If you have a startup, you know that engagement with potential users is super important. They give feedback, and they may become your earliest—and most loyal—customers.
There are a couple ways to help users connect with you. One common way is to use a contact form, where the user fills out a few fields and you get sent an email. Although these can be good for gathering background info about potential customers, there are a couple downsides to contact forms:
- users sometimes mistype their email address, so when you try to reply, your email reply bounces (sometimes you can detect/rectify these typos, like “gmial.com,” but not always)
- when you reply to an email generated by your website’s contact form, the recipient’s email platform/client doesn’t know you from Adam (since it didn’t see the initial outreach from the user to you), so there’s a higher chance you end up designated as spam.
In either of these cases, you’re left with no way to connect with someone who specifically reached out to you! This is frustrating for you, and it may leave a bad taste in your user’s mouth too.
These downsides also apply to Google Forms or other forms that are used to gather info from potential users. While they are great because they can help qualify leads, you still end up being the one to start the email thread—which means you’re more likely to end up in the spam folder. This seems to be especially true for emails sent by founders to potential users, since these emails include language about pricing, signing up, and “free” offers, not unlike spammers.
Better than forms: mailto links!
One way to get someone to send the first email is to simply include your email address on your website: “email us at contact@beelinereader.com.” This is fine, but it’s not as engaging as saying: “if you have any questions, we’re always happy to help,” which gets more engagement because the user might be curious about what happens when they click the link (will it take them to a chat support agent, give them a phone number that’s available 24/7, or something else?)
If you click the linked text above, you can see the next benefit of using mailto links: you can give your user contact ‘momentum,’ and make them less likely to drop off. With a mailto link, you can pre-compose a friendly-looking subject line (“Can you help me with my account?”) and start writing the email for them (“I’m having trouble with…”). You can ask them a series of questions, and just have them fill in the answers. If you’ve got super lazy users, you can even include multiple-choice questions:
I like using your product but am having trouble with:
[ ] signing up
[ ] getting started
[ ] a bug
[ ] something else
Giving your user momentum like this means you’re more likely to have them complete the email and make the connection.
Better than naked mailto links: shortened mailto links!
But you can’t use mailto links everywhere! We wanted to use mailto links in failed-payment email sent by Stripe, our payment processor. But Stripe only accepts an HTTP URL in their automated failed-payment emails. Fortunately, there’s a workaround: link shortening!
Many popular link shorteners do not support mailto links, but platforms like Linkly do. Linkly even has a mailto creation tool, so you can fill in the addressee, subject, and body in plain English, and they’ll merge the fields (along with all those pesky %20's!) into a valid mailto link, which they then shorten into a URL that will be accepted by all those narrow-minded HTTP-only forms.
There are potential downsides to using mailto links. You might get more spam, for example. But if you’re a small startup, this is probably not your biggest concern. For BeeLine, it’s been well worth it to include mailto links in various parts of our apps and in third-party contact points like Stripe emails. (But yes, we still also have a contact form on our website also.)
Do you use mailto links in innovative ways? Or do you have a better idea for how to connect with your users? Share your ideas in the Hacker News discussion!
Nick is the founder of BeeLine Reader, a startup that has won awards from Stanford University and the United Nations. His work has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, and other fake news outlets.
