The shorter the email the more believable it becomes that it was specifically written by a human directed at you, not a mass-used template. If you feel like you get an automatic email, you're not going to respond, because you don't want to talk to a computer. If, on the other hand, you can suspend your disbelief and entertain the fiction that someone named "Valerie" at E-Corp personally contacted you, you are infinitely more likely to respond.
Edit: "Welcome to ${service name}" is also a poor subject line if you expect an answer, because the subject line literally says "this is an automated email to let you know that your click on the register button has been indeed processed correctly. You probably have to click on the big colorful button in the body of this email to activate your account."
> If you feel like you get an automatic email, you're not going to respond, because you don't want to talk to a computer.
For me it isn't about not wanting to speak to a computer, I simply don't want to read a bunch of marketing copy. If a computer sent a short and direct to the point message I would be much more willing to read and respond to them.
That's one thing, but another thing that is not listed as one of the possible reasons is simply that the original email is just verbose and _bad_. Imagine a person in real life gave you that spiel, of course you'd be put off.
I didn’t get close to 1000 responses, maybe a few hundred, and it wasn’t just the feedback that was useful, those few hundred people I regularly conversed with were the real champions and evangelists for the business.
I had a similar experience at LinkedIn in its early days. Back when we had maybe 500k members, we A/B tested the hell out of our invite messages. These messages were critical because no one had heard of LinkedIn at the time (~2004ish) and no one knew what social networking was or why they would want to sign up. And getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us. We A/B tested many invite email formats:
* A paragraph explaining social networking and another paragraph explaining LinkedIn.
* A few paragraphs on the benefits of joining LinkedIn.
* A few paragraphs explaining that a LinkedIn invitation was special because it meant that the inviter trusted and respected the invitee and wanted to stay in touch professionally.
* A tiny blurb along the lines of "I’d like to add you to LinkedIn network."
Despite my expectations that one of the explanatory messages would be best, the short, vague blurb outperformed by a huge margin.
> getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us
So important that you resorted to every dark pattern in the book, it seems. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I don't know any of my tech friends who haven't had a bad experience with linkedin tricking them into spamming invites or similar.
I'm very frustrated by dark patterns, too. IIRC those came well after I left the company in 2005, and I'm disappointed they're there. I think trying to get users to spam invites is especially annoying and lame: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/953059635522502656
Actually this is a perfect fit. Microsoft is a big user of dark patterns - many examples of how they push windows 10 telemetry and other products like browsers, Microsoft teams installations are well documented. It’s almost like a match made in heaven. https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-google-and-microsoft-tric...
> A tiny blurb along the lines of "I’d like to add you to LinkedIn network."
for a long time, there were dark patterns in the account creation flow that tricked users into importing their address book and mass-emailing invitations to join linked-in. the UX made it seem like you were just sending a request to connect with someone who is already on the service.
sounds like this tiny blurb was the seed that sprouted the account creation dark patterns.
Interesting, I wonder how much of it may have been due to other reasons than just the brevity.
I wonder how much of it might also have been due to that, e.g, people generally enjoy helping other people, and so are likely to respond positively to what appears to be someone else outlining what they'd "like" for you to do.
It's hard to be sure, but my guess is the effectiveness came mostly from the brevity. Because at the time no one knew what LinkedIn or social networking were, so most users wouldn't know if the invite was spam or not, whether accepting the invite would help the other person, etc. Today there's more social pressure to accept LinkedIn/Facebook/etc invites from people you know.
I suspect two things to be at work here (among possibly many):
- First, reciprocity. If you send me an email with a one-liner, I will feel that replying in kind would be adequate. A verbose email on the other hand, may have the opposite effect of creating a feeling that I should also be more detailed (which you may not even need). My response might be to set your email aside with the purpose of addressing it later when I have more time (we all know that famously elusive promise of a future that never materializes).
- The second point is slightly in line with the previous, but different. The length of the message can be used to estimate the cost of a conversation. A short message can be perceived to announce a one-off (cheap) exchange, whereas a verbose message may seem like the beginning of a more involved (expensive) one where if I engage, you will ask even more from me (how much exactly, nobody knows). That uncertainty is uncomfortable enough that I may not want to respond at all.
It wasn’t just the length of the email body they changed in the 3rd variant... they also changed the subject line from “Welcome to Netlify” to “Question...”, but that change wasn’t mentioned as a potential contributor to the good result.
I’m betting that change resulted in a big increase in open rate. I’m conditioned to ignore “Welcome to AcmeCo”-style emails.
FWIW I'm also conditioned to ignore emails that are vague. Honestly, at this point I assume any unsolicited communication is a spear phishing attempt until proven otherwise.
Agreed. Extending on /u/formerly_proven point, I think the third variation - where the subject changes - makes the email feel like it's coming from a real human even more.
A corollary is that if you do have to write a long email, try to start it off with a short, 1-2 sentence intro paragraph that piques interest and pulls people in to the rest of the text.
Even better, try to keep all the paragraphs as short as possible. Each paragraph has two jobs: to convey some information, and to convince the reader to keep going to the next paragraph.
Done right, you can get someone to read a long text without it feeling like they read a lot, because you kept them curious about what comes next the whole way through.
Kurt Vonnegut was a master of this technique. The vast majority his paragraphs are very short. It's almost like prose poetry. You (semi-consciously) keep thinking "I'll just read a few more lines" until you look up after 4 hours and realize you're just a few pages from the end of a 300 page novel.
That's also how most newspaper articles are written. Short paragraphs, often one sentence each.
Also, they're top-loaded with all the essential info, followed by a long tail of lesser details as the article progresses (this tail can be cut short in case of space constraints).
The most effective recruiting emails I receive (in terms of how likely I am to reply) are:
* Plain text
* Directly addressed to me from name@company.com
* 3-4 sentences max, slightly personalized
* Optionally have a link to the company career page/job listing (better if the raw link is pasted instead of embedded in text, to save me the time hover-checking it).
I'm more likely to reply because it feels like there's a real person on the other end that "hand-wrote" this email. Not some amorphous system that crawled my LinkedIn and sent me an automated message. Kudos to recruiters that are doing this — doing the thing that doesn't scale to get an edge.
I should add that the key to good writing (in most domains) is to be concise. Editing is primarily about cutting what's unnecessary, but it's often treated like the part where some words are swapped out with fancier ones (e.g. "use" to "utilize").
I'm a big fan of PG's essay, Write Like You Talk, on this topic.
I feel like many times it's not that the message doesn't get read but that it doesn't persuade the recipient to make the time to write a response.
Shortening the text not only transmits the message more efficiently, it also allows the recipient to feel comfortable with writing a one-liner reply. You are actually lowering the threshold over which the person gains the will to start writing a response.
Now that everybody's remote, I think there's an important conversation about respecting the reader's time that needs to happen.
1) Brevity.
2) Get your terminology perfect. Asynchronous "who's on first" sucks.
3) When discussing anything on the web, start with a hyperlink. I can't see your screen, I can't scroll or inspect your screenshots. Expecting the reader to hunt down the resource that you had one ctrl-C, ctrl-V away is rude.
I just mean the repeated loops of miscommunication based on the fundamental misunderstanding of a single word. "Who's on first?" is a comedy sketch where two men are discussing a man named "who" and various other people with misleading names.
I've run into many times where a person has said a similar but distinct term - like they said "repo" when they mean "branch" and then burn 5 minutes of time while two people are confused by the fact that nothing the other person says makes sense.
It feels like the latency-time of writing makes shaking this mess out take 5X longer than spoken conversation.,
Thank you for explaining that. I speak English as a first language and it parsed perfectly well without knowing this reference, and to that end, parsed perfectly incorrectly.
I've recently launched https://boxci.dev and have a 'leave your email if you have questions' box on the landing page.
People have been leaving their emails, but surprisingly, even though the intent is very clear (I think), almost nobody has actually replied when I've emailed to open the conversation. The kinds of response rate percentages (<<10%) talked about in the article very much resonate!
My opening email is nothing like as long as the first one in this article, but it does contain a generic intro paragraph (thanks for leaving your email, I'm the founder, etc) which I include just for context and politeness, but which I've realised from reading this article may be causing people to just stop reading, thinking that it's an auto-generated response. I'll try some one liners from now on and see how it works out!
Yeah, great point, I think this might be the case. I'd been thinking perhaps a chat widget or link to a slack channel or something might be more useful, and clear in its purpose.
Right, so the way to get more replies is to convince the reader that they will get a useful answer if they do reply.
One thing you can do is not bury the request (the offer to help) at the end of the message.
Another thing you can do is make your automated message seem like it isn't automated, and a shorter message and better subject helps. But I wonder if it wouldn't be better to say "Yes, this is an automated message, but we read and respond to every response". Why trick your users when you can just tell them the truth?
The opposite is also true: to get fewer, higher quality replies, say more. Even if people do respond with low quality responses, it's easier to filter them out because they say things that make no sense if they read the entirety of what they are responding to.
Long-form articles posted to HN are a great example.
Maybe if you made it a two word email and removed the signature it would get 16x the engagement. Or if you had an empty email and put the question in the subject you’d get 32x engagement.
The most popular podcast in the world lasts for 3 hours. I don't think it's true that attention spans are getting shorter – long form content has never been more popular.
I think it would be hilarious to get a company email that uses only the subject line. I miss getting "announcement EOM" emails (EOM indicating the end of the subject is actually the end of the message).
What about the effects on branding / user perception of the message? While the first short email feels ok, the straight-shooter 'Hi, I can see you signed up, what do you want from us?' version feels awkwardly impolite.
I find it still obvious that it is an automated message and the attempt at 'being human' makes it even less appealing. This kind of metric chasing most likely results in dark patterns and subpar experiences.
Every company should find their balance between brand and optimization. Amazon will implement practically any change that shows an improvement to some KPI, while Nike would rather preserve their brand image at the cost of, say, lower checkout rates.
I've noticed this too in emails to coworkers. If the email is long enough, they just skip it to "read it later". This is quite frustrating, because sometimes you just _have_ to communicate some more words.
One of my managers gave me some guidelines here. If it's more than 100 words, cap it at 100 and schedule a meeting. It clearly is information-dense to the degree where a quick question/answer session will be helpful.
From my own experience, I make sure to never ask more than one question in an email. If you ask more, people will answer the first and ignore the rest.
I still find it useful to write those emails, even if I'm asking to talk to someone. The email serves as an agenda, it forces me to reason through the issue, and it serves as a long-term record of the issue. But the request for the meeting should come first.
It depends on the context, the workplace, and how you do it.
An agenda is an agenda, which is different than an argument/position that would be in an email. Usually when I get something like that, it's intended to be an "anchor" or written record of something that the other party wants. That triggers more bullshit email, as now a more formal artifact of whatever conversation happens in the meeting is needed.
I had a colleague who never could get our customers to sign off any solutions he suggested. The problem was that he wrote essays comparing the pro and cons of different solutions and asked them to chose one. He rarely even got an answer.
When I took over, we decided what we thought was the best solution. Explained it in an email with max three lines and asked if we should continue with that solution. I usually got an OK within minutes.
And you are right, the long essays are put in the "read later" pile, and in our case, the customers just never got around to them.
Long emails should still have short opening paragraphs. No more than three sentences, one or two preferred. Basic context ("We still need to figure out waffles"), people's names if it's a referral or a request for someone else ("Jane said you know waffle batter the best"), and most importantly, if you're asking a question, end with a question mark ("What waffle batter recipe should we use?").
The rest of the email can then be long, but at the end, always restate the question.
I think this also applies to any document/article/text that is mainly there to convey information.
People will skim through it quickly to extract relevant facts of interest. The longer the text, the harder this is and the less likely someone will do it.
In English we call it "Wall of Text" in German sometimes "Bleiwüste"[0].
Things that help:
- using bullet points
- simple, clear language
- a concise abstract/tldr
- interactive elements when possible such as links and expandable elements:
In HTML there is a standard element that is seldomly used but to me seems very useful: the <details>/<summary> element[1].
I think it should be used more often! Perhaps in combination with a more distinct color/styling too.
Here is an interesting tutorial/article that uses it[2]. You can expand text to get more background information and explanations on certain topics.
This practice condenses the text, making it less daunting at a first glance and also makes a clear distinction between core content and supplementary information, which increases the overall structure.
These results seems quite suspicious to me. In all instances the author only received 1 email in reply. If you run these results through an A/B testing calculator, they aren't statistically significant. That's even the case for the 1% conversion compared to the shortest email 8% conversion. I like the thesis statement that short emails convert users better, but the experimental results certainly aren't strong enough to support that claim. I'd love to see an updated version of the article now that 3 years have passed and see what the conversion rate is.
Maybe I misunderstood the article, but my impression is that the ‘ 4% (1 in 25 users)‘ is just to make the percentages more understandable and the author didn’t only send the email to 100/25/12 users.
I want to talk about the opposite problem - I routinely get 'personalized' emails from the founder/CTO/VP for awesome sauce/ saying "Hey X, I noticed you were able to turn on the light saber but never signed up for a friendly battle with D. Vader. Hit reply to this email if you want to learn how to do so. We read and respond to every email from our Jedi customers."
And if I like the service but find some aspect of it annoying, I spend half an hour composing a thoughtful response to said email. Nine times out of ten it's crickets. Of course it was a mass email sent to zillions of budding saber rattlers but the lack of acknowledgement, let alone a proper reply, sours me on the service for ever.
I know I have a difficult time responding to long emails. When someone (friend or business) sends me a short email, there's a good chance I'll reply right away if it'll only take a minute. Now, if they send a long email, well, I'm not interested in stopping everything and spending 15 minutes writing it out. So, it goes on the to-do list for later. This keeps getting pushed back again and again, and sometimes never gets done.
I remember when I used online dating sites this was also the case. If I wrote someone a long message, asking a number of questions, it would rarely get a reply. However, if I literally wrote one or two sentences with a single, easy to answer question, I'd get a reply 50% of the time.
"You don't learn when you're the one doing the talking."
I cringe when I hear someone talking about a fancy over-designed email. Where the content is all about the brand and close to zero empathy for the receiver. It's 2020, yes?
> Even if you follow all the best practices around emails, genuinely want to help them, and spend a long time writing a personalized email, people still don’t respond.
How do you write a personalized email for a new user?
unless you're going to have an actual human do it, I think it might be better to just not try. I get tons of messages on linkedin from recruiters who say something like "wow impressive profile! based on your experience at {current role}, we think you'd be a great fit for company XYZ". except company XYZ is always some web service company in a totally different domain. my current job is working on a niche desktop c++ product. if I'm a "great fit", so is anyone else with a pulse and a cs degree.
if I get a generic message saying "hey I'm recruiting for company XYZ, here's what we do", I might respond if it sounds interesting. I'm definitely not going to respond if you make it obvious that a bot scraped my profile and didn't understand anything about it.
I'm one of those that dropped and moved to Firebase. The monthly payments were topping somewhere at $130 for a static website with 700-800 daily visitors and Netlify was starting to corner me into paying extra for every little detail possible. I clearly felt that onboarding was off and it's time to milk every cent.
I would find it quite annoying to get any of those emails.
When I give you my email, it's not because I actually want to hear from you; it's because you've made it the only — or the least shady — way to sign up. I do not want to hear from you or answer your questions, especially before I've decided that I like your product and care about it.
So any such email I immediately mark as junk, and the fact that you sent it to me will go the "cons" column when evaluating your product vs the competitors.
Life must be really hard if you get to that point where a welcome email coming from a service you signed up for a trial is so "annoying" that you "immediately mark as junk".
This applies to internal emails, especially requests to management chain. Whenever possible, aim to keep emails to two lines/sentences max, and put the request always first.
This depends on your management. If they trust you, and typically give you what you need, sure.. request first. But if they are more the kind where it is like pulling teeth to make changes or get more resources, then no - first you need to establish the reasons behind your need, explain the negative impact to the team, propose a solution, and explain how it will benefit the broader organization. You still need to do that all concisely, which is a challenge.
I've used that pattern in emails quite a bit since our company was bought a few years ago, and it works far more reliably than when I just send off a short request.
Sure, context matters. But an important lesson I learned only after 10+ years in the industry is that senior execs slice their time and mind-share very thinly. As a very junior engineer I would send out paragraphs explaining the background of an issue, discussions so far, proposals, etc, and sometimes I wouldn't even have an actual request. And then wonder why I got no reply.
The issue of “use simpler words” is important: average reading age in U.S. is 7th grade. I have seen suggestions that indicate 5th grade reading level is the best benchmark to use.
To get more responses to your surveys, make your surveys shorter. The massive response rate will make up for the loss in granularity; most of the granularity is not actionable anyway. The tricky thing is that some huge, in-depth survey looks better to your manager, whereas the simple one looks lazily developed.
I also wonder how much of this is that shorter emails look more like a real person. I have to deal with enough spam and try-my-product emails that I delete emails at the first sent of "sales".
I would be more inclined to the shorter email which looks more like a person actually typed it.
The converse is also true. Say more to have less replies.
When writing business email, be an epistolary writer. Imagine what you vis-a-vis will feel or do or need at the moment they receive your letter and address that.
Basically, to have less replies is to save time for you and your correspondence. They will not take [1] their time answering with questions and you will have more time not answering their mail.
This is where programming (and business) needs empathy in full.
[1] I thought about using "waste" there but declined that after some consideration. They will not waste their time creating a reply to you - because they'll show you your shortcomings. But they will be more productive in case you hit all the spots and your email does not need to be answered.
This applies to internal email as well, no on reads your essays. Keep it short, bullet points if possible, and don't request responses to more than one or two questions at a time.
I really want to do this. But considering my product is effectively a service to help deal with unsolicited mail - sending unsolicited email about on-boarding feels wrong.
I decided not to do it (after sending one, doh >.<). After sending that first one, I thought about it and I don't really like receiving unsolicited on-boarding messages.
Though I am going to build something into my on-boarding process so that people can opt-in for these.
This article led me to another one about email designing which states that plain text emails get more clicks than those with fancy templates. I can relate to that. Every time a see a see an email in plain text I stop to check what it is.
IMO, a brief, thoughtful note is one of the highest-value things that a candidate can do.
Hiring for a small startup, I am looking for connection. So when I review job applications, I will always read a three-sentence cover letter that is tailored to my company, but never read a page-long cover letter that is obviously copy-pasted. So if someone wanted to get a job at Kevala, it would behoove them to spend 5 minutes reading our website.
If you add a one paragraph or even one sentence cover letter that is unique to the company your applying for, you'll already be ahead of 95% of the other applicants in my experience.
Even when we state that a cover letter is required, the number of people who actually supply one is minuscule. It does effectively filter out people who can't read or follow instructions though.
Let me give you some advice...talk less, smile more, don't let them know what you're against or what you're for. Until that is you get their attention, then make the deal. Cuz if you want to get ahead, fools who run their mouths off wind up dead (broke).
Edit: "Welcome to ${service name}" is also a poor subject line if you expect an answer, because the subject line literally says "this is an automated email to let you know that your click on the register button has been indeed processed correctly. You probably have to click on the big colorful button in the body of this email to activate your account."