

This Email Made Me Feel Bad - philipmorg
http://philipmorganconsulting.com/blog/always-be-messaging/

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gizmo
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.

~~~
colbyh
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.

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redmattred
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.

~~~
blaisco
> 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.

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chiph
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.

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rkangel
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/](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.

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latortuga
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."

~~~
patio11
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.")

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mladenkovacevic
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.

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rohamg
...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/](https://www.intercom.io/)

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

~~~
gk1
... Or they can just add one sentence to their emails explaining who they are.
That's much easier than integrating a whole new service.

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

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moron4hire
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.

~~~
RussianCow
You could just unsubscribe..?

~~~
moron4hire
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.

~~~
RussianCow
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.

