How to Send Email Like a Startup

https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/guide/

by bvanvugt • 12 years ago

254 44 12 years ago

Pephers• 12 years ago

What a great resource, bookmarked!

Of course much of this has been written about in various blog posts, but having it all compiled in a single resource is very handy, especially when being in the startup phase of a SaaS business selling booking software (https://zapla.co). I'll definitely be implementing a lot of this advice!

mrmch4• 12 years ago

Thanks! We get many questions around this topic, and it made sense to us that you track your metrics against a funnel (AARRR usually) you can map your emails to that as well.

veb2• 12 years ago

Seconded. This is my 5th bookmark of the year. Wonderful resource.

mrmch4• 12 years ago

Thanks veb! We're still adding to the guide so it'll be even more useful soon.

bevacqua2• 12 years ago

Took the liberty of turning it into markdown so people can collaborate on the guide.

https://github.com/sourceful/send-email-as-a-startup

mrmch4• 12 years ago

This is amazing, we never considered making the guide open source/community driven. Many of our other resources already are.

We'll fork your markdown version this weekend and make the guide we host github powered.

bevacqua2• 12 years ago

`hget` is pretty awesome in that regard, being able to quickly convert an entire page into Markdown using a simple CLI is very powerful.

Glad it's useful!

curiously5• 12 years ago

I like that first 1000 customers you must touch them personally.

My biggest hinderance is getting a phone number that won't cost a fortune to call people in US or abroad from Canada. some Canadian telecom companies absolutely adore ripping people off when it comes to dialing other countries as if we were in the 1980s.

Basically I want to approach my customers with a call me number that won't cost them a lot and won't cost me a lot to talk on.

I'm still reading through this wonderful guide it is ripe with useful information.

dangrossman• 12 years ago

Use the dialer in Hangouts (Android's default messaging app), and calls to US and Canada are free. VOIP is the answer to free or nearly free calls with all your customers. You can get an 800 number for ~$2/month to make it toll-free for them.

curiously5• 12 years ago

I have hangouts on my android phone but I don't know what my hangout number is.

The $2/month, where can I find that?

All in all, I want to talk with my customers and do a tech demo (would need a tool to share screen as well).

gargarplex2• 12 years ago

Skype has unlimited USA and Canada calling for $2.95/month

curiously5• 12 years ago

does this give me a number that they can call or do they have to be on skype to call me?

notatoad• 12 years ago

Twilio is pretty reasonable

personlurking• 12 years ago

My hindrance is that no one responds to any form of communication via the internet, targeted to specific people who could benefit from my product. Sure, it's basically relevant spam, individualized for the person receiving it, but for an aggregation service, how else can I know what people think of my product if no one actually sees it (aside from being on Twitter, et al, which also isn't helping much).

stevebot• 12 years ago

percent of acquisition emails that I click through: zero

chrisan• 12 years ago

The Ministry of Statistics thanks you for your contribution. We have noted your click through rate and have added it to our population sample.

bostik• 12 years ago

You're getting downvotes for the unconstructive snark, but I feel there is a salient point in there.

Unsolicited email = spam; simple as that. And by that association, anything and everything being sold by those emails is suspect. After all, if you had a product or service that people actually wanted to use, why would you resort to spamming?

thebiglebrewski• 12 years ago

Spam people until they unsubscribe?

username223• 12 years ago

Best tl;dr on the thread. I tolerate quite a bit of email pestering from companies with this approach; the majority of what hits my inbox is dealt with by pressing the "delete" key in less than a second, without reading anything beyond the subject line. For the ones who get too aggressive, I just filter their spam directly to the trash rather than dealing with their usually dishonest "unsubscribe" process. I'm not interested in being "onboarded" or shoved through a "sales funnel."

moe• 12 years ago

And then there's the tldr version that everyone seems to be actually using:

1. Send at least one mail per day to urge your user to try out a random feature that he doesn't care about.

2. Make sure every mail claims to be "not a bot", "not automatic", "I'm a real human!!1".

3. Close every mail with an offer to be available at any time for everything and anything. Make sure your user knows that he can call your CEO at 5 in the morning if he feels a sudden urge to have a personal product tour.

4. Mention at least two awesome webinars in every e-mail. Send regular reminders about webinars.

5. Also send invitations for every congress, meetup, bbq party, that you are however involved with.

danieltillett• 12 years ago

Yes all part of the cult of "do things that don't scale" [1].

1. Yes I know why this is suggested and yes many times it is the right thing to do do, but finding sucessful approaches that do scale is really, really hard.

reledi• 12 years ago

6. Don't explain/remind in the email what your product does, because "Squinderly" is such an obvious name.

corobo• 12 years ago

Oh man this is my biggest peeve from startups. As someone interested in other peoples' projects I sign up to a lot of mail lists like this. Please just hint as to what it is you do if your first email is over a couple of days after I've signed up

dreeves• 12 years ago

Really good advice here. One thing I particularly liked is the advice to email the first 1000 users manually and only set up automated drip campaigns as a way to automate what you find yourself sending over and over.

I'd also like to add this PSA: Don't send automated emails that pretend to be from a human. http://blog.beeminder.com/smarmbot (Blog post, "Don't Be a Smarmbot", in which I argue with @patio11 about this.)

shalnoff• 12 years ago

This article actually explains how to make your client hate you and your business.

Dear colelagues, please don't use HTML email notifications as far as some technically advanced people just turn HTML off to a) reduse valnurability (i.e. see all links and remove possible frames, img & JS) b) make email processing faster and less resource consumptive

IMHO I see just one common and most important rule of email notifications. it must be simple as possible and not obstructive. And please never force client to register and leave email without real necessity. Minimize it and keep simpe. Then your audience (smart and most referenced group of it, at least) will love you.

cessor• 12 years ago

I believe I had mentioned this before - and received a lot of downvotes for it: I, as a user, wish not to be bothered with emails.

I often just briefly want to see what the fuzz is all about. The app then "tricks me" into providing them with an email address, by pretending they need this as an identifier, most of the time in order to create an account. They then feel free to send me "Greg from blahblah app"-Emails.

To me, this is spam. It is an email I do not want. To me there is no difference between a random spammer who wants to sell fake viagra and Greg from blahblah app, who wants me to use his cloud-driven javascript thingy.

I believe there is a role missing, in the view on customer relationships. Just because I am looking at things in your store doesn't mean I want to be treated as a customer already. I believe there should be a differentiation between somebody who already bought something and somebody who is about to. Aggressively sending email at any chance isn't the way to make this transformation, imho.

kaybe• 12 years ago

I know this does not help your point for the companies side, but I usually use temporary email adresses (such as http://10minutemail.com/) to avoid that problem.

toumhi• 12 years ago

This is a fine line to walk indeed: you don't want to spam the user, but you also want to stay "top of mind" in the prospect mind.

I think most of app founders view this under the lens of "how can we get this user to use our app?" which I think is a wrong approach.

To me the right approach as always is to start from the user, and not to see yourself (the app maker) as just this app provider. Instead, see yourself as a business coach and help the user solving the business problem (that your product solves).

Brennan Dunn's app (planscope.io) does this quite well. He doesn't just tell you to use his app, by he actively tries to educate you on how to win proposals (and his app is project management app).

Your end goals as a business app provider should be to solve for your customer success. By solving for customer success, you will solve for your product long term success. And this should drive every decision in the business.

So when you think about that email that you send, ask yourself "is this contributing to our customer success? or is it just spamming this user who might need something else at this moment?"

dkrich2• 12 years ago

So, focusing strictly on the business side of things, you have two user groups:

1) Users who have some interest and may purchase your product.

2) Users who "just briefly want to see what all the fuzz is all about" but "don't want to be treated as a customer already."

User group 1 may very well respond to your emails because they already have some interest in your product and the benefit it could provide them. These users like to read about ways to help themselves, thus probably don't consider email related to the product they are interested in as spam.

User group 2 is not interested in the product. We know that. Therefore few, if any, are ever going to pay you for it.

So, why as a business owner, would you care about annoying people in User group 2 (who could always just opt-out of the emails) at the expense of accelerating people in User group 1 through the funnel and paying you more?

tehabe2• 12 years ago

On the other hand, group 2 are the ones who you need to really convince. Group 1 is already convinced. So if you spam group 2, you might lose them completely and group 1 you don't really need to spam.

alexophile• 12 years ago

Hi there, I helped put this guide together and this is totally something we have in mind pretty much all the time (when you tell people you work for an email startup, you're kind of forced to.) But this is actually the kind of email we're trying to prevent. I usually refer to it as "The Other Spam."

I've had multiple users of ours talk about how they tried starting newsletters to resurrect dropped users but got more unsubs/spam reports than renewals. Some even got hit up by their ESPs for a spike in spam reports affecting their domain credibility. There should probably be a more prominent section on this, but we do talk about it in our blog a lot.

Here's what I usually say:

1) Always have a separate opt-in for product updates, off by default, ideally with some sense of frequency. Failing that, send product updates only to paying/active customers.

2) If you have an onboarding drip campaign, once it runs its course, if they haven't engaged, let them go.

3) From there on, all other communications should pretty much be transactional, sent to the opt-in group, or based on some pre-qualification that the user is still interested.

These are all things that we try and make really simple in our product and exercise ourselves. Part of sending better email is just not sending the shitty ones.

On the personal side, I also just add tags to my email address when I sign up for something knowing that I'm just poking around so I can easily filter their follow-ups. I also appreciate this from a lead validation angle, because I can filter email addys with a + in them from our funnel metrics.

oblio• 12 years ago

Minor nitpick: surely the title should actually be "How to Send Email as a Startup". The current phrasing seems a bit odd - especially considering the fact that it is a lecture on reaching out to potential future customers :)

jccalhoun• 12 years ago

Whoever is telling web companies that it is a good idea to suddenly start mailing "newsletters" to people that signed up for accounts is lying to them. Over the past year or so I've started getting emails from web sites I haven't visited in years - for example I signed into an old hotmail account and apparently fark is sending out newsletters now?

The only thing these things do is make me click unsubscribe and make a mental note that the site sucks.

csbrooks• 12 years ago

Have they lost anything when you do that, though? You weren't really a customer or user anymore anyway, and now they can figure that out.

If they send out that email to 100 people, and 95 inactive users unsubscribe but 5 become active users again, that's a huge net gain for them, right?

tehabe2• 12 years ago

I was disappointed. I hoped for a satirical view on what weird emails I get from sites but no. :-(

How to Send Email Like a Startup

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