Ditch your welcome email | Hacker News Reader

Ditch your welcome email

kissflow.com

70 pointsmataug59 comments

For me, I find value in knowing I got a welcome email as a subtle confirmation that I entered my correct details, and if I didn't, I have a way to recover it. I can now safely forget the name of the can't-quite-remember-how-they-spelt-it-startup domain name, my password, username, etc, knowing that I did get my email registered with the company and I have a record of it.

But the article isn't saying to ditch it, it's saying to use that opportunity for something much better. This is a good idea when the goal of it has a benefit to the user. It also builds more value to your brand by being a real entity backed by real people.

I don't know who you are using but..

> my password, username, etc

I would immediately reply to the company rescinding my account and informing them this highlights a total lack of understanding of securing peoples personal details.

Why? It seems common that if you can supply the email you signed up with, you can recover your username and get a password reset. Especially true if the website is not somewhere you go to very frequently like the original comment seems to be insinuating and you are using different passwords for every account you make.

Yes, it's being able to use a password reset function. I have different passwords for all sites and with some more strict password rules, I know I'll struggle to remember it.

I do use a password vault, but only for really important accounts.

I think martin-adams meant something else; not that these details are in the email, but that once your email is registered you can you can always reset your info on the service:

I can now safely forget...my password, username

Correct :)

A provocative but misleading title. The article actually is just a modification of a welcome email, indeed it makes it worse as it doesn't just inform but demands immediate attention too. Title should be "badgering your potential customers to respond immediately in your welcome email increases responses".

It probably works well as a sales tactic but TBH I'm not inclined to do business with companies that demand I work to their schedule in their welcome email. I mean 'drop everything and respond to us within 30 mins' is pretty aggressive.

and that's why you are not the one writing this post :) Atleast the guys at KISSflow are giving enough notice. I dont see anything wrong with it.

have received so many buggy calls from saas businesses without any kinda prior info and many of them are known growing businesses.

this one is a genius hack and one of the few out there.

"I will call you in the next 30 minutes or do you want to do this over email?"

It certainly asks for time in the next 30 minutes, but you're free to do it async on a longer timeline.

But you have to do something in the next 30 minutes (responding to the email) in order to not have to do something in the next 30 minutes. There's no "I'm too busy for this" default (except not taking their call, I guess. That's probably what I would end up doing.)

> That's probably what I would end up doing.

Same here. And I would treat it like any other cold call: if I have time I'll waste some of theirs, and if I don't I'll get them off the line quickly with no care for how rude they might think I am.

You are kinda overblowing this. Simply say do it via email and tell them to reschedule.

Some people prefer the phone to get shit done faster and move on.

YMMV

What if you're too busy to bother reading the email in the first place? What if you signed up, and then instead of fishing out the confirm link, you got distracted and went off to do something else? Now someone's calling you and you don't know why.

I don't usually field calls if I'm busy. I mean everybody has their own style of work. If you are in sales, this is standard.

As a consumer, If you threaten to call me in 30 minutes if I don't respond to the email, you will lose my business. This is, at best, obnoxious advice.

Yeah, some "hacks" can go beyond creepy. I once half filled out a form on a site to apply for an industry association then got distracted. An hour later I get a call asking why I hadn't submitted the form yet and if they could help!

Insurance companies are the absolute worse about that. I'm shopping around for insurance and get 10 quotes. Then I'll pick one company to go with and sign up. I'll either do it online or I call a rep to finish the signup.

Now 5 of the remaining 9 companies I got quotes from but decided not to pick decide I need a phonecall (or less obnoxiously but still obnoxious) email. "Hi, I saw you got a quote on our site, can I help you sign up?" "Would you like to talk about the quote you received on our website?" The best was when I replied "No, I already bought insurance" and the rep was like really confused as to why would I get an insurance quote if I already had insurance. She seemed surprised it would be a possibility to get a quote and NOT sign up. Or even to shop around. Sometimes I even get quotes once in a while to get an idea if I can get a significantly better deal somewhere else. Then I get phonecalls.

I started replying "If I wanted to talk on the phone or sign up I would have called you." and hang up. Its so rude but really, I don't want to talk to them, if I was interested after I got a quote I would call them. Do people really go "oh, yeah, I wasn't going to sign up but since you called me during dinner I changed my mind."?

> I started replying "If I wanted to talk on the phone or sign up I would have called you." and hang up. Its so rude but really, I don't want to talk to them, if I was interested after I got a quote I would call them. Do people really go "oh, yeah, I wasn't going to sign up but since you called me during dinner I changed my mind."?

I guess the sales calls convert - otherwise the companies wouldn't spend the money on phone calls.

Do you know what a welcome email is? It means the customer has already signed up, inputted their contact information, billing information, and is looking to get the value they invested back out of the SaaS product.

I'd be absolutely thrilled to get a phone call from a real live person in this instance.

Actually in many SaaS products (KissFlow included), you sign up for a free level of service to check it out first. No billing info submitted, level of commitment low.

A seemingly-mandatory phone call in 30 minutes is pretty aggressive for that situation.

I think the high reply rate is due to this phrase in the new mail: "I will call you in the next 30 minutes or do you want to do this over email?"

If I wouldn't want anybody to call me, I would probably reply.

Quoting @substack [1] "A phone call is a hostile act of aggression. First you interrupt someone with an infuriating sound and then you demand their attention."

[1]: https://twitter.com/substack/status/292461828368396288

From patio11:

"There is no chasm in America, not even between Red/Blue, so deep as that between Phone People and Email People."

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/519869383372320768

With LiberWriter - a service geared to authors, no less - a certain percentage of our customers really, really wants to talk to someone on the phone.

For some people. For sales people and others whose job it is to be ready for interruption all day, it's convenient.

"I will call you in the next 30 minutes or do you want to do this over email?"

I actually find that line in the email obnoxious. Am I missing something? Hasn't the user already signed up to a SAAS site? And now they are insisting on becoming a distraction? On their schedule?

All their communication seems obnoxious: "Now, do you have a workflow problem or a task management problem or both ?! Tough, right!? That’s exactly why I am writing to you."

They make a great point about using the welcome email for more than just a hello. In their line of business they basically have to force their way in the door to get those potential customers.

Didn't see that little gem. If I signed up and received a phone call within 30 mins Id probably go ahead and close the account.

Email replies doesn't actually mean anything, would be interesting to see what kind of user rentention and paying customers they got from both approaches.

Also, if someone replies saying "please do not call me". Does this count in the stats?

Wow, that is incredibly aggressive. Unfortunately being badgered by phone calls from sales people (for products I'm already paying for) seems to be a fact of life in the business world.

Exactly. Makes me wonder if they actually went through with it if the recipient didn't reply.

Of course they would, why not? That's the point of inside sales.

Kudos on the plain text email. I wish more people did this. Especially if your audience is tech-oriented a fair number of them may be using Mutt or reading email in emacs or vim. Even if they are not, they will likely appreciate a straight email that doesn't look like a magazine advert.

I personally would appreciate text only email since my phone is generally the first place I see emails these days.

On another note, not everyone technical is a Richard Stallman that reads email inside of emacs.

Plain-text-format emails are worth very little to most businesses because the vast majority of email clients render HTML and do not tell the user when the email is plain text.

I could send you an HTML email without images and font declarations and it would look exactly like a plain text email in Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Mac Mail, iOS Mail, etc.

I'm not even sure these emails in the story ARE actually plain text emails, because they say they are sending them via Gmail, and Gmail defaults to HTML emails, even for interpersonal emails. In other words they are likely to be text only, but of format HTML.

It's email, it doesn't need to be one or the other. That's what MIME is for.

There's no way reading email in the terminal is close to 1% of all email users haha.

The first line of this article, "Don’t know Lincoln Murphy? Then, I would pretty much assume you are not in the SaaS Business and you may well skip the rest of this post and do something more useful. :-) !"

Sounds good to me. clicks "back" (I've been in the SaaS world for 5+ years.)

I was similarly turned-off. It's one thing to credit your influences, but this came off as name dropping with a side of social shaming.

Often a "welcome" email is the canary in a coalmine for a service that will annoy me with repeated unwanted communication.

A welcome email is the most dreaded thing in my inbox - I delete them as soon as they land in my inbox.

It's content free, I haven't started to play with the app/site/tool yet (which means I don't know if I like it yet, and I have no real questions until I actually start working with it), and basically, has no value aside from reassuring that someone is available to help.

And even in that case, the welcome email is sent by a robot! Which means that it's not a real person anyways.

In many cases, as soon as I see the welcome email, I hit report spam to block any further email. If it's something I will be using for a long time or for specific purpose, I will bother fiddling with their email settings so I don't get overloaded. If it's a one-off or an app or something, I literally never want to hear from you. So I preemptively mark the first email as spam so I never have to see another one.

No, Runkeeper, I don't need an email when I set a personal record. You told me that in the app, literally as it happened. That's why I reported your email as spam and blocked everything you have to say to me. You're an app, you already have a way to contact me.

And here I was wondering why a few months ago legit emails that I asked for were starting to show up in my spam folder, including all the facebook emails I asked facebook to send me. (I don't log into facebook so if someone messages me or invites me to an event I'll need an email otherwise I'll miss it).

So now I have to check my spam folder emails regularly and put filter on the domains that end up there "no, don't send to spam filter."

Why can't you just use a filter instead of messing up other people's email?

Why should I have to create a filter when I never asked for the email in the first place?

If you're emailing me and I didn't ask you to, that's the definition of spam. Gmail has one button that does two functions. Report spam and unsubscribe. There's no way to have Gmail automatically unsubscribe you from a third party list without also reporting spam, so that's the only option I have. (On a side note, Facebook is something I use quite often so I have my settings there tuned to never send me an email. So your Facebook woes are not because of me, at least).

Mosquitoes serve a purpose as well, but I won't apologize for using a fly swatter.

In Gmail - Click on "more" then "filter messages like these" as so - http://i.imgur.com/OdJpKoE.png and set messages from that sender to be automatically deleted.

That neither marks it as spam nor does it unsubscribe me from the list. 99% of the time the message falls into at least one of those categories, and 99% of that, they fall into both spam and something I want to unsubscribe from.

I don't need three or four clicks to get rid of troublesome emails that I never asked for. Gmail has a handy "report spam" that covers 99.99% of every unwanted email I get.

> In many cases, as soon as I see the welcome email, I hit report spam to block any further email.

What the hell? This is crazy. Reporting an email as spam does not just protect you from receiving further emails, it reduces the reputation of the sender and makes it less likely their emails will get through, even to other customers who want them.

It would be like walking through a bookstore, deciding not to buy anything, then reporting them to the Better Business Bureau as a scam. You are making things worse for everyone else, as a matter of personal convenience.

Yup. Just like using Adblock hurts companies who have decent advertisements on their site, not just abusive advertisers. For sites I frequent that do not have abusive advertisements, I make exceptions for them in AdBlock. Otherwise, everything gets wiped out, on every site. If you're caught in the swath of the innocents, sorry, but I'm not sorry.

Long ago, companies, startups, blogs, etc, declared war. They decided that their readers, their users, their customers aren't good enough and they need to wring from them more money, more attention, more clicks, more engagement. And they are willing to do whatever they can get away with in order to do this, no matter how much it pisses off their customers. I'm not dealing with it. I used to only block actual spammers. And then it got to be so many emails to opt out of, and so much junk coming in. I used to click "unsubscribe", and then they started to pretend the word unsubscribe meant "I'm a real human, spam me more!" I'm happy to give you my email address, because you demand that I do so. But the minute I hear from you at a time when I did not ask you to speak, I no longer care what you have to say, ever again. Why should I go out of my way to figure out how to opt-out when I never opted in?

It's not that I'm walking out of a store without buying anything. It's that I'm walking into a store, being followed by a salesman who is telling other stores in the area that I am out shopping, and then being upsold on everything whether I want to buy it or not, for weeks, months, or years after I walk out of the store. And when that happens, I'm going to tell my friends not to shop there. That is what "report spam" means.

It's the right thing to do, and I'm not going to apologize for it. I would say "just stop being abusive and I'll stop reporting you as spam", but no, like online advertisements, it's too late for that. I will always block your ads, and I will always report you as spam. The privilege has been abused for too long.

Account creation emails are a security feature. If someone sets up an account to pretend to be you, the account creation email will alert you that it is happening.

Account creation emails are a data quality feature. People don't always type their emails correctly, so the account creation email confirms that the provider has the correct email address. If you create an account with a typo'd email, you will not be able to log in because you won't know there was a typo--you'll enter your actual email address on the login form and get denied.

Account creation emails are a best practice that has obvious benefits. I can't understand the mindset that objects to them.

> What the hell? This is crazy. Reporting an email as spam does not just protect you from receiving further emails, it reduces the reputation of the sender and makes it less likely their emails will get through, even to other customers who want them.

LEARN TO USE OPT-IN. Learn to confirm that opt-in. Resist the urge to send unsolicited bulk email just because you have some tenuous "previous business relationship".

We're talking about a transactional email, not marketing.

Let's say you create a free account at GitHub. GitHub sends you an email to confirm the account creation. This guy marks those as spam. It makes no sense.

I'd like to know a bit more about sending emails with Google Apps instead of something like Mailchimp, specifically how automated you can get, what tools are available, and what the risks are. It sounds like a good idea in theory but you presumably run the risk of getting blacklisted for SPAM if you're not careful so I'll assume this only works for businesses with high touch customer processes / fewer signups who don't need to send a whole ton of emails.

Welcome emails are useful for 2.5 things:

    - Confirming that your registration was successful
    - Remembering that you signed up for something in the first place
      - Finding useful information pertaining to the account and the service: the unsubscribe link, the TO field (for remembering the site specific extension you gave), link to TOS, etc.

Keeping these things in mind would make a whole lot of my archived mail more useful.

This is what happens when "growth hackers" get a hold of your sales strategy.

They re-frame the conversation to center around meaningless (although indirectly related to sales performance) metrics that give the sense of success but do everything to shroud real success. Kudos this this marketer for labeling his/her metric improvement "10X conversations" giving it at least a tinge of humanness.

There's nothing wrong about trying to improve these metrics in and of itself, but when the entire tactic is based on tricking or threatening people into initiating "conversations" (ie. when those conversations are more "Please do not call me" as opposed to "Please tell me more about your product") then the real goal of said marketer is not to sell the product, but to sell their own usefulness within a company.

The author here is certainly using some provocative language in their email. I can't comment on the long term effectiveness of that, but I do believe in the power of the plain text email.

We've been using "handwritten", plaintext emails from the beginning at Cronitor. I copy and paste a few bits but I always write something individual for each signup. The days we get 5-10 signups make that a little more challenging, but you won't find us complaining. And I feel better knowing that everybody who took a moment of their day to signup and checkout Cronitor got a moment of mine in return.

Shouldn't this be qualified with "...if you signup to KISSFLOW"? There are certain types of customer that would consider it superfluous, but often a welcome email will have other information that would be nice to have, just so I don't need to login again.

So a rose by any other name, perhaps, but it's still a welcome email.

TL;DR: If your success metric is "conversations with a new customer", then you can increase it by forcing the customer into a conversation via your first email.

However, I bet that many SaaS vendors don't consider that metric as their #1 concern.

Nice rant against using MailChimp et all for the first contact mail. GMail dumps them in "Update" way too often...

This doesn't have to work always. This is obviously a huge risk. I'd say you just got lucky!

It worked for them, so good on them for trying something different and also sharing about it!

As always, what works for one company, won't always work for the next :-)

Is this parody?

"Conversation rate", seriously?

The metrics you are looking for are conversion rate and retention.

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