Email onboarding campaigns are an effective subset of the overall user onboarding experience. After users onboard on your product, do not leave them hanging about what to do next on your product.
An effective email onboarding campaign can be very helpful in getting users to further invest in your product and drive them into the conversion funnel.
Before you start planning your email onboarding campaign, it is important to establish what constitutes an effective email onboarding experience.
a) You help the user understand how your product will solve his/her problem.
b) Show examples of how different people use a particular feature. Case studies are always helpful.
c) Deliver value through your product and then ask your customers to go premium to get additional value from the product. Not the other way around.
d) They should see you more than just a product. Develop a personal connection with them through email communications.
These are the basic guidelines about what you need to do in your email marketing campaign.
Now let’s start with the nitty-gritties of how to prepare an effective email campaign for your startup.
1) For the first thousand customers do not automate – For figuring out what is wrong with your emails/onboarding, it is essential to talk to your customers. If you automate your emails from the start you miss out on a lot of qualitative data about what problems or objectives users are trying to accomplish through your product.
Even after the 1000 users, at least in the welcome email make sure you try to start a conversation with them. Here’s an example of Backlinko’s welcome mail. In his first email, Brain asks the users to get back to him with any problem related to online marketing. A very good conversation starter email in comparison to a welcome email totally related just with the product.
Make your users feel that there is an authentic person behind the product. Remember that if your users do you a favor, their likelihood to recommend you increases multifold.
2) Why are you sending standard emails – Not every user is the same, so you cannot have the same conversation with everyone. If you are going with time-based emails instead of behavior-triggered emails, you are losing out on a lot of potential customers.
In our own platform, it is important to make users download the chrome extension to use our platform.
For people who download the extension, we have a different email.
And for people who don’t download the extension, we have a different email.
3) Segmentation – I agree 100% with Avinash Kaushik’s point that “All data in aggregate is crap!”
This is even true for an email onboarding campaign. Here is an idea on how you can segment your users from ConversionXL.
There are three types of Teams (a cool name for segments) in which you can classify all your users.
1) Team Awesome – They open all your emails. They can’t wait to open your emails.
2) Team Average –- They sometimes open your emails and sometimes they don’t. Kind of in the middle!
3) Team Meh – These guys hardly open your emails. Probably on the verge of spamming them.
Figure out how many users are in each of these segments. Figure out why a person is in a particular segment by asking yourself questions like – What actions did they take on the product? The marketing channels they came from? The time they spent on the website? Which pages did they land on?
By asking these questions you can figure out how to get users to land in a better team.
Also, the probability of someone from Team Awesome to recommend you is higher and they are more likely to buy a premium version of your product. Therefore, send them a mail that facilitates that.
Maybe some users Team Average are not sure of the value proposition of your product. You need to build that through subsequent emails.
4) Use case scenarios/milestone emails – These case scenario emails can also be part of your onboarding campaign. They let your users know how other people are making use of the core features of your product. These include case studies.
Another type of mail you can employ is milestone emails. These emails are sent when the users take a desired action on the platform. They act like a gesture of patting the back of the user, assuring them they are correctly using the platform. Suggestions for trying new features can also be provided through milestone emails.
5) Targeting inactive users – This is another category of users that get left out if you have time-based emails. They either keep getting the same emails as active users or none at all.
It can be easily the case that the user was not ready to try/buy your product at a particular time. But their needs can change over time.
Therefore, make sure to design emails to get these users back into the conversion funnels. Cool example for this can be discount emails (if you are an e-commerce company), cool content (maybe an ebook, blog post or invitation to a webinar) or a success story/case study of your product.
For someone interested in learning more about email onboarding, you can checkout out my knowledge map on email onboarding here.
In case someone wants to share specific problems or learning related to email onboarding, please feel free to do so in the comments.
This article was first published here.
My twitter handle is @pavtiwana. You can also follow us on medium at @knowledge-maps
Arjun Tuli
Hi guys, just wanted to update you on as to how the email onboarding is working for us right now:
1.) We are sending personal emails to all our users, and as a result the opening percentage of the emails is 100% (we are tracking this using a Chrome extension called Sidekick, and automating the sending using Mail Merge).
2.) The downloads for our own extension have increased, and for the people who had already downloaded the extension, the impressions have increased (using the case study methodology as pavneet suggested).
If there’s anything that you would like to know about email onboarding, feel free to reply. 🙂
asha chaudhry
hi pavneet & arjun,
thanks for sharing this one.
since i’m a student of communication (and easily average 100 email interactions a day) i find this topic very interesting! if i receive a neat onboarding email i appreciate it.
we have a pretty std one – i really must change it 🙂
but check out what alok used to do in the beginning (easily the first 100 rodinhooders recd this msg on their profile page from him as abhik did!)
https://www.therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/do-you-have-an-asha-in-your-team
so while i verify each member who signs up – if i notice that they have an interesting venture/startup – i do send them a personalised note telling them and encouraging them to feature themselves in showcase!
just one point i would like to add is being CREATIVE with HUMOUR.
i think folks who have funny onboarding msgs (but relevant ones) – do get your attention and create a further interest in your company.
another company who really uses their emails (onboarding + others) well is NO NASTIES.
i think any communication that goes out to your users MUST be worth their while.
i spend a lot of time crafting the friday newsletter to keep it fresh and unpredictable.
suggestions from you two are welcome!
Arjun Tuli
The article by Abhik is a wonderful one and true in every sense. You won’t believe how much have I thought about this – How lucky trhs is to have someone like asha. Wish we could clone her and have one of them on our team.
You rightly state that creative humour can go a long way in creating future interest in the company. I have subscribed to No Nasties newsletter. Excited to see what they have to offer 🙂
asha chaudhry
🙂
thanks for your kind words arjun – would love to read your how i met my co-founder story 🙂
btw – limeroad uses very good subject lines! even if you don’t want to buy anything they force you to open the email – that’s more than half the job done! (sucked in!!)
you should read this post as well – https://www.therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/8-tips-for-drafting-a-persuasive-email-marketing-newsletter
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
Can I ask a more granular question?
What is the effective open rate, click rate and follow thru rates of worst and best cases?
The challenge for me is that the numbers are so low, that while optimisation seems to be a very sext thing to do, the gross numbers just dont matter…
This especially after mails going to the gmail promo folder?
Pavneet Singh
Hey alok,
The email campaign we are running right now is in the basic stages, we use mail merge to send emails to all of our users. This way all of our emails go into the inbox and not in the promotions tab. But this was we do loose some of our tracking abilities on the email. We do this because we want to have a conversation with all our users.
What my personal perception is that both email marketing and content marketing are both becoming difficult. And i thing the advice people get online that includes even mine is just the starting point. People need to adapt these to there own startups.
And there is so much noise in the world today people shut everyone out. I think the first thing you need to do is to establish your emails and content as absolutely necessary to read if you want people to read your emails.
I sign up to so many emails and end up reading no body’s email. I think publishing a lot of content will soon become a thing of the past. You have to come up with some thing great to say as average content will not cut it anymore.