
Ditch your welcome email - mataug
http://kissflow.com/kissu_kissu/ditch-your-welcome-email/
======
martin-adams
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.

~~~
cones688
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.

~~~
EricBart
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.

~~~
martin-adams
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.

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pbhjpbhj
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.

~~~
trjordan
"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.

~~~
derefr
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.)

~~~
korzun
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

~~~
derefr
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.

~~~
korzun
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.

------
publicfig
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.

~~~
aestra
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."?

~~~
DanBC
> 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.

------
growt
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.

~~~
slig
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](https://twitter.com/substack/status/292461828368396288)

~~~
davidw
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](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.

------
ams6110
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.

~~~
cordite
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.

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wmeredith
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.)

~~~
grossvogel
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.

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

------
barkingcat
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.

~~~
freehunter
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.

~~~
snowwrestler
> 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.

~~~
freehunter
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.

~~~
snowwrestler
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.

------
eriktrautman
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.

------
ics
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.

------
mladenkovacevic
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.

------
encoderer
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.

------
eksith
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.

------
snowwrestler
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.

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

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

~~~
josephb
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 :-)

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moe
Is this parody?

"Conversation rate", seriously?

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

