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Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling
- sp332 6y agoGood points in here, but I disagree about using a person's name as the From address. If I'm getting an email from Notion, I want it to show up as "From: Notion" in my inbox, not "From: Ivan". I have several companies that do this and I never know who the email is from, which adds some cognitive friction I don't need when triaging my inbox. You can put your name in the subject line if you want.
- MattGaiser 6y agoEspecially with all the phishing emails going around.
- pau_alcala 6y agothis is an interesting point. I think the email address matters if you expect people to answer. In the superhuman example, I know the CEO isn't sending me those emails, but I'm more likely to reply if I have a question. Palabra's onboarding emails come from my personal email address and many people reply with questions directly to me, which really helped us get immediate feedback
- sp332 6y agoSince the article is specifically about onboarding, it might not be that bad. But chances are, I'm going to forget your name about 5 minutes after this introduction, so getting future emails with your name will just confuse me.
- asplake 6y agoRight. Further to this, I consider it spammy when the same organisation uses a range of different From addresses in its mailings. I have unsubscribed from lists for this triage-hostile behaviour.
- dqv 6y agoI see it as the exact opposite. If organization sends me marketing from marketing@ and order details from orders@, I easily have a way to quickly delete or classify marketing@ as spam. I can't do that if they send everything from the same email.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoYeah, but what if they send you marketing from Ivan, and also Sara and John?
- dqv 6y agofrom:(organization) -from:(orders@organization) Select all, mark as spam, delete.
- homero 6y agoI despise people names, takes me forever to figure out who it is. I feel tricked into spending time reading into the email to figure it out.
- wtracy 6y agoI personally strongly agree, but I want to point out that HN is not a remotely representative sample of email users. Study marketing a bit, and you'll find loads of things that email power users loathe that still get an overall very positive response from the general public. Know your userbase. Cater to them, not some random people on the internet with strong opinions.
- zingermc 6y agoBy "positive response", are you saying that human "from" names yield a higher click-through rate?
- learnstats2 6y agoYes, it does. It is widely thought to be true and certainly matches my experience at statistical significance.
- zingermc 6y agoKeep in mind the adage "you get what you measure". If you optimize for CTR, you are not necessarily optimizing for user satisfaction/loyalty. Case in point: Netflix's auto-play feature used to drive me bonkers, so much that I would try other streaming services first. How could they think this feature was a good idea? The only plausible explanation I've heard is that they were optimizing for user engagement. Users click around more to prevent the video from auto playing.
- learnstats2 6y agoYou are critiquing your own question, which I was answering directly. What I said also applies to any other metric, including (for example) income generation.
- wtracy 6y agoThat, and feedback that they genuinely enjoyed things that the rest of us hate. Microsoft heard from hundreds of users who were heartbroken when Clippy was removed from Microsoft Word.
- singron 6y agoThis wouldn't be so bad if popular UIs like gmail weren't so opposed to displaying email addresses in an email client. In many places they display exclusively the name. It's very confusing, especially if the people you email have strange names for their contacts, which then get displayed in your client.
- dspillett 6y agoThis for be too: a personal name that I don't recognise is not unlikely to get your message discussed and deleted as junk if I'm scanning my mail in a rush. That and emoji in the subject line (which I assume is designed to make you stand out, but to me grates more then ALL CAPS). But I'm a grumpy old techie, how I see such things is going to differ to the general populous, so maybe a technique that puts me off gets more positive attention from more then enough others that losing me is worth it.
- thomasedwards 6y agoThe problem with everyone doing some of these tips is that I now just ignore all emails that appear to be from people instead because I don’t ever believe it’s from a real person, so unless I’m expecting an email from someone I won’t open these anymore and I just skim the subject. Not sure if people outside of the web community do this too, but probably only a matter of time if not.
- leephillips 6y agoNot just you. It’s a recipe for having your emails deleted without opening.
- bredren 6y agoI largely do the same. Mixpanel uses this technique right now. I do not think Cassie is actually trying to reach me about webinars but if you are Cassie, send me a whats up so I know. I still think trying to look like a real person probably makes me pay more attention. This definitely works if there is any "real" interaction with that person in the onboarding.
- greenshackle2 6y agoI see it as part of the arms race where people find channels or signals for communications they actually care about, then marketers discover they can get more engagement using them, and vomit their noise all over it. The problem is that the "personal e-mail" signal can be faked cheaply as they have discovered. I kind of wish e-mail worked such that anyone who isn't in my contact list has to pay me to send me an e-mail. I'm not sure what the right amount is, maybe $1. EDIT: It's also a kind of tragedy of the commons. If you're the first marketer to fake the signal it will work very well. Once everyone does it, congratulations, you've ruined it for everyone, including people who are not faking it.
- leephillips 6y agoI disagree with the premise of the article: “Every SaaS company must start their onboarding sequences with a welcome message that is sent when a user joins the platform. This is a must by now, since everyone who signs up will expect some sort of confirmation of their transaction.” These emails invariably waste my time. They repeat what the website already told me when I signed up. If I sign up for your SaaS, I expect your site to tell me what I need to know about what I can and should do next. I don’t want an email.
- duxup 6y agoAmen. It's just marketing bullet points / emotional statements about the product and so on. I just signed up. I want to use the thing, give me some tips to get started and do something productive quickly, not a link burred under marketing, straight up spell them out in the email.
- marcosdumay 6y agoHum... As an example of what the article calls "everyone", I do expect that email. I will not read it, just mark it read and archive. It is not the contents that are important, what is important is that your email is set correctly, and receiving the service's emails without problems. So, any future issue can be solved over email.
- leephillips 6y agoYou have a point there. But haven't they already sent you the confirmation email?
- coder543 6y agoThe welcome email in this context is the confirmation email.
- marcosdumay 6y agoI think the article's author didn't even think about separated onboarding and confirmation emails. He's just stating that you can use the confirmation one for onboarding too. I have seen those separated emails. I agree that they add nothing, and I imagine their conversion is much lower than a single email (they don't bother me, I'll just ignore another message). I do agree that onboarding is best done on-channel, but adding an extra link on the email you are sending anyway can only help.
- qwerty_123 6y agoI caution the use of emoji, I've seen so many stack overflow job posts with memey use of emojis and it just makes me cringe and I find it hard to take the company seriously.
- tgb 6y agoWhy can't I just disable emoji in email subjects in gmail? I'd definitely like to.
- wtracy 6y agoIf settle for just being able to disable animated emoji in the subject line. (I was shocked the first time I got spam that started playing animations before I opened it.)
- thewakalix 6y agoI never thought I'd see the lack of unicode support in my terminal as a feature...
- underdown 6y agoEmojis in subject line reliably increase open rate in my experience. Also others report the same: https://www.outreach.io/blog/will-emojis-increase-reply-rates https://www.outreach.io/blog/will-emojis-increase-reply-rate... Maybe SO emails go over the top though
- derenge 6y agoHow much did they increase your open rate? The linked report actually indicates a decrease in replies. Combined across all seven test variations, we saw a 42% decline in reply rate when the subject line featured emojis.
- underdown 6y agoTbh I've never optimized for reply rate so this could have been true for me as well. Generally selling dtc. Open rate and sales increased reliably 10-15%. Haven't done any comparable email marketing in two years so things may have changed since then and obviously my anecdata may not be true for you.
- bjt2n3904 6y agoThis is the most oddly specific lesson to learn.
- hjanssen 6y agoTo add to the points others have made: If I see an email with a name in the title I don't recognize, I instantly think it is spam. Please do not do this, it neither helps with your credibility nor does it help to build a "connection". I want to know where this email is coming from, and if I have signed up at Spotify, I expect to recieve my emails from Spotify, not Tom whoever at Spotify.
- arethuza 6y agoI really dislike emails that claim to come from a person but obviously come from an automated system - I find it remarkably dishonest. Edit: I don't mind if I think the person is even vaguely aware I exist. But an email claiming to be from an executive of some huge company saying how happy they are that I have signed up doesn't fall into that category.
- jariel 6y agoTo me, if it's a 'real person' but an automated system it's even more dishonest. The message is not coming from them. I know it's not particularly disingenuous - it's just 'marketing' but at the same time it really triggers my 'Orwellian Dystopia' concerns about the completely impersonal future where relationships are utterly commoditized and we lose the ability to distinguish between man and machine. In fact, the overly familiar tone of messages those that 'try to hard' to lack protocol bother me as well. A 'corporation' using the language of 'friendship' is ridiculous. Sadly, I think this will go on as we love to think that 'someone who uses more casual language with us must be on more familiar terms'. Frankly, I'd rather go back to proper titles. Mr. Ms. whatever. "I don't know you, you are not my friend, you cannot be familiar with me, don't tell me jokes or help me 'chillax'" is what I feel like saying.
- leetrout 6y agoAlso the odds that Ivan at Notion is using "mail.notion.so" .... umm no.
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoWhy? It's just a matter of time and scale. It's impossible to email thousands of people a personalized message. I still see it as an email from that person, assuming they wrote the template themselves. I would also expect to be able to reply directly to that person if I wanted to, though.
- emojiSpam 6y agoI have never received any important email with emoji in the subject. Actually, I find them so unprofessional that I send them straight to spam.
- OCISLY 6y agoGood point. If someone sends you valuable information, he don't have to try to steal your attention with such cheap tricks.
- scintill76 6y agoCounterpoint: eBay order updates use emoji in the subject. I don’t necessarily like it, but it could be considered important email.
- OCISLY 6y agoI don't use eBay, so I don't know how these mails looks, but I bet they treat it as a marketing opportunity.
- Izkata 6y agoNot just unprofessional, actual spam is the only place I've ever seen this. It's the clearest signal to me to delete without reading.
- detritus 6y agoPerhaps I'm showing my age here, but what the heck is 'onboarding'?
- tux3 6y agoIt's the introduction you give new people. Welcome them "on board".
- coldpie 6y ago"New potential customers," I guess. I'm familiar with onboarding as a term for what you do to new hires and was quite confused by this article until I figured out it's about marketing emails.
- detritus 6y agoThanks, both - it sounded to me too like something to do with new hires, but that didn't make a lot of sense to me in terms of a newsletter.
- wtracy 6y agoIt's primarily used in the context of reaching out to users who just signed up for a service. After they're signed up/subscribed, you send an "onboarding" email with general information on how to get started using the service, and encouraging them to do things that affect whatever KPIs your boss cares about. They can be genuinely helpful for tools that have a steep learning curve, either by serving as an entry point into the documentation or by providing contact information for support. Otherwise, at best they serve as a reminder in case you get distracted before you finish setting up your account.
- continuational 6y agoI don't want to hear from "Ivan". If you send template emails while pretending they're personal, that will come off as dishonest. If you use emoji in your communications, I will think you're not very professional. These emails tend to end up in my spam folder.
- tweetle_beetle 6y agoYour first point is a personal bugbear. Its worst form is when the tone of the email is personal (first name in title, photo of said person, signed off by said person and bonues points for graphic of hand written signature), but it comes from a no-reply address. I once received one of these after I was mistakedly billed too much for a product. The person involved had a C suite type role at an ISP. After a bit of searching, I found their personal work email address and forwarded my reply directly to that. It got a more or less instant response, roping someone in to help me and I was phoned twice by an obsequious rep afterwards to make sure I was satisfied with the outcome. All I wanted was a normal email address I could reply to and expect a response.
- wtracy 6y ago> but it comes from a no-reply address. I consider that an antipattern in and of itself. Unless you have a truly abysmal average CLV, replies should be directed to a system that first filters out (and acts on) bounce messages, simple unsubscribe requests, and obvious spam, then dumps everything else into a ticketing system. Exposing an avenue of communication (which is what email fundamentally is) then trying to pretend that it doesn't exist is just obnoxious.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Swizec 6y agoIn this thread: lots of grumpy people forgetting that if you’re on HN you are weird and not representative I email 10,000+ engineers 3x+ per week. Individually they’re all grumpy and ugh about email. En masse, only 0.01% of them unsubscribe and 24%+ read the emails. Many even email back saying how wonderful they are. And yes adding emojis to both subjects and emails themselves helps. The open and engagement rates improve. Including your name in the email gets some complaints, but open and engagement rates improve. Sending lots of [relevant] email gets some complaints, but open and engagement rates improve. At the end of the day it’s all about brand. Are you trying to look corporate bland or personal and quirky? What works depends on your target market. I wouldn’t send emojis to 50 year old bank execs. But talking to 20 and 30 year old engineers? You bet
- pau_alcala 6y agoTotally agree here, would also add that adding value to each email sent is actually the most important part. Subject lines, emojis and images improve read rates. Value is what makes people actually stay around
- OCISLY 6y ago> spam 3x+ per week > 0.01% unsub rate no way
- Finnucane 6y agoMail clients do pretty good spam filtering these days.
- peruvian 6y agoI was typing a comment but you said it best - this is yet another HN thread where people brag about how different they are and how these strategies suck when they are the way to go in the real world.
- jiux 6y agoWhile on the topic of onboarding emails and how the read focuses around early stage company development, what I would like to also see is a breakdown of lessons learned with SMTP services and how to approach for an early stage company. Anyone have any advice/recommendations/suggestions?
- marvinblum 6y agoUse a service with an API instead of SMTP directly. I like AWS SES (even if you don't use their hosting) as it is easy to integrate, fast and extremely cheap (10ct for 1k mails).
- pau_alcala 6y agowe started with Mailgun and moving to Amazon SES. We actually created Palabra to not have to deal with those services directly. If you want to try our third party tool instead of handling them yourself let me know
- michaelbuckbee 6y agoI run a SAAS and still personally (non-automated) send a welcome /check-in/onboard email to every single signup. I've sent a 1000+ in the last year. I try to make them really personalized. Like if your website is acmewidgets.com - I'll put "Acme Widget Help?" as the subject. My own takeaways: 1. Plain Text for sure 2. Super short - my standard sort of email is now about 3 sentences. 3. Ask a question - in my case there's a couple of driving reasons to sign up so I try and make sure they're doing ok. Even with all of the above I still maybe am only getting a 30% response rate.
- ghostbrainalpha 6y agoIt's interesting, I read your comment and thought your non-automated emails sounded like a time waster for you and the recipient. Then I saw that you have a Security SAAS and instantly felt different. I would love knowing there was a human I could connect with easily at your company. Definitely a smart move on your part.
- Veuxdo 6y ago30% is really, really high for responses to an onboarding email. Manually sending out each one seems like a ton of work, though. I hope you have high customer LTV.
- GordonS 6y agoThis is exactly what I do to. I get around a 15% response rate, which I'd thought was pretty good before reading your 30% - though TBH I've no idea what might be expected?
- heliodor 6y agoMy customers are software engineers. The reply rate is abysmal. Sigh.
- OCISLY 6y agoWho on Earth think onboadrding mail is a good idea? It's junk mail and nobody reads it. Never place there any important information - most users completely ignore them. The only mail I expect is email address confirmation.
- PretzelFisch 6y agoIf I buy a product it is not usefull to me. If I add a user in my org they are golden when done right. It becomes one less thing i need to demo and train a new hire right now before they can be productive.
- petercooper 6y agoThese emails are minimally styled HTML emails rather than "plain text" (in the original email text/plain sense). If there are links using normal text (rather than just autolinked URLs) or a logo, it's HTML – so deliverability or privacy arguments based around being "plain text" don't entirely hold up. Now, do I think there are accessibility and privacy benefits to be had by sending truly plain text email? Absolutely. No open trackers possible, no potential for HTML related vulnerabilities, no dangerous elements to filter..
- diarrhea 6y agoIn an ideal world, I would like to write plain Markdown and send an email off like that, with conversion to HTML happening in the background. A suitable Thunderbird addon for this [1] seems abandoned. Formatting HTML is a real struggle for me in Thunderbird's WYSIWYG editor. On the other hand, using plain-text lacks in readability (lists, short links instead of full URLs, headers, quotes, ...). [1]: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/markdown-here-xul/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/markd...
- petercooper 6y agoIt's more for newsletters than normal day to day email but Swizec Teller (a regular here) made https://techletter.app/ https://techletter.app/ which may be of use to some with Markdown to email needs. It even drags in tweets, code, and so forth and renders it without you doing anything.
- mottosso 6y agoI've been using "Markdown Here" for the past few years and live in this ideal world already. It's great, you should come visit. :)
- mtlynch 6y ago+1 for Markdown-Here. It works well enough for me despite it being abandoned.
- 6y ago
- Aardwolf 6y ago> Emojis in the subject (use with caution) The only emojis I see in subject lines occur in emails in the spam box What is the point of an "onboarding" email by the way? If you signed up on a website, can't that website show this info instead? Receiving an email I didn't ask for (other than functional ones like verification, pdf receipt, ...) after signing up for a service also is spam to me. Especially if they come with some delay, or it start to become multiple ones Is that not so for other people?
- bonoboTP 6y agoI really hate these cheesy lines that are "excellent" according to the article, like: - "You had enough fluff marketing content and so did we. So the absofreakinlutely BEST thing you could do right now..." - "Writing this from my couch at home, hoping to find you safe and well at yours. It's been a busy summer! I wanted to share more about out 2.9 release..." No, just no. Leave me alone, we aren't friends, you did not write this to me personally. When I read such text I am mentally bracing myself and putting up my defenses because we are at war. You are fighting in the arms race in the attention economy at my expense. This kind of email is like mimicry in the animal kingdom. You are faking the appearance of a mail from a friend when it's a business. It's nasty, parasitic and off-putting. But maybe it's a cultural difference. Perhaps American culture is more receptive to this. But in most European cultures politeness requires a certain distance and being overly enthusiastically friendly makes us immediately think you are a scammer (in real life too). So pay attention to local cultural customs because these kinds of fake-cheerful-friendly-informal mails don't work everywhere.
- tlogan 6y agoI do not think this is ‘American thing’. I think this is unique for ‘hipster start ups’ (not sure how to define them, but I can recognize one when I see one). For me, messages like this resonate like ‘we are cool and do not use us if you need us to run your business’.
- pau_alcala 6y agoThis is a great insight, our users are mostly american and they are pretty receptive to cheesy lines. I personally smile even though I know it's automated, just appreciate the creativity i guess? But I hadn't really thought about how these would sound for european readers. Will definitely keep that in mind
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoI'm American and agree with the GP 110%. If I get an email like that, not only do I delete it, but I'm less likely to read your future emails. I think it is a California-centric "it's all good" vibe. Not all of America has California culture.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoI don't see any data in the article to backup these "lessons learned." Seems like you just chose to write whatever you think makes a good marketing email without any data.
- cipherboy 6y agoSince 'pau_alcala is here, what does this mean? > "Zest win the contest of better subjects seding thing like: " It just doesn't parse for me. Perhaps: > "Zest wins the contest for better subjects, such as:" But even that sounds a little weird?
- pau_alcala 6y agoit does sound weird, we'll look into that. Thanks!
- jrochkind1 6y ago> It’s flattering to receive a direct message from a co-founder, it also gives the impression of commitment from the very roots of the company. Really? Most people don't realize that the email can be configured to appear to be from anyone and the co-founder was not actually personally involved in sending it to you? Or is the suggestion it has a psychological effect despite knowing it's kind of artificial? Could be. Always just strikes me as kind of fake and manipulative, but i may not be typical. Now, if I replied, and got a personalized response from the co-founder, that might see like flattering commitment. Until/unless I found out it wasn't from the cofounder at all , just someone signing their name.
- asveikau 6y agoAs I skimmed this I thought about reading text on my phone. When there is no formatting, the text flows pretty well. There aren't obnoxious colors or flashy imagery and the phone's dark mode gets respected. So, in our increasingly mobile-centric life, I think that HTML-less or minimal-HTML is probably a better reading experience. That said, most people probably don't sit down to read text in emails most of the time, especially from a business.
- olah_1 6y agoAre there personal email clients that send plain text instead of html emails? Perhaps the iOS mail app is one of the only ones?
- toast0 6y agoYou can configure most of them to send plain text, yes. It's probably not the default of course, but even Outlook can do it (most of the time).
- dawnerd 6y agoI immediately delete + unsubscribe & sometimes report as spam any onboarding emails I get. If your product is so difficult to use that you have to keep giving me hints every week you have a problem. I don't mind being auto subscribed if the only emails I get are major updates on the product itself, as long as these are not a weekly thing.
- Waterluvian 6y agoPlease DO NOT send me emails with “a name and a face” if it isn’t from that person manually. I see through it and it makes me think you think I’m stupid and easy to manipulate. Please. For the love of god. Just start being honest with your customers.