from Hacker News

Guide to Sending Email Like a Startup

by mrmch on 10/20/15, 6:32 PM with 41 comments

• by eli on 10/20/15, 11:02 PM

  It's mentioned in there, but I really want to emphasize how important it is to ditch the do-not-reply return address and, in fact, to have actual people read every single reply.

  We get great suggestions, feedback, sales opportunities, etc. from replies to automated messages. We don't get many complaint emails, but when we do the author seems to think they're yelling into a void. People seem genuinely impressed when they get at thoughtful reply back and sometimes it changes their whole impression of us.

• by vishaldpatel on 10/20/15, 10:06 PM

  Remember folks, every single piece of correspondence we send should be valuable to the receiver.

  Welcome email? Great - tell them something that will help them to get setup.

  Referral email? Great - tell them how they can win by referring you, and I mean really win.

  Promotional email? Make sure that promo is worth their while.

  And never take your audience's time for granted. You're trying to build a relationship.

• by mrmch on 10/20/15, 6:35 PM

  Excited to share this -- we just completed the guide (5 chapters in all).

  Includes contributions from Ivan Kirigin (YesGraph), Noah Kagan (AppSumo), and more.

  No matter how much you may/may not like receiving email, there are a lot of people out there who do. This guide should help you reach them, without annoying the others.

• by benjaminfox on 10/20/15, 7:35 PM

  Wow, that's comprehensive. The Net Promoter survey is very powerful, if you've never used it: once you've identified and bucketed all of your users who give you a 9 or 10, you can hit them up for referrals, reviews, and shares, and skip all the users who might not have anything nice to say about you.

• by parennoob on 10/20/15, 10:55 PM

  There are several parts of this I disagree with, but the one I disagree with the most is onboarding emails.

  Can I use your product in the email? No? Then don't send me an onboarding email, do the onboarding in-product with overlays when I log into it for the first time. Google does this with some success for Gmail if I recall correctly, it has arrows pointing at different sections and everything, and you can click to dismiss them.

  Bombarding the consumer with multiple onboarding emails may generate a high click rate, but if your target market has people that hate spam, it will instantly leave a bad taste in their mouth. It really sucks when I sign up for a new product I am peripherally interested in, and they clutter up my empty inbox with 5 enthusiastic emails, none of which has any content that I can actually use -- just links to the website.

• by pekk on 10/20/15, 7:56 PM

  This bag of tricks seems to focus more on doing things as other companies do than on what data there is to tell you it is the right thing for you. No guarantees those companies made the right inferences from the right data, and even if they did, no guarantees their conclusions apply without modification to your situation.

  Is there some inherent value to being "like a startup" or following "trends"?

• by ivankirigin on 10/20/15, 7:50 PM

  This is such a great resource.

  I helped with the referrals bits, but the other sections taught me a lot too.

• by gboss on 10/20/15, 11:31 PM

  These are not transactional emails, but triggered emails that are automated by a user's actions. Transactional emails typically revolve around a transaction, example emails include an order confirmation, shipping confirmation, or order cancellation email. I'm pretty sure most of these emails would require the customer to be subscribed to your email list, while a true transactional email would not.

  See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_marketing#Transactional_...

• by foolforyou on 10/20/15, 11:29 PM

  Why is sendwithus.com allowed to advertise by posting as a blog site, why isn't it flagged by now? These are the types of people I block in my server's email configuration.

• by xg15 on 10/21/15, 4:24 PM

  I'm somewhat puzzled by this paragraph - even moreso as they seem to base a lot of advice on top of it:

  For Facebook, they’ve defined core retention behavior as the point when a user has added at least 15 friends to their account. In Alex Schultz’s Startup Class lecture he discloses that, for Facebook, someone that has 15 friends is likely to remain active on the service for a long time, so their retention strategies are all focused around promoting the behavior of adding friends.

  To find your own core retention behavior, look for specific actions that are common to your ideal users, then promote that behavior in your retention strategies.

  I'm not a marketing expert, but this seems like a classic example of "confusing causation and correlation" to me. So, in the example above, facebook has found that "user has > 15 friends" is a good indicator for "user is loyal". Fair enough. but instead of going "we have this awesome way of identifying loyal users, now let's find out what made them loyal in the first place", the guide assumes that the high friend count actually causes the loyality and advises to do everything to bump it up.

  In Facebook's case, this probably works, because friend count might actually influence retention in some ways. (e.g., your news feed might become more active or more interesting, making you want to stay). But even then, you're kept completely in the dark what made those people sign up and add friends in the first place.

  i think taking this as a general advice might actually be dangerous. In the best case, you keep a high retention rate but have no idea why; In the worst case, it might tempt you to build "features" that try to manipulate or even force the users into particular behaviors, only to inflate some metric. (see, e.g. Pinterest's "auto-following" routine: http://www.businessinsider.com/wait-a-minute-pinterests-sign... )

• by nakodari on 10/21/15, 8:26 AM

  This is the most comprehensive and useful guide on sending emails I have come across so far. Going to implement a few ideas right away and track the results.

• by mathgeek on 10/21/15, 11:35 AM

  I feel like the point on "Set a Conversational Tone & Sign from Real People" is reaching a bit of over-saturation currently. As soon as I get such an email from a company, it leads to my thinking that "they're trying to deceive me into thinking someone is actually sending out these automated messages. Do they think I'm an idiot?" It feels very disingenuous.

• by joeyspn on 10/20/15, 9:56 PM

  Clear and simple. Good job.

  I've got a question about your starter/hacker plan... Up to 1,000 recipients/month means that I can do X sends up to 1,000 different emails? For instance, mandrill has 12,000 Free emails limit. Can I connect mandrill and use those 12k/month as long as I don't have more than 1k/users in your system?

• by cessor on 10/21/15, 7:13 AM

  Following every step of this program is a very good way in making me avoid your product.

• by bshimmin on 10/21/15, 9:20 AM

  "Surprise & delight your new readers with a funny cat picture. Seriously, never underestimate the effectiveness of a well-timed cat picture."

  This might work for some types of businesses, I suppose. For others it would be a huge misstep.

• by michaelZejoop on 10/21/15, 6:30 AM

  Thanks for this guide; I think it is great!

• by meowbird on 10/20/15, 7:26 PM

  This article is really great for a marketer at any level!

• by hobonobo on 10/20/15, 8:57 PM

  "Transactional emails are the mechanism by which you keep in contact with your users, just because they’re automated, doesn’t mean they should be robotic."

  Whether its origin is a startup or a giant corporation, any email can be made to sound like a poor marketing scam - just include run-on sentences like that one.

• by slrz on 10/20/15, 9:59 PM

  Oh, a spammer's manual. Disgusting.