How Dribbble sends onboarding email
Pretty much just a newsletter — but a really great one!
A community
of beautiful design work
and long newsletters.
Dribbble is an online community of designers who share their work with one another for thoughts, feedback, and inspiration. I find myself going there often when looking for ideas or looking for people to design cool stuff for me. It’s great!
Communities make for some really fun case studies on engagement, particularly through the lens of onboarding. What role does email play in getting a new community member stuck into this new world? I signed up with Dribbble last fall. Here’s how they approach their email onboarding:
How often Dribbble sends email to new users
The first 35 days
Total: Five emails sent
My best guess at Dribbble’s onboarding strategy
Dribbble has one of the most straightforward onboarding flows I’ve seen. Here it is: Verify your email address, then receive a weekly newsletter every Monday.
That’s it!
The weekly newsletter is the entire onboarding campaign, but it’s a pretty great newsletter. Here are all the components:
- Introduction
- Sponsor
- Link to podcast
- Links to blog posts
- Design jobs
- Popular “shots” (designs) from last week
- New designers who’ve joined Dribbble
As you can see, there are a lot of interesting community elements to this newsletter. The blog posts are written by community members, the shots are from community members, and the new designers are community members.
It’s all written in the language of the Dribbble universe, too: basketball-related names and idioms. Overtime (podcast), Courtside (blog), Hot Shots (designs), etc.
Learnings
- Dribbble only sends a weekly newsletter. No other onboarding.
- In networks like Dribbble, there can be a lot of email volume coming your way if you opt into notifications and activity emails. For instance, you may want an email any time someone you follow posts a new design. This potential extra volume might have informed Dribbble’s strategy of sending fewer marketing emails.
- All the subject lines start with “Weekly Replay”
- After “Weekly Replay” the subject line includes a specific reference to the content of that week’s email
- The emails are jam-packed with images — so much so that I couldn’t get some of them to load down near the bottom. Still, the image-first focus makes complete sense sinceDribbble is for designers.
3 onboarding email tips and takeaways from Dribbble
- Less is more (especially if your users receive notification emails, too)
- There’s room to be consistent with a subject line and also tease the content
- If you’re building a community, highlight what’s happening (“check out all this cool stuff”), and do it at a regular cadence (“this community is still rocking it”)
Here are all the onboarding emails (and beyond) that Dribbble sends
Here’s more on each email that I received from Dribbble during those 35 days. Caveat: I’m sure tons has changed and will change with their onboarding emails, so your mileage may vary when you sign up and see for yourself. 😊
Email confirmation
Sent minutes after I signed up.
Subject: [Dribbble] Confirm your email at Dribbble
From: Dribbble, no-reply@dribbble.com
First, second, third, fourth, etc. emails
Sent three days after I signed up, then skipped a week, then once per week.
Subject: Weekly Replay + Wix Playground Playoff
From: Dribbble, no-reply@dribbble.com
Worth noting
I never did get to the bottom of a Dribbble email. Literally. If you notice in the full Weekly Replay image above, there’s a note at the bottom to click to “view entire message.” This is Gmail’s way of truncating long emails. What’s interesting is that there’s so much more still in the Dribbble emails!
After it gets truncated, there are sections for:
- Team Work: popular “shots” from teams on Dribble (think: agencies, design collaboratives, etc.)
- Coaches’ Picks: staff picks
- Meetups: Dribbble events
That’s a lot of content!
Your thoughts
If you have some thoughts or questions about Dribbble’s onboarding flow, I’d love to hear them.
- What do you think of the newsletter approach?
- Any guesses at how long it takes to put these emails together?
Add a response here on Medium.
Highlight any favorite pieces or parts.
Or clap along to help surface this story to others. 👏
Thank you!
Want to see more onboarding email breakdowns? Check out the rest of Season One of the series, featuring onboarding campaigns from …
👉 👉 Intercom ……. Trello ……. Extra.ai ……. Brandless ……. Fullstory ……. Wistia ……. MixMax ……. Grammarly ……. Dribbble ……. Hubspot ……. Pocket ……. Treehouse ……. CBS All Access…….
