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Comment by freejack | Hacker News Reader

Its not an engineering problem, its a customer service, business and relationship problem. I contend that the more you humanize these types of interactions, the better your results will be, the more you will learn. Look at it this way, 30 seconds to send each email works out to a bit more than 8 hours work to get some amazing customer feedback. Some organizations will spend this much time in planning meetings just to setup a discussion to strategize customer sat approaches. You can get the feedback for almost free. For me, its an easy choice! ;)

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But, again, what do you say in an email that is personalized? Do you switch sentences around at random, change "hi" for "hey", forget a comma, replace a dot by an exclamation mark?

Responding to "it's a waste of my time to write the same email a thousand times" with "you should reply to each email personally" is moving the goalpost. The OP is about sending a first welcome email to every user that signs up, not about replying to an email sent for customer service or technical support.

I would never reply to a client using a canned response, I hate those with a passion. But the first email being sent, the client didn't send anything, doesn't know you or your writing style, didn't offer you any chance of customizing because it's just a "welcome to our service, thanks for signing up, I'm there if you need me" email. My point is, write it as if you would send it personally, but automate the actual sending.

In theory, I think your approach is fine, but in practice, there will always be opportunity to personalize. If you are really motivated, you can google the person and see if something interesting comes up, or you might already know the person tangentially from a conference, or there was an issue with the order that your team had to fix (a great opportunity to reconnect with a potentially unhappy customer). etc. Sure, a number of them might be exactly the same, but many of them won't be if you commit to the exercise and look for opportunities to form a relationship with these clients.

I think I'm starting to see the value, especially reading other comments here. Seeing an email that I recognize may be a great opportunity for a personal hello. I think perhaps one proposed solution would work best - having a list of new users that haven't received the welcome email, see their information, and then decide to send the regular message or edit it before sending. I think that's the way I may be heading, it sounds balanced and right.

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