Three simple email campaigns that can help improve retention

Sending your users targeted, helpful emails is guaranteed to give you a significant conversion boost, so it's worth it to pay for an email service that can help you do it!

In this lesson we'll show you three emails to increase your conversion and retention: the surprise personal email, the abandoned task email, and the last email you'll ever send.

People's first reaction is "but I don't know what to write!" Don't worry, getting started is easy. Customer.io's tips on writing great emails introduces a super-simple framework that will guarantee better results. That's a good place to start.

Here's a few examples that worked well for Segment in the early days.

The surprise personal onboarding email

The first time you can possibly send an email is right after a user signs up. This is a sensitive period: they're exploring your product, and if they get confused they're likely to jump ship. Only a few users will bother to send a support request, praying for a reply.

This is the perfect time to reach out.

All it takes is a single-sentence email from a founder asking if they need any help getting set up. It's a magical experience for users: someone cares. And not just anyone, but the founder of the company!

Every company I've talked to has gotten a major boost from this super-simple email. Here's an example from James at Bugsnag:

Case Study: Bugsnag

Bugsnag captures errors from your web and mobile applications. The first email they send to new signups is very simple, but has been yielding great results.

32 minutes after someone signs up, they get a one-line email directly from James, the CEO of Bugsnag, asking if they need any help:

People reply to this email a whopping 22% of the time. Consider that for a second. With a simple email, James starts valuable conversations with one-fifth of his users. And in return he gets tons of helpful feedback like this:

… or hints about how people find out about his product like this:

By starting a dialogue with their users, Bugsnag has found they can convert people who would usually bounce. Users often get stuck without an answer to the questions they ask, they would have exited the on-boarding process and disappeared forever. But now they get a personal email from someone they can reach out to for help.

There are two important points here that you don't want to miss:

First, the email sets up a direct channel for support questions. The fact that you care about this customer is what gives the email it's impact! If it's not personal or relevant, your going to lose some of that magic.

Second, by delaying the email 30 minutes, people who got distracted come back and finish setting up even if they never reply. The result is happier customers and better conversion.

This surprise personal email will take you 5 minutes to write, and 10 minutes to set up from scratch. I cannot recommend it enough.

That's one down. What next?

The abandoned task email

The key to great emails is to ask "How can I help my users succeed?" When a user abandons your app right before they complete a task, that's an opportunity to help them succeed. Reach out to them and find out why they didn't complete the task (maybe you have a bug?), and remind them what they were trying to achieve.

Here's an example in action from Flightfox:

Case Study: Flight Fox

Flightfox helps its customers 'hack' the best flight itinerary using the power of the crowd.

The process has three steps: providing your itinerary details (e.g. SFO to LON), payment and ultimately, awarding the contest.

Flightfox had a hunch that many people were abandoning the process at the payment step. After confirming this was the case with their analytics they set up an automatic email in Vero that explains why customers should come back and complete their flight contest.

This single campaign lifted the conversions on their entire funnel by 1.5% and, after further A/B testing, has permanently lifted conversions by 3%. With just a few hours' investment, Flightfox has made a massive improvement to their bottom line and helped their customers succeed.

Abandoned Task emails are really effective at increasing conversion for users who have fallen out of your funnel. But you can also send targeted emails to up-sell specific subsets of your users without spamming everyone.

The last email you'll ever send

The ultimate type of abandonment is when a paid user churns. This is especially painful because paid users are really expensive to acquire: 2% of your total visitors will sign up, maybe 30% of those users will activate, and even fewer will pay you. That means that every churned user costs you hundreds or thousands of new visitors.

That sucks! But targeted email can help.

The biggest mistake you can make is to send a lame "We miss you!" email begging the user to come back. Compare these two real emails. Which makes you want to come back?

or…

The email from CouchSurfing selfishly begs for its own success. But the second email from Netflix is trying to help the user. It gives solid reasons to trial again, and even offers a clear channel to talk to a human.

Do what Netflix does: keep churned users updated on your latest improvements, and give them ample opportunity to tell you why they churned. Even better, as they leave, try to figure out why they are doing so. And then, when you finally release the new product enhancement, blow their socks off with a perfectly personalized reactivation email.

Now it's your turn

We've introduced you to three automated emails: the surprise personal email, the abandoned task email, and the last email you ever send. Each one is a great opportunity to learn more about your customers and improve your product.

As you write them up, just remember that successful emails help your users succeed and help your business grow!

Looking for the right email tool? Swing back the lesson where we covered the Email Service Provider landscape to find the one that's right for your business!