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To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)
- mesaframe 6y agoWill this work for freelancing proposal? Will this work for about/cover letter/bio?
- JimBlackwood 6y agoI personally tend to write very short, to the point Bio/Cover Letters. I feel like I have had good experiences with job applications as a result. I have only had 3 serious applications (and been accepted for all), so I do not have much experience. I do think it fits me as a person too. Short and to the point over digital communication - doesn’t shut up outside of it.
- harryf 6y agoYes and yes, so long as you link to more info. It’s an attention economy
- EGreg 6y agoA/B test it L0L
- echopom 6y ago> Will this work for freelancing proposal? Will this work for about/cover letter/bio? Probably not , Gokan is specialized in "DevTools" / "Tech" industry. I think this type of message appeal specifically to Developer. As a developer I really prefer those one-liner intro rather than "Story Telling" type of welcome.
- gk1 6y agoIn my experience, clear and concise writing is usually better. My own consulting agreements are fit on just 1–2 pages.
- mepiethree 6y agoIMO, a brief, thoughtful note is one of the highest-value things that a candidate can do. Hiring for a small startup, I am looking for connection. So when I review job applications, I will always read a three-sentence cover letter that is tailored to my company, but never read a page-long cover letter that is obviously copy-pasted. So if someone wanted to get a job at Kevala, it would behoove them to spend 5 minutes reading our website.
- Androider 6y agoIf you add a one paragraph or even one sentence cover letter that is unique to the company your applying for, you'll already be ahead of 95% of the other applicants in my experience. Even when we state that a cover letter is required, the number of people who actually supply one is minuscule. It does effectively filter out people who can't read or follow instructions though.
- iflp 6y ago> Even if you follow all the best practices around emails, genuinely want to help them, and spend a long time writing a personalized email, people still don’t respond. How do you write a personalized email for a new user?
- gsoto 6y agoHi, ${user_name}! How do you like our product? We are working hard on ${first_clicked_link}. BTW, ${user_browser} rules!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mepiethree 6y agoIf they're using a company email, maybe read their company website for 1 minute? "Netlify has proven exceptionally useful for innovative energy companies like yourself and {other energy industry client}"
- leetcrew 6y agounless you're going to have an actual human do it, I think it might be better to just not try. I get tons of messages on linkedin from recruiters who say something like "wow impressive profile! based on your experience at {current role}, we think you'd be a great fit for company XYZ". except company XYZ is always some web service company in a totally different domain. my current job is working on a niche desktop c++ product. if I'm a "great fit", so is anyone else with a pulse and a cs degree. if I get a generic message saying "hey I'm recruiting for company XYZ, here's what we do", I might respond if it sounds interesting. I'm definitely not going to respond if you make it obvious that a bot scraped my profile and didn't understand anything about it.
- stareatgoats 6y agoBoy are people stressed nowadays.
- EGreg 6y agoMaybe if you made it a two word email and removed the signature it would get 16x the engagement. Or if you had an empty email and put the question in the subject you’d get 32x engagement. Attention spans these days are terrible.
- gk1 6y agoHey that's actually an interesting idea. :) I'm not working with Netlify at the moment but they should try it.
- mepiethree 6y agoTwo word email: Subject: Hey Body: Whaddya want?
- EGreg 6y ago
- fl0wenol 6y agolol
- wilsonbright 6y agoHa ha. This is the shortest!
- mennis16 6y agoI think it would be hilarious to get a company email that uses only the subject line. I miss getting "announcement EOM" emails (EOM indicating the end of the subject is actually the end of the message).
- nisse72 6y agoSend nothing and every recipient replies! It can't get any better.
- 0898 6y ago> Attention spans these days are terrible. The most popular podcast in the world lasts for 3 hours. I don't think it's true that attention spans are getting shorter – long form content has never been more popular.
- rubyron 6y agoIt wasn’t just the length of the email body they changed in the 3rd variant... they also changed the subject line from “Welcome to Netlify” to “Question...”, but that change wasn’t mentioned as a potential contributor to the good result. I’m betting that change resulted in a big increase in open rate. I’m conditioned to ignore “Welcome to AcmeCo”-style emails.
- gk1 6y agoI think so too. The second test had the same subject line in both emails, though, and the body length was the only variant.
- taylorcooney 6y agoAgreed. Extending on /u/formerly_proven point, I think the third variation - where the subject changes - makes the email feel like it's coming from a real human even more.
- TameAntelope 6y agoFWIW I'm also conditioned to ignore emails that are vague. Honestly, at this point I assume any unsolicited communication is a spear phishing attempt until proven otherwise.
- janwillemb 6y agoI've noticed this too in emails to coworkers. If the email is long enough, they just skip it to "read it later". This is quite frustrating, because sometimes you just _have_ to communicate some more words.
- skj 6y agoOne of my managers gave me some guidelines here. If it's more than 100 words, cap it at 100 and schedule a meeting. It clearly is information-dense to the degree where a quick question/answer session will be helpful. From my own experience, I make sure to never ask more than one question in an email. If you ask more, people will answer the first and ignore the rest.
- scott_s 6y agoI still find it useful to write those emails, even if I'm asking to talk to someone. The email serves as an agenda, it forces me to reason through the issue, and it serves as a long-term record of the issue. But the request for the meeting should come first.
- R0b0t1 6y agoI find reading the emails preferential to a meeting myself, but I guess a meeting is sometimes the only way to get people to pay attention.
- Spooky23 6y agoIt depends on the context, the workplace, and how you do it. An agenda is an agenda, which is different than an argument/position that would be in an email. Usually when I get something like that, it's intended to be an "anchor" or written record of something that the other party wants. That triggers more bullshit email, as now a more formal artifact of whatever conversation happens in the meeting is needed.
- scott_s 6y agoLong emails should still have short opening paragraphs. No more than three sentences, one or two preferred. Basic context ("We still need to figure out waffles"), people's names if it's a referral or a request for someone else ("Jane said you know waffle batter the best"), and most importantly, if you're asking a question, end with a question mark ("What waffle batter recipe should we use?"). The rest of the email can then be long, but at the end, always restate the question.
- formerly_proven 6y agoThe shorter the email the more believable it becomes that it was specifically written by a human directed at you, not a mass-used template. If you feel like you get an automatic email, you're not going to respond, because you don't want to talk to a computer. If, on the other hand, you can suspend your disbelief and entertain the fiction that someone named "Valerie" at E-Corp personally contacted you, you are infinitely more likely to respond. Edit: "Welcome to ${service name}" is also a poor subject line if you expect an answer, because the subject line literally says "this is an automated email to let you know that your click on the register button has been indeed processed correctly. You probably have to click on the big colorful button in the body of this email to activate your account."
- cnity 6y agoThat's one thing, but another thing that is not listed as one of the possible reasons is simply that the original email is just verbose and _bad_. Imagine a person in real life gave you that spiel, of course you'd be put off.
- gk1 6y ago> the original email is just verbose and _bad_ I agree 100%. The thing is, a lot of welcome emails look like that. It's bad but not uncommon.
- ponker 6y agoWhen I had a startup I did personally email every user until we got to about 10,000 or so. Didn’t use a template, fired off a new email every time.
- lucaswb 6y agoI also wonder how much of this is that shorter emails look more like a real person. I have to deal with enough spam and try-my-product emails that I delete emails at the first sent of "sales". I would be more inclined to the shorter email which looks more like a person actually typed it.
- lpolovets 6y agoI had a similar experience at LinkedIn in its early days. Back when we had maybe 500k members, we A/B tested the hell out of our invite messages. These messages were critical because no one had heard of LinkedIn at the time (~2004ish) and no one knew what social networking was or why they would want to sign up. And getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us. We A/B tested many invite email formats: * A paragraph explaining social networking and another paragraph explaining LinkedIn. * A few paragraphs on the benefits of joining LinkedIn. * A few paragraphs explaining that a LinkedIn invitation was special because it meant that the inviter trusted and respected the invitee and wanted to stay in touch professionally. * A tiny blurb along the lines of "I’d like to add you to LinkedIn network." Despite my expectations that one of the explanatory messages would be best, the short, vague blurb outperformed by a huge margin.
- dkersten 6y ago> getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us So important that you resorted to every dark pattern in the book, it seems. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I don't know any of my tech friends who haven't had a bad experience with linkedin tricking them into spamming invites or similar.
- lpolovets 6y agoI'm very frustrated by dark patterns, too. IIRC those came well after I left the company in 2005, and I'm disappointed they're there. I think trying to get users to spam invites is especially annoying and lame: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/953059635522502656 https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/953059635522502656
- dkersten 6y agoI'm glad you agree and weren't part of it! Apologies for suggesting you were.
- GlennS 6y agoSomewhat surprised Microsoft haven't done something about this since they bought LinkedIn. It surely doesn't reflect well on their brand. Are people at Microsoft OK with working alongside people who do this scummy stuff?
- gsoto 6y agoI feel like many times it's not that the message doesn't get read but that it doesn't persuade the recipient to make the time to write a response. Shortening the text not only transmits the message more efficiently, it also allows the recipient to feel comfortable with writing a one-liner reply. You are actually lowering the threshold over which the person gains the will to start writing a response.
- davnicwil 6y agoI've recently launched https://boxci.dev https://boxci.dev and have a 'leave your email if you have questions' box on the landing page. People have been leaving their emails, but surprisingly, even though the intent is very clear (I think), almost nobody has actually replied when I've emailed to open the conversation. The kinds of response rate percentages (<<10%) talked about in the article very much resonate! My opening email is nothing like as long as the first one in this article, but it does contain a generic intro paragraph (thanks for leaving your email, I'm the founder, etc) which I include just for context and politeness, but which I've realised from reading this article may be causing people to just stop reading, thinking that it's an auto-generated response. I'll try some one liners from now on and see how it works out!
- knownhoot 6y agoI wonder how many of the users that complete the form mistake it for a newsletter subscribe, as that's commonly where subscribe widgets live.
- davnicwil 6y agoYeah, great point, I think this might be the case. I'd been thinking perhaps a chat widget or link to a slack channel or something might be more useful, and clear in its purpose.
- gk1 6y agoRelevant for you: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/stop-asking-me-to-sign-up/ https://www.gkogan.co/blog/stop-asking-me-to-sign-up/
- davnicwil 6y agoThanks, that is very helpful!
- recursivedoubts 6y agoInteresting.
- ricardobeat 6y agoWhat about the effects on branding / user perception of the message? While the first short email feels ok, the straight-shooter 'Hi, I can see you signed up, what do you want from us?' version feels awkwardly impolite. I find it still obvious that it is an automated message and the attempt at 'being human' makes it even less appealing. This kind of metric chasing most likely results in dark patterns and subpar experiences.
- gk1 6y agoEvery company should find their balance between brand and optimization. Amazon will implement practically any change that shows an improvement to some KPI, while Nike would rather preserve their brand image at the cost of, say, lower checkout rates.
- goldemerald 6y agoThese results seems quite suspicious to me. In all instances the author only received 1 email in reply. If you run these results through an A/B testing calculator, they aren't statistically significant. That's even the case for the 1% conversion compared to the shortest email 8% conversion. I like the thesis statement that short emails convert users better, but the experimental results certainly aren't strong enough to support that claim. I'd love to see an updated version of the article now that 3 years have passed and see what the conversion rate is.
- leegraham 6y agoMaybe I misunderstood the article, but my impression is that the ‘ 4% (1 in 25 users)‘ is just to make the percentages more understandable and the author didn’t only send the email to 100/25/12 users.
- gk1 6y agoThat's correct. I'm editing it to say "1 of every 25 users" to make this less confusing. The actual sample size was quite large.
- stuff4ben 6y agoLet me give you some advice...talk less, smile more, don't let them know what you're against or what you're for. Until that is you get their attention, then make the deal. Cuz if you want to get ahead, fools who run their mouths off wind up dead (broke).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cutemonster 6y ago> don't let them know what you're against or what you're for Why not?
- owaty 6y agoIt's a quote from Hamilton, the musical.
- cutemonster 6y agoThanks for explaining. (Here I found some people's thoughts about that phrase: https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/5y81cw/talk_less_smile_more_dont_let_them_know_what/ https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/5y81cw/talk_less_sm... )
- gre 6y agoThis will work until everyone is sick of getting short emails asking for feedback.
- epistasis 6y agoMy thoughts exactly... and also it will become harder to distinguish emails at a glance. A quick win for the first few spammers that do this, with the end result of degrading the overall utility of email for everyone.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- synlatexc 6y agoKey point here is that most people fail to consider the reader.
- daguar 6y agoThis is neat! That said, I don't think the statistical size makes this a conclusion you can draw: - "a reply rate of 1% (1 in 100 users)" - "a reply rate of 4% (1 in 25 users)" - "a reply rate of 8% (1 in 12 users)" Sorry to say but... we really can't draw a conclusion like this strictly from these kinds of numbers. Totally possible these conclusions ARE true, but I'd test at a bigger scale and/or with qualitative research with users.
- chiefalchemist 6y agoOne of life's absolute truths: "You don't learn when you're the one doing the talking." I cringe when I hear someone talking about a fancy over-designed email. Where the content is all about the brand and close to zero empathy for the receiver. It's 2020, yes?
- d23 6y agoHa, I'm sure if this became widespread, you'd start seeing the opposite, where people only expect longform emails to come from humans.
- overcast 6y agoThis applies to internal email as well, no on reads your essays. Keep it short, bullet points if possible, and don't request responses to more than one or two questions at a time. Seriously though, no one reads your email.
- khazhoux 6y agoThis applies to internal emails, especially requests to management chain. Whenever possible, aim to keep emails to two lines/sentences max, and put the request always first.
- codingdave 6y agoThis depends on your management. If they trust you, and typically give you what you need, sure.. request first. But if they are more the kind where it is like pulling teeth to make changes or get more resources, then no - first you need to establish the reasons behind your need, explain the negative impact to the team, propose a solution, and explain how it will benefit the broader organization. You still need to do that all concisely, which is a challenge. I've used that pattern in emails quite a bit since our company was bought a few years ago, and it works far more reliably than when I just send off a short request.
- khazhoux 6y agoSure, context matters. But an important lesson I learned only after 10+ years in the industry is that senior execs slice their time and mind-share very thinly. As a very junior engineer I would send out paragraphs explaining the background of an issue, discussions so far, proposals, etc, and sometimes I wouldn't even have an actual request. And then wonder why I got no reply.
- jmilloy 6y agoRight, so the way to get more replies is to convince the reader that they will get a useful answer if they do reply. One thing you can do is not bury the request (the offer to help) at the end of the message. Another thing you can do is make your automated message seem like it isn't automated, and a shorter message and better subject helps. But I wonder if it wouldn't be better to say "Yes, this is an automated message, but we read and respond to every response". Why trick your users when you can just tell them the truth?
- carabiner 6y agoTo get more responses to your surveys, make your surveys shorter. The massive response rate will make up for the loss in granularity; most of the granularity is not actionable anyway. The tricky thing is that some huge, in-depth survey looks better to your manager, whereas the simple one looks lazily developed.
- jtth 6y agoIf the response to a question isn't actionable, it's a bad question, not a problem with the question's granularity.
- danenania 6y agoA corollary is that if you do have to write a long email, try to start it off with a short, 1-2 sentence intro paragraph that piques interest and pulls people in to the rest of the text. Even better, try to keep all the paragraphs as short as possible. Each paragraph has two jobs: to convey some information, and to convince the reader to keep going to the next paragraph. Done right, you can get someone to read a long text without it feeling like they read a lot, because you kept them curious about what comes next the whole way through. Kurt Vonnegut was a master of this technique. The vast majority his paragraphs are very short. It's almost like prose poetry. You (semi-consciously) keep thinking "I'll just read a few more lines" until you look up after 4 hours and realize you're just a few pages from the end of a 300 page novel. So it goes.
- Theodores 6y agoWell, I read your entire comment! Seems to work nicely.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoThat's also how most newspaper articles are written. Short paragraphs, often one sentence each. Also, they're top-loaded with all the essential info, followed by a long tail of lesser details as the article progresses (this tail can be cut short in case of space constraints).
- meristem 6y agoThis is called “inverted pyramid”, use for journalism and other kinds of “show me” writing.
- Guest19023892 6y agoI know I have a difficult time responding to long emails. When someone (friend or business) sends me a short email, there's a good chance I'll reply right away if it'll only take a minute. Now, if they send a long email, well, I'm not interested in stopping everything and spending 15 minutes writing it out. So, it goes on the to-do list for later. This keeps getting pushed back again and again, and sometimes never gets done. I remember when I used online dating sites this was also the case. If I wrote someone a long message, asking a number of questions, it would rarely get a reply. However, if I literally wrote one or two sentences with a single, easy to answer question, I'd get a reply 50% of the time.
- Pxtl 6y agoNow that everybody's remote, I think there's an important conversation about respecting the reader's time that needs to happen. 1) Brevity. 2) Get your terminology perfect. Asynchronous "who's on first" sucks. 3) When discussing anything on the web, start with a hyperlink. I can't see your screen, I can't scroll or inspect your screenshots. Expecting the reader to hunt down the resource that you had one ctrl-C, ctrl-V away is rude.
- cutemonster 6y ago> Asynchronous "who's on first" What does that mean? "On first"?
- frosted-flakes 6y ago"Who's on First" is a well-known comedy skit about baseball. Who is on first base, What is on second, and I Don't Know is on third. https://youtu.be/kTcRRaXV-fg https://youtu.be/kTcRRaXV-fg
- digitalsushi 6y agoThank you for explaining that. I speak English as a first language and it parsed perfectly well without knowing this reference, and to that end, parsed perfectly incorrectly.
- Pxtl 6y agoI just mean the repeated loops of miscommunication based on the fundamental misunderstanding of a single word. "Who's on first?" is a comedy sketch where two men are discussing a man named "who" and various other people with misleading names. I've run into many times where a person has said a similar but distinct term - like they said "repo" when they mean "branch" and then burn 5 minutes of time while two people are confused by the fact that nothing the other person says makes sense. It feels like the latency-time of writing makes shaking this mess out take 5X longer than spoken conversation.,
- 6y ago
- kerkeslager 6y agoThe opposite is also true: to get fewer, higher quality replies, say more. Even if people do respond with low quality responses, it's easier to filter them out because they say things that make no sense if they read the entirety of what they are responding to. Long-form articles posted to HN are a great example.
- tijuco2 6y agoThis article led me to another one about email designing which states that plain text emails get more clicks than those with fancy templates. I can relate to that. Every time a see a see an email in plain text I stop to check what it is.
- jjclarkson 6y agotldr: people don't read lengthy text.
- criddell 6y agoIf I'm not expecting the email I generally won't read it unless I know the person who wrote it. It's part of the reason I think the mailing list gold rush has peaked and will probably decline. I don't know many people that want more email.
- austinl 6y agoThe most effective recruiting emails I receive (in terms of how likely I am to reply) are: * Plain text * Directly addressed to me from name@company.com * 3-4 sentences max, slightly personalized * Optionally have a link to the company career page/job listing (better if the raw link is pasted instead of embedded in text, to save me the time hover-checking it). I'm more likely to reply because it feels like there's a real person on the other end that "hand-wrote" this email. Not some amorphous system that crawled my LinkedIn and sent me an automated message. Kudos to recruiters that are doing this — doing the thing that doesn't scale to get an edge.
- austinl 6y agoI should add that the key to good writing (in most domains) is to be concise. Editing is primarily about cutting what's unnecessary, but it's often treated like the part where some words are swapped out with fancier ones (e.g. "use" to "utilize"). I'm a big fan of PG's essay, Write Like You Talk, on this topic. http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
- mekoka 6y agoI suspect two things to be at work here (among possibly many): - First, reciprocity. If you send me an email with a one-liner, I will feel that replying in kind would be adequate. A verbose email on the other hand, may have the opposite effect of creating a feeling that I should also be more detailed (which you may not even need). My response might be to set your email aside with the purpose of addressing it later when I have more time (we all know that famously elusive promise of a future that never materializes). - The second point is slightly in line with the previous, but different. The length of the message can be used to estimate the cost of a conversation. A short message can be perceived to announce a one-off (cheap) exchange, whereas a verbose message may seem like the beginning of a more involved (expensive) one where if I engage, you will ask even more from me (how much exactly, nobody knows). That uncertainty is uncomfortable enough that I may not want to respond at all.
- dutchoven 6y agoNice!This is insightful and actionable. This reminded me of Scott Adams' advice on writing too: https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/08/22/the-day-you-became-a-better-writer-2nd-look/ https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/08/22/the-day-you-became...
- ternaus 6y agoEvery book that about better writing that I read, talks about this. Cut all the clutter, use simpler words, be personal. Do not write in a way that you do not talk. For example, first few chapters of the book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53343.On_Writing_Well https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53343.On_Writing_Well talk in details on the topic.
- meristem 6y agoThe issue of “use simpler words” is important: average reading age in U.S. is 7th grade. I have seen suggestions that indicate 5th grade reading level is the best benchmark to use.
- javier123454321 6y agoImagine if they just wrote "sup?"
- rajekas 6y agoI want to talk about the opposite problem - I routinely get 'personalized' emails from the founder/CTO/VP for awesome sauce/ saying "Hey X, I noticed you were able to turn on the light saber but never signed up for a friendly battle with D. Vader. Hit reply to this email if you want to learn how to do so. We read and respond to every email from our Jedi customers." And if I like the service but find some aspect of it annoying, I spend half an hour composing a thoughtful response to said email. Nine times out of ten it's crickets. Of course it was a mass email sent to zillions of budding saber rattlers but the lack of acknowledgement, let alone a proper reply, sours me on the service for ever.
- the_goku 6y agosure
- thesz 6y agoThe converse is also true. Say more to have less replies. When writing business email, be an epistolary writer. Imagine what you vis-a-vis will feel or do or need at the moment they receive your letter and address that. Basically, to have less replies is to save time for you and your correspondence. They will not take [1] their time answering with questions and you will have more time not answering their mail. This is where programming (and business) needs empathy in full. [1] I thought about using "waste" there but declined that after some consideration. They will not waste their time creating a reply to you - because they'll show you your shortcomings. But they will be more productive in case you hit all the spots and your email does not need to be answered.
- dennisgorelik 6y ago1) Netlify traffic dropped 4x in May 2020 [1] 2) Email - is very small part of Netlify traffic (0.99%). 3) $97.1M funding. Last round - $53M on Mar 4, 2020 [2] [1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/netlify.com https://www.similarweb.com/website/netlify.com [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organizations/funding_total/netlify https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...
- chimen 6y agoI'm one of those that dropped and moved to Firebase. The monthly payments were topping somewhere at $130 for a static website with 700-800 daily visitors and Netlify was starting to corner me into paying extra for every little detail possible. I clearly felt that onboarding was off and it's time to milk every cent.
- lebaux 6y agoFunnily enough, they slashed their prices 3 days ago. https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/07/21/netlify-expands-pricing-options-more-value-for-developers-and-enterprise-teams/ https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/07/21/netlify-expands-pric...
- kyle_morris_ 6y agoHas there been an analysis of comment length and replies/upvotes? I've got to assume the length of your comment correlates with engagement.
- owaty 6y agoI would find it quite annoying to get any of those emails. When I give you my email, it's not because I actually want to hear from you; it's because you've made it the only — or the least shady — way to sign up. I do not want to hear from you or answer your questions, especially before I've decided that I like your product and care about it. So any such email I immediately mark as junk, and the fact that you sent it to me will go the "cons" column when evaluating your product vs the competitors.
- chimen 6y agoLife must be really hard if you get to that point where a welcome email coming from a service you signed up for a trial is so "annoying" that you "immediately mark as junk".
- Shorn 6y agoI really want to do this. But considering my product is effectively a service to help deal with unsolicited mail - sending unsolicited email about on-boarding feels wrong. I decided not to do it (after sending one, doh >.<). After sending that first one, I thought about it and I don't really like receiving unsolicited on-boarding messages. Though I am going to build something into my on-boarding process so that people can opt-in for these.