Emailing as a secret weapon for engagement!

Muhammed Tüfekyapan
Design of a SaaS business
4 min readNov 29, 2013

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We are as product managers keeps our questions at our minds and always seek answers even we know an answer. Finding a solution to a problem related to product, don’t make sense for product managers. Always there is a better way to solve the same problem and you have to think about that. Because of this generally “product guys” like thinking and thinking about thinking.

When subjects become finding better solutions to problem which has already has solutions, there are two important things. 1. Thinking about thinking and learn deeply how we think. 2. Thinking and searching deeply to which problem we should care.

In a startup, especially a new startup, product and business has a lot of needs. There are a lot of things to getting done and never you can get this done altogether. As a product manager, every day you should do only two task

1. Define product problems

2. Search better ways to solve this problems.

In the startups, when time changes, some product problems changes. First days of product you don’t care if your button bigger 2px how it performs. Because there are some deeper question as what should be call-to-action and making bigger button at first days really does not make any sense. But there is some problems about product and this problems never change by time, like “ENGAGEMENT”. Every product, in every stage has engagement problem. Always there is need more engagement and you can’t say this (engagement) is enough. Never, ever.

In this post, I write the how successful product use email as an engagement tool.

Email and emailing today’s most hard channel for product managers. Everyone complain about getting email. Average email opening rate is about 15%-20% and other big part goes directly trash or spam box. Email subject line wars getting harder. Everyone makes A/B testing and think about how to attract attention of users. Yes, emailing is hard and this is why emailing is important.

When working on hard things, tricks never leads to success. Strategy makes possible to win on hard competition and getting radically better results. Today’s emailing wars, you can only win working hard on strategy. Working on strategy require to catch of your customers point of view. If you really catch of your customers point of view, you double odds of improve effective strategy.

Today’s successful product use emailing as a secret weapon. Below some great emailing examples. Let’s look that closer;

Medium’s email’s great for this point. When you sign up, you get this email. They don’t use compelling images or some unnecessary design, just write six sentences and that’s it! Call-to-action so clear.

This is also a great example. Academia.edu send email users when someone visit their profile via searching on Google. This email makes user feel important for himself and gives “people visit your profile when search you. Your profile so important. Upload your paper and update your profile” messages to user.

LinkedIn send email when someone endorsed you for a skill. When you click “Continue” button going to endorse screen. Subjects line begin with name of people who endorse you. This email is important because, speculate emailing for feel user’s important and good.

This example again from LinkedIn. Before the your premium account’s time finish, get email which summarize benefits of being premium user.

How you plan your emailing strategy for improving user satisfaction? Let’s talk about!

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