10 ms·

Writing Effective Welcome Emails

132 points by veesahni 13y ago

veesahni 13y ago
OP here. I try to establish "first contact" as soon as possible as it helps identify gaps in the product & helps answer the question "What should I work on today?" .. What else works well for increasing early feedback?
- dreen 13y ago
  I find this generally helpful and I like the attitude of these emails, but you are making a massive mistake that every single one of those websites which do the same thing make as well - you don't provide a clear and quick way to be removed from your mailing list. This should be in every email, a simple link or even asking to reply with the word "unsubscribe" in the subject. If you don't do this a lot of people are going to think you're spamming them.
bdunn 13y ago
Great post. I recently rewrote Planscope's welcome email (original here: http://copy-cat.co/blog/a-followup-email-that-actually-works/ http://copy-cat.co/blog/a-followup-email-that-actually-works...), and this time around really emphasized point #9 of yours: providing onboarding tips. If you don't have a big, fat textarea on your cancellation page that asks people why they're canceling, stop whatever you're doing and spend 30 minutes adding it. Once you have enough cancellation data, you should know why a lot of people who sign up for a trial cancel within the first few days. Recycle that feedback directly into your welcome email (and in-app onboarding), and aim to eliminate as many confusion points as possible while continuing to reinforce your product benefits. For the curious, here's the new email template I'm using: http://glui.me/?i=h5f7alhn92c131t/2013-05-07_at_9.52.24_AM.png/ http://glui.me/?i=h5f7alhn92c131t/2013-05-07_at_9.52.24_AM.p...
- cmadan 13y ago
  I was about to post the copycat link but you beat me to it. :) We've modeled the ClinchPad (my startup) welcome email pretty much on the original Planscope email and it has been very, very successful in getting responses compared to the previous welcome email.
- PebblesRox 13y ago
  You have an infestation of apostrophes in some of your plurals! I wouldn't want someone to stop taking you seriously because of a few typos (you have "Monday's" and "customer's" instead of "Mondays" and "customers").
  - bdunn 13y ago
    Good point! Thanks. Serves me right for writing them in a bar in the center of a Vegas casino :-)
    - michaelbuckbee 13y ago
      I can't find the article now, but I'm positive I have seen cases of higher open/click rates in emails with grammatical errors as it seems more "human" and less a template.
philhippus 13y ago
I agree that where possible one should be as personal as possible in email correspondence, but this does not scale well. If you start getting 15 (that's fifteen, not fifteen thousand)or more signups per day, being personal approaches a full time job. I suppose the crux of the matter is honesty. If you try to automate individualised emails, that comes off as a bit sleazy and 'markety'. In this case I think it would be of net benefit to make an auto response email read like an auto response email, in the same spirit as you do with the personal hand written versions.
- veesahni 13y ago
  The only part that isn't automatable (and therefore scalable) is adding something unique in the email. Skip that part and it scales fine. One approach I've been thinking of is to have the system automatically send the email but have a mechanism in place to selectively disable for single email. This would allow me to be more personal where desired but still have a decent default being sent out in within the ideal window.
  - timjahn 13y ago
    Exactly. We do this with matchist (http://matchist.com/talent http://matchist.com/talent). We're not trying to be sleazy, as the GP suggests. Instead, we're trying to be as personable as possible while at the same time, growing the business in a healthy way and providing more value for all our customers.
    - philhippus 13y ago
      Hi there [enter your mark's name here] old friend...is what I refer to as 'sleazy'. A strong term I admit, but if you are going to send me an auto response, don't pretend like we're close buddies. I would respect more something like 'You are the 159th signup we had today, send an email to [a real person] to request support.' Perhaps I am just an outlier.
      - eropple 13y ago
Alekanekelo 13y ago
Thanks for the post. They are simple but extremely helpful and not always apparent tips. Courtesy and personal conversation gets you a long way.
deepak-kumar 13y ago
Being a business development guy I have seen a pattern that personally written email will get you a positive response rather than a formal HTML template email which people tend to ignore without even reading it. Very well summarized article. Thanks for the share.
- veesahni 13y ago
  I find that I barely skim heavy branded emails thinking it's just marketing stuff. Plain email always gets more interest from me. On that note, this is something I also considered heavily when building Supportfu - all outbound replies mimic a traditional modern email client, graphical branding isn't even an option.
dendory 13y ago
Every web site I sign up to these days, I'm 100% certain that from that point forward I will now be spammed by them on a regular basis. It's a simple fact of the modern web now and I despise it. But when those emails look like this one, I hate them even more. Why? Because a normal form spam mail is easy to recognize. I can hit the spam button in under a second. But when they use my first name, sound all happy and cheery, and talk like they're my best friend, I have to actually read the first sentence to see that it's spam. It not only takes me longer, but it makes them seem even worse. To me an email like that doesn't tell me they are more interested to 'engage', but instead that they want to trick people to read them. You know what I want? For them to never send me any email unless I specifically request it.
- timjahn 13y ago
  Here's the problem: it works. Email is still the most effective way of reaching people on the Internet.
  - larrys 13y ago
    Truth is a certain amount of spam is like a vital sign. If you log in and you have no spam you have to wonder if there is a problem with your email server (if you run one) or your email provider.
- jdmaresco 13y ago
  I feel this way with respect to sites that I am forced to sign up for just to view the demo. Sites that I will never use again ... I don't want them being my best friend yet. If I've tried the demo and I am actually signing up to use your site, this type of email would be tolerable, but again, I generally don't want to engage with the company unless I have an issue. The only time I can see this being welcome to me is in a B2B context where I have signed a longer-term contract for a solution that my business will need support for.
- monsterix 13y ago
  > I have to actually read the first sentence to see that it's spam. I second that. In fact I lost my primary Gmail account recently to unsolicited mail, by signing up with just one wrong guy. Started receiving roughly 600 junk daily in my inbox starting from (1) insurance schemes from big banks to (2) UK LOTTERY from our Nigerian brothers. Betweeen (1) and (2) above, I must say, I did have to actually read first few sentences of (2) to decide that it was spam. That's so true, and scary at that. I guess, this problem actually stems from the fact that by design email is vulnerable. And that we're forced to keep our email address a secret and share it very carefully - like using simple obscurity [username at servicename dot com] type of stuff... but this is not enough. This model also makes spam filtering a costly affair for the service provider. I wonder how much additional cost Google has to bear to filter spam and malicious? Have seen it often that flooding continues and continues until the user is forced to change his/her email address and start all over again. It's no wonder that over 97% of global email is unwanted [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam
helipad 13y ago
These emails work staggeringly well. Most responses are "I'm OK thanks", but people think they're genuine enough to respond to. Even when automated, I've still seen many tech founders, nevermind lay users, responding to these as if they've been personally touched.
- wilfra 13y ago
  The 'tech founders' are likely to be responding to see what happens next, because their intrigued by the idea - not because 'they've been personally touched'. Source: I reply to all of these for exactly that reason.
  - fyi80 13y ago
    I love it. Founders sending fake-sincere emails to collect user data. Founder sending fake-sincere replies to collect business data.
larrys 13y ago
This is good advice. We've been sending emails like this for a long time. The method is fairly low tech. Pull list of new customers > file.txt and then newcustomer.sh < file.txt Most importantly though a few points. Even if you aren't doing a personal email (because it might not scale), even if it's not suppose to be personal make sure to have it come from a real person where if someone has an issue they feel that if they write back a real person will read what they say. Of course if you have 29 million customers this might not apply (say free product) but then again you probably won't be reading HN right now anyway. Separately, nothing is a bigger turn off (to me) that getting a letter from a company appearing to care but not being signed by anyone other than "support team" or being signed by a person who has a non person sounding email address.
nixy 13y ago
I appreciate the body text of his e-mail, it does feel personal and engaging. However, I wonder if I would have gotten as far as reading the body of an e-mail had it come with the subject line "SupportFu is going to change your life - let me show you how." The subject just reeks of spam. A better way of structuring the subject line to get my attention would be something a bit less "Enlarge your penis - let me show you how"-ish and a bit more along the lines of "On using our tool" or "SupportFu introduction." They might not be as striking as far as subjects go, but I would not be as quick to dismiss them as spam.
alan_cx 13y ago
There is good advice there for many other applications, like writing to a bank or public official.
abraxasz 13y ago
I have never answered this type of email. Why? Because at this stage, I don't know your product, and I don't want you to annoy me (you may not think it's annoying, but really, it is). That being said, I sent spontaneous feedback emails exactly twice: - The first was to the guy who wrote the 'learn you a Haskell for great good' free online tutorial (now book, website is still free). I just wrote to let him know that his tutorial was awesome and that it was the only tutorial I'd read that made sense of monads. - The second was to Hipmunk. Again, after using Hipmunk for the third time or so, and having such a great and painless experience, I sent an email saying how much I appreciate the service, and thanking them for keeping it free (although I'd gladly pay for it). I guess you could say that neither my emails contained feedback. In both cases, I felt that it would be a shame if these people stopped doing what they're doing, thinking that nobody cares (I know, Hipmunk is not gonna go away, but well, I guess was just not rational)so I just wanted to let them know that I found there work remarkable. What I'm trying to say is that the best way to get feedback from users without pissing them off is simply to do something that they really really like, and that they want to you to keep improving.
- rgbrenner 13y ago
  "What I'm trying to say is that the best way to get feedback from users without pissing them off is simply to do something that they really really like, and that they want to you to keep improving." To me, the type of email you sent is the most useless email I could receive. It contains: nothing I can help you with; nothing I can improve; nothing that you had a problem with... it's empty kudos. Secondly, it's very difficult to create something people "really really like" without asking them why they don't like what you are currently providing. And since people don't care about products they don't like, they will rarely tell you what's wrong if you don't ask... they'll just leave, and you'll never know why. To improve your email, instead of simply telling them that their service was great.. tell them what your favorite feature was or what was the most helpful about their service. At least that will give them some idea of why you liked it, and it might give them some idea how they can improve other parts of their service.
6d0debc071 13y ago
> Studies have shown that people love to hear their name. That's not, it seems at the moment, what that study said. It seems to say that areas of the brain responsible for self-representation seem to activate when people hear their own names: > 3.4. Conclusions > The findings of this simple paradigm are consistent with the findings in the literature. There is unique brain activation specific to one’s own name in relation to the names of others. In addition, the patterns of activation when hearing one’s own name relative to hearing the names of others are similar to the patterns reported when individuals make judgments about themselves and their personal qualities, and include the regions of the medial frontal cortex and superior temporal cortex near the temporo-parietal junction. These results will enable us to study young children and even infants’ responses to their own names in order to see when self representation first occurs. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1647299/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1647299/ It may, of course, be true that people like to hear their own names. It seems rare for someone to go bankrupt gambling on how interested in themselves people can be. But just the same...
- JohnLBevan 13y ago
  Personally I hate it when my name's overused; it makes me feel as if I'm talking to a pushy sales guy / the person using it gets a high score on either the "creepy" or "slimey" meter. "John, I'm so glad you downloaded a copy of MegaThingyFoo. I know that you, John, like myself must have to struggle with generic problem which MegaThingyFoo is supposed to resolve. John; if you could provide me with some feedback on this product I'd be eternally grateful." Eugh! I have a feeling that as soon as these studies are made public they begin to effect their own findings - i.e. those who can take advantage of the findings do and for a while this works. However as this becomes standard people build up a social immunity to these tricks (either through familiarity with the texts (social vaccination) or through exposure to the users of such techniques (previous infection). I'd be interested to see a fake study published which claimed something like "People who wear yellow ties generally make 1% more sales", when in fact genuine studies show that tie colour has no effect. 5-10 years later repeat the genuine study and (assuming this fake knowledge went viral) I suspect you'd find people who wore yellow ties would fall behind other tie colours on sales.
orangethirty 13y ago
Not a bad start, but it could still use some work. When people sign up for something, they still have a lot of questions. Address those by including links to FAQs or sending them an users manual. That will increase your numbers by a good amount. Plus, you can upsell without much problem. An email subject that tends to work well with this approach: "Here are some helpful links to get you started with $name."
- veesahni 13y ago
  This is the next step for me - providing additional onboarding tips. The questions I get in response to the current email identify gaps in documentation and clarity.
fyi80 13y ago
#5 "Echo their name back at them" That is literally a specific advice to write low-quality "porn" content that stimulates superficially and then trigger an anger/betrayal reaction. These "tricks" are copied straight from a used car sales lot, and we hated them there too.
keenahn 13y ago
My one comment would be, I wonder how the customer feels receiving a message from the Founder of the company. One of two possible reactions: 1) Wow I'm really special to receive personal attention from the founder. 2) This company must be small potatoes if the founder has time to be writing emails. I wonder if you could follow up with an A/B test, same exact message from you and from a "Community Manager"

132 points by veesahni 13y ago

OP here. I try to establish "first contact" as soon as possible as it helps identify gaps in the product & helps answer the question "What should I work on today?" .. What else works well for increasing early feedback?

dreen 13y ago
I find this generally helpful and I like the attitude of these emails, but you are making a massive mistake that every single one of those websites which do the same thing make as well - you don't provide a clear and quick way to be removed from your mailing list. This should be in every email, a simple link or even asking to reply with the word "unsubscribe" in the subject. If you don't do this a lot of people are going to think you're spamming them.

bdunn 13y ago

Great post. I recently rewrote Planscope's welcome email (original here: http://copy-cat.co/blog/a-followup-email-that-actually-works/ http://copy-cat.co/blog/a-followup-email-that-actually-works...), and this time around really emphasized point #9 of yours: providing onboarding tips. If you don't have a big, fat textarea on your cancellation page that asks people why they're canceling, stop whatever you're doing and spend 30 minutes adding it. Once you have enough cancellation data, you should know why a lot of people who sign up for a trial cancel within the first few days. Recycle that feedback directly into your welcome email (and in-app onboarding), and aim to eliminate as many confusion points as possible while continuing to reinforce your product benefits. For the curious, here's the new email template I'm using: http://glui.me/?i=h5f7alhn92c131t/2013-05-07_at_9.52.24_AM.png/ http://glui.me/?i=h5f7alhn92c131t/2013-05-07_at_9.52.24_AM.p...

cmadan 13y ago
I was about to post the copycat link but you beat me to it. :) We've modeled the ClinchPad (my startup) welcome email pretty much on the original Planscope email and it has been very, very successful in getting responses compared to the previous welcome email.
PebblesRox 13y ago
You have an infestation of apostrophes in some of your plurals! I wouldn't want someone to stop taking you seriously because of a few typos (you have "Monday's" and "customer's" instead of "Mondays" and "customers").
- bdunn 13y ago
  Good point! Thanks. Serves me right for writing them in a bar in the center of a Vegas casino :-)
  - michaelbuckbee 13y ago
    I can't find the article now, but I'm positive I have seen cases of higher open/click rates in emails with grammatical errors as it seems more "human" and less a template.

philhippus 13y ago

I agree that where possible one should be as personal as possible in email correspondence, but this does not scale well. If you start getting 15 (that's fifteen, not fifteen thousand)or more signups per day, being personal approaches a full time job. I suppose the crux of the matter is honesty. If you try to automate individualised emails, that comes off as a bit sleazy and 'markety'. In this case I think it would be of net benefit to make an auto response email read like an auto response email, in the same spirit as you do with the personal hand written versions.

veesahni 13y ago
The only part that isn't automatable (and therefore scalable) is adding something unique in the email. Skip that part and it scales fine. One approach I've been thinking of is to have the system automatically send the email but have a mechanism in place to selectively disable for single email. This would allow me to be more personal where desired but still have a decent default being sent out in within the ideal window.
- timjahn 13y ago
  Exactly. We do this with matchist (http://matchist.com/talent http://matchist.com/talent). We're not trying to be sleazy, as the GP suggests. Instead, we're trying to be as personable as possible while at the same time, growing the business in a healthy way and providing more value for all our customers.
  - philhippus 13y ago
    Hi there [enter your mark's name here] old friend...is what I refer to as 'sleazy'. A strong term I admit, but if you are going to send me an auto response, don't pretend like we're close buddies. I would respect more something like 'You are the 159th signup we had today, send an email to [a real person] to request support.' Perhaps I am just an outlier.
    - eropple 13y ago

Alekanekelo 13y ago

Thanks for the post. They are simple but extremely helpful and not always apparent tips. Courtesy and personal conversation gets you a long way.

deepak-kumar 13y ago

Being a business development guy I have seen a pattern that personally written email will get you a positive response rather than a formal HTML template email which people tend to ignore without even reading it. Very well summarized article. Thanks for the share.

veesahni 13y ago
I find that I barely skim heavy branded emails thinking it's just marketing stuff. Plain email always gets more interest from me. On that note, this is something I also considered heavily when building Supportfu - all outbound replies mimic a traditional modern email client, graphical branding isn't even an option.

dendory 13y ago

Every web site I sign up to these days, I'm 100% certain that from that point forward I will now be spammed by them on a regular basis. It's a simple fact of the modern web now and I despise it. But when those emails look like this one, I hate them even more. Why? Because a normal form spam mail is easy to recognize. I can hit the spam button in under a second. But when they use my first name, sound all happy and cheery, and talk like they're my best friend, I have to actually read the first sentence to see that it's spam. It not only takes me longer, but it makes them seem even worse. To me an email like that doesn't tell me they are more interested to 'engage', but instead that they want to trick people to read them. You know what I want? For them to never send me any email unless I specifically request it.

timjahn 13y ago
Here's the problem: it works. Email is still the most effective way of reaching people on the Internet.
- larrys 13y ago
  Truth is a certain amount of spam is like a vital sign. If you log in and you have no spam you have to wonder if there is a problem with your email server (if you run one) or your email provider.
jdmaresco 13y ago
I feel this way with respect to sites that I am forced to sign up for just to view the demo. Sites that I will never use again ... I don't want them being my best friend yet. If I've tried the demo and I am actually signing up to use your site, this type of email would be tolerable, but again, I generally don't want to engage with the company unless I have an issue. The only time I can see this being welcome to me is in a B2B context where I have signed a longer-term contract for a solution that my business will need support for.
monsterix 13y ago
> I have to actually read the first sentence to see that it's spam. I second that. In fact I lost my primary Gmail account recently to unsolicited mail, by signing up with just one wrong guy. Started receiving roughly 600 junk daily in my inbox starting from (1) insurance schemes from big banks to (2) UK LOTTERY from our Nigerian brothers. Betweeen (1) and (2) above, I must say, I did have to actually read first few sentences of (2) to decide that it was spam. That's so true, and scary at that. I guess, this problem actually stems from the fact that by design email is vulnerable. And that we're forced to keep our email address a secret and share it very carefully - like using simple obscurity [username at servicename dot com] type of stuff... but this is not enough. This model also makes spam filtering a costly affair for the service provider. I wonder how much additional cost Google has to bear to filter spam and malicious? Have seen it often that flooding continues and continues until the user is forced to change his/her email address and start all over again. It's no wonder that over 97% of global email is unwanted [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam

helipad 13y ago

These emails work staggeringly well. Most responses are "I'm OK thanks", but people think they're genuine enough to respond to. Even when automated, I've still seen many tech founders, nevermind lay users, responding to these as if they've been personally touched.

wilfra 13y ago
The 'tech founders' are likely to be responding to see what happens next, because their intrigued by the idea - not because 'they've been personally touched'. Source: I reply to all of these for exactly that reason.
- fyi80 13y ago
  I love it. Founders sending fake-sincere emails to collect user data. Founder sending fake-sincere replies to collect business data.

larrys 13y ago

This is good advice. We've been sending emails like this for a long time. The method is fairly low tech. Pull list of new customers > file.txt and then newcustomer.sh < file.txt Most importantly though a few points. Even if you aren't doing a personal email (because it might not scale), even if it's not suppose to be personal make sure to have it come from a real person where if someone has an issue they feel that if they write back a real person will read what they say. Of course if you have 29 million customers this might not apply (say free product) but then again you probably won't be reading HN right now anyway. Separately, nothing is a bigger turn off (to me) that getting a letter from a company appearing to care but not being signed by anyone other than "support team" or being signed by a person who has a non person sounding email address.

nixy 13y ago

I appreciate the body text of his e-mail, it does feel personal and engaging. However, I wonder if I would have gotten as far as reading the body of an e-mail had it come with the subject line "SupportFu is going to change your life - let me show you how." The subject just reeks of spam. A better way of structuring the subject line to get my attention would be something a bit less "Enlarge your penis - let me show you how"-ish and a bit more along the lines of "On using our tool" or "SupportFu introduction." They might not be as striking as far as subjects go, but I would not be as quick to dismiss them as spam.

alan_cx 13y ago

There is good advice there for many other applications, like writing to a bank or public official.

abraxasz 13y ago

I have never answered this type of email. Why? Because at this stage, I don't know your product, and I don't want you to annoy me (you may not think it's annoying, but really, it is). That being said, I sent spontaneous feedback emails exactly twice: - The first was to the guy who wrote the 'learn you a Haskell for great good' free online tutorial (now book, website is still free). I just wrote to let him know that his tutorial was awesome and that it was the only tutorial I'd read that made sense of monads. - The second was to Hipmunk. Again, after using Hipmunk for the third time or so, and having such a great and painless experience, I sent an email saying how much I appreciate the service, and thanking them for keeping it free (although I'd gladly pay for it). I guess you could say that neither my emails contained feedback. In both cases, I felt that it would be a shame if these people stopped doing what they're doing, thinking that nobody cares (I know, Hipmunk is not gonna go away, but well, I guess was just not rational)so I just wanted to let them know that I found there work remarkable. What I'm trying to say is that the best way to get feedback from users without pissing them off is simply to do something that they really really like, and that they want to you to keep improving.

rgbrenner 13y ago
"What I'm trying to say is that the best way to get feedback from users without pissing them off is simply to do something that they really really like, and that they want to you to keep improving." To me, the type of email you sent is the most useless email I could receive. It contains: nothing I can help you with; nothing I can improve; nothing that you had a problem with... it's empty kudos. Secondly, it's very difficult to create something people "really really like" without asking them why they don't like what you are currently providing. And since people don't care about products they don't like, they will rarely tell you what's wrong if you don't ask... they'll just leave, and you'll never know why. To improve your email, instead of simply telling them that their service was great.. tell them what your favorite feature was or what was the most helpful about their service. At least that will give them some idea of why you liked it, and it might give them some idea how they can improve other parts of their service.

6d0debc071 13y ago

> Studies have shown that people love to hear their name. That's not, it seems at the moment, what that study said. It seems to say that areas of the brain responsible for self-representation seem to activate when people hear their own names: > 3.4. Conclusions > The findings of this simple paradigm are consistent with the findings in the literature. There is unique brain activation specific to one’s own name in relation to the names of others. In addition, the patterns of activation when hearing one’s own name relative to hearing the names of others are similar to the patterns reported when individuals make judgments about themselves and their personal qualities, and include the regions of the medial frontal cortex and superior temporal cortex near the temporo-parietal junction. These results will enable us to study young children and even infants’ responses to their own names in order to see when self representation first occurs. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1647299/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1647299/ It may, of course, be true that people like to hear their own names. It seems rare for someone to go bankrupt gambling on how interested in themselves people can be. But just the same...

JohnLBevan 13y ago
Personally I hate it when my name's overused; it makes me feel as if I'm talking to a pushy sales guy / the person using it gets a high score on either the "creepy" or "slimey" meter. "John, I'm so glad you downloaded a copy of MegaThingyFoo. I know that you, John, like myself must have to struggle with generic problem which MegaThingyFoo is supposed to resolve. John; if you could provide me with some feedback on this product I'd be eternally grateful." Eugh! I have a feeling that as soon as these studies are made public they begin to effect their own findings - i.e. those who can take advantage of the findings do and for a while this works. However as this becomes standard people build up a social immunity to these tricks (either through familiarity with the texts (social vaccination) or through exposure to the users of such techniques (previous infection). I'd be interested to see a fake study published which claimed something like "People who wear yellow ties generally make 1% more sales", when in fact genuine studies show that tie colour has no effect. 5-10 years later repeat the genuine study and (assuming this fake knowledge went viral) I suspect you'd find people who wore yellow ties would fall behind other tie colours on sales.

orangethirty 13y ago

Not a bad start, but it could still use some work. When people sign up for something, they still have a lot of questions. Address those by including links to FAQs or sending them an users manual. That will increase your numbers by a good amount. Plus, you can upsell without much problem. An email subject that tends to work well with this approach: "Here are some helpful links to get you started with $name."

veesahni 13y ago
This is the next step for me - providing additional onboarding tips. The questions I get in response to the current email identify gaps in documentation and clarity.

fyi80 13y ago

#5 "Echo their name back at them" That is literally a specific advice to write low-quality "porn" content that stimulates superficially and then trigger an anger/betrayal reaction. These "tricks" are copied straight from a used car sales lot, and we hated them there too.

keenahn 13y ago

My one comment would be, I wonder how the customer feels receiving a message from the Founder of the company. One of two possible reactions: 1) Wow I'm really special to receive personal attention from the founder. 2) This company must be small potatoes if the founder has time to be writing emails. I wonder if you could follow up with an A/B test, same exact message from you and from a "Community Manager"