This Email Made Me Feel Bad | Hacker News Reader

This Email Made Me Feel Bad

philipmorganconsulting.com

22 pointsphilipmorg20 comments

I don't think the email made Philip feel bad. I think he saw the Quip email as an oppertunity to write a mean-ish post about Quip on his blog and advertise his consulting services in the process.

It looks like Quip links to their webpage in the first sentence of their email. So it only takes one second to figure out who they are if you care. Besides, new functionality emails are mostly aimed at active users anyway.

It's not optimal to send identical emails to every user, but everybody knows that already. There are million ways to segment your users. You can send different emails to power users and casual users. Different emails to disengaged users. Different emails to admins vs non-admins. There are always a million things to optimize and A/B test.

OP here and article author here.

Eh... might have come across as mean-ish, but it's nothing personal against Quip. They just did something I see a lot of companies do, which is gloss over some of the finer points of email engagement.

I didn't get any sense of meanness.

> It's not optimal to send identical emails to every user, but everybody knows that already.

Do they? I don't think so. The company being discussed doesn't know it (or knows it but doesn't do it), and they're not alone.

I read it that way, too. Quip is still a young company focusing on product more than anything, going down the rabbit hole of long-tail user re-engagement optimizations would be a waste of time at this point.

I'd go as far as saying that at this point if a "New Features" email isn't enough to get you re-engaged then you aren't the type of user they need to be optimizing for at all. And that goes for basically any startup pre-P/M fit.

Focusing on reactivating their disengaged users is likely not the most effective use of their time at this point. With a relatively young product, they're probably right to be focusing their time and energy on filling in product gaps and letting their audience know about it.

There is a time and place for complex, context aware email marketing, but they're probably not there yet.

That being said, it wouldn't hurt to start off with a simple sentence that reminds/reaffirms the value of their product to everyone.

> That being said, it wouldn't hurt to start off with a simple sentence that reminds/reaffirms the value of their product to everyone.

I think most newsletters could benefit from this, particularly if they're going out ~once a month or less. patio11 does a good job of this with a quick two sentence introduction: (1) who is it and (2) why am I getting this.

Every SaaS firm I've worked at knew they should be doing this, but didn't. They always rated new features and bugfixes ahead of putting the hooks in to identify who isn't using the product. All it really takes is a query to return the contact info of active (paying) customers who haven't logged in for 30-45-60 days and ship the report to the sales & marketing departments for followup & analysis.

Not actually explaining what service you provide is a common problem, and I don't think providing a link covers it. You should have a short description, and use it everywhere that isn't aimed at established customers.

If you want to see a classic example of failing to do this, have a look at the basecamp website (https://basecamp.com/). Here's the game - pretend REALLY hard that you have no idea what Basecamp is and does (like me, yesterday), then visit that homepage to find out. It doesn't tell you, at least, nowhere obvious. Sure, they talk a lot about "helping people to complete projects", but that could mean a communications tool, a scheduler, a bug tracker, whatever.

This is a surprisingly common problem with landing pages. The people putting it up are so used to knowing exactly what the service is that they forget they have to explain the very basics to everyone else.

This is distressingly common, especially among pre-launch startups. It usually goes like this:

1. Set up launch page with a name that has nothing to do with what the product does. 2. Collect emails 3. Wait 4 months 4. Email me and assume that of course I remember who you are, what you do, and why I was interested.

It's mind-bendingly crazy to email me and assume such a thing yet it happens over and over. I used to email them back and say "Who are you? Why don't you just say who and what you are in the first sentence of your email?"

At the risk of being accused of pandering to the community, patio11 actually does a remarkably awesome job of not doing this in his newsletters. The first sentence of his email is always "Hey this is patio11, you signed up to receive my thoughts about software, unsubscribe at the bottom if you don't want this anymore."

Thanks, glad people appreciate that. (I feel occasional pangs of regret that literally the first thing under my salutation is the permission reminder, but it always struck me as the right call. I used to put an unsubscribe link in the first sentence, too, but people told me it was way too easy to hit on an iPhone accidentally, so now I think the boilerplate says something like "Scroll way to the bottom and one click will take care of it.")

Re-engagement for the sake of re-engagement is more or less pointless.... kinda like the acquaintance who calls you just to "check in". Letting me know you still exist doesn't do anything to re-engage me with your service.

Have a strategy before sending me that "re-engagement" email. Why have I become disengaged in the first place? Maybe I wasn't blown away by the workflow your application presented to me. Waiting for me to forget that experience is the perfect opportunity to use me to test a completely different workflow.

Either way, staying top of mind is not about "checking in" every once in a while.. it's about getting your users to depend on your product.

...And this is why every startup should use intercom [1]

intercom will let you do exactly what the OP suggests: segment and message your users based on how they use (or don't use!) your product, as well as who they are and how important they are to your business!

disclosure: I am an early investor. but don't worry, intercom will be around for a while: they just raised $23M from Bessemer [2].

[1]: https://www.intercom.io/

[2]: http://insideintercom.io/silicon-valley-outsider-raised-30m-...

... Or they can just add one sentence to their emails explaining who they are. That's much easier than integrating a whole new service.

Those pearly-whites will be burned on my retina for the next week or so...

To these sort of places:

I wish you would just plain stop emailing me. Signing up for your service should not be license for you to spam my inbox. Yes, I know, technically I did give you approval to email me. But you email me more often than my mother, and my mother emails me a lot. Stop it. You're creepy and annoying. If you were a coworker, I'd report you to HR or the police for stalking me.

You could just unsubscribe..?

I have yet to see that actually work. I still get emails from supposedly legit companies, stuff like, "We know you unsubscribed, but perhaps you'd like to give it another go?" I never got back together with any of my ex girlfriends, I'm not getting back together with any of my ex services.

Really? I've yet to see that. The worst I see is companies like Facebook automatically opting me in to new notifications they create, but they do this maybe twice a year and it takes two minutes to uncheck the boxes in account settings, so not really an issue.

A lot of services now don't even offer the opt-out for email marketing, for example, when you sign-up for Twitter you expect notifications, but they also opt-you-in for all their other emails; it's not just Twitter, I see more and more companies removing the opt-out and instead offering the unsubscribe button, thinking it's at least OK to send me junk-mail once, in the hope that I'll be interested. Unfortunately, marking it as spam does very little since their volume is so high.

Filters or unsubscribe?

I would live to have this sort of problems. My email is in github for quite some time, and I get a lot of spam.

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