between 50 and 150 words. About a quarter of the emails were over 150 words. Here’s the exact percentage breakdown:

The variation in copy length makes sense—the amount of text you use depends on what you have to convey to new users. It can take longer to explain to someone how they can generate leads than it might to show them a dress to buy.

Despite the variation, it’s possible to be both concise and thorough. This email from Zillow, coming in at only 32 words, is a good model. It has all the component parts (welcome text, image, CTA), and explains all of Zillow’s core functions (home listings, mortgage pre-approval, and “zestimating”).

Zillow sums up the basics of their service and invites you to use it, showing that you don’t have to use a lot of words in order to be comprehensive.

Personalize your message to increase conversion rates

Personalization improves click-through rates. And most marketers claim to prioritize personalization.

In our analysis, we looked for two types of personalization:

• Name personalization: Think “Hi, Ellen!” or “Welcome, Jake!”
• Content personalization: Tailoring content based on information you have about a customer, like whether a customer downloaded your productivity tool for business or personal use.

For name personalization, only 11 out of the 50 emails we analyzed used our names (or usernames) in the greeting. That’s just 22%.

It’s not hard to address your customers by name, as long as you’ve got that information. (In Customer.io, you use a simple Liquid tag.) And because personalization tends to increase conversions, any little effort is worth trying.

In terms of content personalization, we found that none of the emails we received were personalized based on use personas. Because few companies are doing this, this is an opportunity to make your welcome emails exceptional.

Clearbit, a business intelligence tool, gathers data to determine their customers’ job roles and sends different welcome messages based on those roles. A new user’s job affects how they approach and use Clearbit’s products.

Here’s a marketer-focused welcome, offering integrations with tools they’re likely to already use and calling out the potential to “becoming a marketing god.”

In contrast, here’s what Clearbit sent to their developer customers. The message prompts them to test and learn about their enrichment APIs—which may turn off a marketer who isn’t very technical.

The important takeaway here isn’t about inserting a name or other personalized field but about delivering relevance. Understanding your recipients’ motivations is key to an effective message.

In the case of a welcome email (and many other lifecycle messages), the text aims to invite customers to engage in some way, so you have to make that invitation appealing. And different elements of your service or ways to frame your message can effectively appeal to different segments of people.

Images: Use Graphics to Help Customers Understand Your Brand

65% of people are visual learners. Beyond adding visual appeal, images help your customers process information. Using images in welcome emails might seem obvious, but only a little more than half of our data set did—30 out of 50.

Including an image isn’t a necessity—and when used incorrectly, it can actually distract from the goal of getting customers back inside your app. Still, images in welcome emails are unique opportunities to help cement your message.

Researchers showed that people are 83% more likely to remember text when paired with an image. Images have also been proven to help you process messages faster and more thoroughly, trigger emotions, and motivate learning.

Here are two simple tips on how to capitalize on how images can help people absorb your message:

Use supporting images

The best images support the messages you want your users to take away, adding helpful context. This email from book-creating tool Blurb uses three different types of images to get its message across, using the header, body, and footer of the email.

The first image, which includes the logo and a picture of a book, occupies the email header—helping you understand what Blurb is all about.

The second set of images gives you a visual representation of the types of publications you can create with Blurb, showcasing the product’s core benefits.

The third set of images are small, but our associations with the heart, the book, and the barcode help us understand the process of using Blurb at a glance.

The way Blurb uses images helps customers get the gist of each element of their messaging, even if they end up scanning the email.

Join the Blue Email Group

The color of welcome email images—in addition to the content—can also affect the way your customer perceives your company. It’s basic color psychology: green is associated with growth/nature, purple with luxury/royalty, black with exclusivity. But one color stood out in our findings.

Out of the 50 emails we analyzed, 30 of them prominently featured the color blue—60% of the total. That’s 36% more than any other color.

While some of these companies had blue in their logo, not all did. So it wasn’t necessarily overall branding that led to a blue choice, which often showed up specifically for their welcome email.

The color psychology surrounding blue aligns with the mission of the welcome email. A welcome email is supposed to help give a positive first impression and build trust, and the color blue symbolizes trust, integrity, and efficiency. For a subscription service, you need to present these qualities to help keep your customers around.

Of course, a blue welcome email isn’t a must-have, but incorporating blue into your color scheme may give you a little boost, as you’re acclimating customers with your service and earning their trust.

Call-to-Action: Maintain Momentum to Prevent Early Churn

It’s easy to lose the interest of new users when you haven’t yet proven your value and built habits of engagement. And when it comes to apps, the numbers are brutal: less than 25% of people will open an app after the first time they use it.

Your first call to action is essential. Your customers decided to download your app or create an account because they’re curious about your service. But that curiosity is fleeting—use it or lose it. Most businesses agree. Out of the 50 emails we analyzed, only 4 didn’t include at least one CTA.

This was the least deviation we saw in any of our findings. But the consensus that all welcome emails need a CTA is pretty basic. The deeper problem remains: you don’t just need any CTA, you need the right one.

Power conversions with a single CTA

While most emails we analyzed had more than one CTA, the best ones had one clear CTA. Research shows that emails with a single, strong call to action increased click-through rates by 371% and sales by 1,617%.

This email from NPS tool Delighted provides an example of what to avoid. There are many instances of hyperlinked text, but it’s not clear what action you should take next.

With ten different links in this email, there’s no one area that draws your eye. It’s harder to pick from ten options than to follow one clear direction, as too many options creates choice overload, which often ends up in inaction.

On the other hand, look at this email from productivity tool Trello. There are multiple hyperlinks in this email—links to the Getting Started Guide, social media channels, and Trello’s blog—but the design shepherds you to a clear next step.

Customers see a clear path instead of getting blocked by too much or irrelevant information.

Maximize click-throughs with a button

Much like Trello’s clear next step, using a button rather than linked text or photos can boost click-throughs. Buttons are hard to miss and hard to misunderstand. It’s easy to gloss over a hyperlinked phrase or miss how clicking an image leads to a dashboard.

This email from the Moz Community has both hyperlinked text and a “Start Exploring” button. Here’s the body text:

There are six CTAs in total, but only one is the star. Our eyes go right to the yellow “Get Started” button. The other links are easy to gloss over while available for anyone interested enough to explore.

While we recommend using a button to lead your customers on a clear journey, using hyperlinks can provide the context they need along the way.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

The most important takeaway we’ve learned from analyzing 50 welcome emails is that there’s no one-size-fits-all process for creating yours.

Our trusty shades of blue might clash with the purple in your logo, or maybe your specific audience loves lots of links in their first message. There aren’t any universal rules. There are however some universal goals: welcome messages should leave a positive impression and openness to more engagement.

Okay, we’ve given you strategies for successful welcome emails. Now tell us about your welcome email or how you’re planning on improving them!

We all have our own ways of making decisions. The pro/con list. Gut instinct. Maybe you consult your trusty Magic 8 ball. But according to psychologists like Peter Gollwitzer, no matter what methods we use to make choices—big and small—there are two distinct phases of this process:

• Stage 1: Deliberation
• Stage 2: Implementation

This mindset context is often missing from the strategies that companies use to communicate with their leads and customers. Approaching messaging as a way to either help people determine or implement is useful to create communication that comes off relevant and helpful, rather than random and promotional.

You can use this framework to create lifecycle messaging that aligns with a customer’s decision-making process. For example, you can send email tailored to people in these broad phases, reaching users pre-signup (Stage 1: Deliberation) and post-signup (Stage 2: Implementation).

The chart below breaks down some common customer challenges in the deliberation and implementation stages of their lifecycle, along with ways that businesses can respond:

Product and marketing teams often use this framework without quite realizing it. Used deliberately in your customer approach, the framework is even more powerful. Equally often, companies craft messages that don’t sync with a customer’s current phase. An “implementation” message to a “deliberation” customer isn’t just unhelpful, it makes for a bad experience during a delicate time in the lifecycle.

In this post, we’ve collected some examples that illustrate strategies for reaching customers in these two phases with the appropriate message at the right moment. Let the customer lead the way and use these simple guidelines to shape the appropriate messaging.

Stage 1: Deliberation

Customers in the deliberation phase are seeking—sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously—a connection that will point them in the right direction.

The line is generally clear. A customer that hasn’t yet signed up or one that has taken a soft step (a free trial, for example) is still deliberating. If they aren’t paying you, they aren’t truly implementing yet.

While people are still deliberating, communicate with them effectively by addressing the questions they’re mulling over and supplying the education and information they’re most likely seeking. To see what we mean, we’ll borrow examples from a few industries to look at how different businesses solve this problem for their customers.

Align your goals with the customer’s goals

Consumers and businesses tend to make decisions in the same way, albeit with different processes. In either case, emotions, urgency and past behavior contribute to the ultimate choice. Regardless of whether you’re selling to consumers or businesses, you need to understand their goals before sharing how you can help them achieve those goals.

This email from Glassdoor a great example of high-level alignment on goals between the lead and the business. It is content-driven and sells ideas, not solutions. That helps this message resonate with their ideal customer’s goals.

A few other things help make this email successful for their audience. It’s sent on a Tuesday, smack in the middle of the busy workweek. It also leverages Glassdoor’s own data about work-life balance and the companies that are hiring—the segue to the product is both logical and useful.

Answer questions before they’re asked

It’s likely that your prospect or new trialer does have a goal, but isn’t sure exactly how to achieve it. Along with uncertainty comes preconceived notions about the way things are done. You can address this by answering common questions before they’re asked. Anticipate these questions by talking to your sales and support teams. Where are people struggling? What is holding them back from implementing our product/service?

Newton is a new kind of running shoe company that launched in 2007. The shoes are built to promote better running form, but are very different from their competitors. They use their emails to explain how their shoes work and why they could be a better choice than Nike or Brooks.

In this case, the customer’s goal is likely injury-free running. They’re deliberating on the best way to achieve that goal. If they’ve already come across Newton and subscribed to the newsletter to get more information, it’s the perfect time to differentiate the product.

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Use branding to address subconscious emotions

Every interaction with your company helps people form an opinion about you. The colors in your marketing, the copy on product pages, even the tone of your tweets—it all factors into the emotional reaction. But “branding” is a vague word. There are many ways to interpret branding, but perhaps the simplest is helping customers establish positive feelings about your company (not just your product).

(It’s important to note that you can’t fake a great brand. It’s built into the DNA of the company. You can put branding to work in your emails, but only if it’s an accurate reflection of your business.)

Plenty of companies use content to provide information, but Litmus took the time to survey more than 900 email marketers to create its State of Email Design Report.

The result is a community-oriented resource that’s helpful to email marketers whether they use Litmus or not. It’s just the kind of thing that creates the positive branding connections that you can draw on later on the customer lifecycle.

Stage 2: Implementation

The deliberation phase is all about helping customers connect the dots. Not only do you want them to have positive emotions about your brand, you want to convey that you have the ability to help them achieve their desired outcomes.

Once they’ve decided that your product or service can help them, it’s about implementation. How do you get them up and running and maintain engagement?

Create a positive feedback loop

The first step is simply affirming their decision. Know as milestone emails, these messages congratulate customers on taking an important step. Welcome emails can fall into this category, as can emails that reward users for any number of breakthrough events events in their lifecycle.

Medium tackles notifications and milestone emails in one fell swoop. Their emails alert writers to highlights and comments, but also close a positive feedback loop. Here’s proof that the work you published on Medium is reaching people.

Support Ongoing usage with timely information

Most software products are meant to be used on an ongoing basis. Given the nature of the customer’s relationship to the product, it makes sense that people will need help getting value from it. Their relationship with your product will fluctuate—it isn’t a linear line towards greater and greater value.

Evernote sends regular emails to help their customers get more from the app. Like many software tools, Evernote starts as a blank slate—no data and therefore no value. Only by adding content and context to the app do users get a return on their investment.

They use this email to let customers know about integrations. (Rather than a one-off strategy, it’s actually a proven way to reduce to churn.)

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Evernote does this with tips for using their software. Newton could do it by providing workout ideas. Medium can do it by sharing the work of other writers. Glassdoor can do it by offering a salary estimator and resume writing tips. In every case, ongoing usage of a product or service should be paired with timely information.

Retention = Goal Re-Alignment

Goal alignment will usually need to happen more than once. As customers lose interest and drift away from your product or service, there are all kinds of ways to re-engage them.

Airbnb does a particularly good job with this. In the example below, they’ve jogged the customer’s memory and leveraged behavioral data to suggest places to visit. They also don’t ask for a huge commitment. Instead of “Book now,” they simply prompt the customer “Start your search.”

Understanding where the customer is in their lifecycle is paramount to communicating effectively. It takes empathy, perspective and a bit of data to pinpoint the kind of message that people need–and then deliver it.

Clearbit builds a brilliant and extensive suite of API products. Exciting use-case ideas abound. Just a sampling: sales reps can get a lead’s company size from a single email, marketers can enrich lead and customer data to better segment their emails, and developers can integrate Clearbit with their own software to show rich profiles.

Having multiple products, use-cases, and audiences means that Clearbit has a lot of explaining to do. Their challenge: guide different types of users through custom onboarding experiences for multiple products. Clearbit has to get founders, salespeople, marketers, developers, and other professionals to all understand, adopt, and make the best use of their platform.

The solution, naturally, involves the clever use of data. Using their own Clearbit-enriched data, they segment their audiences and personalize content to tailor their lifecycle messages in Customer.io, delivering only the most vital and relevant information.

The result: a hyper-personalized email strategy that achieved an overall open rate of 49%. Here’s how they did it:

Segment free trialers by role

People who sign up for a free trial are usually newbies, who don’t yet know how a product can best serve them. Recognizing that their various buyer personas require different information to get started, the Clearbit team knew they needed to find a way to match the right message to the right users.

Upon realizing that their buyer personas’ needs hinged on their job expertise, Clearbit decided to segment their welcome email drip campaign based on a user’s role. Take a look at two of these emails that have a 64% open rate.

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The email on the left provides developers a peek into how the Clearbit API operates, showing an example cURL command and the data Clearbit returns. The email on the right, on the other hand, addresses a marketer’s concern, reassuring that building a technical integration isn’t necessary to explore and find value. There’s plenty to do to get started “without writing code” using 3 popular non-technical tools.

To accomplish this message personalization, Clearbit turned to their Clearbit integration with Customer.io. The integration sends new signups to the Clearbit Enrichment API, which passes information linked to the email address, including data points like role and seniority, into Customer.io.

From there, they created a simple segment based on the role attribute data now in Customer.io.

Instead of sending a catch-all email with a generic “check out all the cool things you can do” message, Clearbit addresses specific use cases relevant to their various audiences. As a result, their conversion rates are between 4.9% and 6.3% through the welcome series alone.

Harness user feedback to personalize onboarding

Clearbit continues onboarding people after they become paying customers of their Enrichment API service. Just because a new customer pays for a month or more doesn’t mean they’ve fully adopted a tool. Many will leave a product they don’t totally understand without communicating their needs. Clearbit nips this issue in the bud by directly asking customers how they’re planning to use Clearbit data. Then they send post-purchase onboarding emails based on those self-reported plans.

Once you start paying for the Enrichment service, you’re asked to take this quick one-question survey:

Each time someone responds to the survey, that gets passed into Customer.io as an event, with their specific answer as an event attribute. Clearbit uses this response data to further group their paying customers—adding segment conditions based on whether customers took the survey and which answer they selected. Here’s what that looks like:

Clearbit uses these segments to trigger emails tailored to the survey response. Here are two examples:

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People who plan to enrich their lead and customer information get the email on the left, which includes helpful tips for how to boost their sales and marketing conversions, all with example case studies. Those who plan to integrate Clearbit with their own product receive the more technical email on the right, with pointers on how to best navigate the API.

The risk of sending the same email to everyone is that the message is irrelevant and fails to resonate (and prompts an unsubscribe). Clearbit doesn’t make their customers do the mental work of cherry-picking their own relevant bits from a message and instead automatically delivers personalized tips.

Deepen engagement based on technology personalization

It’s up to Clearbit to make sure that their customers find long-lasting product value. To deepen engagement, the team points out how customers can use Clearbit with tools they’re already using.

The email on the left tells Jan how to get more out of Marketo, a tool he’s already using, by using Clearbit. The same goes for Brian in the email on the right, but with Google Sheets. Instead of sending an email cataloging a laundry list of integrations on offer, Clearbit sends this email addressing a very specific use case. As a result, the email is engaging, the customer is happier, and the product is stickier.

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes of that seemingly simple email. Not only does Clearbit use their own Enrichment API to pass through data points about tools in use into Customer.io, they manage all the message variations in a single email, using Liquid.

With Liquid powering “if/else” logic to show different text in both the body and subject line, Clearbit creates one email covering four different use-cases—the integration of Salesforce, Segment, Marketo, or Google Sheets.

At a 59% open rate, this simple integration suggestion gets a 5.5% click-through rate.

Clearbit built an entire company around the principle that data is paramount. But gathering information is only the first step. It’s even more important that you put that data to good use to create a great experience for your customers.

By getting creative with enriched data in Customer.io and some experimentation, Clearbit came up with a robust email strategy. Clearbit can equip their users to be successful in their businesses, and it pays off big time. Learn how to set up the integration between Clearbit and Customer.io (or via Segment).

Onboarding new customers is like teaching kids how to swim. You want everyone to be a future Olympian but have to start from scratch with how to blow bubbles in the kiddie pool first.

The big problem with mastering a new skill is that the kiddie pool is frustrating when that’s not your primary goal. When you’re learning something new and you don’t have a lot of experience, it’s easy to get discouraged and give up.

Wistia’s CEO Chris Savage says that the best way to encourage people to learn something new is to change the shape of the learning curve.

The most important component of learning something new is setting small goals on the road to achieving a big one.

“Here’s the secret: You can change the graph of happiness to skill learning if you can measure improvement in smaller increments, deriving joy from each achievement along the way.”

By setting small goals, you can feel more joy and thus, motivation, even at a low experience level. Instead of a slog, the onboarding experience should feel like barrier-free advancement.

Onboarding is all about coaching users to achieve their goal, from the kiddie pool to swim floaties and beyond. Design and communicate a series of small wins to build and maintain motivation. Here’s how to get started.

Provide a Small Milestone

We all tend to approach motivation with the Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal in mind, whether we’re product-makers or consumers. It’s all about running the marathon, getting rich, learning French, nabbing the promotion rather than all the little steps in between. But as it turns out, the thing that motivates us most is small wins.

For one, it boosts our mood. One study asked employees what affected their mood during their day. When they made progress towards a work-related goal, they felt happy. What’s particularly surprising was that in 28% of these instances, the mood-boosting step forward didn’t even majorly affect the progress of the project.

We love to make progress, even if the win is not that important. That provides the motivational fuel to keep going.

Getting customers to experience meaningful progress in your product requires their activity and engagement. That feels like a chicken-or-egg problem when they don’t even want to use the product yet! As CEO of Chameleon Pulkit Agrawal argues, you can’t assume that people want to learn how to use your product.

“Users don’t churn because they can’t figure it out — they churn because they don’t want to.”

At the very beginning of the product journey, provide smaller goals to get people a little more excited about figuring stuff out.

Codecademy Provides an Introductory Small Win

When people sign up for online learning platform Codecademy, they have one big goal: learn how to code. But mastering a brand new subject is incredibly daunting. So Codecademy breaks up their onboarding process into smaller-scale goals with a quick lifecycle email.

They provide a mini coding project to make it feel like you can actually complete something. By the end of this assignment, you’ll have a completed project that’s unique to you. It’s like an amuse-bouche to get you hungry for more.

Help Customers Visualize Their Progress

Sometimes, it just takes a little more encouragement to help people accomplish their small goals. One of the most powerful tools in your arsenal is showing people their progress.

In one of Dan Ariely’s studies, students were paid to build Lego figurines called Bionicles. Every figurine they built earned a decreasing amount of money, and both groups were told that their Bionicles would be disassembled once they were done. In Group One, though, the participants watched as their completed figures were dismantled. Group Two, on the other hand, placed each completed toy on a desk like a trophy before continuing onto assembling the next one.
Group Two built eleven, and Group One built seven.

Seeing that visible accumulation of Bionicles drove Group Two to keep building. They did so even though they knew each completed figurine earned less and less money and would be undone.

The progress meter is a common tactic in products and apps, whether it’s measuring the completion of a profile for a social site or encouraging the next step in an online course. Knowing where you stand in a process or reaching a goal is motivating because you can see how much you have left to go.

Songkick’s Motivating Progress Bar

Songkick helps you keep track of when your favorite artists go on tour near you. But for you to get any value from their service, they need to know which musicians you like. Otherwise, you’d never get a concert alert and Songkick would never have a chance to prove itself.

So here’s what happens in their mobile app onboarding: Songkick wants you to choose 20 artists to track, but if you stop before you reach 20 in the setup phase, you get this notification:

There’s a bar at the bottom of the screen that indicates your progress as you scroll through their recommended artists. But they also don’t give up too easily on the less motivated folks like me who clicked “Done” after choosing 5. They keep up the encouragement with an offbeat mini-incentive to finish the task.

This is truly a small win from the user’s perspective. But it’s a fun way to get a little more invested in the app and brand that pays off to reach the larger goal of keeping up with concerts better.

Reinforce Progress By Celebrating Wins

Positive reinforcement for small wins is an effective strategy for many kinds of behavior modification, from dog training to classroom management to motivating employees in the office. But it’s especially effective when people are just starting something new, as there’s so much inertia to overcome.

One study examined different ways of motivating people to donate to a charity called Compassion Korea. In an email marketing campaign, researchers sent out two emails to people who’d just completed a donation. One email said that they were halfway towards their fundraising goal, and the other version said that half the money still hadn’t been raised.

Both campaigns raised the same amount of money by soliciting this second round—but from different kinds of donors.

New donors, that is, people who had only donated to Compassion Korea once or twice before, were much more likely to respond positively to the “glass-half-full approach”. As the researchers noted, “Novices feel uncertain about their level of commitment… and increase their efforts in response to success (versus failure) feedback.”

Newbies need positive feedback, more so than old hats. This applies to your onboarding. Your feedback needs to be encouraging and positive to drive further engagement, especially in the early stages.

AddThis Reaches Out with Win Notifications

AddThis sends customers an email to notify them when something good happens, like a spike in traffic or shares on their site.

It’s a simple message that provides not only a positive psychological boost for the reader but also a valuable alert. AddThis knows that their customers’ big, hairy goal is to grow their audiences and celebrating a small win like a spike in new visitors helps you feel like you’re moving forward.

Consider designing and orchestrating some of these small wins as part of the initial onboarding experience.

Your Customers’ Wins are Your Wins

Your small wins aren’t necessarily the same as your customers’ — and that’s one of the most important principles to remember when designing the user onboarding experience.

You want to drive engagement, get people to keep using the app, or elicit referrals and invitations, but the odds very much are that there aren’t your users’ goals. The user’s goal is to experience some real-world value.

You can’t motivate people to achieve even the smallest of goals unless you think about it from their perspective. Inch by inch, their small goals will make a big difference.

In 2013, Groove got serious about combatting churn.

Customers were leaving at a higher rate than ever before, but Groove wasn’t sure why. After all, a customer who feels lukewarm about your product isn’t going to go out of their way to explain that their issue. So Groove wanted to reach out to at-risk customers. But how could they do that if they didn’t know who their at-risk customers were?

That’s when Groove started examining user behavior. By looking at what actions customers were (or weren’t) taking inside their helpdesk app through Kissmetrics, they were able to learn about someone’s likelihood to churn. On average:

• users who didn’t churn after a month spent 3 minutes and 18 seconds using Groove in their first session, and logged in an average of 4.4 times a day.
• users who did churn after a month spent only 35 seconds using Groove in their first session, and logged in an average of 0.3 times per day.

Customer behavior shows reliable signs of intent, almost as if customers were telling them, “Hey, I love your app!” or “Hey, I’m getting stuck.” Customer actions, Groove realized, spoke 1,000 words.

How did Groove make a huge difference in their churn rate? Whenever they saw one of these key actions that indicated churn, they reached out with a tailored message. This helped them cut churn by 71%.

Why was Groove’s approach so effective? For one, it was responsive — by using behavioral signs of intent to trigger customer communication, it was easier for that message to be relevant, timely, and helpful to the situation. Also, the approach was systematic, as the company applied their data-driven approach to retention.

Today we’re going to talk about how to set up your own system of responsive customer communication by showing you 3 ways to automate behavior-based messaging through Customer.io.

How to Automate Your Behavioral Messaging

For behavior-based messaging, first identify the behaviors you want to see. You’ve probably already identified key actions that users need to take — or learned where drop-offs occur from analytics tools and user interviews. Once you identify the desired behavior, translate that it into a line of conversation that bridges the gap between one step and the next — as well as the user’s point of view to your own.

A super common example is when users don’t complete the very first key action that they need to see success or gain value from a product. Here’s what translating that into a line in a conversation might look like:

• Behavior: People aren’t finishing that first key action (like integrating, filling out a profile, setting up a project, completing a game) and not coming back.
• What does it mean for the customer?: I’m not getting value out of your app yet so I’m not motivated to return. Maybe I got stumped somewhere, or I don’t really understand the product. Maybe I got busy with other stuff, or I simply forgot since I’m just starting out and your product hasn’t stuck with me.
• What you should do: What will help spark a little motivation to engage and get to that aha moment? Help people make progress and get to the next step. That could mean teaching them how to do stuff, helping them remove barriers and obstacles, or inspiring them with specific examples and stories.

3 Ways to Keep Customers on the Right Track

Okay, you’ve got a strategy for when to reach out, to who, and why. Now let’s set up some automated campaigns that trigger based on specific user activity. Here are 3 types of messaging campaigns that you can set up using Customer.io’s triggered emails and webhook Actions.

Action 1: Trigger Helpful Email Messages

Nudge people who haven’t completed those key tasks with an email or drip series.

Elevate, a game-based brain-training app, reaches out if you don’t complete your first training session. Instead of nagging you to return, their message starts off on a positive note of congratulations. Then the email proceeds to address different problems users might be having.

From feeling too challenged, pressed for time, or wanting more option, there’s a specific clarification for why you should return to the app in the email. At the very least, it’s a succinct nudge to remind folks about the app. The clear, customer-oriented call-to-action “Train Today”(“training” sounds pretty valuable) encourages users to get back into the app and finish that first game.

Action 2: Create a Support Ticket

Triggering external communication to customers (like emails or even postcards isn’t the only method at your disposal for helping them make progress and preventing churn. Triggering internal communication is also vital.

Internal notifications based on user behavior not only helps your team keep a pulse on what’s happening but also equips them with the information they need to take charge. Sometimes, a situation calls for a more involved conversation or a more manual approach like proactive support efforts or hand-written customer appreciation notes.

Trigger a notification into your helpdesk service like Zendeskor Help Scout for your support team to reach out in specific situations. That lets your team know when someone’s first exhibiting signs of churn, for example. Escalate outreach if people have been unresponsive to your triggered outbound messages, customize your requests for feedback, or simply say thanks for sticking around, all based on customer history and context.

Let’s take the example of a low NPS rating. You can connect Customer.io to Help Scout, Zendesk, or any other helpdesk with a public API, using Webhook Actions to create new conversations when customers enter a “Low NPS Rating” segment.

Even if you’re tracking NPS ratings within Customer.io to make segments for newsletter and automated messages, you may want to reach out to detractors personally to address their specific concerns and reasons for their rating.

Getting these workflows into your current helpdesk allows for better record-keeping and opportunities for proactive communication, with ticketing systems that ensure that things don’t fall through the cracks.

Action 3: Get Productive with Trello

Team workflows may involve productivity and project-tracking tools like Trello — and it’s often helpful to build a bridge feeding data about what’s happening with customers in your product into that task management flow.

Here at Customer.io, for example, our success team keeps a careful eye on the health of our customers to make sure we’re doing all we can to help them be successful.

The team uses a Trello board to keep track of proactive outreach tasks. One list on that board is the “New Customer Checklist” and, using webhook Actions, automatically create a Trello card in this list every time an account converts into a paid subscription. Each card contains a checklist to manually go through and verify in the account whether everything is set up for smooth sailing ahead, from making sure the integration is set up correctly to double-checking that the account is complying with our anti-spam policy.

We supplement the Trello Action with a triggered internal message into the #team-customer-success channel in our Slack account. Not only does this help keep the success team up to date in realtime, it creates more transparency for the whole company about what’s happening around conversions.

Customer.io is a powerful platform that can get complex depending on your knowledge level and your objectives — and our philosophy as a company is that we can only succeed if our customers do. Being able to automate very specific notifications around our customer data to then extend a proactive, human, and very personal approach is vital to that goal.

Deepen Customer Relationships

Your probability of making meaningful connections with your customers is much higher with specificity and relevance — a personalized approach that offers support and the real opportunity for dialogue, carried out over time. Then your messages go out to people willing to actually listen.

Automating your messaging, external and internal, by responding to actual user behavior is the smartest way to maintain specificity and relevance at scale. Over time, that will help you build much deeper, more trusting relationship between you and your customers.