Post-mortem: how a sorry email had the best open rate ever reached
Quick case study of how talking as real humans can really spice up things at your company.
Table of contents:
- Context
- How a standard email is
- The thin line between staging and production
- This is not a drill
- How it all turned out
- Numbers.
- Conclusions
Context
Casavo is the next-generation European platform that matches home sellers’ needs with homebuyers’ desires through an integrated and personalized experience.
On the sellers’ side, the seller can test the market for free, by sharing their house profile with their potential buyers (i.e., buyers in their area, with an adequate budget, and looking for a similar house).
On the buyers’ side, we created a Priority feature: registered users can see listings of houses that are not yet on the market, to be the first to visit the house — and eventually to bid for it.
How a standard email works
On the buyers’ side, they receive a general introduction to the feature, photos of the house, and then a CTA to book a visit. Plain and simple.
Hi name,
This home is not on the market yet, but it may be soon. With Casavo, you can already get in line to visit it.
What’s the advantage for you?
You are one of the first to see it and have less competition to buy it. So, if you like it, you have a greater chance of being able to purchase it.
What do you say, would you like to visit it?
I would like a preview visit
The thin line between staging and production
On the seller side, we started testing the feature on staging. We completed the profile of a new house and then shared it with its potential buyers. What could go wrong — we’re on staging!
A few minutes after that, the head of product received a mail. And it was at that moment that he knew we screwed up.
Do you notice something different between the two emails…?
We accidentally sent a Priority listing of a cliff to 300+ people.
This is not a drill
Our first reaction — shock.
So we did what every team would do in this case.
We started to send us memes, just to decompress.
But when the going gets tough, the tough get going. We needed an idea. fast.
To gauge the response, I asked the head of product if he agreed with this idea:
If we sent an [erratum] email with something like “We took the concept of a preview too literally. We’re so ahead that we sent you the email before the house was even built. But if you want to take a look and envision it, the photo was taken at X.” or something along these lines. What do you think?
How it all turned out
Being a curious monkey, I already knew some examples of companies that had to manage that kind of situation.
In “Designing for emotion”, Aarron Walters tells what Flickr did that time in 2016 when their site was down. They didn’t just leave a general “We’re sorry” on their homepage, but they launched a contest to win a free year of Pro. People had to print out the page and colour the dots.
“Thinking like a veteran parent trying to keep an antsy kid occupied while waiting for food in a restaurant, they applied the art of redirection and ran a coloring contest.”
Airfrance had to manage something similar. The now well-known Julien thought he sent a push notification ”Julien’s test again” on staging environment, but he instead did it on production. One hour later, users received a new notification stating, “It’s good Julien, it works!”It was indeed a test by our technical teams :)”
Now, it was my turn to become a meme.
I had to create an email, but I knew a soul-less “sorry email” just wouldn’t cut it. I wanted something more engaging and interesting. There were three key points I wanted to emphasize:
- It was a test
- Incorporate copy related to the sea
- Highlight the Priority feature
Since there wasn’t much time for extensive discussions on a Slack channel, I opted to create a Google Doc instead. I invited several individuals to collaborate on it, including the head of product, the product designer I had worked with on the feature, the product marketing team, the copywriter, and the product manager.
I sent a first draft, and they just did some tiny copy corrections.
Here’s how it all came together.
Object: “We took a crab (= expression for “we made a mistake” in Italian) (with a rock included) 🐟”
“Hi {{ contact.firstname }},
Did you happen to receive an email about a Priority listing for… a cliff?
That’s just how we are: we send you photos of the house even before it’s built. You know how real estate agents always tell you to “picture yourself” in a property? Well, we took that a bit too literally.
So yes, it was an internal test. Maybe next time we’ll choose a photo from the mountains for those who prefer mountains over the sea.
PS: Seriously, we apologize for the inconvenience.
Have a great day!
The Casavo team
Numbers.
That’s when things started to get interesting.
We sent out the email at noon, and a few hours later, the product designer checked Hubspot, just to be sure.
To our surprise, the email had an open rate of 43%, and an impressive 91% of recipients actually read it.
Conclusions
But why did we need a “crisis” to realize that speaking as humans was more effective?
This case study further reinforced the importance of emotional design in our daily operations.
In this situation, we employed emotional design to apologize to our users, and we responded as genuine human beings because we didn’t have time to become robotic and distant.
As a company heavily reliant on technology, AI, and the like, we may have inadvertently overlooked the fact that people are not machines. It’s essential for us to stay connected and continually explore ways to humanize technology.
Stay in touch to learn more about our journey in humanizing technology — for good this time. ❤️
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