Edward always has a finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the product, despite having neither fingers nor pulses. Edward is a bot!

DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure provider for developers, built Edwards-Bot to help tackle VIP customer churn. As Edward Chiu, Director of Sales and Customer Success, explains:

You have excellent relationships with all your customers and a pulse on every single one of their needs, right?… It’s nearly impossible to stay on top of this.

Enter Edward-Bot, who diligently checks on DigitalOcean users. Edward-Bot flags whoever might need help from a real human representative:

When VIP users exhibit behavior that indicates intent to churn—defined here as destroying “droplets” at a high rate—Edward-Bot alerts the DigitalOcean team by delivering notifications in real-time to the company’s #customer-success Slack channel. From there, the team knows immediately who to reach out to and when. Edward-Bot is even programmed to share the user’s typical behavior pattern to help give the humans important context.

Edward-bot frees up the customer success team to focus on more complex priorities while alerting them when it matters. It’s part of the company’s customer-first approach of paying close attention to user behavior and account health to create a great customer experience. In fact, this strategy helped decrease VIP churn to 0.69%.

Of course, not every team has the developer-time or resources as DigitalOcean to create their own Edward-Bot. That’s why we’re excited that our new integration, Customer.io’s Slack Action helps any team create their own customer pulse Slack bot.
Let’s explore what types of customer data to send into Slack and how this automation can help your team work better, together.

How to Curate the Push of Customer Data to Slack

Responding intelligently to customers requires understanding how they’re behaving. If you’re using Customer.io, you’re already sending that behavioral data through to create segments and messaging workflows. Simply add Slack Actions to funnel that data into Slack.

By setting up super-precise automation rules based on your customer attributes and behavior, you can trigger messages to designated channels or directly to team members. Create specific channels for behaviors to monitor, like #new-users or #VIPcustomers, or add them to existing ones in use.

Activity Stream for Critical Events and Transparency

There are broad customer behaviors that everyone on your team would find interesting. These tend to be critical events in the user lifecycle, such as:

• signups
• cancellations
• upgraded plan
• downgraded plan
• conversions to paid accounts
• invited team member

This type of information works well as an activity feed in dedicated channels. That provides a lightly-curated stream into which people across teams and roles can dip their toes but not have to constantly pay attention.

Creating Slack notifications around user behavior can prove costly if it adds to notification overload. Dedicated channels are a good defense, as people can mute the channel to avoid getting pinged with every message but still check in.

Use targeted notifications for priority intelligence

The ability to pick out the signals amidst the noise is powerful, because it helps you prioritize well. That’s why you wouldn’t want Edward-Bot to necessarily report on every single user’s droplet destroyage. It’s not efficient to spend time reaching out to small customers who switched from $5 to $2 a month payments. But dropping from $5,000 to $2,000? Now that’s worth at least a follow-up email from a customer success rep. Maybe even a phone call!

There’s an easy solution here: get targeted with customer attributes and behavior triggers to create purposeful notifications. What these look like will probably depend on your particular business and team goals, but here are some ideas for more specific triggers:

Important positive behaviors:

• New signup from a customer with high MRR
• Customer increased their plan to enterprise account
• Someone has been a customer for 1 year
• Key activity has increased, indicating readiness to upgrade
• High NPS rating

Churn intent flags:

• When a customer drops off in key activity (like Edward-Bot)
• When a VIP customer increases key red-flag activity, like exports of their data
• When a customer hasn’t logged in to your app in 14 days
• A very active user’s free trial expired AND they haven’t logged on in 3 days
• Low NPS rating

Here’s an example of a situation where your customer success or account management team would want a very specific notification. Let’s say annual billing for your product usually requires a conversation to figure out the best plan together and make sure the customer is happy. A quick timely notification set to trigger a month or two ahead of the renewal day helps everyone stay on track:

Use and enrich attribute data

Don’t forget about attribute data to give context to behavioral events! If you’ve captured information from any signup forms or are using a data enrichment tool like Clearbit, your Slack Actions can get very specific. This can be especially handy for managing lead or sales stages, when you haven’t had as much time to create relationships and history with a customer.

For example, the sales team can get pinged when Customer.io and Clearbit register new accounts from:

• leads from companies in software industry
• someone with a target persona title or seniority, like “VP of Marketing”
• companies with over 300 employees

Or whatever is important to you! It’s important to keep iterating to figure out what your most important user actions and attributes are, so that you respond to important behaviors right when they happen.

Here’s an example of a Slack Action that triggers upon account signup when someone enters comments in the signup form, furnished with a combination of user-entered and Clearbit-enriched data that help give context.

When our sales team sees a Slack message like this, where someone signing up has relevant questions, shows a ready willingness to buy, and has target attributes — they know it’s go-time to get in touch!

Slack Brings Teams Together to Do Their Best Work

At many companies, employees might not have much, or even any, interaction with customers or visibility into what users doing in the product. Even those who do, like people in customer success or support, probably hold pieces of the puzzle rather than the whole.

While this could be a transparency or access issue, the culprit is often time. Who has time to be rooting around in user accounts and dashboards every day for slivers of information, with everything else already on your plate? And when you do search, it can take a long time to get what you need. (According to some surveys, people spend 20-30% of their time at work looking for information!)

When information you need isn’t in easy grasp, you risk missing opportunities and operating in the limited confines of a knowledge gap. Surfacing key information right in Slack provides an easy path to understand what’s going on with customers—without having to context-switch—and kickstart real action. Everyone can gain some knowledge of key activity going on in the product, which leads to better alignment and collaboration. When there’s a new feature release and churn spikes, for example, engineers should know that, not just product managers!

Let’s get meta with one way we’re using Actions at Customer.io. To keep an eye on the new feature usage, we set up a Slack Action that triggers when users configure a Customer.io Action:

Here’s what the Action looks like under the hood, in the workflow composer:

One of our company goals for the Actions launch is strong customer adoption. Using the Slack Action is a neat way to see if we’re making adoption progress and identify which Actions are getting faster uptake (Slack is winning!).

Customize Your Notifications for Powerful Communication

Customer actions speak a thousand words, but if you’re not paying attention to behavioral context, you’re letting lots of opportunities slip by.

As (human) Edward from DigitalOcean says, it’s impossible to know exactly what everyone is doing in your product at all times. And it doesn’t make sense for jobs like Edward-bot’s to belong to humans—those tasks are boring, repetitive, and distract from higher-impact work. Instead, the smarter choice is to automate around that issue to deliver critical nuggets of intelligence.

Creating your customized customer-pulse Slack app helps you grow by providing the seeds for increasing team collaboration, alignment, and agility. We’re excited how Slack Actions unlocks your customer data from dashboards and disparate sources to make it transparent, timely, and actionable.

Learn more about how our Slack Action works. Share your smart Slack Action workflows here or come chime in with questions and feedback in Product Hunt!

Behavioral email can take a back seat for mobile app marketers, who focus on communicating with people through in-app messaging, push notifications, or within the product itself.

The problem with that strategy is that it relies on how much customers are using your app. And no matter how good you are, your app probably isn’t a core part of your customer’s day-to-day lives.

But email is. People check their emails 15 times a day on average. And according to email analytics platform Litmus, over half of all emails are opened on mobile. Your users are just a thumb-swipe away from your app.

Behavioral email act like an extension of your product by relating directly to the actions your customers have taken — which means you can reach people with relevant, personally-tailored calls-to-action that feel like a natural next step for them to take. With mobile deep linking, you can even decide exactly what part of your app to send those users to, prompting the exact behaviors you’re looking for.

Behavioral email is the perfect way to get your customers in the habit of using your app. Here are five examples of behavior-triggered emails to get your mobile app users engaged and coming back.

Onboard New Users from the Inbox

User onboarding is the most important moment of the customer lifecycle. 80% of users delete the average app within just three days. But on the flip side, apps with great onboarding see retention boosts well beyond those three days, throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Early retention is crucial, but also incredibly difficult. When most people open an app, everything is unfamiliar. If it’s not immediately obvious what they’re supposed to do, they’re not going to spend all day figuring it out. After all, they were doing fine without the app. They feel no attachment to it yet, which makes the decision to uninstall it really easy.

The flight-finder app, Hitlist, fights those obstacles by setting triggers for new users to receive a behavioral email if they haven’t planned any trips after a few days past signup. At first glance, this is a pretty plain email but what they’re saying is helpful to a new user, explaining not just why using the app is worth your time but telling you exactly how to make that happen.

The reinforcement of why and how you should try the app out makes starting much easier — now that I know I don’t need to know exactly when or when my trip is to get value out of the app, I can go hit that button to poke around the app the try planning my first trip.

Onboarding is all about getting users to that aha moment—the time when your app delivers whatever improvement or value it promises—as quickly as possible. Onboarding software experts Appcues explains how “your product’s onboarding process is where users will learn how to use their newfound powers” — and sometimes you need to prompt people to get to those learnings and aha’s by communicating outside of your app.

Introduce Users to an Unfamiliar Feature

Check out how Swarm hypes up its new messaging feature in this email. It gives users a quick overview of why the feature is valuable and how to use it, followed by two buttons inviting them to try it for themselves. Those buttons then use deep links to open Swarm and send them right to the messaging feature.

What’s great about this email is that it quickly explains the value of the new messages feature and sets the stage for the customer to try it immediately — it’s just a tap away — while their curiosity is highest.

But this strategy applies to more than new features you build. Many people will gravitate towards the one or two features of your app they like the most and then don’t try out any others. That means they’re missing out on some of the best parts of your app. Getting them to use those other features and discover new value works wonders for retention.

You can use an analytics tool like Amplitude to see which features are underused or to identify which parts of your product are most popular. Then trigger an email like Swarm’s above to get them to try something new.

Pro tip: If your mobile app also has a web version, make sure your deep links account for that. If the customer opens the email on their desktop, the link needs to send them to the appropriate part of the web app.

Remind Users How Valuable You Are with a Milestone Email

Fitness tracking app Strava sends users emails like this when they hit certain exercise milestones.

Each triggered email automatically pulls personalized data on the user from the app to make it feel crafted just for that recipient. In the short-term, an email likes this makes people feel good about how much they’ve worked out, plus there’s the handy reminder that it might be time to invest in some new shoes. But in the long term, it also reminds people of the value they get from using the app.

It’s a classic positive feedback loop. Psychologically, we get a rush from these kinds of rewards and are motivated to repeat the actions that lead to them. It reinforces the feeling that you’re helping your customers make progress on their way to real achievements.

The key is to monitor your customers’ success metrics—the number that shows the customer is using your app productively. For Strava, that number is miles run while using the app. For Uber, it would be rides taken. Whatever it is, celebrate your users with a personalized email whenever they hit a new meaningful milestone.

Send Notifications Your Customers Want to Know About

Great behavioral emails aren’t sales-y. They focus on building a relationship with the customer that’s based on trust, even when it comes time for the upsell.

Most upsell emails come off like a bad cold call: unwanted, one-size-fits-all attempts to get more money. But behavior-triggered emails like the one here from Instapaper are more successful because they take the users’ activity into account, and offer them a way to get more out of the app. It’s not about selling the product, it’s about making sure the customer can continue using features they like.

Instapaper lets users save articles they want to read later across all their devices. Premium users also get to make highlights and add notes to pieces of text, but free users can only do that five times a month. When those free users get close to the limit, Instapaper alerts them by email and invites them to try out the premium service.

By emailing free users who push the monthly highlight feature to the limit, Instapaper is targeting the people most likely to upgrade. That, combined with the free month, is a strong incentive for them to try premium. And since the email is also alerting the user that they’re nearing the limit, it feels more like a helpful reminder than a hard sell.

Cancellation Emails

One of the biggest mistakes users make with retention is assuming that people are gone for good when they cancel (or uninstall!). Don’t abandon people just because you think they’ve left you. Re-engage churned users with a timely email like this one from Spotify.

When premium Spotify users cancel or downgrade to the free plan, they get an email like this — which includes a little reminder of the features — like no ads — that they’ve grown accustomed to and will lose. Then, it provides the chance to reverse the cancellation with a single click of the eye-catching “Go premium” CTA.

With this email, Spotify takes the time to make the argument that canceling might not be the greatest decision — but without being too pushy or weird about it. Then, it makes resubscribing to the service pretty easy — just a click away!

The key is to have this email trigger as soon as the user cancels. It serves as a transactional record but also makes a pitch for when someone might still be on the fence about their decision and be willing to listen to you. Take the opportunity for your communication to go up to bat for your product.

Behavioral Emails Feel More Natural

In order for your emails to improve the customer experience, they need to fit seamlessly with the experience each user has already had with your product. Behavior-triggered emails are the simplest way to achieve this sentiment. It makes your email messaging feel like a natural conversation rather than a one-way megaphone that people will want to shut off immediately.

Thanks to the rise of mobile email and the power of deep linking, behavior email is even more powerful with mobile apps. If you reach your users with relevant mobile messaging, it won’t be hard to get them out of their inbox and onto your app, no matter where they are in the customer lifecycle.

Have you seen any great or terrible examples of engagement emails from your mobile apps? Do share in the comments!

Which do you prefer, Coke or Pepsi?

In blind taste tests, consumers regularly cast their vote for Pepsi. But here’s the catch: as soon as consumers knew they were drinking Coke, they preferred it more. When scientists studied why people picked Coke over Pepsi — even though they liked the taste of Pepsi better! — they found that people had stronger mental and emotional associations with Coke’s brand.

Marketers leverage this type of finding with an all-too-simplistic formula: the more touchpoints a consumer has with a brand, the more they’ll like it. In fact, there’s a psychological phenomenon called the familiarity principle, which states that the more you see something, the more you prefer it. But the number of touchpoints simply doesn’t cut it. It’s not like Pepsi doesn’t advertise. In fact, they spend copiously, often advocating that they have a superior taste.

Yet it’s clear that Coke has the superior branding. Whatever they’re doing is able to outweigh Pepsi’s touchpoints because theirs matter more. The real magic of the familiarity principle is creating interactions that cut through the noise to actually stick with people, boost mindshare, and build trust.

Here’s how you can use it in email marketing and communicating with your customers:

Dude, Where’s My Czar?

The clothing company Burberry was having an identity crisis. The 150-plus-year-old company was underperforming and seemed stodgy, all while trying to appeal to too many people. Burberry’s genius solution: implement a “brand czar.”

The brand czar’s sole job was to regulate every consumer-facing part of the business. Everything from their product offerings, their brick-and-mortar stores to their online ordering system to their customer support scripts to their emails had to feel consistent. With the brand czar, consumers would walk away from every interaction, knowing that they dealt with Burberry, a luxury brand.

It worked. The company transformed its brand, spurred growth, and affirmed its place in the luxury sector.

This takes advantage of one of the most crucial elements of the familiarity principle: consistency. Sociologist Robert Zajonc, the first person to study the familiarity principle in a lab setting, discovered that the principle only works if few variables are changed between touchpoints. Humans like consistency.

For users to connect with a consistent brand, there should be an identity that comes through each experience — and that includes how you talk to people in your emails. Second, there can’t be a “too many cooks” problem. The experience should feel continuous, from your email headings to the copy and tone of your messages.

Introducing: Taco from Trello

Trello users sometimes get an email from an interesting address: taco@trello.com. Taco the Husky is Trello’s mascot, a literal embodiment of a brand czar. As the mascot for Trello, the dog “sends” emails too, including feature updates, news, and a helpful “how to get started” message.

In addition, Taco has a Twitter account. It’s goofy, but it shows the brand’s personality and gets people to want to engage, instead of shoving touchpoints in their faces.

A presence like Taco’s helps make the brand feel consistent over time, which is what the familiarity principle is really about. It’s not necessarily about having an actual person to latch onto but an identifiable presence that users can get to know and even engage with.

To build a consistent presence with your emails, first, consider the elements that can become familiar to someone in their inbox — like design, tone, and having designated, identifiable senders. People feel safer opening an email from a friendly name, (like Janet from Customer.io) rather than a do-not-reply address. And as Kristen Craft, Wistia‘s director of business development, puts it, showing character is a great way of getting touchpoints that matter.

Over time, the more people see this identifiable, positive presence, the more that identity will stick. You’re increasing trust and recipients’ inclination to open and pay attention to you, message-by-message.

Tell Stories to Engage Emotions

Political canvassers have a tough job. For every unsubscribe we might get, they get a literal door closing in their face. But recently, a team of researchers examined how going door-to-door can actually change people’s minds, even on really hot-button issues. The most effective canvassers don’t throw facts at people or present a laundry list of reasons to vote for this candidate or against a certain policy. The most effective canvassers tell stories.

Specifically, they tell stories that really get the listener to empathize, and allow the listener to imagine what it would be like to be in that situation. As one study found, perspective-taking, or “imagining the world from another’s vantage point,” is a cognitive-active process that can have huge effects, from changing someone’s mind to even reducing prejudice.

Branding these days can seem like it’s all about being catchy and viral, but it’s quality touchpoints like stories that connect with and involve people that stick around.

How Watsi Tells Stories that Matter

Watsi enables people to directly fund patients in need across the globe. The nonprofit saw the great impact of telling their patients’ individual stories, including updates on their treatment and beautiful photography, via email.

For Watsi, this “user experience” has become an important part of their brand. It feels much different when you make a donation through Watsi than another organization. I love getting updates about patients whose treatment that I’ve helped fund.

Instead of getting a receipt for my donation as if it were any other type of cold purchase, Watsi allows me to become more involved in the narrative, which accomplishes many things. I get to feel like a caring, informed person, which makes me think of Watsi in a positive light. I feel more engaged with their work, which makes me want to continue to engage with them and continue donating. And it aligns with the company’s main value of radical transparency, which creates a consistent experience.

Here’s one of Wati’s best-performing email campaigns. The message is personalized based on a patient previously funded and brings in the perspective of the patient’s doctor, recalling the familiar and weaving a continuing narrative journey of support, care, and hope.

“We realized the closer we can bring people to the work we’re doing on the ground — to the patient, to the hospital providing the care, to the person’s family — the more they will feel like they are having a signficant interaction, and that’s the product we deliver for every donation,” co-founder Grace Garey told First Round.

What Good Can You Do?

One big common mistake is abandoning your audience and customers too early, before making a lasting positive impression, or even before they even know who you are (which is why sending the odd blast email to everyone at once can seem so terrifying). That requires more than just showing up to push a holiday promotion to drive sales or random news blast to drive traffic. For marketers, this means investing in interactions that are more than strictly transactional.

Another huge mistake is that you grab the wrong takeaway from the familiarity principle — to win, talk more. That’s the fast track to acting like an annoying spammer, barraging your recipients with empty, impersonal messages.

So your job isn’t done after one more signup or subscription — nor is it done by adding yet one more piece of noise to mix. Your job’s done when your brand comes off more like Coke than Pepsi. And when it comes to email marketing, one way to do that is by doing some good.

First Rule of Email: Add Value

We talk a lot here about the value of great product-driven behavioral emails — they give direction to people who get stuck and help users make progress towards their goals in your product.

So today, let’s examine another way of adding value via email: provide helpful content that helps people do their job or accomplish their goals outside of your product or service.

This type of engagement improves your relationship to people at any stage of the buyer’s journey or customer lifecycle. Instead of a sales-y exhortation to “buy something now!”, it’s an offering. Not only do you start — and continue — conversations with folks you want to engage, you build trust and connection to your brand, all without focusing on yourself.

Wistia does a great job of this by providing tons of educational content — whether you’re a free user, newsletter or community subscriber, or a power team mega player. Everyone needs a hand when it comes to being successful with video. This isn’t a new tactic of course, but what makes Wistia stand out is their quality and personality. Because they deliver this value, over and beyond their video-hosting product, consistently and with such character, they stand on the Coca Cola side of the branding spectrum.

The company, Mention, collects job information at signup, which enables them to send content customized to those roles, from blog posts:

click to see full email

to relevant webinars:

By continuing to engage users even after signup — and personalizing content to make sure it’s relevant and useful — Mention is building a familiarity that matters.

The Crazy Thing About How You Communicate

The familiarity principle seems like a bunch of common sense. Repeat positive interactions — get happier audiences and customers — and ultimately, happier business results.

But there’s still one profound lesson we haven’t talked about yet: the fact that how you communicate with people changes their experiences and perceptions of your product. Positive contextual associations that you create have an ability — on a neurological level — to affect someone’s enjoyment of your offering, over someone else’s.

The potential for your customer communication and email marketing to make that difference is enormous. Data allows you to get even more personalized and relevant to your customers. Combine that data with a consistent voice and branding, great storytelling that brings people closer, plus valuable, helpful content — and you’ll supercharge your marketing.

What’s another company that you think does a great job of branding and customer communication?

What does it take for an idea to register? The challenge is that information alone isn’t enough to convince or teach. The way you deliver information matters.

When Melissa Studzinski joined General Mills as a brand manager for the product Hamburger Helper, she got binders of data, market research and surveys, and briefs to help do her job. These “death binders,” as she called them, overwhelmed her with information in the abstract. What clicked for Melissa and her team was when they started visiting moms cooking in their kitchens. She says,

“I’ll never forget one woman, who had a toddler on her hip while she was mixing up dinner on the stove. We know that ‘convenience’ is an important attribute of our product, but it’s a different thing to see the need for convenience firsthand.”

Chip and Dan Heath tell this story in Made to Stick to illustrate the power of concreteness, how decision-making can be easier when guided by specific experiences. For Melissa, actually seeing moms in their homes delivered insights into the value of predictability and convenience for mothers and the kids they were feeding, over the extensive variety the company had been pushing. After simplifying the product line and adapting the ads, sales of Hamburger Helper increased by 11%.

In email marketing, it’s easy to deliver death by confusing abstractions or to take haphazard stabs at what we think will motivate. Instead we can educate, nurture, and convince much more effectively by using concreteness.

How Concrete Language Motivates

Concrete things exist in the real world. You can reach out and touch them, or stub your toe on them, and that vividness provides an entry-point into your audience’s reality. By doing some of the mental work in how your message is presented, people don’t have to expend extra brainpower unpacking fuzzy abstractions and figuring out exactly what you mean.

Whether it’s Aesop’s fables or a punchy elevator pitch, concreteness makes messages easier to understand, remember, and even believe. Concrete language is easier for the brain to parse and recall, and as psychologists Jochim Hansen and Michaele Wänke found in a 2010 study, the mind takes speedily processed and recallable information as more true and believable.

Take this pair of sentences used in the study:

• In Hamburg, one can count the highest number of bridges in Europe. [concrete]
• Hamburg is the European record holder concerning the number of bridges. [abstract]

Even when meaning and level of detail are the same, as in these Hamburg bridge descriptions, subtle linguistic framing makes a meaningful difference in how the information is digested.

“Linguistic concreteness makes the described situations more imaginable,” Hansen and Wänke write. “Increased imaginability, in turn, causes people to believe the statements with greater likelihood.” Framing the information as an experience that the reader is performing instead of plainly stating the fact that Hamburg has the most bridges in Europe feels more concrete, and so, adds credibility and persuasiveness.

Concrete language also paves the way for easier judgment calls and decisions. Because people can imagine and believe concrete statements, they can also envision outcomes and feel more comfortable making decisions towards those outcomes. For instance, researchers found that using more concrete language like “one share of IBM stock” rather than a generic “asset” in disclosures increased investors’ willingness to invest in a firm.

The researchers also found that highlighting concrete language reduces feelings of psychological distance. If you’re not familiar with something, confusing jargon, vague generalities, and abstract ideas end up becoming reasons to lose interest. In email of course, those are immediate reasons to unsubscribe, delete, ignore, or even spam.

Concreteness offers a bridge of believability and affinity to cross over and explore new things.

Applying Concreteness In Your Emails

So what does communicating with concreteness mean in practice? Present your message in a way that’s easy to imagine, visualize, and even feel as a reader. That may involve:

• vivid storytelling
• specificity and contextual details
• images, graphics, and photos
• illustrative examples, like testimonials and case study details
• language of the senses
• personas and personalization, speaking to the experiences and needs of specific people (or types of people)
• describing a shared experience, like coming together to solve the same problem

You’re using details, but not just any old details either. They have to be specifics that take into account the audience’s point of view. That way, they can inhabit, imagine, and absorb.

As the Hamburg bridge examples shows, word choice and framing matters too. Here’s a brief primer from psychologists Gün Semin and Klaus Fiedler’s “Linguistic Category Model” which categorizes types of words from concrete to abstract:

• Descriptive action verbs describe specific behaviors in specific situations, with little room for interpretation. They’re less likely to have positive or negative connotations. e.g., count, crouch, kiss, run
• Interpretive action verb describe general behavior in a specific situation and requires some interpretation. These verbs also tend to have positive or negative connotations. e.g., help, cheat, threaten
• State verb describe emotional, mental, or feeling states that have no clear beginning or end. e.g., believe, love, admire, envy
• Adjectives are the most abstract type of word and require a lot of interpretation. e.g., creative, impulsive, reliable

To aim for concreteness, then, use more descriptive and interpretive action verbs and hold off on the adjectives.

Since concreteness helps close gaps with psychological distance, it’s especially useful when you’re dealing with newness — new users or audience members, new features, and other types of new situations. Concreteness, funnily enough, is your welcoming, pillowy soft landing for your readers’ minds.

Let’s look at a few email examples:

Close.io

About a week after a new app signup for Close.io, a sales CRM tool, they trigger a very long email from CEO Steli Efti.

Click for full, epic email

Why does this message clock in at over 1,000 words? It’s sharing many stories, all designed to build a bridge to the reader and hopefully ferry them over closer to activation and engagement.

Instead of saying something like “Get started because Close.io is the best!” — Steli shows you why with a resonating origin story. You learn that the Close.io team is solving a pain they had experienced firsthand. That’s why the specific descriptions of existing solutions that turn people into “manual data-entry-monkeys” feels magnetic. They’ve walked in your shoes, their product started out as their own secret sales sauce — this is Close.io’s version of showing that they’ve been in moms’ kitchens and understand their needs.

After testimonial quotes from real-life happy customers, Steli brings the focus back to you. Envision your future — you’ll make better calls and emails, escape the data-entry monkey zoolife, and gain sales data insights — and here are all the details on how that all comes into existence.

Casetext

Casetext is a handy platform for legal writing, research, and publication. Their mission is to make legal knowledge and resources free and understandable. Here’s an email Casetext sent out about one of its contributors Leah Litman, who has written about retroactivity of a law affecting convictions.

Click for full email

The message describes how Leah’s Casetext piece was cited in a legal brief to the Supreme Court, providing a concrete example of the reach and impact that publishing your work on Casetext and being part of its community can have. Your words can go all the way to the top!

Instead of listing out cool, snazzy features or even a bunch of abstract benefits, Casetext succeeds in making all that come together in telling Leah’s story.

The call-to-action button is a great concrete touch, too:

Instead of something generic like “learn more” or “sign up” — it’s a specific and relevant direction: start writing!

Appcues

Appcues, a user onboarding tool, unsurprisingly has put some thought into their triggered activation emails. A few days after you sign up for the product, you get an email with the subject line “Honestly, I was blown away…”

Click for full email

The email highlights one specific company, StoryboardThat, and the specific successes — 112% increase in conversions! — they had using Appcues.

This is a story that will resonate with Appcues’s target audience: here’s a real-life small team that has to deal with many competing priorities but wanted to make their user onboarding more effective. Here is what actually happened after they starting using Appcues, including this impressive A/B test result that blew the customer away.

Their call-to-action button copy is on point too. Even though the link simply takes you into the app, the message is not about signing in or checking Appcues out. Instead, it’s about the very clearly defined goal that the reader has: increase your conversion rate.

Finally, the Appcues team includes the picture of the person featured in the story, which makes it easier to see and understand who was impacted. Aaron is a real person, very much like you, who wants to increase conversion rates without having to wrangle a bunch of code.

Telling relevant stories, showing specific examples, and using concrete language is simply part of good writing and effective communication. Still, concreteness is a remarkably helpful principle that keeps you thinking about your reader and customer’s experience. It battles against your curse of knowledge, the fact that your product or business takes up such a large part of your mind compared to a visitor or prospect, or even loyal customer, and often gets in the way of getting your actual point across.

Our emails and messages shouldn’t be death-by-information but helpful bridges and balloons that bring people up and over to where they want to go.

Do you have an example of super concrete or super abstract language in an email? Share with us in the comments