Email: the easiest way to improve retention | Hacker News Reader

Email: the easiest way to improve retention

segment.io

125 pointspkrein30 comments

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.

" then it's critical to actually respond to people when they react to your email."

This.

James from Bugsnag here. We make sure to reply to people asap, we've set up Help Scout (https://www.helpscout.net) to manage the replies to these emails, so even if I'm out of the office, my co-founder can jump on and reply.

Our target is to reply within 10 minutes, unless we are asleep :)

Ian from Segment.io here and +1, we've also just started using HelpScout to handle having lots of messages going to all four of us. It was the nicest solution we found for keeping the personal touch still, since they don't add weird support crap to your emails.

Also the graphs for response time as fun to monitor. Accidentally let one request go over night the other day and really messed up my average ;p

Chris from Vero here. This is the method we use. Essentially, setup a group mailbox that everyone can respond to.

I use chrish@getvero.com instead of chris@getvero.com to send the emails. 'chrish' goes to the entire team.

I remember seeing HelloFax do this way back in May 2012 (at least, as far as I can remember!) and it was very effective.

James, you're doing much better than me! I've been slipping on my reply times recently to up to 2 days which totally sucks.

One thing I started doing is taking an hour of zero-distraction time every morning to fire off responses to emails that come in to support.

Unfortunately we don't have anyone handling customer responses full time, but we're getting to where we should. Responses to emails are a blessing and a curse, but I wouldn't trade em for the world.

Thanks for mentioning Helpscout! Amazing product.

Couldn't agree more. We take this to heart with matchist (http://matchist.com/talent) and always respond to feedback/questions that come through from our personalized emails.

I can't emphasize enough just how useful the feedback that comes from these types of emails is.

I wrote a bit about this, and how – as an email marketing company – I figured it's okay to send emails "as if you're a human" but only as long as you reply like a human: https://www.userfox.com/blog/the-joel-at-buffer-feature/

If you don't reply, you shatter the trust from that email you think someone wrote you.

for what its worth, I believe Buffer were the guys that pioneered this, and email marketing companies (like ourselves) just turned it into a feature.

One popular startup has been emailing me every couple days since I signed up a week or two ago, asking me if I'm having trouble getting started and suggesting some simple ways to start using their service today. That's great, but I have already started using it successfully.

Every time I get a new email I start to draft a "please don't bug me about this any more" reply, but I decide not to send it because I don't want to get on the radar of their sales staff. The only email I hate worse than spam is email from salespeople.

mmm, yes this is the advantage of targeting users. if they're already set up, then the startup you mention should be sending them the next level of helpful email... or no email at all.

the cool thing is that the companies mentioned in the article all let you do this kind of targeting really easily.

Chris from Vero here - totally agree.

That's one of the big benefits of Vero and the other guys: a typical autoresponder (think Mailchimp) is hard to 'cancel' but it's easy to setup different flows with Vero depending on where a customer is in your product's lifecycle!

I guess I don't fit the template because I definitely find automated email, especially automated email that masquerades as a personal email, to be a big turn-off as far as first impressions go. When I register for something I don't mind an immediate confirmation email with an activation link, but just give me the help/support email address and if I need it I'll use it. THEN you get your chance to impress me with your responsiveness.

Having now spent a lot of time sending and analyzing email campaigns/triggered emails (I'm one of the co-founders of Klaviyo), we keep seeing that email is one of the best ways to turn analysis into action - not least because it gives you a complete feedback loop.

For example, say an Ecommerce store realizes most people only make 1 purchase and don't come back. With email, you can target exactly those people, but you also can quickly see if it worked (because you know who you sent it to, you can see if they actually made a purchase).

Retention is definitely really important, but I think what's at root here is that email is an ideal way to interact with users in a more targeted and personal way outside of when they proactively visit your website. The same feedback loop idea should (and will) apply to push notifications, texts, in-app messaging, etc as time goes on.

Sometimes I think startups make an effort to re-invent everything. If you want a successful email program then you have to go and copy the mailings (as in made of paper) you get from charities. Those are the best to study and follow. Pay attention to the language, the composition of the offer, the colors each page has (due to the purpose of each page), the layout, and how most include a little gift to get you to open it.

Now, the other day I noticed a little detail in the emails I would get from Firefly (Dan Shipper's startup). The from line said "Team". I emailed Dan and told him to change it to someone's name. He promptly did. But why? People relate to other people. Little details like these are what nudge people towards opening emails. Be very, very conscious about details. That's how you get engagement. The details.

Oh, and answer the damn emails. I hate replying with a question, only to be ignored because some idiot forgot to forward the mail to the general inbox.

For a recent application I developed, I used a series of 3 automated emails post sign-up. The first was sent right after signing up, with a "personalized" welcome that came directly from my email address. The second came 5 days into the trial period with suggested activities to try within the application, again from my email address. The third was sent 15 days into the trial and included links to the help and support site, along with links to tutorial videos for advanced activities. The third email was sent from our support team email address. Each message included the option to stop receiving general inquiry emails.

Awesome! How did you pick those timings? And what were the responses like from the people who received the emails?

What do you guys all use for email management between a small 2 person team (founder co-founder)? I've seen that one person has already mentioned https://www.helpscout.net/

I've been using Assistly/Desk http://www.desk.com , but find that it's actually a bit overpowering, and adds a lot of support meta-junk to each email that just makes it looks like we're trying to be an enormous company, when in fact, we don't get that many emails, but at the same time, we want to handle each email efficiently and promptly.

Like I mentioned, +1 for HelpScout. You pretty much described a use case that is exactly what they solve nicely. No need to keep looking :p

I'd love to use something like Help Scout, but I absolutely never under no circumstances would use a hosted solution for that.

Do you know an equivalent that I can self-host?

Why don't you want to use a hosted solution?

Users asking for help will send you all kinds of potentially sensitive stuff, even if you don't ask for it. Screenshots, passwords, etc. You may not want that in the hands of a third party.

Valid points. If it was for records, or being able to move off of it in the future, Help Scout is fine for both of those.

1. I don't want to include JS from a third party. I don't even use Google Analytics. It's a potential security issue and it's slow.

2. I'm EU citizen, my business is in Germany and I don't want to store customer information on servers in the United States, because the privacy laws are different.

3. Customers might send me sensitive information that I don't want to have on any other system than the ones I own/rent.

4. I don't want to "leak" business internals to a third party. That's why I don't use Evernote, Basecamp or anything cloud-based where any information about me, my company, my revenue, my metrics or my customers is potentially accessible by a (rogue) employee of that service or where any of that information might leak to the public if the service get's hacked - which seems to be not that unlikely.

Some might argue that business-wise I'm at a disadvantage, because I don't use all these fancy tools for A/B testing, metrics, customer support and whatnot, but then the decision for me is always very easy: Can I self-host this software? No? Okay, don't bother with it.

Best Practical's "RT" (Request Tracker) is one of the typical choices. I find administration to be quite quirky and the browser UI is straight out of the last century but once you figure it out it does pretty much everything, and most normal request management functions (replies, status changes, internal comments, assignment changes, etc.) can be done entirely via email.

+1 for Help Scout. We started with Zendesk but my productivity in managing incoming emails is like 10x with Help Scout.

This is a really powerful tool, and we use it too with generally good results. Getting feedback is hard, and it's a good way to accomplish this, whilst making users feel good about the company and product.

That said, I do start wondering if this becomes the norm, people will see through this. I already 'feel it' when those emails arrive from the founder, or katie from <insert company here>. It's almost obvious now that these are just automated emails, and it makes it feel much less genuine. A bit like when you know how a magic trick works, it's no longer magic...

Nice work on all the case studies Ian, Peter, Ilya and everyone at Segment.io (who have I forgotten ?!)

Keep it up!

Calvin! But he's deep in Sublime right now so he probably won't notice :)

email is just a tool of communication. The keyword is moderation.

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