What I learned about on-boarding emails in one year of on-boarding users.
Let’s face it. On-boarding at a startup is fickle business. Educating your customers on how to use your product correctly is one of the most important aspects of the broader customer experience (or CX if you want to sound chic). It promotes proper engagement, enhances transparency, and if executed with a little TLC, leaves the customer wanting more. That’s right, more email.
But with the common growing pains of startups such as lack of resources, out-of-the-blue bugs and the simple act of starting something at a company for the very first time, your process is bound to get broken, you will make regular human errors, you will make regular technology errors, and damn, you will learn a lot.
I’m the community manager on the marketing team at Krossover. I manage our community of coaches and take care of all of our customer email communication. In a few short hours, I’m going to trigger off my very first automated email campaign *kicks feet up*. Today, as I polished off the final requests and ran through a seamless link check thanks to Mailchimp’s hard work, I was lucky enough to have a look back on last year’s campaign.
At first glance, I laughed at myself hard… really hard. What I saw was fluffy with text, rough around the edges and lacking creativity and branding overall. However, it must have been the best I had one year ago as we collectively signed off as team and on-boarded our first customers on to a brand new product.
I look at this post as a celebration. I’m about to embark on a journey free of weekly tasks, constant customer support responsibilities and overall pain-in-ass-ness. I feel it’s only right to reflect on some things I picked up from my days of manual labor to the peaceful atmosphere of automation.
Trim your text.
On-boarding is very instructional, so it get’s tough to squeeze in everything you want to say to your customers without exhausting them. Combine that with the added attempt of personalization, and before you know it, you’ve cornered your customer into a novel that is just not worth the read.
I found myself writing intro sentences that intro’d another sentence that really intro’d what I had to say in the body of the email; all in attempt to ‘talk the talk’ with our customers. Here’s an example of a basketball on-boarding email, similar to the football example above, just four months later.
Not only was this process time-consuming and exhausting for me, but it was a burden on our customers. The problem? I love to talk. I love to talk so much, that I’ll even talk to Medium sometimes.
I began noticing that my colleague, Matt, had a knack for copy-writing for our brand, and any brand I presume. He’s our social media mastermind (behind our CEO, of course) and writes all of the promotional messages and CTA’s for our blog. Whenever I needed a better, simpler, stronger way to say something, I’d ask him to Matt-ify it.
An example of Matt-ification might be, “This week, I wanted to share important information on how to upload your game.” → “You’re ready to upload your first game! Let’s show you what this process looks like:”
To keep messaging consistent across our team, I knew I had to learn how to Matt-ify, and transfer that same language to our customer, and eventually sales and marketing, emails. I was able to leverage one more on-boarding campaign to learn to STFU and trim my text before I’d reach one full year of on-boarding.
Note: One weird practice that helped me was saying my sentences out loud, with excitement and a stern fist. I needed to command my sentences like a pitcher commands a fastball. Imagining this ridiculous trick works as well.
Here’s what I brought to the table one year later:
Boom. Matt-fied.
I did it, first, by getting over all conventional writing skills I’ve ever learned, including the structure of paragraphs. Teasing the user with what I was about to say, words before I said it didn’t help them in any way.
Secondly, I took half of what I wanted to say and put it in a form of a question (a statement works too) to start. This immediately eliminated the need for fluff explaining what was about to go down in the body. Why a question? I did this pose a potential problem to our user. If the user cannot qualify themselves as someone who needs to read this email, why should they? This method helps in sales marketing language as well.
Lastly, I took my time. The same amount of time it took me to write three or four descriptive sentences, I now translate to structuring one statement that says it all. With only one statement per topic to write, I had the time to draft, rewrite, think, change, stare at and discuss each statement. I enjoy this process a lot more and our users do too.
Responsive Design
In the wee early days, I was on the first sales team at Krossover prior to moving to marketing. I consider this era pre-historic as we worked with no firm process, no templates, hardly any tracking and definitely no email marketing. It was just me and three members of our team working the entire sales process from prospecting to account management and support.
I had the ability to work the crowd with my words and my response rates soared, and when I made the transition to marketing (a transition in which I was lucky to make with little to no prior experience), I brought my best tool, my ability to talk with anybody. The difference? I was now speaking to the masses versus our individual customers.
I explained in the previous segment that the task at hand became exhausting. I got tired of writing each email and linking a number of small CTA’s, hoping our customers would pick up each important topic. I needed a new way to express myself and our brand, all while trimming down the mass word vomit in our emails.
This is where I brought in our Creative Director and in-house Mighty Duck. We came to the conclusion that these emails and the process by which we create them was indeed a bit outdated. What we needed was more images and large hero’s that acted as our CTA’s for newsletters and soft, welcoming icons for on-boarding. We also made a decision that buttons should become more regularly used. Over time, we eliminated fluff and made our emails more welcoming and responsive with these adjustments.
The moral to responsive on-boarding design is that if your customer needs help, he or she should be 3–4 thumb taps away from help before they need reach out to you directly.
- Swipes open phone.
- Opens email app.
- Opens email.
- Clicks CTA for support resources.
Be there for them by providing a comprehensive, responsive email, right at their fingertips.
Copy it, Steal it, Make it Yours
In a year and a half in a marketing position, I must have signed up for over 100 newsletters and new apps to expose myself to what everyone else was doing in the world of email marketing. I was in the position to create new things and processes, set the tone and sit in the drivers seat for some of the first times we attempted to retain our customers. Paying attention to subject lines that came through my personal inbox that resulted in an open and what CTA’s left me feeling like there was no choice other than clicking through, helped me immensely in noticing what I could work on. Once I noticed something, I immediately put it to the test (ex. Matt-ification).
In fact, I copied my entire way to where I am today.
How can I trim down text in an email? Thanks to the team at FanCred for showing me some great examples in a number of campaigns:
How can I explain our product and encourage engagement with responsive design? There’s an Atlassian email for that:
Lastly, if there’s any company that knows email and content marketing, it’s Newscred. Their emails constantly flood my inbox with the top content marketing tips and tricks. In particular, Newscred’s feature highlight emails pose the questions I began asking our users to identify problems and push the reader to want more information:
If you’ve made it this far reading, I hope you can get a kick out of the similarities in the emails above compared to our emails sitting pretty in our queue today. I couldn’t be more confident in our campaign this year and can rest easy knowing inspiration and knowledge was collected throughout the entire process.
**If anything goes wrong in our automated on-boarding campaigns in the coming weeks, this post will self-destruct.
