Hey nawitus, thanks for the feedback. From what we've seen so far, the majority of signups have reacted positively to the personal emails. Usually, there's some type of question that we can help out with off the bat.
Great point on this. We've recently had a meeting discussing this in detail, I think you're absolutely right, it doesn't make people feel great to get a standard response like the one you've received. We've been trying to come up with a better way to personally respond to people, which has proven quite difficult. There were 2,000+ applicants last month and I think we're still trying to figure out the best work-flow to make each response tailored.
I wanted to assure though that we've read your email (and we do read each and every email, always), even though we sent a standard response (which I totally agree with isn't a great method). Hope that might help and I hope we can come up with a better solution to respond to you and everyone individually in the future. If anyone has had experience on this, would love your thoughts!
That's exactly how I feel about it. We've gotten some great feedback, and I attribute it exactly to the fact that the email is personalized, and includes an introduction to me.
I did do send them personalised email - in which I actually poured way to much time - and I am usually getting or not answers or "I'll use it soon" type of answers. "
Will continue putting more energy down that path tho. Thanks.
It's difficult to give feedback without knowing what your emails look like.
What specifically are you trying to get them to do? Why do you want to initiate a conversation? How are you getting them to sign-up? Clearly you're doing something right in getting the sign-ups, maybe you can tweak that process to get them to expect or initiate the conversation themselves.
Did you make it clear that they were encourage to email / communicate if they had any questions? Because I could definitely see myself not emailing back unless that was specified
To me an email like that doesn't tell me they are more interested to 'engage'
When it's an email like the one from this blog I actually do feel that they are looking to engage — even though I know the email itself wasn't sent personally.
I like the invitation to reply — I've done that several times with a random question or thought about the product / service. Knowing that the person on the other end expects and welcomes those kinds of random emails is helpful. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't send it — and I expect many others feel the same way, which is why these types of emails are seeing a lot of success.
I'm really intrigued by your approach. But doesn't this come across as nagging? I get the first email, and it's perfectly fine by me. I wouldn't mind receiving such an email. But the second one seems a bit spammy to me.
Can you share what kind of feedback you got from those emails? What is your success ratio?
that's great stuff. quick suggestion: if you're collecting the first names of your users, you should make sure to include their name when addressing that email. it does wonders to make it seem more personalized.
smaller suggestion: considering the tone in the email, i think the ask could be a bit more informal than "please respond..." <-- sounds very robot-like. i would say "if so, let us know the best number to reach you :) "
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.
Not really. Some people don't respond, others just respond to the email with the reason and the remaning take us up on the offer and give us great feedback.
> Even if you follow all the best practices around emails, genuinely want to help them, and spend a long time writing a personalized email, people still don’t respond.
How do you write a personalized email for a new user?
> Perhaps just prominently feature your email address?
That's exactly what I'm doing right now :). Email address is not exactly as encouraging to reach out as a simple comment box, but I've had a hunch that the small possible upside is just not worth the hassle, and your experience seems to confirm that. Thanks!
this 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
A few weeks ago, I decided to start emailing users of our app for feedback with a personal message from me (the founder of our little startup). By and large, the feedback has been very useful; many people are impressed at the personal attention. However, this morning, I received the first bit of negative feedback about this practice, calling it "creepy."
Do you think that such personal emailing is a good or bad practice? Are there better ways to engage users in a dialogue? We all know how hard it is to get real, honest information from users when we have such a small sample size.
Thanks! What are your thoughts on the response? Did you follow up asking for an introduction or explaining better? Might make more sense to do so in a week or two when his inbox is less stuffed (and the price drops from $100)
I hope those pseudo-personal emails don't get more frequent. I don't need more "spam", and it makes me feel a little rude not answering direct questions in an email.
If you're going to do this (and a _lot_ of startups seem to do this now), then it's critical to actually respond to people when they react to your email.
I've had a number of startups (OrderAhead, Instacart) email me shortly after I've signed up with a 'personalized' message. I've had issues or questions so I've followed up with them straight away - only to get no reply.
That, in a nutshell, is a perfect way to destroy retention. If you're going to do stuff like this, it's critical to follow through. My opinion of a company is strongly tied to how well and how quickly they respond to customer feedback.
Feedback: when I log in for the first time, I don't really have any prompts, and I'm not sure what I should do, or why I should do it. I'm thinking something like "Do you want to email XXX -- you used to talk to them a lot, and it's been a while." If you can help me along the path from "I just signed in" to "ETacts just helped me!", that would be awesome.
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