Comment by tiborsaas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tiborsaas | Hacker News Reader

> First and foremost, always, always, always, split test EVERYTHING.

That's a lot of work and as a developer I couldn't care less, since it's just a side project. Just ask people about your core message and if it doesn't resonate, change things.

> On-boarding

This is the hardest thing to get right. Too much instruction will be counter productive, too little will be unpredictable. Black magic.

> 1 Hour later

I'd instantly unsubsribe. Leave me the alone please with your followup mails. I can instantly tell if your personal touch email is sent 60 min later that it's a bot. Product hunt follow up mails on my submissions are bots. I find it lame.

It also probably converts more :)

> Price Anchoring

Do, test, ask. This is the most crucial part of any business. I'd personally push a lot of focus here.

> QA the SHIT out of your product

Well said, any product start should have this as #1 priority.

> While I know this is probably only a side project, there is no reason you couldn't turn this into a viable small startup with an additional 1-2 developers

What you listed above already takes a fulltime job of 1-2 people.

Thanks for you comments.

I agree with you on unsubscribing from the emails, but it works. 86% of the users open, 54% click, 23% replied to the email and only 2% unsubscribed.

At my job with HKSEO/Humankind, this is what I spent my days doing, but I would do 4-5 prototypes at a time, pitch them to the owner, build the 1-2, launch and repeat constantly. Once the product was making a decent amount of money, we would spend more time doing the split testing and on-boarding (which was also split tested).

So I know a single developer can do this on 20% time if they aren't expecting a 1 week turnaround.

Question about on-boarding email: does the strategy lose its effectiveness as more products do it?

Software developers are among the most cynical when it comes to marketing, so I expect us to say that these suck.

What I wonder though is if every company starts to take the same approach, does a public collective fatigue set in?

I imagine that the conversion rate on direct mailers that look like novelty checks started off quite high, but the public eventually became immune as the "trick" is absorbed.

There is a free Markdown-based collaborative editing website I use. Wonderful stuff. Free (did I mention that?).

Signing up enrolls your user email into a drip marketing thread, from "Joe", the founder. He asks "how's it going? can I help?" I reply with thanks and a couple of questions. No reply.

A few days later, a canned follow-up email from "Joe", etc.

As I try to figure out the service and sharing, I sign up with another email address. Bam, the same number of hours later, a "personal" query from "Joe", as above.

Research suggests that "Joe" has abandoned this side project (his right, of course).

I'd suggest though that "drip marketing" + abandoned site is an anti-pattern. I'd be happier with "Joe" and his free service if I'd never gotten the transactional email (especially the second or third in the sequence, when he's never replied.)

The oddly good news: the lack of replies plus the Googling it instigated made me realize I was relying on an abandoned project, so of course I backed up my stuff.

> 86% of the users open

How did you measure this if there's literally no email clients left out there that load remote content by default?

I would love to know this too ...

Gmail loads pictures by default these days.

Yes, but not when email is actually opened.

This my be true now, but when I was working and doing the marketing for my products, it reported accurately. I'm pretty sure it still does honestly.

According to Customer.io, the change was to make images load by default, not requiring the end user to click Show Images. Thus making the open rates more accurate.

https://customer.io/blog/gmail-loading-images.html

I don't understand that - if Gmail opens images ahead of time and caches them, then how will you know when a customer has actually opened the email?

AFAIK, it doesn't. It will proxy all images through its own servers (and thus hide your IP), but it happens as your browser requests it and is not cached.

GMail does. It bounces the images via a server to strip out IP info but it opens them.

AFAIK all webmail providers do too, otherwise there wouldn't be so much of a market regarding email marketing with open rates and remote updating content (eg https://movableink.com/gallery/autotrader)

I'm honestly confused that Gmail would proxy their images to anonymize them, but wouldn't just make that proxy a caching proxy, such that a given image URL would only ever get one retrieval from Gmail's servers. It'd be a huge win for them bandwidth-wise.

I would assume that a unique pixel is generated by Mailchimp for every recipient to prevent this form of caching.

Similar, every URL in the email is completely unique to that 1 user's email. That is how you track opens and clicks back to a single user.

> I'm honestly confused that Gmail would proxy their images to anonymize them, but wouldn't just make that proxy a caching proxy,

They do that, but images in mail have unique URIs per recipient to enable this sort of tracking. Before Google enabled caching, it was possible for sender to figure out the exact number of times an email was read, now you can only know the first time it is read.

Most of the big providers will open images by default (sometimes via a proxy) if your message passes DKIM and SPF.

Probably wrong numbers because of gmail. Gmail will cache the image automatically, regardless of wether or not you open the mail. This is done specifically to prevent people to know that you open their mail. So you must have a shitload of false positives in there.

As far as I'm aware, google doesn't load the image unless you open the email. That said, these numbers are from 3 years ago prior to that change.

It is the last information I have from my job with Humankind before I left for a corporate gig.

Inaccurate metrics on a fancy slide deck has never stopped anyone before.

I'm suspecting both 86 and 56% numbers as well, but 23% reply and 2% unsubscribe is likely correct, which is way better than I would expect.

Though far more probably file as junk thank take the time to unsubscribe. Unsubscription process is notoriously annoying.

We tracked our junk/spam reports (which is reported back by all popular email services and software) and it was never terrible, but I don't have the numbers on a per email or campaign metric. As a whole we saw a 0.5% spam report rate. At its highest it hit 25% but that happened due to a glitch in the marketing platform that spammed every signup on one of our campaigns one night with around 100 "thank you" emails.

> Unsubscription process is notoriously annoying.

Really? Clicking a link? And Gmail often even adds their own "Unsubscribe" button.

Not the parent but sometimes, you have to check all the different mailing lists and/or they require you to retype in your email. Some might find this a bit more annoying than simply marking the email sender as spam.

An actual user typed follow up email does wonders.

Recently, Postach.io did a comeback with the service where they started out by mass-emailing inactive users what problems they are facing about the service. I emailed them expecting an automated "Thank you for your time" response.

Instead, a while later I got a custom email talking about the very specific issue I had emailed about and how they had been getting complains about the same from other users and how they are working to resolve this issue.

That made me feel they actually cared about my problems. Needless to say, I am on board!

Also agreeing with the follow up emails. Good god, please don't do this. The personal crap is icky. But the worst thing is the "if they haven't used it, send them an email asking if they have had a chance to try it" part.

Screw that. If I haven't flagged you as spam already, I will now. You're either incompetent because you actually don't know if I've logged in or not, or you are intentionally misrepresenting what you know. Either way, you've lost me.

As far as the "it works--percentages" stuff, I hate to break it to you, man, but I think you've got a serious case of correlation/causation confusion.

There are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself when you send an email:

1. Is your business spam? 2. Are you literally engaging in fraud?

If the answer to both of those is no, email is probably not the droid you are looking for. There are some exceptions, but not many--and fewer by the day as people figure this out.

>I'd instantly unsubsribe. Leave me the alone please with your followup mails. I can instantly tell if your personal touch email is sent 60 min later that it's a bot. Product hunt follow up mails on my submissions are bots. I find it lame.

A while back I signed up for a pingdom alternative. I was pretty happy with the interface and probably would've considered paying for some of the extra features.

However, I very soon after received an 'informal' message from the CEO or whatnot asking if I'm happy with the product and about upgrading the paid version. And whenever I logged in, a chat box would open with some first-name-basis employee asking me if I'm happy with the product and whether I'd be interested in upgrading. On top of that a number of the screens would have similar types of messages.

I've rarely experienced such aggressive on-boarding, and I implore every business owner to avoid doing so. Because as a result, I am less likely to upgrade to a paid version.

> I logged in, a chat box would open with some first-name-basis employee asking me if I'm happy with the product and whether I'd be interested in upgrading.

Oh my god, those damn chat boxes! I work for a company that uses one of those chat box providers. They seem to be actively used and i haven't gotten many complaints.

With that said, our chat icon just sits in the bottom. However, often when i login to the icon provider (to check messages, reply to customers, etc) they have a 6th of my screen taken up by some fake non-replyable chat announcing some faq item, new feature, etc.

I've downvoted every one, and they just keep coming. The activity of it is quite annoying. Especially since we're already a paying customer for them. I hope to god my company doesn't decide to push any of these fake messages out.

> Oh my god, those damn chat boxes! I work for a company that uses one of those chat box providers. They seem to be actively used and i haven't gotten many complaints.

My hosting provider has a support chat box that occasionally pops up, but generally isn't very intrusive. I've used it a bunch of times for support and it's been very helpful. I think chatboxes are great when they're used in this way.

Anything else is just annoying.

I'll second the comment about On-boarding, follow up templated emails just serve to annoy me. I'll try out the product when I get a chance to. Maybe a simple 24 hour later email introducing support and asking if I've got questions and another follow up 2 weeks later. Nothing more.

Oh and please please please, put some effort into multi-account detection (if not a side project). It's really annoying / unprofessional to trigger off a new series of On-boarding emails just because I added a new org.

Also, price appropriately, just because your unlimited plan is stupidly priced wont make people thing the solo plan is reasonable if it's not. Ask your early customers what they're using and what features they'd use/pay for if individually offered to them.

I agree with pricing appropriately. The pricing structure was defined for Duet (duetapp.com)

Cool, interesting app, Duet, that is. The 1, 2 or unlimited and the pricing seems pretty reasonable indeed.

If you're a startup wasting your time working on some way to detect multiple accounts for people who really hate on boarding emails AND have multiples accounts, you're doomed. Just put a checkbox on the sign up form somewhere allowing the user to opt out of the on board flow and be done with it (if you even care that much - in general you should have much higher priorities or you've run out of things to work on).

>That's a lot of work and as a developer I couldn't care less, since it's just a side project. Just ask people about your core message and if it doesn't resonate, change things.

I agree split testing is a lot of work, but you can use something like a bandit algorithm to automate the testing to reduce the amount of work needed.

>I'd instantly unsubsribe. Leave me the alone please with your followup mails. I can instantly tell if your personal touch email is sent 60 min later that it's a bot. Product hunt follow up mails on my submissions are bots. I find it lame.

you might, but I do not mind the emails as long as they have not hit the 1 per day threshold. I usually get annoyed at that point and look for the unsubscribe. Sending out a set of emails as he describes works very well in most cases.

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