Blog Archives

How Pairing Powers Remote Teams

Written by Alisdair McDiarmid on June 25, 2015.

Over the past few months, Customer.io has grown from ten people to almost 20, and our engineering team has more than doubled in size. With such rapid growth, getting everyone up to speed is a major challenge.

But it has worked out well so far! All our new developers have hit the ground running, learned how the product works, and made contributions in their first few weeks.

How are we making this work? Remote pairing.

As one of the new engineering hires, I’ve been really keen to pick up as much as I can from everyone on the team. So I’ve been pairing with other members of the product team, working together on building features, stomping on bugs, and writing tests.

Pair programming is normally done with two people at one desk, sharing a single computer. But because we’re a remote company with a team distributed throughout the world, that isn’t really an option for us.

So instead, we’re using our high-speed internet connections to work together virtually. Every day, we share our screens and text editors, discuss plans for features and bugs, verbalise our thought processes, and collaboratively iterate on new features for our product.

How to Pair Program Remotely

Remote pairing used to be tedious — fiddling with firewalls, forwarding SSH ports, configuring text editors, and fighting with internet voice quality. The result is that remote teams often avoid pairing altogether, instead focusing purely on asynchronous communications by chat, email, or issue trackers.

But real-time and face-to-face communications are really important, both for working happily and efficiently. Asynchronous and text-based communications can easily lead to misunderstandings, and the high turnaround time can lead to frustratingly long conversations. It’s often much easier to grab a colleague for 5 minutes to hash out a solution, which could take days to reach using email.

There’s usually some good overlap between timezones.

Fortunately, remote pairing is now really easy! We use Screenhero, which is a video-based pairing tool and is part of Slack. When a colleague and I want to work together, we just schedule a time via direct message — it could be in 5 minutes, after lunch, or first thing the next day. Two clicks and we’re sharing our screen and voice chatting.

From there, it’s almost exactly like working with someone at my desk. I can see their entire screen, we both have independent mouse pointers, and either of us can type. Video and voice over the internet work pretty much seamlessly, so we’re always in contact and on the same page. We take turns typing, suggest improvements or catch typos, bounce ideas off each other, and share knowledge.

Why It’s Important To Pair As A Remote Team

We’ve found pairing to be particularly useful in our remote team for lots of reasons. The biggest wins: better collaboration, more effective bug fixing, and faster feedback cycles.

Two-Point Perspective

It’s much easier to work on the product when you’ve got the benefit of two points of view instead of just one. Working alone is great for focus and one of the blessings of remote work, but sometimes it’s more useful to have a wider view. There’s huge value in having someone there with you to question if this is the right way forward, or suggest a course correction.

This can also be useful for building consensus in small teams. It’s easier to see the reason for choosing a particular solution to a UI or engineering problem when you’ve also been there to see the alternative approaches that didn’t make the cut.

Our habit of frequent pairing sessions helps establish a culture of collaboration. We work on our product together every day, not in isolated teams of one, and it’s much better for it.

Double the Brain Power for Squashing Bugs

Working remotely from the rest of the team can make fixing bugs particularly difficult. If you’re stuck, you can ask for help, but if everyone is working independently it could take hours to get a response to an email or a Slack message. When you can’t glance across the room to check if someone’s concentrating, there’s a social barrier to interrupting them.

Because we’re screen sharing and pairing every day, this is less of a problem for us. It’s so common to pair for just a couple of minutes that we don’t stay stuck without help for too long. Working together on a problem is normal, so there is no implicit expectation that one person must always be able to complete a task alone. This makes it much easier for each of us to ask for help when we need it.

Pairing is also great for preventing tunnel vision: getting so focused on a particular theory for a bug that you spend hours going in the wrong direction. Having someone else there to break tunnel-type concentration and suggest a different approach stops this from happening.

Reducing Latency

One of the biggest bottlenecks in a distributed software team is latency. No, not screen sharing lag, but the time taken for work to be reviewed. All of our software is peer reviewed, and the realities of multiple timezones can mean that a couple of iterations of feedback can take several days.

Jumping into a pairing session early on can really help with this. It means that our later reviews are normally just catching style mistakes, or suggesting small fixes. You’re much less likely to waste a couple of days of work going in the wrong direction if you have someone there with you to help with the big picture.

Because there’s no effort in getting started, we can easily pair up for a few minutes to help get unstuck, or for half an hour to explain a domain concept. It’s also great for a quick handover when timezones overlap. All of these kinds of communication are vital to keep us running productively, and screen sharing with voice is one of the most effective ways to achieve this.

Sharing Knowledge

For me, whether remote or in person, the most important reason for pairing is an obvious one: learning.

I’ve already learned a ton of things from my new colleagues, and I’ve been able to teach them a little of what I know too. This can be something as simple as a neat Vim trick, or as involved as the history of a collection of software components. Every time I pair with someone, I get a little better as a software engineer, and those tiny improvements add up to create a more effective engineering team.

Do you pair program remotely? Share your process with us on Twitter!

Company News

Save Your Emails from Spam Filter Purgatory With These 3 Tips

Written by Janet Choi on June 18, 2015.

The email that doesn’t make it to the inbox is like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it – what’s the point?

One of the eternal quests of email marketers is to stay out of the spam folder. Still, deliverability, while at the heart of all email communication, is often one of those priorities that gets buried by our focus on measurements like list growth and open rates.

Times have also changed for how email clients and internet service providers decide what does and doesn’t get into the inbox. You may remember the First Age of Deliverability, the Wild West, no-rules era of email — or the Second Age, which centered around the “report as spam” button.

As email marketing expert Chad White describes, we are currently in the more nuanced, complex “Third Age of Email Deliverability,” where filtering decisions take into account both individual and collective engagement. That means the same message from a company following all the deliverability best practices can get stuck in the spam folder in one person’s email and waltz into the main inbox for another.

So how do you optimize deliverability and what do you do when you find your labored-over emails plunge into spam purgatory? I chatted with our email and support expert Diana Potter to find out.

Email Deliverability 101 – A Review

There may be a number of best practice tips floating out there, but just 2 basic ground rules of deliverability.

Set up email authentication.

Authentication isn’t so much about reputation-building (which is tied to your domain) but trust.

Most email providers look at authentication, because they need to know if they can trust that a sender is who they say they are. It’s like checking a Social Security number or passport to prove your identity. Failure to set up your email authentication paves the way for delivery problems, because the lack of trustworthy evidence will cause email providers to scrutinize and filter emails more severely.

sample authentication

Be relevant.

The very definition of deliverability involves reaching someone, encompassing not just mere broadcast but also receipt. So email success is not about sheer numbers but quality connections.

Maintain a quality email list by sending only to people who have opted in and given you permission. Regularly check the health of your list, and prune people who haven’t opened in ages.

Create quality content for your list and send information relevant to their interests. That means more segmentation, knowing your audience, and staying away from blanket email “blasts”.

Why is My Email Being Sent to Spam?

Seeing your emails land in spam can provoke the kind of rattling panic or anxiety that’s made worse by not really knowing how to fix the situation. Let’s look at how email providers make those filtering decisions.

In this Third Age of Deliverability, email providers look at a wide variety of metrics. Still, they largely focus on engagement and individual domain reputation, which is how users are treating emails sent from your domain (rather than just the IP) and your email contents. (If you’re using high-quality ESPs, including Customer.io, you don’t have to worry much about managing IPs.)

Each email client also has its own spam-filtering rules (which aren’t publicized, in order to stay ahead of actual spammers). Nonetheless, personal filtering decisions by users do factor into overall spam filtering. This includes steps like users not opening emails, users deleting emails without opening, or even how users treat similar emails.

Here’s how Aaron Beashel from Campaign Monitor summarizes 7 signals used to determine engagement, both on an individual and global level:

Open (GOOD) – If a user frequently opens your campaigns, this is seen as a good signal that your campaigns aren’t spam and helps your emails make the inbox.

Reply (GOOD) – If people respond to your email campaigns (via reply email), this is seen as a good signal and helps improve your reputation with email providers.

Move to Junk (BAD) – If people move your email to the Junk folder, this is considered a very strong, negative signal that your email campaigns aren’t worthy of the inbox.

Not junk (GOOD) – If people move your email out of the Junk folder, this is considered a very strong, positive signal that your campaigns are relevant and worthy of making the inbox.

Delete without open (BAD) – If your recipients take a quick glance at the sender and subject and then delete your campaign, this is seen as a negative signal.

Move to folder (GOOD) – If your recipients move your emails into various folders in their inbox, the email providers take this as a sign they care about your emails and are more likely to continue delivering them to their inbox.

Add to address book (GOOD) – If your recipients add your email address to their address book, the email providers take this as a sign that they care about receiving email from you and are more likely to continue delivering them to the inbox.

The impact of a user reporting an email with a “mark as spam”-type button will vary, depending on whether providers have “feedback loops” that collect information on spam complaints and forward them on to many established ESPs for reporting and processing. (In Customer.io, we suppress future emails based on such direct spam actions.) Hotmail (now Outlook.com) and AOL, for example, have such feedback loops. Gmail treats individual spam reports differently, so you might not see the same kind of direct impact from Gmailer’s spam reports.

Customer.io sample report

Many people ask us if sending emails from personal addresses, as opposed to more generic addresses — such as “diana@customer.io” versus “support@customer.io” — harms deliverability. If anything, this tactic will improve it, since people are more likely to open these personal-looking emails(as long as they recognize your name). Whatever you can do to remember to be human increases engagement and thus decreases the likelihood of spam-filtering.

How to Test Your Emails for Spam Issues

Watch for drops in open rates, emails actually landing in spam folders, or a spam rate higher than the average .02%. These are signs to check for spam filtering issues.

Run manual and automated tests.

For manual testing, send your test emails to a variety of email provider types, such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. Use multiple accounts for each (since filtering can be so personalized) and see what happens.

To run full, automated spam tests, we recommend tools like Litmus or Email on Acid, which both provide visual previews and spam checks for ISPs and webmail providers, as well as corporate filters.

sample Litmus test

Locate the issue.

Send any email you see filtered to multiple addresses at one provider to see if it’s an issue localized to one email address, client, or everywhere. If you observe spam filtering happening in specific email clients — focus your tests there. For example, if you only see spam filtering at Gmail, it’s most likely a Gmail issue — whether it’s one Gmail account or Gmail not accepting your content.

Test your content.

If you see spam filtering across clients, focus on testing your content. Here’s how you can hone in the problematic sections:

First, remove half the email content. Was it delivered to the inbox?
If so, start adding back what you removed, paragraph by paragraph or section by section, until it fails again.
If not, try swapping in the other half, and start again.

Figuring out content failures is a trial-and-error process, but you can generally narrow it down by doing this type of systematic sweep testing.

If spam-filtering isn’t concentrated in one client, it could be an engagement issue. Fixing engagement problems can take much longer, but getting people to whitelist your emails by adding you to their address book and slowly getting more opens and clicks by providing relevant content will help over time.

Have any burning questions about deliverability or other email issues? Send us an email or tweet us!

Photo: Freezelight/Flickr

How Asana Welcomes New Users

Written by Janet Choi on June 11, 2015.

We’re taking a page from the great user onboarding teardowns of Samuel Hulick to walk through how Asana handles new user registration, onboarding, and email flow.

Along the way, you’ll learn how Asana:

gets the most out of the persuasion principle of social proof
writes utility subject lines
manages friction in the signup process, removing friction to make it easy to submit an email address and fill out account information but adding friction with an account verification step to improve clarity and quality in the next stage of the funnel
provides clear direction on what to do next in the first few emails
follows the “one email, one goal” rule
takes a product with many features and removes some new user inertia by employing the IKEA effect
incorporates newsletters into its funnel, adding context, showing value, and keeping fresh in people’s minds — but giving people the control to unsubscribe from specific kinds of emails
uses email as UX
iterates and improves its emails

On to the show!

Click anywhere on slide to start.
Use green arrows or use arrow keys to navigate. Swipe if you’re mobile.

Case Studies

The Psychology of Upgrade Emails: Make Something to Lose

Written by Janet Choi on June 4, 2015.

Here’s an interesting scenario. Let’s say you have the chance to win $200 if a coin toss lands on on heads, but if it came up tails, you’d lose $100. Would you take that bet?

Most people wouldn’t.

Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman poses a similar question to both his students and other classes of folks alike:

I say: ‘I’m going to toss a coin, and if it’s tails, you lose $10. How much would you have to gain on winning in order for this gamble to be acceptable to you?’

People want more than $20 before it is acceptable. And now I’ve been doing the same thing with executives or very rich people, asking about tossing a coin and losing $10,000 if it’s tails. And they want $20,000 before they’ll take the gamble.”

Why does this happen? People hate losing more than they love winning — and it turns out this very human tendency can impact the success of your business.

The Surprising Value of Loss

Not wanting to let go of what you think is yours is a powerful emotion. That feeling of resistance and protest of “it’s mine!” bends the rational decision-making process. This is called loss aversion, which Kahneman defines in Thinking, Fast and Slow as:

a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo in the lives of both institutions and individuals …. it is the gravitational force that holds our life together near the reference point.

That magnetic tug occurs, even with something as trifling as a coffee mug. In 1991, Kahneman and his colleagues performed an experiment to examine the differences in valuation that can result from loss aversion.

In the study, participants were randomly designated as sellers or buyers. Sellers got a mug that normally sold in the store for $6.00. The researchers then asked the sellers what the minimum amount they’d be willing to accept to sell the mug and asked buyers the maximum price they would pay to purchase the mug.

Buyers were willing to fork over a maximum of $2.87 for the coffee mug. Sellers, on the other hand, wanted at least $7.12.

Sellers were parting with something they possessed — even for such a short time — and due to that loss aversion, they valued their mug much higher than the buyers did. That’s the endowment effect at work, the tendency for people to assign more value on things simply because they own them.

The “but it’s mine!” feeling hiked up the perceived value by more than double.

The Key to Loss Aversion in SaaS Trials

If you have a free trial for a SaaS product — the kind where an upgrade is required to continue use — loss aversion naturally comes into play. You’re relying on the psychology of free trial users to feel resistance against losing something they have, increase their desire to keep using it — and pay for the ability to do so.

But wait, you might be thinking — then why do so many people sign up for a free trial or freemium account but never convert? Where’s all that helpful loss aversion?

There has to be a feeling of ownership in place first. If trial users don’t realize value and attain that “this is mine!” feeling, there won’t be anything to really lose to fuel motivation to convert.

In addition, there’s more to loss aversion than the mere possibility of deprivation. The type of loss matters too.

As Kahneman and his colleague Nathan Novemsky note, loss aversion seems to spring from “benefits rather than on attributes of goods.” That means if you have things with different attributes but the same benefits, loss aversion doesn’t really come into play. To illustrate, think about upgrading your computer or car:

For example, there is no loss aversion for an old car that is traded in as part of the purchase of a new car if the new car is perceived as having all the benefits of the old one.

Your job isn’t over when somebody signs up for a trial or free account. What are you doing to deliver value and benefits once that has happened?

3 Persuasive Ways to Use Email Marketing, based on Loss Aversion

Loss aversion is a common tactic used in upgrade emails sent out towards and at the end of a free trial. You can also employ loss aversion if you have a freemium model or would like to nudge more customers to higher pricing tiers with additional features beyond increased space or volume limits. Here are three quick examples:

1. Start users on trials with premium features.

SaaS businesses with freemium models, like Datahero, often start people out on trials with premium features and then switch them over to the free plan if they don’t upgrade.

Wistia also starts people off with premium features to “test drive.” Here’s how they invoke loss aversion in their final trial notice email:

Followup.cc leans heavily on loss aversion in its upgrade email, after starting you on a free trial with premium benefits.

followup.cc upgrade email loss aversion example

Given what we understand about loss aversion, this email could have been even stronger if it invoked the benefits, not just the attributes, of the premium features — reminding people that they could be losing powers to organize, be productive, and build relationships.

2. Offer a trial of a premium plan later on.

Whether it’s because you build premium features later on, want to reengage inactive users, or nudge potential power users — try offering a trial of a premium plan some time after the free trial.

This can make users feel special and incentivize them to really try your product in a more meaningful way than discounts and coupon codes. Here’s how Todoist frames the offer:

For this type of offer, you can employ the power of time scarcity as a persuasion tactic. Here’s what Strikingly does, with the urgent subject line, “24 hours left to get Strikingly Pro for free”:

3. Give a trial of a special premium feature.

There may be certain features that push people to really adopt your tool and become power users — whether it’s advanced search capability or access to useful tracking and reports. For Buffer, their absolute number one feature request was to include Pinterest sharing.

The new feature is only available with paid plans — but the Buffer team chose to give their freemium users a chance to try out the feature and experience its value.

If you have a major feature release like this that you know has great demand and impact, consider treating the feature like its own product.

Loss aversion is a cognitive tendency that helps convince people to become customers or even upgrade to higher plans. But there are meaningful prerequisites: users must realize benefits, not merely experience attributes — so much so that they feel a sense of ownership.

That calls for proactive work on great onboarding and activation during a trial period to engage, build trust, and help people succeed so that they experience real benefits and value — so that there is something to lose.

Check out more upgrade email examples and 5 copy templates that you can start using today: How Great SaaS Companies Write Trial Conversion Emails.

Lifecycle Marketing

How the Best SaaS Companies Write Upgrade Emails that Convert

Written by Janet Choi on May 28, 2015.

Upgrade emails are your bread and butter messages. They help convince and remind people to convert and upgrade from free to paid accounts and to higher plan tiers.

Before we dive into one of the most important types of emails for your business, a reminder:
if you really want to grow conversions and upgrades, you have to lay the groundwork first. Invest in your product, onboarding, and support to bring value to people — all before you make your big asks. As Wistia says in one of its trial expiring/upgrade emails, you have to do some work up front:

“If we’ve done our jobs right, you’ve gotten a good feel for what Wistia can do for your video marketing.”

When is the best time to ask people to upgrade? There are two answers: towards the end of a series in which you build trust and value before you sell — or based on behavior such as active use, indicating that that trust and value is already in place.

In this post, you’ll find some tactics, examples, and templates for you to use to plan and create your own upgrade emails.

Quick Tips to Level Up Your Upgrade Emails

Make it relevant. Personalize your emails with names and pertinent details, such as how much time is left in a trial or based on certain user activity, to make your message feel relevant and timely.
Specify features that people will gain or miss out on when upgrading.
Here’s an example from CloudApp that talks about gains like faster, larger uploads.

On the other hand, Followup.cc takes the loss aversion approach, bringing up previously available features that you’ll lose when you don’t upgrade.

Include plan pricing details. Clarity around pricing is helpful for people making a purchase decision. Front makes this evident by including an image of their pricing plans:
Use social proof to persuade.
Make it easy to keep in touch.: People might not be ready to upgrade or want to cancel, but that doesn’t mean you should say goodbye to them forever. Make it easy for them to stay connected. Here’s how Wistia does it at trial expiration.
Make your call to action stand out. Most CTAs in upgrade emails are basic, such as “Upgrade Now!”. Try a/b testing copy that is more specific to the rest of your email or benefits-focused, such as Followup.cc’s “Get them back.”

5 Upgrade Email Templates

Now let’s look at some examples and copy templates that you can start using today:

1. Free trial over: upgrade/subscribe to continue

Example: Basecamp
Subject: Your Basecamp trial has ended. Subscribe today to pick up where you left off.

Take note of the subject line here. It includes all the vital facts you need to convey: the stage of the trial, what to do next, and what happens to your work.

This upgrade email also does a great job of allaying any worries and being clear about what’s to come. It explains what happens to your data, team member access, and how to pay —
while providing some social proof to get your brain to say yes.

All it takes to subscribe or cancel is a click of a button. If you’ve been getting value out of the tool — and want to “keep using” it and keep getting that valued, this nudge to give Basecamp your money should be pretty effective.

Trial Over: Upgrade Email Template

[greeting]
Hi Bob!

[be nice, say thanks]
Thanks so much for giving Readerific a whirl!

[main message: trial status + what to do next]
Your free month to try out Readerific has reached the end, but you can keep using Readerific to stash, organize, and share your work reads when you subscribe!

[CTA] (Keep on reading!)

[Proactively address concerns, what happens next, what happens to data]
Your library will stick around until you’re ready to subscribe and any team members you invited will still have access.

[Pricing plan or payment details]

Our subscription plans start at $8 a month. [Persuasive tactics – social proof, benefits, etc.] Don’t miss out on what everyone else in your team is reading and offline access to your library.

[open communication channel for questions and feedback]
Have any questions or feedback? Just reply to this email to get in touch!

Keep reading!
The Readerific Team

Grab your editable template here.

2. Free trial expiring – transitioning to free plan

Wistia’s trial gives people a taste of the premium life. Once that trial is over, you can either upgrade or stay on a free plan.

Example: Wistia
Subject: 3 days left in your Wistia Premium Features Test Drive

In this upgrade email, Wistia reminds you of the cool premium features that you’re getting to test drive (and will lose if you don’t upgrade). They also link straight to the premium features’ related documentation in case you hadn’t had a chance to try them out.

Not upgrading at this point also isn’t goodbye. The email explains clearly that you can keep using the free plan and for how long.

Trial Expiring/Free plan Transition Upgrade Email Template

[greeting]
Hi Linda!

[main message: trial status + what happens next]
Your Readerific trial is coming to an end in 3 days, and you’ll be on our free plan if you choose not to upgrade.

[premium benefits reminder, other persuasion tactics to upgrade, etc.]
Hopefully you’ve had a chance to check out our snazzy premium features, like the weekly reading digest, offline mode, advanced search, and work chat. Take 60 seconds to upgrade if you’re enjoying the premium reading life.

[CTA] (I’m ready for the Super Plan!)

[What happens with no upgrade?]
Not ready to upgrade? No sweat! You’ll be on the Readerific Free Plan so that you can keep checking out your library and shared reads. You’ll also be limited to 10 articles a month and restricted chat capabilities.

[Pricing plan or payment details]
Our subscription plans start at $8 a month. [Persuasive tactics – social proof, benefits, etc.] You’ll be joining a community of 10,000 smarties at great companies like Super Acme and Woogle, who are always in-the-know at work.

[open communication channel for questions and feedback]
Have any questions or feedback? Just hit reply and we’ll gladly help.

Thanks for trying Readerific!
The Readerific Team

Grab your editable template here.

3. Trial Over – extension / upgrade

Businesses will often offer extensions on trials when asked — and they will include that in their upgrade emails with a quick sentence such as “Need more time to try our app” or “Didn’t get enough time to check out our premium features?” and directions to get in touch.

Squarespace sends a whole email dedicated to the trial extension. Their empathetic acknowledgment that everyone gets busy and could use a little extra time also conveys that they understand human beings — something that often gets left out of promotional asks.

Example: Squarespace
Subject: Need more time?

The fact that all one extra free week takes is a simple click feels like a nice gift. But note where the focus is for the call to action here — on the upgrade button.

Trial over – Extension/Upgrade Email Template

[greeting]
Hi Tina!

[trial status]
Your Readerific free trial has expired! [what happens to my stuff?] Don’t worry: your library and chats have been saved.

[trial extension rationale + offer]
We know how busy life gets — and thought you might need some extra time to check out Readerific. Just reply to this email or click to get an extra 10 days: (Extend my trial)

[the quick upgrade pitch]
If you enjoyed Readerific, take one minute to upgrade. Our subscription plans start at $8 a month and all include 24/7 support, the weekly reading digest, offline mode, and more!

[CTA] (Upgrade now to keep using Readerific)

[open communication channel for questions and feedback]
Have any questions or feedback? Just hit reply and we’ll gladly help.

Thanks for trying Readerific!
The Readerific Team

Grab your editable template here.

4. Hit a limit or paywall — upgrade

Send this type of email to encourage upgrades to paid or higher plans at the most opportune time, as people actively approach any limitations on usage.

Example: Dropbox
Subject: Your Dropbox needs more space!

Similar to the trial-related upgrade emails, be clear about the status of the account. You can personalize the email to feel more relevant or urgent by including actual usage details.

Don’t spend too much time in this email on making a persuasive pitch. In this situation, customers are active enough to reach the next tier, so they already realize the value of your product or service. What would be most useful to them at this point is to explain any new benefits of upgrading.

Hit Limit or Paywall – Upgrade Email Template

[greeting]
Hi Gene!

[account status]
You’ve already saved 30 reads! Your Readerific plan is running out of library space. [what happens if I don’t upgrade?] Enjoy unlimited storage and other great Pro features by upgrading now.

[CTA] Upgrade now for more reads

[upgrade benefits]
Upgrading to Readerific Pro will get you limitless saves and shares and access to advance search and work chat features.

[open communication channel for questions and feedback]
Need a hand with anything? Just hit reply and we’ll gladly help.

Happy reading!
The Readerific Team

Grab your editable template here.

5. Announcement/pro feature = Upgrade opportunity

Here’s an email from CloudApp, educating users about its relatively new annotations feature.

Example: CloudApp
Subject: New: Annotate your screen grabs

Great features offer opportunities to ask for an upgrade — either as part of your free-to-paid email series or a one-time announcement of a new feature or pricing plan change. With these types of emails, focus on showing and explaining your feature or change.

Announcement/Pro Feature Upgrade Template

[greeting]
Hi Louise!

[Describe feature/plan change and benefits]
One of our most requested features for Readerific has been full-text search, and today we’re excited to announce our new superfast, powerful advanced search feature that’s unlocked when you upgrade to Readerific Pro.

[CTA] (Start getting your search on!)

[Quick explanation of pricing & benefits of upgrading]
By upgrading to Pro for just $X, you’ll gain access to our new power search functionality, which includes the ability to use filters and operators. You’ll also get to unlimited library storage and our work chat Slack integration.

[CTA] (Upgrade to gain pro powers)

[open communication channel for questions and feedback]
Have questions or need help with anything? Just reply to this email!

Happy reading!
The Readerific Team

Grab your editable template here.

Message Composing

Email is User Experience

Written by Janet Choi on May 21, 2015.

People always want to believe that their creation speaks for itself.

Thanks to this Field of Dreams “build it and they will come” mentality (plus an irrational fear of coming off as spammy), there’s often a startling disconnect between how much thought and investment goes into building a product — and how little goes into emails about it.

Yet emails are part of your product. From sign-up through every other moment in a user lifecycle, email serves as the timely yet asynchronous glue that connects you to customers on their turf.

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking emails about your product are not part of the product,” as Sunir Shah, President of Cloud Software Association warns. “The most important emails are part of the product experience.”

Email is User Experience, Too

The cost of thinking that your product is so good, it speaks for itself is a self-centered and insular point of view.

That disregard of the perspective of your customers — who have lives of their own, whose worlds do not revolve around your product — leads to treating email communication like business bolt-ons rather than elements. Your world shouldn’t revolve around just the bits and bytes of your product. “The product is not just the web app or a mobile app. It’s the entire flow the end user needs to go through to complete their goal,” Sunir explains.

Consider Peter Morville’s famous user experience honeycomb, which lays out what facets of user experience actually help people complete their goals. You’ll see that all types of emails can make a sweet difference in every honeycomb cell:

Peter Morville's user experience honeycomb

Useful: Is your product ultimately useful? Are you helping people get something done or make progress towards a goal?
Usable: Is your product easy to use?
Desirable: Does your product build emotional affinity? Is it likable?
Findable: Is your product easy to navigate?
Accessible: Morville defines accessibility in regards to people with disabilities, there are other access considerations, such as language barriers, stress levels, perception of safety, and low confidence.
Credible: Does your product build trust?
Valuable: Does your product deliver value and advance a mission?

All your emails should serve a clear purpose, not only to nudge users to do what you want them to do, but to drive their user experience forward. Then they play an incredibly powerful and vital role in your business — bridging UX gaps in your product and addressing the UX of basic everyday life, where busy people won’t remember to return to your site or app.

Fighting Against the Fragmented Customer Experience

A customer’s encounter with your product or service extends beyond the bounds of a device or website, whether it’s figuring out a refund, getting urgent questions answered in a live chat, tracking a package ordered online, or reading a helpful case study or blog post. That’s the “whole customer experience.” And when you’re looking at this more holistic view, Peep Laja says, “Every single customer experience is your moment of truth.”

Emails are more than underutilized return tickets to your site or app — they’re opportunities to improve your customer’s whole experience, from teaching with helpful onboarding emails and newsletters to providing valuable insight with digest emails and beyond.

Email has become even more of an explicit interface for people to complete relevant actions without leaving the inbox. In Gmail, for example, you can perform tasks like confirming subscriptions, RSVPing for an event, and adding items to your queue.

Instacart provides a great example of whole customer experience that builds on the understanding that users won’t (and shouldn’t) stay glued to their site or app. They use all kinds of messages (email, SMS, and even phone calls) to build that whole experience, aiming beyond delivering groceries to making the interaction flow make the most sense for the customer. Otherwise, they could have turned grocery delivery into something just as frustrating as waiting for the cable guy.

After placing an order, Instacart sends these email messages:

Your Instacart Order Confirmation (order and delivery details, the ability to update the order)
Instacart Delivery Reminder (especially useful when the delivery is not set to the same day)
Instacart is on the way! (expected arrival time — great to know because I should be home to get my groceries!)
Your Order with Instacart (provides order summary and finalized total charged)

Note this last email in this interaction. There’s a “Review” button that appears in the inbox. Clicking on that allows you to send a review and rating without ever leaving the inbox or even opening the email.

If you do open this email to check out your order, you can still publish a review without leaving the email client:

With your fridge freshly stocked, chances are lowest that you’ll want to go back to the site just to leave a review. By incorporating email messages into the whole user journey, Instacart is able to build towards both customer and business happiness.

If every email is an opportunity to improve user experience, then you’re forced to be relevant by always considering your customer’s specific context and situation in every communication. It’s one more gigantic nail in the coffin on annoying, tone-deaf batch-and-blast messages.

Yet even today, only 20% of marketers use behavioral marketing based on web activity, according to a survey from Econsultancy. That’s a lot of room to surprise, delight, and help your customers — and really stand out amongst the radio silence approach on one hand and the sea of spray and spam, on the other.

The mere existence of your product isn’t enough for success. Whether people experience empathy, service, and value – both inside and outside of your app — will be what defines you.

Header photo: Chris Beckett/Flickr

The One Power Word to Persuade Them All

Written by Janet Choi on May 7, 2015.

“Because you’re worth it.”

This famous slogan by the cosmetic company L’Oréal’s uses one of the most powerful words in persuasive copywriting — “because.”

Humans crave reasons and resolutions. Ever since you are a small child, you want to know “why?” The master of persuasion, Robert Cialdini, explains why that basic desire drives action:

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.

When you lose motivation with a task or job, you may find yourself asking “why am I even doing this?” in the first place. Reasons equal motivation, including motivation to click through, reply, comply with your request, or even do you a favor.

So are you making the most out of the power of “because” in your emails?

The Surprising Power of “Because”

People aren’t even choosy about their rationales for behavior, as Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer found in a famous 1978 study.

Langer and her colleagues wanted to see whether people would let someone skip ahead of them in line at a busy library copy machine. They asked people three request variations. Take a look at the success — or conversion — rate for each question:

Excuse me. I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine? — 60%
Excuse me. I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? — 93%
Excuse me. I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? — 94%

It makes sense that not providing a reason performed the worst — simply asking without a justification makes you look presumptuous. But surprisingly, giving the meaningless, redundant rationale of “I need to make copies” did nearly as well as a legitimate explanation. In this scenario, the mere existence of a rationale increased the likelihood of success by 55%.

Still — the power of “because” by itself has its limits. When the line interrupter announced that they needed to jump ahead to make 20 copies rather than 5, people became much more critical about the reason’s substance.

Compare:

Excuse me. I have 20 pages. May I use the Xerox machine? — 24%
Excuse me. I have 20 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? — 24%
Excuse me. I have 20 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? 42%

As Langer explains:

Once compliance with the request required a modicum of effort on the subject’s part, thoughtful responding seemed to take the place of mindlessness, and the reason now seemed to matter.

Almost any explanation motivates — but the bigger the ask, the more the quality of your reason matters.

Because Persuasion Requires a Bridge

So now you know that we, humans, will use almost any reason to justify our behavior — but that a quality reason is most compelling.

“Because” is the conjunction that connects your goal to the reader’s motivation, putting everyone on the same side. The takeaway here is not necessarily to go heavy on the word “because” in your copy as a quick-fix formula — but to carry out that connective reasoning that bridges the gap between intentions. Emails and calls to action fail to convert when they fail to take the reader’s perspective into consideration.

Your reader is the protagonist, the VIP, the star. L’Oréal’s enduring pitch isn’t that their cosmetics are worth it — it’s that their customers are awesome. Give reasons that resonate with readers so that they’ll follow your request and become loyal customers:

because that’s the awesome type of person they want to be (appealing to self-expression needs)
because it will help them accomplish their goals (appealing to functional needs)
because it will be fun or enjoyable (appealing to aesthetic needs and the senses)

Despite being the participant of many-a-power-word list, “because” doesn’t seem very common in digital copywriting. Try testing using the word “because” in your emails and copy to motivate people to comply with your call to action.

example of a CTA from Copyhackers using “because”

Now let’s dig into some examples of how you can use the power of “because” in your emails:

Dot & Bo (limited time + incentive)

This cart abandonment email from Dot & Bo provides the good ol’ Cinderella rationale to act quickly — “because this code expires at midnight” within 2 weeks.

The limited time discount is not the only “because” factor in this email. The cute owl lamp is not a random product but something I left in my shopping cart before leaving the site. This customization based on my behavior makes the message feel relevant and that this call to action is for me rather than any ol’ Joe Schmoe.

ePantry (VIP treatment + incentive)

ePantry provides a subscription service for sustainable household products. Their brand revolves around their mission to prioritize customer happiness and, as a B corp, social and environmental good. This strong company identity and purpose provides many reasons for customers to bite.

This email with the subject line “We do things differently” is no exception.

This is a good example of the “because I have to make more copies” rationale. While I don’t doubt that ePantry believes its community members are the best, that reason is also not specific or compelling on its own. It works, given the company’s consistent mission and messaging, the sweetener incentive of free shipping, and the feeling of special treatment — a mix that has worked so successfully for companies like Zappos.

Stitchfix (testimonials, social proof)

Stitchfix offers affordable personal styling services for women. As part of the sign up process, you have to fill out a personal style profile to share your sense of taste, budget, size, and lifestyle. Instead of bugging me right away with a generic “please complete your profile” nudge, Stitchfix sent me 4 reasons to get moving from happy customers.

Your happiest customers have already found reasons that resonate — and they’ll probably say it best.

Unbounce (accomplish your goal + incentive)

In its newsletter, Unbounce sends updates on their newest, best content. In a smart move, the company also connects its content audience to its product by including a call to action in every postscript.

While there’s no explicit “because” statement — there’s a reason (Unbounce will help you solve the problem of creating marketing landing pages) that leads right up to the pitch to “try Unbounce today.” Notice how they follow through with what sounds like an incentive. “We’ll pay the first month for you” sounds like a more compelling reason to act than the usual “free trial” angle.

Don’t make an unjustified request that sounds like a presumptuous command or comes off as worthless noise. People like having reasons for what they do, and as one wise giant robot dinosaur says:

EVERYONE CARE ABOUT SELF FIRST. TAKE HINT. CARE ABOUT THEM FIRST TOO.

WHOLE POINT OF COMMUNICATE? THEM. WITHOUT A THEM THERE NO COMMUNICATE. IT JUST OTHER WORD END IN “ATE”.

For marketing emails — and any emails really — where you’re asking people to do something, give reasons. Because you’re worth it. Because awesome.

What’s your experience with conversion when using the word “because”? Share with us in the comments!

Photo: Olivier Jeannin/Flickr

Behavioral Messaging

Optimize Your Welcome Emails With These 5 Templates

Written by Janet Choi on April 30, 2015.

Sure, welcome emails are vital.

They help acquire that critical feeling of trust that anchors a stronger customer relationship. Research by ReturnPath even shows that welcome messages not only boost engagement but predict long-term subscriber behavior and revenue potential.

But the blank page is always nerve-racking, especially when you’re trying so hard to create a really great first impression. So we’ve gathered examples of 5 different types of welcome emails that many businesses use — with copy templates you can use and adapt to get started.

5 Types of Welcome Emails

Welcomes arise in many situations. People meet businesses in many different ways — which calls for more than one type of email greeting.

Here’s a rundown of the 5 types of welcome emails:

General product / service: The basic welcome message from a business, app, or website once you sign up for an account.
Newsletter Subscription: A welcome to your marketing world, whether the goal is to nurture leads, build an audience, engage existing customers, or promote sales.
Personal outreach: New signups automatically receive a personal welcome email from someone in the company. This has become a standard email practice for many startups.The following 2 types are less common but still important to categorize as welcome emails and treat with the same care.
Free Sample Welcome: Companies often offer free content in exchange for an email address — it’s just as crucial to make a memorable first impression here.
Invitation: When a teammate or group member invites others to a product or service.

Want your own editable version of these 5 copy templates?Download now (and get a bonus swipe file)!

First, review our tactics for how to create a trustworthy first impression plus the 3-part Princess Bride formula you need in all welcome emails.

Also consider the context, timing, and flow of your welcome emails — in relationship with each other and other messages. For example, if you have a verification step to confirm an email address, will that be in a separate email or combined with the welcome message? What’s the action that triggers the welcome — a signup, purchase, promotion, or contest — and how will that inform your approach?

Now let’s look at examples and copy templates that you can start using today. The templates refer to an imaginary productivity app called Prioritizer.

5 Welcome Email Templates

1. General Product / Service Welcome Email

Example Email – Evernote
Subject: Get Started with Evernote

Evernote’s welcome email is short but gets all the right points across, telling you why it exists, how it will help you, and a clear CTA. What’s the most important action for the reader to take next? In your quest to be helpful and informative, don’t bury the next step.

Some quick subject line idea from my inbox:

Welcome to Blue Apron (the basic bread and butter of welcome email subject lines)
Welcome to Mention Janet! (the personalization variation)
Thanks for joining! Let’s get started. [CNET Insider]
Welcome to Bigstock Free Trial (specifying context of signup)
We’re pleased to meet you [Headspace]
Wistia Powers, Activate!

General Welcome Email

[greeting]
Hi Bob!

Welcome to Prioritizer! Thanks so much for joining us. You’re on your way to super-productivity and beyond!

[who we are; our mission/ what we help you do; how it works]
Prioritizer is a task management app that helps you focus on the important things in life by only allowing you to add 3 items a day. Set and track daily, weekly, and monthly priorities — and get the stuff that matters done.

[what to do next that will set you up for success]
Our number one tip to get the most out of Prioritizer is to download our browser extension and give it a whirl. [how it helps] It’ll make sticking to your priorities super simple and just a click away.

[CTA](Download the extension)

[open communication channel for questions, conversations, and help]
Have any questions? Just shoot us an email! We’re always here to help.
Cheerfully yours,

The Prioritizer Team

Grab your editable template here.

2. Newsletter Welcome

Example Email: Zapier Blog
Subject line: Thanks for Subscribing to the Zapier blog!

Zapier’s email welcoming new subscribers to its blog is great. The most important information is at the top — setting expectations about type of content and frequency of emails. Presumably people sign up for recurring newsletters for a reason — and this is your chance to make sure those reasons are mutual and they won’t mark you as spam down the line.

Many newsletter welcome emails offer a collection of proven material to give new subscribers a sense of the quality content they’ve just signed up for. Others may offer a freebie or bonus content as a thank you for signing up that reflects the content to come.

Finally what makes Zapier stand out here — that many businesses don’t do well — is taking the time to introduce the company behind the blog is and what it does.

Quick things to consider:

What’s going to be in the newsletter? What type of content will it link to?
How often and when will subscribers get newsletter emails?
If your blog publishes multiple times a week, will you send an email with every new post or offer to set email frequency preferences?
Are you going to share a best-of collection of reads or a freebie?

Subject line ideas from my inbox:

Welcome to the Sunday Dispatches [Paul Jarvis newsletter]
Thanks for subscribing! Let’s get started with some free resources [Campaign Monitor]
[Groove’s Startup Journey] You’re subscribed to the Groove blog 🙂
Subscription confirmed! Welcome to the Buffer email club!
Thanks for subscribing! Here’s some free stuff [Invision]

Newsletter Welcome Template

[greeting]
Hi Linda!

Thanks so much for signing up for the Prioritizer newsletter! [set up expectations/make personal connection] You’re joining an amazing community of folks who love nerding out about productivity.

[set up expectations re: frequency + type of content]
You’re joining an amazing community of folks who love nerding out about productivity. Here’s what to expect: every Tuesday you’ll get an email with a collection of our best content with actionable advice and food for thought to help you get more done.

[who we are / why company exists]
Oh, by the way, let’s introduce ourselves before we get going. Prioritizer is a task management app that helps you focus on the important things in life by only allowing you to add 3 items a day. Our goal with the newsletter and our content is to create and share content that will help you be more effective with your time!

[best content / freebies to build trust + affinity]
As you wait for the next issue, check out some of our most popular posts. They’re a great place to get started.
(links)

[openness to conversation]
We’d love to chat. Just hit reply to this email or any of our newsletters to get in touch with feedback, questions, or ideas for us!

Have an awesome day!
Louise, Prioritizer Marketing Manager

[secondary call to action can go here, or a trust-winning reminder how easy it it is to unsubscribe]

p.s. Want to check out our Prioritizer app? Head here to sign up for a free trial.

Grab your editable template here.

3. Personal Outreach Welcome

The personal outreach email isn’t just for introductions. It fits in at any point in a customer lifecycle — whether it’s to ask for feedback, “check in to see how things are going,” or offer help after periods of inactivity. Here we’ll focus on the personal outreach email for the specific purpose of welcoming people aboard.

Quick things to think about:

Be personal, as if you were sending an email to a friend. Use simple formatting and plain design.
Consider flow. If this is the only welcome email you’re sending, incorporate all the elements in the general product/service welcome. If this message is part of a welcome or onboarding series, consider timing and goals.

Example Email: Farmigo
Subject line: Hope you love it!

I got this personal outreach email from Benzi Ronen, the founder of Farmigo. What does it do well? It arrived in my inbox 10 days after the general welcome and, more pertinently, a day after my first order. So the interaction felt personal and responsive to my individual behavior, even though it was most likely triggered automatically.

The message also reiterates Farmigo’s missions while soliciting customer feedback. The coupon incentive in the postscript didn’t hurt either — I used it to make my next purchase.

At this point, you’re not going to stand out for sending a general personal outreach email. While it’s important to offer your customers a chance to provide feedback and kickstart a conversation, this message is an opportunity to both cement your business identity and give new users a nudge in the right direction.

Personal Outreach Welcome Template

[greeting]
Hi Gene!

I’m Louise Belcher, CEO of Prioritizer. I’d like to personally thank you for signing up. Welcome aboard our journey towards smarter task management and happier productivity!

[explain mission / common goal; personally connect with the reader]
We started Prioritizer because we’ve always had trouble keeping a realistic to-do list that made sure important priorities got done. So much of your day escapes you because you end up doing reactive work that feels more urgent.

[lead into what you’d like the reader to do next]
Our mission is to help people keep on track with valuable goals. So I wanted to make sure you get the most out of your trial. [CTA] Check out our 5 top tips for success with Prioritizer.

[open door to support and feedback]
I’d love to hear whether you think Prioritizer helps fulfill your big goals or what we can do to improve. If you have any questions about getting started, I’m happy to help. Just reply to this email!

Let’s do great things together!
Louise Belcher

[postscript call to action – great spot to get a little more salesy, offer an incentive, ask a specific question to elicit a response, or express extra personality]
p.s. I love reading about productivity but hate wasting time finding quality stuff. What’s your favorite source of good reads?

Grab your editable template here.

4. Free Sample Welcome

Companies, especially many SaaS businesses, offer free content, such as e-books, guides, reports, and other goodies to increase their visibility and collect email addresses.

One common mistake I see over and over is that this email includes a download link or quick thanks and not much else. Yet this is often your first point of contact with people who’ve just expressed interest in a field in which you’re probably selling.

It’s worth your time to make a great first impression here and take advantage of the opportunity to make a meaningful connection, set expectations if they get put on a marketing email list, or include a more specific call to action with enough context to persuade.

Example Email: Litmus
Subject line: You read the 2015 State of Email Report. Now what?

Litmus offers its 2015 State of Email Report as an instant download. While the email I got doesn’t specifically say “welcome”, the message acknowledges the fact that I may be new to the Litmus universe. Litmus already knows that I’m interested in email because I downloaded their report — so I’m likely more receptive to their nudge to start a free trial.

What I especially like about this email is the explicit “Now what?”. If you’re sending freebies and resource downloads to grow your lists, come right out and answer the “Now what?” question. Will you send more emails? Do you want them to start a trial? Would you like them to share the resource?

One quick tip: be specific in your subject line. Instead of “Here’s your ebook,” include details. People are more motivated to open and read an email from a relative stranger if the subject line is clear. Here’s a nice example from Copyhackers: Yay! You’ve got your free persuasion ebook + this (you’ll love it).

Free Sample Welcome Email Template

[greeting & gratitude]

Hi Bob,

Thanks so much for your interest in our 50 Most Successful Productivity Lifehacks book! [access to resource] Here’s your download link.

[what’s next?]
You’ll also start receiving weekly emails with thoughtfully human-curated content and our best blog posts full of actionable advice and food for thought to help you get more done. If that’s not your jam, no worries – just click the unsubscribe link.

[explain who you are, make a short pitch to give context for your call to action]
At Prioritizer, we’re only interested in lifehacks that make it easier to focus on accomplishing great goals — so much so that we made an app for it! We help you keep a realistic to-do list of priorities.

[CTA] Check out our 30-day free trial!
(Start being more productive)

Always here if you have any questions,
The Prioritizer Team

[postscript – a nice spot to ask for a visibility boost for your content]
p.s. Think this guide is helpful? Just click here to share with friends and colleagues.

Grab your editable template here.

5. Invitation Welcome Emails

Invitation (and referral) emails can be the first time someone meets your business. In order to make a trustworthy impression and appealing introduction, make sure your invitation email includes this information:

Who invited the reader or created the account?
Who are you and why should the reader also sign up?
What’s next?

Example Email: HelpScout
Subject line: Welcome to HelpScout

HelpScout’s invitation email is short and covers all the bases. It’s clear about who extended the invitation and explains why the tool is helpful. The call to action should be rather straightforward here — to set a password or create/activate a new account. The overall goal, as with all welcome emails, is to create trust and motivate those key first actions.

Invitation Welcome Email Template

[greeting]
Hi Bob!

Tina Belcher invited you to join The Burger Team on Prioritizer! Welcome to the crew!

[who you are; what you do; why should reader care?]
Prioritizer is an app that helps teams collaborate to accomplish big goals. Your teammates need you!

[what to do next]
All you have to do is finish setting up your account to join your team.
[CTA](Set password)

[help getting started]
Find out more about Prioritizer with our 5-minute walkthrough or just reply to this email with any questions! We’re always here to help.

Cheers,
Your friends at Prioritizer

[secondary CTA]
p.s. Once you’re all set up, we recommend downloading our browser extension. It makes Prioritizer a lot more useful!

Grab your editable template here.

Want your own editable version of these 5 copy templates?Download now (and get a bonus swipe file)!

The Princess Bride Formula for Memorable Welcome Emails

Written by Janet Choi on April 23, 2015.

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

You might not realize it, but this famous quote from the Spanish swordsman in The Princess Bride has all the ingredients you need to make great welcome emails.

Hello — the Greeting
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. — Who you are: a name and identifying information that provides the context (what you do, your interests, cares, and concerns) required to make a connection
Prepare to die. — What comes next.

Let’s examine the 3 elements of the welcome email, go through some ideas for what to say, and see how to tie it all together (without threats of revenge).

1. The Greeting (and gratitude)

The greeting is quick moment simply to say “hi” and “thanks.”

This is the one spot governed by convention, so don’t think too hard about the basic social act of acknowledging other human beings — “hello” or “welcome” will do just fine. Follow through with an indication of happiness or gratitude that someone expressed enough interest to grant you entrance into their inbox.

Hi, nice/great/lovely to meet you, welcome, hey
We’re happy, glad, excited, thrilled, delighted that you joined our app!
Thanks for subscribing/signing up for our list!

Gain your advantage by breaking away from the generic. Add some specificity. Personalize using first names and other relevant details — and make the reader feel special or part of something larger than themselves.

Thanks for joining our newsletter community of thousands of people who love email!
It’s exciting that you’re one step closer to mastering how to play the ukulele!

2. Who are you (and why is that important)?

Now this is your big chance to stand out. Anyone can say “welcome” and “thank you.” It’s who you are and why you exist that makes you distinctive. Strangely, this is the one element that’s most often missing in welcome emails, making them feel as if they could have come from anybody. Organizations overlook this step or just assume you’ll remember who they are.

What makes you worthy for people to trust and connect? What do you do, why are you here, and why should the reader care?

Here are a few snippets I pulled from real welcome emails:

what you do

GetFeedback makes it easy to create mobile-ready surveys.

share your origin story

We started Karma with one simple idea: everyone should be able to get online, everywhere they go.

specify your mission

We’re on a mission to make your working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive. [Slack]

show people better versions of themselves

You just joined thousands of people who take control of their work and save valuable time using automation. [Zapier]

how it works

Watch a video to quickly learn how to make the most of your Inbox.” [Google Inbox]

Timeful’s email verification message hits many of these points elegantly:

3. What’s next?

The final component of the welcome email is to build trust by setting up expectations and move readers towards your goals with clarity around what to do next.

What’s going to happen after this welcome conversation?

Newsletter welcomes often describe what type of content and frequency to expect.
Grubhub’s welcome email explains that subscribers will get discounts, prizes, and restaurant recommendations.
Blue Apron explains: “each week, we promise to bring you the best, fresh ingredients along with new and imaginative recipes to enjoy.”
Asana notifies you of 2 more emails to follow in its welcome series: “Welcome to Asana! This is the first of three emails we’ll send over in the next week to help you transition from email to Asana.”

Then, be clear about what you want readers to do next. Often this is framed as how to get started, the best suggestion for success, or ensuring you get the most out of the service or product. Some common goals for your call to action:

download or install something like an app, browser extension, or code snippet
watch a walkthrough video
perform a task, like create your first project, fill out a profile, or set preferences
reply to the email or set up a phone call
make your first purchase (using this incentivizing discount coupon!)

Are there multiple tasks that will help someone get started or activated? Split up your welcome emails into a drip series. Getting the most out of an app or site doesn’t mean you have to stuff all that most-ness into one email

Finally, inform your new signups that they’re in good hands if they need help with any questions or concerns that come up. Be clear about how to get in touch, whether that’s a support site, email, or phone number.

If you require assistance, have a question, or would like to suggest new features, please visit Todoist Support at https://todoist.com/Support. We’re happy to help you anytime!
We’re here to help. If you have any questions about getting started, setting up your first automation, or saving time with Zapier, just reply to this email. Our friendly support staff will point you in the right direction, free of charge.
We would love to get your feedback and learn about how we can help you to best manage the web apps you work with every day. Just reply to this email anytime. [Meldium]

4. Tying it all together

Editing is especially important for your welcome emails. You don’t have much of a window to make a great first impression. Your message should be clear, concise, and distinctive.

Do a final check to make sure every sentence and image serves a purpose by asking whether it meets any of these goals:

earning trust
building towards a particular action
showing personal context

Now let’s see how some companies combine all the elements of the Princess Bride welcome formula:

Gilt

Gilt‘s welcome email is straightforward, quickly setting expectations of how its emails and sales work and getting you to browse and shop right away.

Greeting: Welcome to Gilt! We’re thrilled to have you as a member.
Who you are: Learn how to shop like a pro…Then get ready to score some amazing deals from hundreds of top designers and brands. We don’t want you to miss a thing…
What comes next: be on the lookout for our daily emails — most sales start at noon ET every day. SHOP NOW.

Buffer

Buffer is a tool that helps you share social media content. Here’s the welcome email sent by CEO Joel and the team.

first part of Buffer’s welcome email

A huge part of Buffer’s company identity is its emphasis on amazing customer service and personal touch — and you can tell by the way that priority is woven throughout this entire welcome email: Every single one of us is here for you … drop us a line anytime. The whole postscript is devoted to explaining that the whole team participates in support around the clock and sets up the high and valuable expectation that you’ll hear back within hours if you reach out.

second part of Buffer’s welcome email

Farmigo

Farmigo is an online farmers’ market that delivers locally grown and produced food directly to your community. It’s all about the farm-to-neighborhood connection.

Greeting: Dear Janet, Thanks for joining Farmigo! Clearly you’re someone who loves delicious, fresh-from-the-farm food, and we’re happy to offer you a new way to get it.

The greeting here does a great job of making me feel part of the local food movement, enriching my sense of self-identity — which starts creating emotional affinity for a company I’ve just met.

Here the what comes next is brought to the forefront. The service involves a fair amount of logistics so the email makes clear what I have to do to get my first (incentivized!) order delivered and where to pick it up.

Who you are:

Finally, the last part of the email explains Farmigo’s origin story, mission, and values all while connecting to a certain community of people and tapping into powerful emotions like excitement, inspiration, and pride.

Shoeboxed

Shoeboxed is a tool for scanning, organizing, and keeping track of receipts and expenses for reports and taxes. Unlike Farmigo, Shoeboxed’s welcome email is extremely succinct but it includes all the necessary elements.

Personalized Greeting: Welcome to Shoeboxed, Violet!
Who you are: This part might have used some beefing up, but you get an idea of what Shoeboxed does because they encourage you to submit receipts.
What comes next: The best way to get started is to download the mobile app or launch the web app.

Don’t make your welcome email sound like an impersonal, automatic form letter. Otherwise, you’re wasting an opportunity to continue making your pitch to a willing audience and saying something to be remembered by.

Submit your welcome email(s) to janet[at]customer[dot]io for a free, friendly critique!

Liked this post? Check out 5 Keys to Welcome Emails that Make Rewarding First Impressions or 5 Valuable Templates to Optimize Your Welcome Emails.

Email Marketing Basics: Newsletters and Drip Campaigns

Written by Janet Choi on April 16, 2015.

This week, I chatted with Carl Sednaoui, an email marketing consultant and co-founder of MailCharts, a tool e-commerce marketers use to uncover their next email move.

We decided to go back to the basic building blocks of email marketing: newsletters and drip campaigns. This is a great introduction for beginners, and for more advanced types, a quick refresher with helpful pro-tips and food for thought.

Here’s what you’ll learn in the next 12 minutes:

When you use newsletters versus drip emails — and what to expect.
What to do if you don’t have anything new to share in a newsletter.
One great tactic that both builds relationships and improves deliverability.

AMA: We cover the basics here, but newsletters and drip emails aren’t always simple. Ask your questions in the comment section below. Carl and I will answer them!

Watch our chat:

Full transcript

Janet Choi: Hi, I’m Janet from Customer.io. I’m here today with Carl from MailCharts.

Carl Sednaoui: Hi, everybody.

Janet: And we are going to talk about our favorite thing in the whole wide world, email.

Carl: Go, email. So what are we talking about today? All the email?

Janet: Today, we could talk about all the emails but I think that would be pretty boring for everyone. So let’s just talk about two types of emails.

Carl: There’s many different types of emails that you can send out, and the most popular are drip and newsletters. One of the things as we were talking about before this, and you mentioned, is that when you speak to somebody that’s new to email marketing, it’s often hard for them to wrap their head around what is what, and when to use which one.

Janet: Sure.

Carl: So I think we can talk about that today. Does that sound like a good idea?

Janet: That sounds great, let’s start there.

Carl: All right cool, so let me share my screen with you, And I’ll share with you examples of emails. So here’s an example of a newsletter. This newsletter was sent by Any.do, which is a to-do app, and they’re announcing their Web version, and they’re saying it’s here. So they most likely send this email to their entire list at the same time, one the same date, announcing that this new product of theirs was ready.

Janet: Okay.

Carl: So this is one example of a newsletter. Another example of a newsletter will be this email here from Uniqlo that they sent to, again, most likely to their entire list during the holidays or during winter. And here, we have this great content or this beautiful image about this orange jacket followed by some pricing information and some holiday discounts, along with a few other items that they were promoting.

This is very typical to newsletters. So whenever you check your inbox and you look at the emails you received from different companies, most of the times, those are the emails you’re looking at. They’re just newsletter emails that either went to the entire list or the majority of the list. This is content that is relevant either today, or for the season, or for this week and that also includes special promotions as we saw here earlier, new announcements, things that just got out the door.

Janet: Sure.

Carl: This is what newsletters look like and when they are used. On the flip-side, there are drip campaigns. Drip campaigns are basically a series of emails that you will receive over x period of time. As an example, here’s an email from our friends at MailChimp. You see here it says, “Number 1. Getting Started with MailChimp.” This email is all about using a template or how to create your own, inside their tools. So this drip goes out to any new MailChimp subscriber. So this is the first part of it, then a few days later, you’ll go ahead and receive the second part, which is about collecting subscribers and building your list.

Here they talk about Facebook integrations and other features they have. Then if you wait a few more days, you’ll get yet another email. So here’s number three, and this one talks about how to avoid the spam folder to reach the inbox. Then you’ll get four, five, six, and so on. This is exactly what drip emails are. They’re a way to send messages or information over time in small chunks. You can think of them as bite-sized messages.

Janet: Yeah, and I think one interesting difference between them, as you were saying that with the drip emails, everyone gets the same one depending on where they are in their customer life cycle, versus the newsletter, you sort of enter the stream, where you enter the stream. If you signed up for a newsletter last week, you’ll just start getting that stream of information that they’re sending out.

Carl: Right. And then the other big pros and cons to the two is that, imagine you’re the marketer at MailChimp. You and your team go ahead and create this beautiful email drip. Once you’ve created this drip series, you can basically send it and forget it — in the sense that subscribers that join your list or become customers in a month from now, three months from now, or maybe even a year from now will still get this very viable email drip.

On the flip-side if you look at Uniqlo, the marketing team behind this has to create these newsletters on a daily basis, on a weekly basis. So it’s a lot more on-going effort that must go into generating these newsletters. Whenever you create a new email, you need to test the email, make sure all the links work properly, make sure that you have all the tracking codes, all the UTM parameters, that the template doesn’t break in different email clients. It’s a lot of on-going work to be sending newsletters on a frequent basis.

Janet: Yeah, it’s a little bit like the difference between writing a book about something where you’re done and everyone can read the same book and be helped by it or whatever. And then versus a blog post every week, where you have to keep churning out new material.

Carl: Yeah, That’s a really good comparison, actually. I hadn’t thought about it that way. Both of them have the value they provide.

Janet: Right.

Carl: And both of them have their place in your email marketing strategy. One of the things I wanted to mention when it comes to newsletters is that often times, you don’t have new things happening every week. Often times, you don’t have new products, new items to talk about every week. And the default to that, whenever the C-suite is pushing you to be sending more emails, or you yourself want to send more emails, it’s the default to promotions.

That is something that as a recipient or the newsletters, as a subscriber, it comes less and less appealing over time. If this is the seventh promotion that you’ve sent me in a row in one month, I’m less just likely to go ahead and purchase from you, then if it was the first promotion.

Janet: Right.

Carl: One of the things that I have seen done really, really nicely is what I like to call product narratives, which is one email where you highlight this one product, and you talk about this one product in-depth, and why it’s a great product. So in the example of Uniqlo, they are known or at least, from what I’ve seen in the subway ads, for creating very high-tech fabrics.

So they can have an email where they talk about one piece of clothing, article of clothing, how it was made, the process and give it a lot more life than just like, “Here is a bunch of images of products you can buy today at a discount.”

Janet: I think that is a good strategy for people, especially businesses who don’t have regularly restocked inventory, or new things to show every week. They can really go in-depth and tell a story either about a customer, or a feature, or like a product. That can be way more compelling than just giving you, “Ten percent discount”, “Limited time only”. I think that’s a good way to do newsletters without being overly promotional every single time.

Carl: Yeah, absolutely. And then on the drip side, often times, when you create a drip, you want to, before you even map what the drip is going to look like, have a goal in mind. So what is your goal? In the example we shared with MailChimp, their goal was to get new customers onboarded and to get them to know about the different features that they offer.

Janet: Right.

Carl: Right, and so they’re giving you this information one step at a time to make sure you as a customer have time to process it and digest it. That’s much more user-friendly than just sending you like, “Here’s our startup guide”, in this like 30-page PDF. Right? So that’s the goal behind this email series that they have. Sometimes you’ll have companies who’s goal is to sell.

Janet: Right.

Carl: One of the things I’d like to make sure that everybody thinks about is don’t approach your drip campaign as just a series of sales emails that are spaced with x days in between them.

Janet: Right.

Carl: Try to have some form of story that goes through all those emails that you are sending. If your goal is to drive sales, how can you drive value at first before you try to ask for the sale? Or how can you approach the drip with content that makes people keep listening and keep opening up your emails?

Janet: Yeah, I think that’s a really great point. Just the idea of dripping information out in a certain period of time doesn’t necessarily mean that the content is sales or promotional, you know. It’s sort of agnostic about the content.

But the most successful ones that I see are mostly educational, entertaining and provide value to the customer other than an offer or a sale that they want to make. That sort of builds up enough trust for them to make the sales sort of later on down the road, maybe closer to the end of the drip, or in another drip.

Carl: Exactly, and of the things I love to do in a drip for example is to try and choose your response from the subscriber. So ask them why they’re interested in, or what is their favorite article of clothing, or what are you going to do this week, whatever the case might be. And a company like Uniqlo, if they would set up a drip or maybe somebody with a volume such as MailChimp, doesn’t have the resources to handle that kind of responses or maybe don’t want to.

But if you’re a smaller company and you can do that, I really encourage you to do so because it helps you create a bond with your subscribers, and kind of build that relationship over time. It also helps with your deliverability, right? Because Gmail will see that you responded to this email address, the emails that come from this email address are much more likely to end up in your inbox than your spam folder or elsewhere.

So there’s a twofold game behind this that I think makes that really appealing. So if you can trade responses, go for it because you’ll learn a lot.

Janet: Yeah.

Carl: You’ll be surprised by how much people are willing to share.

Janet: That’s a really great point. And I think it goes to going beyond just a few of your open rates and click rates. Are these subscribers and customers actually engaged, whether you’re sending a drip email or a newsletter.

Carl: Exactly.

Janet: That’s a really great point.

Carl: Yeah, and then one last, quick thing before we wrap up.

Janet: Sure.

Carl: Whenever you create a drip, often times, you’ll see your open rate and your click rate decrease over time. And that’s because subscribers have been on your list for longer. So keep that in mind. People are never more likely to open your emails that when they’ve just signed up. Okay, I think that’s the right words. First time.

Janet: They’re most likely to open…

Carl: Exactly.

Janet: … when they’re new.

Carl: They’re most likely to open a new emails when they just sign up, versus a month from now, versus a year from now. You’ll see this tail basically, your email rate tailing off in terms of open rates and click rates, and that is expected. So as a marketer, if you see that, don’t freak out. It doesn’t mean that your second or third email are really bad. It’s just a normal user behavior that you’ll see throughout your campaigns.

Janet: Yeah, and I think that’s the same advice for doing newsletters. You’ll probably see a bigger spike with new subscribers. And then you’ll see a continual ebb and flow of unsubscribes.

Carl: Exactly.

Janet: Awesome.

Carl: All right, well this was great.

Janet: Thanks for teaching us about drip emails and newsletters.

Carl: Of course. I’ll see you next time.

Janet: All right, bye.

Carl: Bye.

Lifecycle Marketing