JK1
Anyone sending activation emails for their software company?
Our company just wrote up a post on user onboarding with email. It's stuff we've researched and have experience with, but I'd love to get more feedback on it from the larger email community.
Is there anything you've found that's working or not working? What kinds of emails do you send users in the first 30 days?
There's no comment system on the site, but I'd love to hear your thoughts here.
Great post, Jonathan!
We're seeing a lot of success here at Litmus with automated support check-in emails as part of our onboarding flow. They're plain text emails from our Support Manager 3 days into the trial, checking in and seeing how things are going. If the user hasn't done a certain action that we'd like them to, there's a dynamic bit that mentions that as well. (Something like, "I noticed you haven't used your first analytics tracking tag yet. Check out this quick support guide on getting started with analytics.")
Since they are plain text and from a person, they do a nice job of disrupting the standard flow of designed emails from Litmus. It also allows us to proactively address concerns from users while they are still early in their trial, and gives the user someone they can reach out to if they have any questions.
The kind of qualitative feedback you get from that is difficult to match otherwise. I've been manually going into our support email system and hand-tagging all of the emails with various themes, so that we can see trends as they emerge (turning the qualitative into quantitative, as it were). For example, if someone mentions trouble inputting their credit card information, it gets tagged with "Trouble with CC" and if we start to get enough of those, I bring it to the attention of everyone else.
Wow, thanks for sharing this. I love that human touch, both that it comes from a person and looks like plain text. Is that technically a transactional email, or is it something people can unsubscribe from? Seems like a bit of a grey area.
A grey area it is indeed! Just to be safe and because I'm a nice guy, I include an unsubscribe link. Since it's not a designed email though, I usually try to fit it in a little differently. Something like this at the bottom, maybe:
I'm reaching out because you recently started a free trial with Litmus. If you don't want to hear from us, you can unsubscribe or manage your email preferences.