7 ms·

Ditch your welcome email

70 points by mataug 12y ago

sircausticsoda 12y ago
This doesn't have to work always. This is obviously a huge risk. I'd say you just got lucky!
- josephb 12y ago
  It worked for them, so good on them for trying something different and also sharing about it! As always, what works for one company, won't always work for the next :-)
spacefight 12y ago
Nice rant against using MailChimp et all for the first contact mail. GMail dumps them in "Update" way too often...
growt 12y ago
I think the high reply rate is due to this phrase in the new mail: "I will call you in the next 30 minutes or do you want to do this over email?" If I wouldn't want anybody to call me, I would probably reply.
- rbinv 12y ago
  Exactly. Makes me wonder if they actually went through with it if the recipient didn't reply.
  - gk1 12y ago
    Of course they would, why not? That's the point of inside sales.
- slig 12y ago
  Quoting @substack [1] "A phone call is a hostile act of aggression. First you interrupt someone with an infuriating sound and then you demand their attention." [1]: https://twitter.com/substack/status/292461828368396288 https://twitter.com/substack/status/292461828368396288
  - hagbardgroup 12y ago
    For some people. For sales people and others whose job it is to be ready for interruption all day, it's convenient.
  - davidw 12y ago
    From patio11: "There is no chasm in America, not even between Red/Blue, so deep as that between Phone People and Email People." https://twitter.com/patio11/status/519869383372320768 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/519869383372320768 With LiberWriter - a service geared to authors, no less - a certain percentage of our customers really, really wants to talk to someone on the phone.
- dhimes 12y ago
  "I will call you in the next 30 minutes or do you want to do this over email?" I actually find that line in the email obnoxious. Am I missing something? Hasn't the user already signed up to a SAAS site? And now they are insisting on becoming a distraction? On their schedule?
  - Lord_Zero 12y ago
    All their communication seems obnoxious: "Now, do you have a workflow problem or a task management problem or both ?! Tough, right!? That’s exactly why I am writing to you." They make a great point about using the welcome email for more than just a hello. In their line of business they basically have to force their way in the door to get those potential customers.
- cowls 12y ago
  Didn't see that little gem. If I signed up and received a phone call within 30 mins Id probably go ahead and close the account. Email replies doesn't actually mean anything, would be interesting to see what kind of user rentention and paying customers they got from both approaches. Also, if someone replies saying "please do not call me". Does this count in the stats?
- morgante 12y ago
  Wow, that is incredibly aggressive. Unfortunately being badgered by phone calls from sales people (for products I'm already paying for) seems to be a fact of life in the business world.
martin-adams 12y ago
For me, I find value in knowing I got a welcome email as a subtle confirmation that I entered my correct details, and if I didn't, I have a way to recover it. I can now safely forget the name of the can't-quite-remember-how-they-spelt-it-startup domain name, my password, username, etc, knowing that I did get my email registered with the company and I have a record of it. But the article isn't saying to ditch it, it's saying to use that opportunity for something much better. This is a good idea when the goal of it has a benefit to the user. It also builds more value to your brand by being a real entity backed by real people.
- cones688 12y ago
  I don't know who you are using but.. > my password, username, etc I would immediately reply to the company rescinding my account and informing them this highlights a total lack of understanding of securing peoples personal details.
  - grey-area 12y ago
    I think martin-adams meant something else; not that these details are in the email, but that once your email is registered you can you can always reset your info on the service: I can now safely forget...my password, username
    - martin-adams 12y ago
      Correct :)
  - EricBart 12y ago
    Why? It seems common that if you can supply the email you signed up with, you can recover your username and get a password reset. Especially true if the website is not somewhere you go to very frequently like the original comment seems to be insinuating and you are using different passwords for every account you make.
    - martin-adams 12y ago
michaelhoffman 12y ago
Often a "welcome" email is the canary in a coalmine for a service that will annoy me with repeated unwanted communication.
ams6110 12y ago
Kudos on the plain text email. I wish more people did this. Especially if your audience is tech-oriented a fair number of them may be using Mutt or reading email in emacs or vim. Even if they are not, they will likely appreciate a straight email that doesn't look like a magazine advert.
- cordite 12y ago
  I personally would appreciate text only email since my phone is generally the first place I see emails these days. On another note, not everyone technical is a Richard Stallman that reads email inside of emacs.
- icebraining 12y ago
  It's email, it doesn't need to be one or the other. That's what MIME is for.
- bennyg 12y ago
  There's no way reading email in the terminal is close to 1% of all email users haha.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  Plain-text-format emails are worth very little to most businesses because the vast majority of email clients render HTML and do not tell the user when the email is plain text. I could send you an HTML email without images and font declarations and it would look exactly like a plain text email in Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Mac Mail, iOS Mail, etc. I'm not even sure these emails in the story ARE actually plain text emails, because they say they are sending them via Gmail, and Gmail defaults to HTML emails, even for interpersonal emails. In other words they are likely to be text only, but of format HTML.
eksith 12y ago
Shouldn't this be qualified with "...if you signup to KISSFLOW"? There are certain types of customer that would consider it superfluous, but often a welcome email will have other information that would be nice to have, just so I don't need to login again. So a rose by any other name, perhaps, but it's still a welcome email.
ics 12y ago
Welcome emails are useful for 2.5 things: - Confirming that your registration was successful - Remembering that you signed up for something in the first place - Finding useful information pertaining to the account and the service: the unsubscribe link, the TO field (for remembering the site specific extension you gave), link to TOS, etc. Keeping these things in mind would make a whole lot of my archived mail more useful.
barkingcat 12y ago
A welcome email is the most dreaded thing in my inbox - I delete them as soon as they land in my inbox. It's content free, I haven't started to play with the app/site/tool yet (which means I don't know if I like it yet, and I have no real questions until I actually start working with it), and basically, has no value aside from reassuring that someone is available to help. And even in that case, the welcome email is sent by a robot! Which means that it's not a real person anyways.
- freehunter 12y ago
  In many cases, as soon as I see the welcome email, I hit report spam to block any further email. If it's something I will be using for a long time or for specific purpose, I will bother fiddling with their email settings so I don't get overloaded. If it's a one-off or an app or something, I literally never want to hear from you. So I preemptively mark the first email as spam so I never have to see another one. No, Runkeeper, I don't need an email when I set a personal record. You told me that in the app, literally as it happened. That's why I reported your email as spam and blocked everything you have to say to me. You're an app, you already have a way to contact me.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    > In many cases, as soon as I see the welcome email, I hit report spam to block any further email. What the hell? This is crazy. Reporting an email as spam does not just protect you from receiving further emails, it reduces the reputation of the sender and makes it less likely their emails will get through, even to other customers who want them. It would be like walking through a bookstore, deciding not to buy anything, then reporting them to the Better Business Bureau as a scam. You are making things worse for everyone else, as a matter of personal convenience.
    - freehunter 12y ago
      Yup. Just like using Adblock hurts companies who have decent advertisements on their site, not just abusive advertisers. For sites I frequent that do not have abusive advertisements, I make exceptions for them in AdBlock. Otherwise, everything gets wiped out, on every site. If you're caught in the swath of the innocents, sorry, but I'm not sorry. Long ago, companies, startups, blogs, etc, declared war. They decided that their readers, their users, their customers aren't good enough and they need to wring from them more money, more attention, more clicks, more engagement. And they are willing to do whatever they can get away with in order to do this, no matter how much it pisses off their customers. I'm not dealing with it. I used to only block actual spammers. And then it got to be so many emails to opt out of, and so much junk coming in. I used to click "unsubscribe", and then they started to pretend the word unsubscribe meant "I'm a real human, spam me more!" I'm happy to give you my email address, because you demand that I do so. But the minute I hear from you at a time when I did not ask you to speak, I no longer care what you have to say, ever again. Why should I go out of my way to figure out how to opt-out when I never opted in? It's not that I'm walking out of a store without buying anything. It's that I'm walking into a store, being followed by a salesman who is telling other stores in the area that I am out shopping, and then being upsold on everything whether I want to buy it or not, for weeks, months, or years after I walk out of the store. And when that happens, I'm going to tell my friends not to shop there. That is what "report spam" means. It's the right thing to do, and I'm not going to apologize for it. I would say "just stop being abusive and I'll stop reporting you as spam", but no, like online advertisements, it's too late for that. I will always block your ads, and I will always report you as spam. The privilege has been abused for too long.
eriktrautman 12y ago
I'd like to know a bit more about sending emails with Google Apps instead of something like Mailchimp, specifically how automated you can get, what tools are available, and what the risks are. It sounds like a good idea in theory but you presumably run the risk of getting blacklisted for SPAM if you're not careful so I'll assume this only works for businesses with high touch customer processes / fewer signups who don't need to send a whole ton of emails.
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
A provocative but misleading title. The article actually is just a modification of a welcome email, indeed it makes it worse as it doesn't just inform but demands immediate attention too. Title should be "badgering your potential customers to respond immediately in your welcome email increases responses". It probably works well as a sales tactic but TBH I'm not inclined to do business with companies that demand I work to their schedule in their welcome email. I mean 'drop everything and respond to us within 30 mins' is pretty aggressive.
- tejazz 12y ago
  and that's why you are not the one writing this post :) Atleast the guys at KISSflow are giving enough notice. I dont see anything wrong with it. have received so many buggy calls from saas businesses without any kinda prior info and many of them are known growing businesses. this one is a genius hack and one of the few out there.
- trjordan 12y ago
  "I will call you in the next 30 minutes or do you want to do this over email?" It certainly asks for time in the next 30 minutes, but you're free to do it async on a longer timeline.
  - derefr 12y ago
    But you have to do something in the next 30 minutes (responding to the email) in order to not have to do something in the next 30 minutes. There's no "I'm too busy for this" default (except not taking their call, I guess. That's probably what I would end up doing.)
    - dspillett 12y ago
      > That's probably what I would end up doing. Same here. And I would treat it like any other cold call: if I have time I'll waste some of theirs, and if I don't I'll get them off the line quickly with no care for how rude they might think I am.
    - 12y ago
publicfig 12y ago
As a consumer, If you threaten to call me in 30 minutes if I don't respond to the email, you will lose my business. This is, at best, obnoxious advice.
- petercooper 12y ago
  Yeah, some "hacks" can go beyond creepy. I once half filled out a form on a site to apply for an industry association then got distracted. An hour later I get a call asking why I hadn't submitted the form yet and if they could help!
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  Do you know what a welcome email is? It means the customer has already signed up, inputted their contact information, billing information, and is looking to get the value they invested back out of the SaaS product. I'd be absolutely thrilled to get a phone call from a real live person in this instance.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    Actually in many SaaS products (KissFlow included), you sign up for a free level of service to check it out first. No billing info submitted, level of commitment low. A seemingly-mandatory phone call in 30 minutes is pretty aggressive for that situation.
- aestra 12y ago
  Insurance companies are the absolute worse about that. I'm shopping around for insurance and get 10 quotes. Then I'll pick one company to go with and sign up. I'll either do it online or I call a rep to finish the signup. Now 5 of the remaining 9 companies I got quotes from but decided not to pick decide I need a phonecall (or less obnoxiously but still obnoxious) email. "Hi, I saw you got a quote on our site, can I help you sign up?" "Would you like to talk about the quote you received on our website?" The best was when I replied "No, I already bought insurance" and the rep was like really confused as to why would I get an insurance quote if I already had insurance. She seemed surprised it would be a possibility to get a quote and NOT sign up. Or even to shop around. Sometimes I even get quotes once in a while to get an idea if I can get a significantly better deal somewhere else. Then I get phonecalls. I started replying "If I wanted to talk on the phone or sign up I would have called you." and hang up. Its so rude but really, I don't want to talk to them, if I was interested after I got a quote I would call them. Do people really go "oh, yeah, I wasn't going to sign up but since you called me during dinner I changed my mind."?
moe 12y ago
Is this parody? "Conversation rate", seriously? The metrics you are looking for are conversion rate and retention.
wmeredith 12y ago
The first line of this article, "Don’t know Lincoln Murphy? Then, I would pretty much assume you are not in the SaaS Business and you may well skip the rest of this post and do something more useful. :-) !" Sounds good to me. clicks "back" (I've been in the SaaS world for 5+ years.)
- grossvogel 12y ago
  I was similarly turned-off. It's one thing to credit your influences, but this came off as name dropping with a side of social shaming.
encoderer 12y ago
The author here is certainly using some provocative language in their email. I can't comment on the long term effectiveness of that, but I do believe in the power of the plain text email. We've been using "handwritten", plaintext emails from the beginning at Cronitor. I copy and paste a few bits but I always write something individual for each signup. The days we get 5-10 signups make that a little more challenging, but you won't find us complaining. And I feel better knowing that everybody who took a moment of their day to signup and checkout Cronitor got a moment of mine in return.
mladenkovacevic 12y ago
This is what happens when "growth hackers" get a hold of your sales strategy. They re-frame the conversation to center around meaningless (although indirectly related to sales performance) metrics that give the sense of success but do everything to shroud real success. Kudos this this marketer for labeling his/her metric improvement "10X conversations" giving it at least a tinge of humanness. There's nothing wrong about trying to improve these metrics in and of itself, but when the entire tactic is based on tricking or threatening people into initiating "conversations" (ie. when those conversations are more "Please do not call me" as opposed to "Please tell me more about your product") then the real goal of said marketer is not to sell the product, but to sell their own usefulness within a company.
snowwrestler 12y ago
TL;DR: If your success metric is "conversations with a new customer", then you can increase it by forcing the customer into a conversation via your first email. However, I bet that many SaaS vendors don't consider that metric as their #1 concern.

70 points by mataug 12y ago

sircausticsoda 12y ago

This doesn't have to work always. This is obviously a huge risk. I'd say you just got lucky!

josephb 12y ago
It worked for them, so good on them for trying something different and also sharing about it! As always, what works for one company, won't always work for the next :-)

spacefight 12y ago

Nice rant against using MailChimp et all for the first contact mail. GMail dumps them in "Update" way too often...

growt 12y ago

I think the high reply rate is due to this phrase in the new mail: "I will call you in the next 30 minutes or do you want to do this over email?" If I wouldn't want anybody to call me, I would probably reply.

rbinv 12y ago
Exactly. Makes me wonder if they actually went through with it if the recipient didn't reply.
- gk1 12y ago
  Of course they would, why not? That's the point of inside sales.
slig 12y ago
Quoting @substack [1] "A phone call is a hostile act of aggression. First you interrupt someone with an infuriating sound and then you demand their attention." [1]: https://twitter.com/substack/status/292461828368396288 https://twitter.com/substack/status/292461828368396288
- hagbardgroup 12y ago
  For some people. For sales people and others whose job it is to be ready for interruption all day, it's convenient.
- davidw 12y ago
  From patio11: "There is no chasm in America, not even between Red/Blue, so deep as that between Phone People and Email People." https://twitter.com/patio11/status/519869383372320768 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/519869383372320768 With LiberWriter - a service geared to authors, no less - a certain percentage of our customers really, really wants to talk to someone on the phone.
dhimes 12y ago
"I will call you in the next 30 minutes or do you want to do this over email?" I actually find that line in the email obnoxious. Am I missing something? Hasn't the user already signed up to a SAAS site? And now they are insisting on becoming a distraction? On their schedule?
- Lord_Zero 12y ago
  All their communication seems obnoxious: "Now, do you have a workflow problem or a task management problem or both ?! Tough, right!? That’s exactly why I am writing to you." They make a great point about using the welcome email for more than just a hello. In their line of business they basically have to force their way in the door to get those potential customers.
cowls 12y ago
Didn't see that little gem. If I signed up and received a phone call within 30 mins Id probably go ahead and close the account. Email replies doesn't actually mean anything, would be interesting to see what kind of user rentention and paying customers they got from both approaches. Also, if someone replies saying "please do not call me". Does this count in the stats?
morgante 12y ago
Wow, that is incredibly aggressive. Unfortunately being badgered by phone calls from sales people (for products I'm already paying for) seems to be a fact of life in the business world.

martin-adams 12y ago

For me, I find value in knowing I got a welcome email as a subtle confirmation that I entered my correct details, and if I didn't, I have a way to recover it. I can now safely forget the name of the can't-quite-remember-how-they-spelt-it-startup domain name, my password, username, etc, knowing that I did get my email registered with the company and I have a record of it. But the article isn't saying to ditch it, it's saying to use that opportunity for something much better. This is a good idea when the goal of it has a benefit to the user. It also builds more value to your brand by being a real entity backed by real people.

cones688 12y ago
I don't know who you are using but.. > my password, username, etc I would immediately reply to the company rescinding my account and informing them this highlights a total lack of understanding of securing peoples personal details.
- grey-area 12y ago
  I think martin-adams meant something else; not that these details are in the email, but that once your email is registered you can you can always reset your info on the service: I can now safely forget...my password, username
  - martin-adams 12y ago
    Correct :)
- EricBart 12y ago
  Why? It seems common that if you can supply the email you signed up with, you can recover your username and get a password reset. Especially true if the website is not somewhere you go to very frequently like the original comment seems to be insinuating and you are using different passwords for every account you make.
  - martin-adams 12y ago

michaelhoffman 12y ago

Often a "welcome" email is the canary in a coalmine for a service that will annoy me with repeated unwanted communication.

ams6110 12y ago

Kudos on the plain text email. I wish more people did this. Especially if your audience is tech-oriented a fair number of them may be using Mutt or reading email in emacs or vim. Even if they are not, they will likely appreciate a straight email that doesn't look like a magazine advert.

cordite 12y ago
I personally would appreciate text only email since my phone is generally the first place I see emails these days. On another note, not everyone technical is a Richard Stallman that reads email inside of emacs.
icebraining 12y ago
It's email, it doesn't need to be one or the other. That's what MIME is for.
bennyg 12y ago
There's no way reading email in the terminal is close to 1% of all email users haha.
snowwrestler 12y ago
Plain-text-format emails are worth very little to most businesses because the vast majority of email clients render HTML and do not tell the user when the email is plain text. I could send you an HTML email without images and font declarations and it would look exactly like a plain text email in Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Mac Mail, iOS Mail, etc. I'm not even sure these emails in the story ARE actually plain text emails, because they say they are sending them via Gmail, and Gmail defaults to HTML emails, even for interpersonal emails. In other words they are likely to be text only, but of format HTML.

eksith 12y ago

Shouldn't this be qualified with "...if you signup to KISSFLOW"? There are certain types of customer that would consider it superfluous, but often a welcome email will have other information that would be nice to have, just so I don't need to login again. So a rose by any other name, perhaps, but it's still a welcome email.

ics 12y ago

Welcome emails are useful for 2.5 things: - Confirming that your registration was successful - Remembering that you signed up for something in the first place - Finding useful information pertaining to the account and the service: the unsubscribe link, the TO field (for remembering the site specific extension you gave), link to TOS, etc. Keeping these things in mind would make a whole lot of my archived mail more useful.

barkingcat 12y ago

A welcome email is the most dreaded thing in my inbox - I delete them as soon as they land in my inbox. It's content free, I haven't started to play with the app/site/tool yet (which means I don't know if I like it yet, and I have no real questions until I actually start working with it), and basically, has no value aside from reassuring that someone is available to help. And even in that case, the welcome email is sent by a robot! Which means that it's not a real person anyways.

freehunter 12y ago
In many cases, as soon as I see the welcome email, I hit report spam to block any further email. If it's something I will be using for a long time or for specific purpose, I will bother fiddling with their email settings so I don't get overloaded. If it's a one-off or an app or something, I literally never want to hear from you. So I preemptively mark the first email as spam so I never have to see another one. No, Runkeeper, I don't need an email when I set a personal record. You told me that in the app, literally as it happened. That's why I reported your email as spam and blocked everything you have to say to me. You're an app, you already have a way to contact me.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  > In many cases, as soon as I see the welcome email, I hit report spam to block any further email. What the hell? This is crazy. Reporting an email as spam does not just protect you from receiving further emails, it reduces the reputation of the sender and makes it less likely their emails will get through, even to other customers who want them. It would be like walking through a bookstore, deciding not to buy anything, then reporting them to the Better Business Bureau as a scam. You are making things worse for everyone else, as a matter of personal convenience.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    Yup. Just like using Adblock hurts companies who have decent advertisements on their site, not just abusive advertisers. For sites I frequent that do not have abusive advertisements, I make exceptions for them in AdBlock. Otherwise, everything gets wiped out, on every site. If you're caught in the swath of the innocents, sorry, but I'm not sorry. Long ago, companies, startups, blogs, etc, declared war. They decided that their readers, their users, their customers aren't good enough and they need to wring from them more money, more attention, more clicks, more engagement. And they are willing to do whatever they can get away with in order to do this, no matter how much it pisses off their customers. I'm not dealing with it. I used to only block actual spammers. And then it got to be so many emails to opt out of, and so much junk coming in. I used to click "unsubscribe", and then they started to pretend the word unsubscribe meant "I'm a real human, spam me more!" I'm happy to give you my email address, because you demand that I do so. But the minute I hear from you at a time when I did not ask you to speak, I no longer care what you have to say, ever again. Why should I go out of my way to figure out how to opt-out when I never opted in? It's not that I'm walking out of a store without buying anything. It's that I'm walking into a store, being followed by a salesman who is telling other stores in the area that I am out shopping, and then being upsold on everything whether I want to buy it or not, for weeks, months, or years after I walk out of the store. And when that happens, I'm going to tell my friends not to shop there. That is what "report spam" means. It's the right thing to do, and I'm not going to apologize for it. I would say "just stop being abusive and I'll stop reporting you as spam", but no, like online advertisements, it's too late for that. I will always block your ads, and I will always report you as spam. The privilege has been abused for too long.

eriktrautman 12y ago

I'd like to know a bit more about sending emails with Google Apps instead of something like Mailchimp, specifically how automated you can get, what tools are available, and what the risks are. It sounds like a good idea in theory but you presumably run the risk of getting blacklisted for SPAM if you're not careful so I'll assume this only works for businesses with high touch customer processes / fewer signups who don't need to send a whole ton of emails.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago

A provocative but misleading title. The article actually is just a modification of a welcome email, indeed it makes it worse as it doesn't just inform but demands immediate attention too. Title should be "badgering your potential customers to respond immediately in your welcome email increases responses". It probably works well as a sales tactic but TBH I'm not inclined to do business with companies that demand I work to their schedule in their welcome email. I mean 'drop everything and respond to us within 30 mins' is pretty aggressive.

tejazz 12y ago
and that's why you are not the one writing this post :) Atleast the guys at KISSflow are giving enough notice. I dont see anything wrong with it. have received so many buggy calls from saas businesses without any kinda prior info and many of them are known growing businesses. this one is a genius hack and one of the few out there.
trjordan 12y ago
"I will call you in the next 30 minutes or do you want to do this over email?" It certainly asks for time in the next 30 minutes, but you're free to do it async on a longer timeline.
- derefr 12y ago
  But you have to do something in the next 30 minutes (responding to the email) in order to not have to do something in the next 30 minutes. There's no "I'm too busy for this" default (except not taking their call, I guess. That's probably what I would end up doing.)
  - dspillett 12y ago
    > That's probably what I would end up doing. Same here. And I would treat it like any other cold call: if I have time I'll waste some of theirs, and if I don't I'll get them off the line quickly with no care for how rude they might think I am.
  - 12y ago

publicfig 12y ago

As a consumer, If you threaten to call me in 30 minutes if I don't respond to the email, you will lose my business. This is, at best, obnoxious advice.

petercooper 12y ago
Yeah, some "hacks" can go beyond creepy. I once half filled out a form on a site to apply for an industry association then got distracted. An hour later I get a call asking why I hadn't submitted the form yet and if they could help!
vinceguidry 12y ago
Do you know what a welcome email is? It means the customer has already signed up, inputted their contact information, billing information, and is looking to get the value they invested back out of the SaaS product. I'd be absolutely thrilled to get a phone call from a real live person in this instance.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  Actually in many SaaS products (KissFlow included), you sign up for a free level of service to check it out first. No billing info submitted, level of commitment low. A seemingly-mandatory phone call in 30 minutes is pretty aggressive for that situation.
aestra 12y ago
Insurance companies are the absolute worse about that. I'm shopping around for insurance and get 10 quotes. Then I'll pick one company to go with and sign up. I'll either do it online or I call a rep to finish the signup. Now 5 of the remaining 9 companies I got quotes from but decided not to pick decide I need a phonecall (or less obnoxiously but still obnoxious) email. "Hi, I saw you got a quote on our site, can I help you sign up?" "Would you like to talk about the quote you received on our website?" The best was when I replied "No, I already bought insurance" and the rep was like really confused as to why would I get an insurance quote if I already had insurance. She seemed surprised it would be a possibility to get a quote and NOT sign up. Or even to shop around. Sometimes I even get quotes once in a while to get an idea if I can get a significantly better deal somewhere else. Then I get phonecalls. I started replying "If I wanted to talk on the phone or sign up I would have called you." and hang up. Its so rude but really, I don't want to talk to them, if I was interested after I got a quote I would call them. Do people really go "oh, yeah, I wasn't going to sign up but since you called me during dinner I changed my mind."?

moe 12y ago

Is this parody? "Conversation rate", seriously? The metrics you are looking for are conversion rate and retention.

wmeredith 12y ago

The first line of this article, "Don’t know Lincoln Murphy? Then, I would pretty much assume you are not in the SaaS Business and you may well skip the rest of this post and do something more useful. :-) !" Sounds good to me. clicks "back" (I've been in the SaaS world for 5+ years.)

grossvogel 12y ago
I was similarly turned-off. It's one thing to credit your influences, but this came off as name dropping with a side of social shaming.

encoderer 12y ago

The author here is certainly using some provocative language in their email. I can't comment on the long term effectiveness of that, but I do believe in the power of the plain text email. We've been using "handwritten", plaintext emails from the beginning at Cronitor. I copy and paste a few bits but I always write something individual for each signup. The days we get 5-10 signups make that a little more challenging, but you won't find us complaining. And I feel better knowing that everybody who took a moment of their day to signup and checkout Cronitor got a moment of mine in return.

mladenkovacevic 12y ago

This is what happens when "growth hackers" get a hold of your sales strategy. They re-frame the conversation to center around meaningless (although indirectly related to sales performance) metrics that give the sense of success but do everything to shroud real success. Kudos this this marketer for labeling his/her metric improvement "10X conversations" giving it at least a tinge of humanness. There's nothing wrong about trying to improve these metrics in and of itself, but when the entire tactic is based on tricking or threatening people into initiating "conversations" (ie. when those conversations are more "Please do not call me" as opposed to "Please tell me more about your product") then the real goal of said marketer is not to sell the product, but to sell their own usefulness within a company.

snowwrestler 12y ago

TL;DR: If your success metric is "conversations with a new customer", then you can increase it by forcing the customer into a conversation via your first email. However, I bet that many SaaS vendors don't consider that metric as their #1 concern.