A lot of you have told me you want to learn how to do a lifecycle email series / drip email series. That’s not surprising considering that creating a lifecycle course can be one of the most impactful things to your bottom line that you can do.

X-Plane gets dramatic results with their lifecycle emails created by Tyler Young of Conversion Insights:

A lifecycle email series is just several related emails, delayed over time, based on some action a person has done.

The action can be something on your website – like visiting the upgrade page but not upgrading. It can also be something like filling in a form with an email address.

We’ll cover how to set up an opt-in email course (sometimes called an autoresponder course), but these ideas apply to lifecycle emails triggered by on-site action (or inaction) too.

Most people I speak with have a hard time with the details of setting up the course.

Details like:

• What do you write about?
• How many emails should you send?
• How much time should you leave between each email?
• When should you ask for “the sale?”
• What if people get to the end, but they don’t convert?

Over the next 3 weeks, I’ll share the steps I’d go through to set up the series of emails.

1. Week One (today): You’ll learn how to find a topic and set up a structure for your course.
2. Week Two: You’ll learn about how to write powerful content and make the emails work together
3. Week Three: You’ll learn how to convert people and what to do when you run out of emails.

Ready?

Let’s dig in.

Our Example: An online education course about writing emails

If you signed up early, you’ve been getting ideas and tips about email from me for coming up to a year. New people signing up for the list are missing out on the best articles from the past.

I’ll be creating an educational email course based on the “How to write better emails” content from this newsletter / blog, my classes at GA, and the Email Bootcamp for Startups I did with Joanna Wiebe and Patrick McKenzie.

What’s the goal of the lifecycle emails?

Help new people learn how to write great emails faster, build trust, and get them to continue on to the weekly newsletters.

As a secondary goal, I’ll also offer new Customer.io signups this email course to help them use the product better.

How many emails will we send?

There’s a common marketing rule:

Let’s use that to set up a 7 email campaign to make people smart and trust us.

How do you figure out what to write?

You already know what we’re doing, but what about your company? What should you write?

Don’t over-think it!

This is surprisingly uncomplicated.

Although it varies from business to business, you can look at almost any business and tell them what type of email content they could write.

The most common types of email content that sells fits in to two buckets:

• Help someone achieve a goal
• Help someone make a decision

Let’s take the first example: “Help someone achieve a goal”.

If you’re a marketer at a dating site you might write content to help people have more successful dates. Your course could teach them How to pick a spot for a first date. and When is it ok to split the bill?… things like that

Then there’s our second type: “Help someone make a decision”.

Let’s say you run a Photography equipment retailer. You could write a series on “How to pick a digital camera” where you talk about the different types (SLRs, Point and Shoot), and things like “The megapixel myth”.

You probably have the curse of knowledge. You might over-estimate how much other people know about your business or area of expertise. Don’t over-estimate how much others know.

Break down complex concepts important to your business and put them in an educational email course.

Like digital camera example above, think about what your business sells and see if you can imagine a course with the topic:

“What you need to know before buying __”

Scribble out some topics for emails on index cards

If you break them apart so it’s one email per index card you can add additional notes about what you want to cover in the email.

It also makes it really easy to re-order things or throw out a particular email and put in a new index card.

Things will change after you start writing these, but it’s a good place to start.

The notecards about are for a “How to write lifecycle emails” course I’ve been toying with. For a copywriting course, I took a shortcut and just made a list since I knew exactly what the course should be:

Will you be following along?

Want to create your own lifecycle course? Follow along. This week, find a topic area and write down 7 - 8 preliminary email topics or subject lines on notecards.

Next week we’ll get in to content. How to set expectations in the first email you send, and how to string the emails together with teasers and cliffhangers so people stay interested.

I can’t wait to learn about the lifecycle emails you’re doing.

Send a picture of your notecards to me or share them in the comments for feedback.

Happy Emailing, Colin

P.S. Tyler Young whom I mentioned above also wrote an article Set Up Your First Lifecycle Email. Take a look.

P.P.S. You should be doing Lean Product Tests. Here’s how to BRANDiD does them with Angular.js and Customer.io.

Editors Note: We don’t usually let people guest post on our blog, but when @arush from BRANDiD reached out, his pitch was unexpected. It was too good to pass up!

Why we started sending more email:

We’ve been using Customer.io for less than a day, and we’re so excited about what we can do with such a simple and powerful product. During our Seedcamp US trip, we were fortunate enough to hear from @akashgarg, head of the Growth Engineering team at Twitter, former CTO of Hi5, explain how important clever email techniques are for re-engaging Twitter users. He explained that they learned from Facebook to send more emails. After Akash got involved, Twitter started sending 1000x more emails than they used to.

Twitter uses a $6 million per year EC2 cluster to send 200 million individually personalised emails to its users every day.

Customer.io is democratising that kind of power for all of us. It allows us small startups to send equally personalised, highly targeted transactional and rule-based emails to increase retention and engagement.

Using Customer.io and Angular.js to Run Lean Product Tests

At BRANDiD, we’re a big fan of fake buttons. Throwing up a fake button saves you from building out features that nobody even clicks on. In this post I’ll share with you how we take advantage of Angular.js Directives and Customer.io’s simple Javascript SDK to create fake buttons that send emails in one line of code. And it’s HTML code, believe it or not!

<a data-lean-test="Vote Up" data-trigger="click" data-bs-tooltip="'Thanks for your vote!'">Vote up!</a>

In this case, we’re testing whether people will be bothered to vote for someone to buy something on BRANDiD. The code above renders the following button:

When someone clicks it, it looks like this:

NB: we haven’t actually built any voting functionality. But we are able to measure the impact of this feature with one line of HTML. All we have to do to run more tests is change the attributes, e.g. instead of “Vote Up”, we have another button that allows people to “Give Mad Props” to people who have spent a bunch of money on BRANDiD.

This simple, repeatable line of code does all the following things:

1. Disables the button and displays a tooltip for some user feedback
2. Sends a tracking event to your service of choice (Mixpanel.com, Kissmetrics.com, Customer.io, Segment.io etc…) with the event name taken from data-lean-test (in this case “Vote Up”)
3. Sends an email to the BRANDiD product team with the logged-in user’s email address and the action performed

Here’s a picture of the email sent through Customer.io every time that button is clicked

This is how our investors and stakeholders see it on our Dashboard (we use Geckoboard and Mixpanel

How did we do it?

The thing that makes this so easy is Angular.js Directives. Directives are re-usable DOM elements that can have their own logic. Here’s the directive for the lean-test button above:

var foo = angular.module('bar',[])

.directive('leanTest', ['$rootScope', 'HelperService', 'EmailService', function($rootScope, HelperService, EmailService) {
  return {
    restrict: 'A',
    link:function (scope, element, attrs) {
      var done = false;

      element.click(function() {
        event.stopPropagation();

        // make sure this only happens once
        if(!done) {
          // disable the button
          element.addClass('disabled');
          done = true;

          // Send an email with the Customer.IO JS SDK
          var email = '';
          email = $rootScope.currentUser.get('email');

          if(typeof email === "undefined") {
            email = "Anonymous User";
          } else {
            email = $rootScope.currentUser.get('email');
          }
          $rootScope.currentUser.get('email');
          // Track in your favourite analytics tool
          HelperService.metrics.track(attrs.leanTest, {user: email, page: location.href});

          // Send an email
          EmailService.sendLeanTest(attrs.leanTest, email);
        }

      });

    }
  }
}])

The comments in the code explain what’s going on. $rootScope.currentUser picks up whoever the current logged in user is so we can grab their email address. HelperService.metrics.track() is our own metrics wrapper function that sends the tracking event to all our tracking services, exactly like Segment.io. The EmailService is a similar Angular.js wrapper we’ve written for the Customer.io Javascript SDK. That line sends the email you saw above.

If you’re familiar with Angular then you’ll notice we also use the bs-tooltip directive from angular-strap for the tooltip.

Here’s the EmailService.js wrapper we’ve written to send the email using Customer.io

var foo = angular.module('bar')

.factory('EmailService',function() {

  var sendEmail = function(eventName,payload) {
    _cio.track(eventName,payload);
  }

  return {
    sendLeanTest:function(content,email) {

    // We got a lot of stuff to send, so let's send a payload baby
    var payload = {
    to_address:"help@getbrandid.com",
    userEmail:email,
    content:content
    }
    var eventName = "_sendLeanTestEmail";
    return sendEmail(eventName,payload);

    }
  }

});

Et voila! As our lead engineer @spacenick says, the Customer.io system receives our email content and figures out which template to use based on the event name _sendLeanTestEmail.

Let us know what you think and how you run lean product tests in the comments.

Arush Sehgal is the CTO of BRANDiD, A marketplace connecting men who hate shopping with people who love to shop.

Last week you learned how to plan for your lifecycle email course. This week we’ll go into depth on the first email that you send. We’ll also look at how to keep interest high from email to email.

We won’t be talking much about landing pages

Since this is about email copy, we won’t be covering landing pages in depth. For your lifecycle email course though, the first step is to get a place to collect email addresses. You can see my first version for the new course:

For some other landing page ideas, here are 25 lead gen landing pages critiqued for conversion from Unbounce.

Unbounce makes landing pages easy, and this morning I figured out how to automatically add Unbounce signups to Customer.io.

Landing pages are a big topic. If you want to learn more about them, let me know. Now on to your emails…

Use your first email to set expectations for the course

Tell people what to expect from you. An automated email series is one of life’s few opportunities to tell people what you’ll do, and then do it without breaking a sweat.

Here are some rules to follow for a first email in a lifecycle course.

The first email should:

• Deliver value immediately
• Let people know they’re in control (make your unsubscribe obvious)
• Tell people what to expect from the rest of the course

Should you start the course on day 0? Or wait until the next day?

Below is the first email from “5 Sales-Spiking Website Tweaks”, a free 5 day course.

Did you read it? You might notice 2 things. First, you have to wait until tomorrow for your first tweak. However, the other thing you may have noticed is that there’s a cheat sheet for you to download today.

This teases the reader, increasing the likelihood they’ll look for the first email tomorrow. It also gives immediate gratification with a freebie download.

Don’t stress if you don’t have a freebie to give away.

You can start your course with the first email.

I don’t have a good freebie to give away right now either, so we’ll start with the first lesson in email 1. It’s going to be about “From Addresses”. You might want to start with the most straightforward of your subjects to ease people in to your course.

Remember, people like to hear things they already know!

Here’s the first email in the new series I’m working on. Click on it to see the full content.

Here are the goals of the email:

1. Set expectations. Show all the other emails someone’s going to receive and when to expect them.
2. Provide value. We started the first lesson on “from addresses”
3. Give people something they can do now. “Go review your from addresses…”
4. Get people excited for the next email. You can see my hint about what to expect next time.

If you’re a slacker, creating lifecycle email courses is for you!

I’ll let you in on a little secret… I’ve only written the first email of the new course. That’s enough to get started letting people in to the course.

I’m going to be writing and tweaking the rest of the course emails between now and next week.

I have no idea how this works in other email software, but in customer.io, I can create all my emails without content first and start getting people in. Worst case scenario, someone will wait a day while I finish writing an email.

In customer.io I have my 1 email automatically being sent out, and then when people get to email 2, those emails get queued up and will only go out when I say so.

Why would you spend all that time upfront before people are actually in the course?

Are you building your course right now? I’d love to know where you’re having success and where you’re struggling.

And in the breathtaking finale…

Next week you’ll have built up a bunch of trust and we’ll look at how to ask for the sale, as well as strategies to keep people engaged if they don’t take your offer.

Happy emailing,
Colin

P.S. If you’re curious, check out the new email course in action by signing up

P.P.S. Back by popular demand, I’ll be teaching my “Write emails people will read” course at General Assembly. If you’re in New York next week, come learn about email

In the last 2 weeks, you learned:

• 1/3 - How to plan for your lifecycle course
• 2/3 - How you can make landing pages and welcome emails

This week, we’re looking at asking for the sale.

Your lifecycle email course is going to be all for nothing if you don’t ask for the sale.

You could read the word sale and take it too literally. The sale is not necessarily a financial transaction. The sale could be a follow up phone call with a sales person, or a demo of your product.

Or, it may be what you initially thought – a financial transaction.

When asking for the sale, a good place to start is the second to last email.

Why ask for the sale in the 2nd to last email?

Remember back at a school dance when you were a kid? Maybe there was someone you wanted to ask to dance. The later in the night it became, the more pressure there was when you thought about asking.

All of a sudden it’s the last dance. It’s a make or break situation. You’re running across the dance floor trying to ask your crush to dance. You don’t see that someone’s just spilled the punch, and you start slipping. So much for being calm, cool and collected.

Asking for the sale in the 2nd to last email reduces the build up and the pressure for a sale. It also gives you the ability to offer an option B in the last email.

The craziest sales email ever.

I wanted to share the craziest, longest sales email I’ve received. This is the sales email in a course from Ramit Sethi. I shrunk it down to fit on your screen.

I’m not saying that you should try what Ramit is doing here, but I think it’s worth observing how long the email is and how he builds up to the link at the bottom.

How do you ask for the sale?

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use AIDA to structure the sales email.

As a reminder, that structure is:

• Attention
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

With AIDA, you should be building, building, building towards the call to action. Everything else in the email reinforces why the person will benefit from taking the action.

In your call to action, focus on the outcome that the sale will provide. E.g.

• Choose your time for a free email strategy consultation
• Speed up your website in 30 minutes by signing up now
• Look sharp in a new custom suit– book your appointment today.

With this structure, it will be clear what people are supposed to do. You’re not going to get 100% conversion though.

What to do if people don’t take the deal?

You sweated building your conversion email, and you’re getting between 3% and 10% of people taking the deal. What about everybody else?

You now have a decision to make about how you’d like to continue the relationship. Here are 3 ideas for calls to action in your last email:

• Join our regular newsletter
• Join our community
• If this course was helpful, invite a friend to check it out.

Some people decide to auto-opt-in people who sign up for a course to their email newsletter. If you do this, you should certainly let people know that’s going to happen in the last email.

What else do you want to know about lifecycle emails / drip emails?

We barely scratched the surface together & this is a complicated topic.

A couple of paid options to learn more

• The McIntyre Method - from the Autoresponder Guy
• Hacking Lifecycle Emails - from Patrick McKenzie

Is there anything I haven’t covered yet that you want to know? Do you feel like you could get started building your first lifecycle email course or have I left you dangling missing something critical?

Send me an email with what to cover next, or let me know in the comments.

Happy Emailing,
Colin

Everyone has a ‘risk muscle.’ You keep it in shape by trying new things. If you don’t, it atrophies. Make a point of using it at least once a day. – Roger von Oech

A few weeks ago I got a plea for help by email. It read something like this:

“My job is on the line if you don’t fill out this survey”

This was a follow up email for people who hadn’t filled out the survey earlier. The whole email was overly dramatic. Though it was written to come across as serious, you know it is a joke.

When your sample size is in the thousands, you’re going to get some interesting reactions. When you send an email like the one I received, you’re going to get reactions.

This week, I had a phone call with the person who wrote the email. I asked her: How many complaints did you get? Did people think you were actually going to lose your job?

She said people wrote back with some positive feedback. She also received a few emails from people who thought she was serious. They were upset at the pressure they felt to fill out the survey.

In terms of getting people to fill out the survey, the email worked really well. I’ve seen the numbers, but unfortunately don’t have permission to share them.

Taking risks is how you learn what works and what doesn’t. The important thing is to learn.

Here are some ideas of things you can try in your emails:

• Add your phone number, and invite people to set up a time to talk
• Try using a customer story in an email (like the one above)
• Put in a funny picture (my favorites are meme pictures like the one below)

Just a few ideas for you to get you started.

What risks have you taken this week? What’s the most surprising thing that has worked for you?

Happy emailing, Colin

You may not have been at BaconBizConf last week, but you can still steal great ideas from some of the people who were there. It seemed like everyone was talking about how they use email to great success.

There was great email insight being shared by vocal email people like Nathan Barry, Brennan Dunn and Patrick McKenzie.

Everyone left with a gigantic list of things to implement in their businesses. I have 20 pages of notes and 30 action items of things to test.

Here are a few of the big MUST DOs for The next time you’re launching a new app, book, or anything online. This advice will help you sell more.

1. Start an email list

When you decide to launch a new product, start collecting email addresses on day 1. The last thing you want to do is launch to an empty room.

Ryan Delk from Gumroad presented and shared a story about a high-profile launch that used only social media on the day of the launch. They had big reach, but nobody cared so nobody bought.

Gumroad has great stats on people using their platform to sell. They found this:

Products that launch with a dedicated email list get 3x the revenue. via @gumroad#baconbiz

— Colin Nederkoorn (@alphacolin) May 31, 2013

Gumroad also found that across different channels, email was the winner:

Conversion rate to purchase by source:

• Youtube: 2.2%
• Twitter: 5.4%
• Facebook: 6.3%
• Email: 9.4%

Whatever you’re launching, collect email addresses on day one.

2. Build up demand before you launch

You don’t want to just collect email addresses. Build a relationship and trust with your audience before you try to ask for the sale.

Brennan Dunn says he gives away the best content of his book in the promotional emails around it.

"Get your audience to commit to purchasing before you give them the chance to buy."– @nathanbarry (My favorite quote from #BaconBiz)

— Ryan Delk (@delk) May 31, 2013

Leading up to a launch, email people to build excitement. Tell them the day before “Tomorrow’s the day!”.

You’ll find that more people are talking about you on launch day. More importantly, people will be ready to buy.

3. Charge more

Lastly… you should probably be charging more than you are. Seriously. Raise your prices.

Two recurring themes from #baconbiz : Charge more + email lists. (Like penicillin and washing hands, they're "boring" because they work.)

— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) May 31, 2013

If you’re selling digital content, one way to do this is to use tiered pricing. Offer videos, code samples, or even video consultation at the higher tiers.

Ask anyone who runs a SaaS product: your worst customers tend to be the ones that pay you the least (or nothing at all).

Charging more money will help you avoid signing up those customers so you can spend more time improving the product to help your best customers.

Were these ideas already obvious to you? Did you learn something new? Let me know if you have anything to add in the comments.

Happy emailing,
Colin

P.S. As a bonus, I love to share lifecycle email success stories. Thomas Fuchs from Freckle - time tracking for freelancers and small teams gave an amazing presentation on metrics. He is graciously letting me share a couple of the slides with you:

I recently chatted with Marc-André Cournoyer, an expert in conversion copywriting. Marc is the author and creator of “How to create your own programming language”, an online course that… you guessed it… teaches people how to create their own programming language.

I realized very quickly that Marc knows secrets about copywriting that we could all learn from.

So I asked Marc:

What’s the book that taught you the most about copywriting?

This is what Marc recommended:

In Influence, the author Robert Cialdini talks about the 6 key principles of influence:

• Reciprocity
• Commitment and Consistency
• Social Proof
• Authority
• Liking
• Scarcity

Let’s try another crazy experiment. This time, it’s a mini book club.

We will read through the book together

There are 7 chapters in the book. Let’s read through the book together at a pace of 2 chapters per week. That’s about 100 pages a week.

Reading Schedule

June 19th - Review Chapter 1 & 2 June 26th - Review Chapter 3 & 4 July 3rd - Review Chapter 5 & 6 July 10th - Review Chapter 7 & wrap up

We’ll discuss it on BetterEmails.org

You’ll find a thread on BetterEmails.org to discuss the book.

Want to learn and talk about Influence? What about getting ideas from other readers of the book? Buy the book and join in the experiment!

Don’t want to read a book?

At the end of the 4 weeks, you’ll see a write up and summary of the biggest takeaways from the book that you all discussed crediting everyone in the discussion. The biggest value will be gained by the people reading and discussing, but I wouldn’t want the rest of you to miss out.

Will you be joining in this experiment?

1. Create your account on BetterEmails.org (if you don’t have one)
2. Log in and go to the discussion on the forums.
3. Click “Favorite” and make sure you’re “Watching” the thread for updates.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to pick up a copy of the book at your library or on Amazon!

Happy Emailing,
Colin

Today we’re going to talk about the dirty stuff - spam reports. The data I’m going to share with you is aggregate stats across Customer.io senders.

After reading through this email, you should know:

Are you better than our average sender in spam reports? Are you worse?

If you’re better, feel free to brag about it in the comments. If you’re worse, let’s figure out how to improve your results.

How much of your email is marked as spam?

Here’s the average across a set of Customer.io senders:

Average: 0.061%

This is too high. You might notice a couple of recent peaks at around 0.1%. That’s from a single sender sending to a large (but disengaged) list. It skewed the stats.

Keep in mind that spam numbers are real people who got your email, looked at it and were confused about who you are, and why they got the email from you. Then rather than unsubscribing, they clicked the “Report as Spam” button.

Here’s what Mailchimp says about it:

Most ESPs and ISPs say a reasonable threshold for abuse complaints is 0.1 percent (one out of a thousand people reported your campaign as junk). Because of the sheer volume of emails sent from our IPs, and because most of our IPs are shared across multiple users, our threshold is stricter than that.

Mailchimp has a threshold at 0.01 percent for spam complaints. That’s a number you should shoot for. Here’s why:

What happens when someone clicks “Spam”?

A spammed email today may mean that your email doesn’t get through tomorrow.

For example, when someone clicks “Spam” on your email at an ISP like AOL, it’s a black mark against you as a sender. It’s also a black mark against the IP address you’re sending from too.

When AOL thinks you’re a “bad” sender you’ll get blocked from sending or throttled. Your messages may also end up in a recipients’ spam boxes rather than delivering to the inbox.

How can you avoid getting marked as spam?

Doing the things we often talk about will help:

Get permission before sending

That means no buying lists! Get people to opt in by signing up for your product / service or for your list. Double opt-in is the gold standard, but for products a single opt-in usually works best.

Set expectations for what people will receive from you

There should be no bad surprises. Be clear about what people will get from you:

Send regularly and on a schedule

If someone signs up, but never gets any emails from you, they will forget about you after a month. If you send a marketing newsletter send it at least 3 - 4 times per month to keep people engaged.

Make it easy to opt out of your emails.

A link at the bottom usually works, but consider putting it in the first paragraph in riskier mailings.

Write compelling content

Know your audience. Write your words to inspire, teach and help them.

Segment your list rather than blasting the same content to everyone.

Last week you might have received an update email about the product. Blasting everyone who put in their email address who probably get some spam complaints, so I segmented to identify people who would likely be interested in the update.

Unless you’re paying, or sent us data, or basically did something in the last month, you’re not getting the email.

Auto opt-out disengaged people

Both Fab.com and LinkedIn have recently started opting people out who don’t engage with their emails. Here’s an example from LinkedIn:

Getting marked as spam sucks. My hypothesis is that most of the time spam complaints happens from Hail Mary marketing. Marketing where the recipient has a weak relationship or has disengaged from the company.

Take some time to review who you’re emailing, how they got on your list, and whether or not the emails your sending are being well received.

Happy emailing,
Colin

P.S. Did you read chapters 1 & 2 of Influence by Robert Cialdini? Join the discussion

Design in email is usually a mess. Sure, it’s easy to get a photoshop jockey who makes you a great looking picture of an email. To actually deliver a great looking email to multiple email clients – that’s the mess.

Starting last week, we rolled out a new responsive email template for Customer.io. I like it so much, I want to give it to you guys too.

Rather than only giving you the finished product, you’ll probably benefit from learning what we went through to make it.

Start with a design?

Having some experience, we had a good idea of what we wanted. Email has limitations, and if you set your expectations within those, it’s great to start with a design.

Give your designer clear guidelines and you should get an awesome result. Here’s what I sent to Steve, our designer:

Could you do an email template design for Customer.io consistent with the new branding we have?

A good example for styles we’ll need is probably our current welcome email. Beyond the button on it I’d want to cover:

ul, il, img, h1, h2, a

And here’s what came back:

Click on it to make sure you see the full thing. We were happy with the design. Then it was time to get it in to code.

Note: If design isn’t your strong suit, start with a good looking template and add your logo to that

Write your code from a solid foundation

I’m lazy. I hope you are too. When you see a great foundation to start from, grab it with both hands.

Several months ago, the good folks at the design agency Zurb released their responsive email templates. These templates are a great starting point. They do a good job of working on Gmail’s client on iOS and Android too. I’ve griped about Gmail not supporting @media queries which is the preferred way by most people to make emails responsive. Gmail not supporting it means you need to try a different tack. Zurb’s (and now our) emails are responsive in gmail (except with images – but that’s another story).

Email responsiveness across all the clients is no trivial matter so starting with tried and true methods is recommended.

Customize and add your unique elements

While Zurb’s email templates have some great base styles, you’ll probable want to customize those and add some additional elements of your own.

We added or tweaked things like:

… to show you a couple. We also changed the font sizes and made other changes to the basic styles. My recommendation is to have an email styleguide which shows every element you might use in an email all on one page.

Test test test

You’ve made a great layout that looks perfect in your email client and your test file on your browser. But what about everyone else’s email client?

Making sure emails look good everywhere is an order of magnitude harder these days than getting stuff to work in a web browser.

We use Litmus.com to make sure that the emails are going to look great in the places we care about and acceptable in others.

Litmus tests 37 different ways someone might see your email. You’d be nuts to try testing all of these ways yourself. Litmus will save you a huge amount of time.

Take a look at our latest email styleguide on Litmus. It’s awesome to see how the email renders everywhere.

Want to make your next email visually awesome?

If you’re our customer, you’ll find this layout is already in your account. If you sign up, you’ll have it too. Otherwise, you can download and use it somewhere else.

Download "Modern" Now or Check it out on Github

Did you learn something about responsive emails? Is there anything you know that we didn’t cover? Let everyone know your thoughts in the comments.

Happy emailing,
Colin

Yesterday it was Brennan Dunn’s birthday. Lucky for us, he took some time out of his day to share some email wisdom with all of us in this interview.

Brennan has always impressed me. He’s a great experimenter with landing pages and email. I think you’ll really enjoy his insights. Hopefully this interview inspires you to try something new this week with your emails.

We’re turning this and other interviews into a semi-regular podcast:

Subscribe on iTunes

Show Notes

• Brennan’s Twitter
• BrennanDunn.com
• Drip by Rob Walling
• Double your freelancing rate

Full transcript

Colin: Hey, everybody. I am here with Brennan Dunn. Brennan Dunn runs Planscope. He has a very popular blog for freelancers. I’m not doing this justice. Brennan, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell people what you do?

Brennan Dunn: Hey, Colin. My main app is Planscope. That’s my oldest product, and since then, I’ve written two books. I have a newsletter, podcast, a workshop, a new workshop that I’m doing, and just a lot of different things, all related to consulting and freelancing. It’s all very same audience, just different products.

Colin: You do a lot with email, with your newsletters, with a lot of lifecycle emails. How did you get started working with email? What was your introduction to the medium?

Brennan: The first time I really started using email as a way to actually be integral to my marketing was with my first book, so that was “Double Your Freelancing Rate.” I launched that back last August, and it was almost accidental. I did pre-orders.

People paid me, and I felt…I knew that they should be getting something while I wrote the book, so I just started writing once a week as a newsletter, and I would write to them about what I was working on, what I was writing that was going to come into the book that they bought, and I just never stopped after the book came out.

It turned into what was a book-specific newsletter to being my newsletter. I’ve used that now to…really, it’s my glue. It’s the glue between everything I do. It promotes…somebody can enter my newsletter any number of different ways. They can get to it from my blog. They can get to it from a paid ad that runs to a [inaudible 01:59] page. They can buy a book of mine and get on it.

What’s beneficial is, over time, they can come to know who I am, what I do, and my beliefs and consulting. There are the occasional outlets to all the different products I have.

Colin: I’ve been fortunate in that we came across each other really, really early on, so I’ve been lucky to see you grow and to see you just increase the breadth of the things that you can offer people. One of the things that I really like about what you do is the tone. How do you think about the way that you write and the tone that you use when talking to your audience?

Brennan: Any time I send a newsletter, or even any time I send mostly any type of email, I treat it as if I’m writing you directly. If I were to open up Apple Mail, and type in “Colin,” and then start typing, that’s how I treat all of my emails. They’re not designed. They don’t look computer generated.

They look like a peer-to-peer email, which helps, because the tone is very informal. It’s always like, “Hey, Colin, blah blah, blah. Cheers, Brennan,” and that’s literally my format for just about anything I send.

Colin: That’s your template. [laughs]

Brennan: Yeah. I should actually add the salutary and whatever they call the “cheers” part to the email template, but I do write that by hand. It’s very informal. I look at is…A lot of my call-to-actions are actually replies, so I ask people to reply and tell me about something. Truthfully, that’s how I do most of my discovery, how I figure out what language people use, instead of doing these mass surveys.

I run a lot of raw data that I can individually look at and see, “How do people describe their problems? Is there a critical mass of people who have this problem that I could potentially provide something to?”

Colin: I remember we were chatting, I guess about a month or so ago, at BaconBizConf. One of the things that struck me is you said…I think you were talking about the first email in one of your lifecycle series and the question that you ask people. Do you remember what that was?

Brennan: Yeah. It’s actually the second email. The first email is more of an introductory. The second email in my autoresponder sequence is I ask people what the number one problem they have with consulting and freelancing is, and I list out a few different examples. I get a lot of…

I don’t know the exact percentage off hand, but I get probably three or four replies a day that just get tagged automatically in Gmail. I just dig through that every once in a while, but I do make an effort to respond to everyone who writes me. It’s a way to build up a relationship quickly and help people out where I can. That’s the second email I write.

The third email, which is the follow-up to that, is the number one problem that people have written me about. I have enough data now, and I’ve been doing this long enough, that I can write this third email. It’s actually the biggest thing people struggle with is making more money and pricing. It’s a natural upsell for my book, “Double Your Freelancing Rate,” and I get a lot of…

I want to say I get maybe sell between $100 to $200 a day off that book, which I wrote last August. Even a year into it, I’m still getting consistent revenue. A lot of that, I think, is because I have this sequence setup that happens when somebody joins my newsletter.

It’s not a hard sell at all, it’s just like, “Here are some blog posts that I’ve written about pricing, or if you want to read 100-plus pages about it, here’s a book.” It works pretty well.

Colin: What are some of the other ways that you’re using, or thinking about using emails, either like autoresponder series or lifecycle emails, which are essentially like different names for the same thing, but… [laughs]

Brennan: It does get a little more complex than that, and I do send emails out based on my purchases. When somebody buys like a [inaudible 06:33] , I’m going to email them, I think I have it going out 20 days later, where I ask them what they thought, which is just fishing for testimonial. I also promote my other book that way, because usually Double Your Freelancing Rate is the first book that they’ll come across. Can you hear me OK?

Colin: You broke up a little bit, but, yeah, it seems to be OK now.

Brennan: I do have some lifecycle emails that go out based on purchases. Eventually, my goal is…It’s funny. We’re recording this on Tuesday, July 9th at 3:00. At 2:30, I just replied to an email from somebody who wrote me an email, saying they just joined my list a few weeks ago or something. They wanted to know if I had any resources I could provide on how to get more clients through your website.

I replied saying, “I literally wrote the book on that, right?” and pasted a link to the book. There’s definitely some room for improvement on how I can better expose the stuff I’ve done to my web as a whole. That’s going to be…when I have the time, I’m going to do a very big project that will hopefully allow me to wrangle stuff in.

Colin: You and I have talked about the idea of rather than sending people to a landing page, you send them to a lifecycle email course or an autoresponder course. I think we were both talking about that as an experiment we wanted to run last time. Have you implemented that? Is that in production now?

Brennan: I have. Actually, about two weeks ago, I put up a drip email course on Planscope. If you go to the Planscope site, there’s, in the bottom-right, I’m using Drip by Rob Walling, which is just a thing that’ll track actual visitor to trial conversions. It’s basically meant for [inaudible 08:44] . I’ve gotten a few…I think I’m getting about a five percent conversion rate from people who joined the course so far.

I’m only two weeks in, so I don’t really know how it’ll pan out, but it’s already…because it’s a lot easier to get somebody to put in their email address than it is to whip out the credit card and start off a trial. Likewise, with the book, if you’re sending random traffic to a landing page or a [inaudible 09:14] .

Colin: We’re breaking up a little bit.

Brennan:…who don’t trust it, they don’t know who you are, then it’s going to be very hard, I think, to sell them. I think we cut out again.

Colin: Yeah. Can you jump back to the bit where you’re saying if you send people to a landing page when they don’t trust you?

Brennan: Yes. If you send traffic that doesn’t know who you are to a landing page, and you’re asking them to buy something, the likelihood that they’ll buy it if they don’t know who you are is pretty low. You need to break down a few different trust barriers that will allow them to be comfortable enough buying your thing.

One of the best ways to do that, I think, is to build up a relationship over time, and to just ask them for an email address, maybe give them something immediate in return, like a PDF or lesson one of a course and, basically, use that to build up trust and give them free value over time. Then ask for the sale like a month into it or something.

Colin: Do you have any advice for people on how to find the content for the course, relative to their product? How do you make a decision on, “I should write about this, because my product’s about that?”

Brennan: It’s easy if you’re selling a book. You just take out themes from the book, and deliver it. For a software product, one thing I’m really big on is stepping back. I sell project management software, but that’s just one facet of a company that has clients’ needs. There are a lot of other needs that they have.

My email course is a five-day “Become a Better Freelancer” challenge, and I basically just took the…One of the benefits of having a newsletter is you can practice these courses through your newsletter. You can have a four- or five-part series.

I got feedback from it and I was able to modify the underlying content, and then put it into a lifecycle email course that I put out.

In my case, I knew that the people who typically bought Planscope were freelancers or small teams that they were trying to get their head around project management and managing clients and making more money and better scheduling themselves and stuff. I just took all that info that I knew about them and wrote a course – just a five-part series on how to…“Five Quick Wins That Can Improve Your Business.”

Obviously, the overarching theme is, if the topic is on transparency with your clients, I will plug Planscope and say, “One of the reasons I built Planscope is to make this problem a non-issue.” It’s a very subtle way of marketing your own product.

My benchmark is, if I stripped out anything sales-related for any of these emails, they should still be valuable to the reader. You should still want to read it, or it should still be something that somebody walks away better off than they were before they read your email.

I see a lot of people botch these up, where they do these really hard-sell emails, and there’s nothing of value. It’s a very one-sided email. All you’re doing is saying, “I want your money.” You’re not actually providing value to them in exchange.

Colin: You mentioned…I think a few things came up in what you were saying, as far as rules of thumb. Always provide value, and then I think your course on Planscope is a five-email course. What’s the spacing between the emails? How do you think about things like that?

Brennan: Some people say do a month course with multiple days in between. Mine’s literally a five-day back-to-back course. I could probably start experimenting with different types. But, for the time being, I don’t really see a lot of benefit. If I was selling a big, “Pay $1,200 right now, that’s it,” then you might want to invest a lot more time into building that relationship.

I think if all I’m asking for is to start a trial with this SaaS, I don’t think they need a month to do that.

Colin: That makes sense. Tailor it a little bit for the type of product you’re trying to sell. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Any other rules of thumb that you use when building these series of emails?

Brennan: Yeah. I won’t really aggressively promote anything – or even non-aggressively promote much – at the beginning. At the beginning, it’s all about them – understanding their needs, empathizing with them.

Later on, conveniently, it’s basically gluing…“We’ve defined the problem. This is the problem. Here’s data, or here’s what I think on how to solve that problem.” Then I will loosely link that with different products that I’ve had. They could be a free product – it could be a blog post I might have written, it could be a podcast episode – or it could be a paid product.

I don’t really draw a distinction between my newsletter and a book. The way I look at it is, you get lower value from the newsletter than you would out of a book, because a book is a very concerted effort by me to really focus on one problem and go really in detail on that. If you want to learn about that, there’s an exchange. There’s a monetary exchange. You buy the book, and you get a solution to that problem.

I don’t intentionally make it so my newsletter is nothing more than really elegant marketing. My newsletter by itself I think is very valuable, and people have said this, even if they don’t buy anything ever.

I look at it as, if the book is 10 to 1 – if the book is like 10x the value that the newsletter delivers – and that’s $50 for that book, then my $1,000 workshop is 100x or something. I try to peg it according…I forgot who…I think it might have been via Nathan Barry, Chris Guillebeau – I can never pronounce his name – I think he said something like, “You should always deliver 10x on the money you ask.”

Colin: I’ve heard that before. I think Patrick McKenzie might have even brought that up as well when he thinks about pricing. [laughs]

Brennan: I think we all…yeah. I make it very clear in the marketing, even, for my book. If you can just raise your rate by a dollar, that’s still a win because if you’re working even 1,000 hours a year, that’s $1,000 you’re going to make more, just by being able to do that.

Now, most people will go substantially higher, so the value they get is huge. You can get value out of a newsletter, but you can get more value out of other avenues. I really try to just make that obvious and evident in what I’m doing.

Colin: For someone getting started today, who maybe has a product – maybe they have a book that they’re writing – how do they get started with email, with building a list? How do they get attention for themselves? What would you recommend?

Brennan: It’s a good question. I was talking to somebody on Twitter today. He was like…It actually took me by surprise, because he kind of said, “Of course it’s easy for you to sell stuff, because you’re well known in that niche.”

I’m like, thinking back a year ago, no one knew who the hell I was a year ago. I think I replied saying something like, “Anyone with a name has been a no-name at some point.”

Planscope literally stagnated for a while, when I did the traditional startup-y, “Launch your product, think that people are just going to flock to it,” and then get frustrated and you’re like, “I’m going to run paid ads,” or “I’m going to do the whole blogging thing and that’ll just send people and they’ll buy.”

Planscope started taking off when I started focusing on creating value through my newsletter and through these books and stuff like that.

If you’re thinking about creating a product, whether it be…I don’t see a big distinction between a book or a software product. At the end of the day, they both solve problems. But what I would start doing sooner than later is really focus on building up the customers who are going to be the buyers for that product, and offer them something of value.

Over-deliver value as much as you can right now, and it will – it sounds cheesy – but it establishes good karma, and people will just want to naturally buy stuff from you because they already know you produce great stuff. You can use it to learn about what you’re building.

One great thing…Stop building stuff in isolation. Write a book collaboratively with future customers or even current customers if you pre-sell.

Colin: It’s funny. Your comment about nobody knowing you a year ago. Nobody knew us – Customer IO, me, or anything – a year ago.

Brennan: No one knew Patrick five years ago.

Colin: Yeah.

Brennan: There’s no predestination when it comes to this stuff. We’re not Calvinists.

Colin: I think all you have to do is start somewhere, but the advice that you’re giving – about focusing on delivering value now, and that will pay back later for your business – I think that’s really sound. It worked for us. It seems to have worked for you, too.

Brennan: Frankly, a lot of people think it’s the old hockey stick idea. My newsletter was built one subscriber at a time. My customer base, one customer at a time. There’s no…I like the predictability of a nice, linear, upward growth.

But I think a lot of people get discouraged when they launch, say, a SaaS and they have two paying customers or something. But, yeah. We were all…I was there. We’ve all been there.

Colin: Absolutely. I think that’s about it. Where would you want people to go if they wanted to get onto your list? What’s the URL for your list?

Brennan: My list is FreelancersWeekly – “Freelancer” with an S – Weekly, dot com. Actually, you join my list and then the thank you page has every product that I build, so that’s a good way to get there. If you want to see products without needing to give me your email, you can go to BrennanDunn.com, and I have an About page and a Products page and stuff.

Colin: Thanks so much, Brennan, for taking the time and sharing your knowledge with us. We really appreciate it.

Brennan: No worries, Colin. Thanks.

Colin: Take care.

This post was originally sent as an email

Hello Friend,

Believe it or not, when John and I started Customer.io, we were scared to send you email. We thought: "We've got one shot at emailing you to check out our product. Let's make it perfect".

Not communicating with you is the dumbest thing we've done to date. Here's what we learned from Ramit Sethi, New York Times bestselling author and probably the best "white hat" email marketer around:

After a month, most people don't remember signing up. After 6 months, the entire list of people is cold. Dead. Gone. It's basically as though the person never signed up. But what about when you have a live product that people can sign up for?

We spent months asking companies "what happens after people sign up for your product if they do nothing else?". The most common answer?

Absolutely nothing. They spend 30 - 60 seconds on the site, and never hear from that site again. People are so afraid of email that they sit on their hands. They wait until the next “Monthly Newsletter” to write a boring, generic update. If your product is live, and you have people signing up but they never hear from you again except for newsletters, you’re making a big mistake.

Even if you aren't afraid to email -- what do you say?

The two most common strategies we've uncovered are education and personalization. A series of educational emails keep a product in the front of the user's mind while teaching about the product. Then, there's personalization -- an email from the CEO just after signing up. Often this email is followed up a day later with someone checking in from the support team. When we've analyzed successful web apps, they're almost always using one of these strategies.

You could be printing money. Why haven't you built this yet?

“Even the dumbest possible implementation of [lifecycle emails] prints money in my experience” – Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on Hacker News).

We know this, and I'm guessing you knew this which is why you're interested in our product. We're working to release publicly in the next few months, and are adding more people to our private beta as soon as we can.

Even while you're waiting, I can still help you.

While we get the product ready for broader use, we’re excited to share what we learn from you, our own testing, and from conversations with experts like Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie. So let’s get started making us all experts:

Question: What’s your biggest fear about sending more email to your users?

Write me a few sentences explaining what your biggest fear is with sending more email to your users. I’ll compile what everyone says, anonymize it and share the feedback next time I write.

- Colin

This post was originally sent as an email

Hello Again,

In my last email, I shared how foolish we were for not emailing you sooner. I received this response from Luke B. which helped me know I was on the right track:

My opinion of you guys changed completely today. I love the tone, style and content of this email and totally agree with the sentiments you are describing. You have totally won me back and also you have established your credibility and quality of your email content and I will now going forward read what you write.

Many more of you wrote me offering encouragement and sharing your fears. Thank you! You helped me overcome mine.

So what are your biggest fears about sending more emails to your users?

For Jason S. it's "Having people unsubscribe". Stacy I. said "Getting buried in the inbox and ignored". Shawn A. said "Sending (another) email stating that we are delayed in launching". For Chris A. it was "Having my emails blocked by spam filters."

These are totally legitimate concerns. However, they’re outliers in the pattern I saw.

Overwhelmingly, people shared fears about sending irrelevant emails. Often using the words irrelevant or relevance when describing their fears.

So it's somewhat counter-intuitive when i tell you that sending only monthly marketing blasts is actually the problem.  Sending one monthly marketing blast increases the likelihood that your emails aren't relevant to your users. If you try writing an email for everybody, then you end up connecting with nobody. So what’s the alternative?

Write for your core audience. Focus on making them ridiculously happy

This will cause some people to unsubscribe. Guaranteed. But so will writing emails that lack personality. Don’t be scared if your emails don’t have universal appeal. It’s better to have 15 people who love you and 5 who unsubscribe than 20 who don’t care.

How do you identify your core audience?

The best way is to talk to your users. I have between 10 and 20 conversations a week with existing users and prospective users. From those conversations, I’ve learned our product appeals to engineering, product or marketing people. When I write to you, I imagine a combination of everyone I’ve spoken to. Some kind of super product focused CTO marketer who believes in the power of email to improve relationships with customers. When I write with that image in my head, I'm not confused about how to communicate. Mostly it's because we speak the same language.

Make sure you test emails on real people before sending them out to everyone.

By the time you read this, it’s gone through at least 5 people who have proof-read it to make sure I don’t come across like a boring idiot. Last time, I knew it was good when my girlfriend said she read it all the way through. (I can’t even get her to pay attention when I’m showing her our product). 

So focus on writing for real people. Get people you trust to review your email for clarity and interest. If they come back and are ridiculously happy with the email, send it out to everyone. That's what will make your email relevant.

This is my second newsletter email (ever). How am I doing?

Is there a topic you’d like me to cover? Let me know by replying to the email. Here are three of my ideas: 

1. Mapping out the emails your app should send 
   
2. Writing killer subject lines
   
3. Email open rates (based on analysis of our own data)
   

Or, suggest something else.

Reply to this email, and paste the topic you want me to research and write about next. I’ll do the heavy lifting.

Hello Friend,

Last email I asked you what you wanted us all to learn about next. Here's a little status update

1. This time: Writing killer subject lines
2. Next time (all going well): Email open rates (based on analysis of our own data)
3. Later: Mapping out the emails your app should send

I can't wait for the Email Open Rates newsletter. We have a great data scientist working to uncover gems of information in our data... But this email is about writing killer subject lines

I used to be bad at writing copy. So bad that at my last job, we hired someone to compensate for my poor skills.

If you’re anything like me, when you’re bad at something you want to get better. About 8 months ago, I learned about a series of Ebooks from CopyHackers. I read them cover to cover. If I’ve gotten better at copywriting, it’s because of these books as well as lots of practice and experimentation.

When you guys said you wanted to learn more about subject lines, I knew I had to speak with Joanna Wiebe, copywriter extraordinaire and founder of CopyHackers.com.

Joanna kindly broke down subject lines into her Top 5 things to think about when writing subject lines. We got a little excited about talking to Joanna and decided to record our conversation. So click on the 3 minute video and if you want to learn subject line kung fu like Neo in the Matrix. Or read on for the text version of Joanna's wisdom:

Here are Joanna’s 5 things to think about when writing subject lines

1. The Basics
2. The Trigger
3. What’s in it for them
4. Friend-ness and Relevance
5. Context

So let’s dig in to what Joanna recommends (note: I’ve paraphrased a few lines, but these great ideas are hers not mine):

1. The Basics

• Use the brand name somewhere in the line, even if it’s in the From line
• Stick to 50 characters with spaces – or less (unless you have data that suggests longer headlines work better)
• Don’t use title case but rather use sentence case
• Avoid overtly spammy words, or more than 1 spammy word
• Mirror the subject line in the email headline

2. The Trigger - Why is someone getting the email?

• Are people expecting this email or aren’t they?
• How long ago did they ask for this email?

3. What’s in it for them?

• In a newsletter, what’s intriguing, timely or curious about the subject?
• If it’s an enticement to upgrade, what’s the offer? When does it end? What new highly desirable feature should I want to get?
• If this is a “welcome” email, what will make them feel welcomed? Do they event want to feel welcomed, or do they just want access to your free ebook?

4. Friend-ness and Relevance

How can you make the email look like it’s from a trusted source who understands them, not from a company with an agenda? Get strategic about:

• Personalization
• Recent behaviors (e.g. “you just signed up”)
• Time since we last spoke (e.g. “It’s been a while, Sarah”)
• lowercase, like a friend would write.
• Tone
• Avoiding creepiness! How do you know so much about me? If an email gets triggered from inside an app, what level of detail should you share with me in the subject line?—When does it get creepy?

Or, if they consider your brand a friend then use your brand voice. Good examples of this are Woot.com and Kate Spade

5. Context

Remember, you’re trying to get noticed in the midst of a massive inbox (in many cases) filled with competing messages from invited and uninvited people. You must consider context in all copywriting, and subject lines are no different.

Thanks Joanna Wiebe for chatting with us. Listen to the audio (15 mins).

Want this newsletter to have more issues with audio and video? Let me know. It's a little more work, but you guys are worth it.

- Colin

Hello Friend,

Have you ever been to the beach and there's that hairy guy with a big gold chain, wearing a speedo and showing just a little too much?  For the faint of heart, turn away now because...

...this week's email is all about open rate data. I'll show you ours, ask to see yours, and I'll cover a key metric: the email open rate, which is one way to gauge whether your users are engaging with your emails.

Most companies don't write interesting emails. Just take a look at averages across industries.

Mailchimp publishes “Email Marketing Benchmarks”. Averages across different industries vary, but most industries have between 10 and 20% open rates on their marketing emails. The top industry is a mysterious “Other” with a 33.52% open rate.

I'm feeling a little nervous sharing this... but here are our email open rates for the past few emails.

We started off with a rate of 33% opens, equal to Mailchimp's best performing industry segment. But by applying the advice experts have been giving and incorporating feedback from you, we’re now at open rates of 47% -- nearly a 30% improvement!

If you're relying on open rates as a key metric, it's important to understand how they're calculated.

So, how does almost every email provider calculate open rates?

A tiny invisible image, unique for every recipient, is placed somewhere in the email. So, when you send an email to tyrion@lannister.com and the image is accessed from the server, you know Tyrion opened the email. This works the same way across almost all email products. 

Tracking using an image works great except for one tiny problem...

Gmail turns images off by default and so do a few other email clients. As a result, open rates tend to be under-reported.

For example: A friend of mine runs Timehop (an awesome startup that sends a daily email about what you did on that day a year ago). They have A LOT of gmail users who also use iPhones. If these people receive the email before they get to work, there is a good chance they'll open the email on their iPhone.

Here's the tricky part: iPhones automatically load images. So their open rates report higher when the emails are sent early in the morning. But it would be wrong to conclude that more people are reading the emails.

Moral of the story: take the accuracy of open rates with a grain of salt. 

Consider where people will be when they receive your email, and what device they use to read your emails.

Do you get killer open rates on your emails?

Forward an example of one of your highly performing emails to colin@customer.io. It’ll just be between you and me unless you tell me:

1. You want me to feature it on greatemailcopy.tumblr.com
2. I can share it in the newsletter next week.

Do your open rates need improvement?

Great, let’s work on it together. Forward me an email you wish had performed better. Don't forget to include some context about what purpose that email should have served.

Next time, I’ll share some common traits of high performing emails that we will all be able to learn from to kick our emails up a notch.

Before you move on to surfing reddit, hacker news or maybe doing some work, do me a huge favor. 

Forward ONE email you currently send to colin@customer.io. Let me know if it's "killer" or "needs improvement".

Until next time,

Colin

P.S. A few days ago I did a blog post about how I would re-write an email for Trello to improve readability. They read it and changed the email they were sending. My top tip is to set the width of your text emails to 550px max. 

I recently made that change on all of our text emails.

There's a universal truth about people. A truth that Paul at "Circle CI" understands and has used to amazing effect in the welcome email he sent out. And it goes something like this...

When you were a child, you lived at the center of your universe. When you closed your eyes, everything disappeared. When you were hungry, you cried and food would appear. If you were too hot, you cried. Too cold, you cried.

Everything was you you you (or me me me since you’re you -- boy that’s confusing).

When you became an adult you learned how to repress some of those urges. But they’re still there. YOU are still the center of YOUR universe.

Now, you and me... we’re savvy email people. When we receive emails, we don't just care about ourselves, right? We just want cold hard facts and data and we can decide what solves our problems, right?

WRONG

If doesn’t matter how smart your audience is or what your product or service is...

You'll want a pen and paper to write this down. I'll wait.

People don’t care about you. They only care about themselves

Think about that next time you write an email. Everything in your email should be about the reader and their problems, not about you and your company.

Here’s an awesome (short) example of this sent in by Paul from CircleCI.com.

Hey Colin,

Here's your invite to the Circle private beta:

https://circleci.com/?invite=12312827

In 20 seconds, your code will be set up for Continuous Integration, and your first tests will have started running on our servers. It's that easy!

Try it now: https://circleci.com/?invite=12312827

Paul

Founder, Circle

PS I love to hear feedback, so please let me know what you think :)

Paul killed it with this email. The value to the user is so clear: In 20 seconds, the product will be working. And he delivers. We’re a customer of Paul’s. If you don’t know what Continuous Integration is don’t worry. It’s something that developers know they SHOULD do, but it’s a pain to set up and maintain yourself (kind of like the emails we power).

Paul’s service makes Continuous Integration easy to set up and he communicated that extremely well in the email.

As a result, Paul got a whopping 55% of people to click on the link to check out Circle CI. Pretty awesome, huh?

I want to help you achieve ridonkulously great results like Paul’s (55% click through!)

Need a little inspiration before I challenge you to apply some of these ideas?

I got you an awesome 10 minute video of Neville Medhora. Neville is a professional copywriter who writes copy for AppSumo. In the video with Andrew Warner of Mixergy, Neville breaks down and improves a company’s welcome email.

This is usually paid content and one of the videos in Neville Medhora’s Kopywriting Kourse. (There’s no referral link in there. I paid $89 for the course and it was well worth the money)

I begged, borrowed and stole from Neville to show this video to you. To respect his awesome course, you need to watch it before July 31st. We can’t keep it up forever.

This Week’s Challenge is to make one of your emails AWESOME

1. Before July 31st, Watch the super sekret kopy video I swiped from Neville Medhora’s Kopywriting Kourse
2. Use the lessons learned in this email and the video to improve one of your emails.
3. Send me the before and after.

Sincerely,

Colin

P.S. If you’re among the first 50 people to reply with what you changed in one of your emails, I will give you a discount code for 40% off Customer.io’s email service for 6 months to use when you sign up.

P.P.S. Neville let me use the video with permission. Please don’t send me DMCA takedown notices. The phrase "People don't care about you, they only care about themselves" also came from Neville's course.

P.P.P.S. Last week's email on open rates had an open rate of 52%… our best ever!

The human brain has three parts. But I'm just going to focus on one part today: The lizard brain. This is the oldest part of our brain. It takes care of our basic needs like remembering to breathe. It is where fight-or-flight decisions are made.

Understanding the lizard brain is really important if you're writing emails

The lizard brain is the part of the brain that decides to open and read an email.

The lizard brain is the first responder. Imagine you're crossing a busy street and you hear a car sound its horn. Your lizard brain causes you to turn in the direction of the noise. Your lizard brain helps you decide "Am I in danger"? This time, it's safe.

The lizard brain is hard at work when you're scanning new emails in your inbox. The subject line "Account overdrawn" from your bank will probably set off alarms in your lizard brain. You should probably open it, read it and get that resolved.

But most companies like yours and mine will rarely be delivering messages of great urgency like a bank account being overdrawn.

And sending messages designed to alarm users into opening them gets tiresome quite quickly.

How should we stimulate the lizard brain?

Beyond responding to alarms, the lizard brain is also curious.

The lizard brain (when not sensing danger) is stimulated by the new or interesting.

Here's an example

A dating tips mailing list (I sign up for A LOT of newsletters) sent me an email with this subject:

My lizard brain couldn't resist that email subject (even though I'm happily in a relationship).

But that's just the subject line, what about the rest of the email?

I've found that a great way is to structure emails is to use a technique created before email by the wizards of direct mail. When you write emails, structure them emails using A.I.D.A. That stands for:

Attention

You've got 2 seconds to capture and hold the lizard brain's attention. Use the subject line and the first few lines to suck them in.

"The human brain has three parts" is an example first line that captured your attention

Interest

This is where you educate the user and share the details of the email. Make sure to focus on the benefits to the reader. Don't spend the whole time talking about you!

If you've made a feature update, talk about benefits of those features in the "interest" section.

If you're trying to recruit people to an event, show them why they should go to the event and give them details the event - where it will be and when.

Desire

Write at least one line to build up to the action you want the reader to take.

E.g.:

• "Your clients are going to personally congratulate you on the improvements we've made in this release"
• "Tickets are going fast, and will increase by a dollar each day until they're all sold out"

Action

Try your best to limit what you're asking people to do. Stick to one action per email.

E.g.:

• "Log in and see the changes"
• "Reserve your spot today"

I can't wait to show you some of the emails I've written using AIDA.

This week see if you can stimulate some lizard brains.

Take a look at one of your emails and rewrite it by breaking it in to Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

Sincerely,
Colin

P.S. For 3 people who reply (before Monday) with an email broken down in to AIDA, I'm going to buy and send you a copy of "Ogilvy on Advertising". This is a MUST READ if you want to stimulate lizard brains with compelling emails and website copy.

Have you received a bad email from a company and clicked reply to give them feedback only to find that their email address is "noreply@lamecompany.com"?

They're CRAZY! You always want to encourage users to get in touch with you.

User feedback by email is the next best thing to sitting next to real users doing real user testing.

Let's think about a situation that some of us are all too familiar with. Imagine you released a new feature but not a lot of people are using it.

How do you know if your version of the feature sucks, or if the feature isn't appropriate for users of your app?

When people check out the feature, but don't use it, email them and ask "why?". You'll know instead of guessing from looking at your metrics.

I'm not going to pretend like writing emails to gather feedback is easy, because it's not. You're asking a favor of the recipient, in exchange for making the product better for them. These emails are hard to write.

But the responses you'll get will make it worthwhile.

Here are a few tips:

A few things you should not do

1. Don't punish people or express frustration that they haven't set up your product
2. Don't nag. If you have multiple emails, increase the time from the last email with each additional email.
3. Don't ask people to do too many things at once. If you try to focus on one task to accomplish, they're more likely to do it.

A few things you should do

1. Use AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) to structure your email. We talked about it last week in The Lizard Brain -- and email.
2. Answer the question "Why is this good for me?" for your recipient (not for you). When asking someone to do something, why should they do it? Even better, show them.
3. Be personable. Imagine you're writing the email to a friend of your best friend. Someone you haven't met yet, but you've heard great things about. A friendly message will go a long way.

Here's an example I put together soliciting feedback about a feature of Pseudo Project

Do you have a great email to solicit feedback? Or do you want help? Send me a copy. I'd be happy to give you feedback or feature it on greatemailcopy.tumblr.com.

Until next week,

Colin

P.S. Wednesday is now email day, so look for an email from me next wednesday. Same-ish time. Same place.

P.P.S* Thanks to everyone who sent in emails you re-wrote using AIDA. I hope you're enjoying reading "Ogilvy on Advertising".

Technology businesses and small companies increasingly use Google Apps to power their corporate email. Google Apps Email is just Gmail with the ability to swap in your logo and receive email on “mycompany.com”.

You know from previous newsletters that Gmail under-reports open rates because images are off by default.

But Gmail is actually also underreported in stats because so many recipients are using it and you wouldn’t know it...

How many people really use Google’s email Google Apps + Gmail? We had our data scientist run some numbers on almost 200,000 behavioral emails we’ve sent. And we were surprised at what we found.

So in reality over half of your recipients might have images off by default and underreport open rates.

What’s interesting about this is when we ignored volume and just looked at all the domains we’ve seen:

We’ve also found that people who sign up using their Google Apps email click are about 10.2% more likely to click on your email than regular Gmail users.

My guess is that people willing to sign up with their company email address are more qualified leads and therefore more likely to click. What do you think the reason is?

Understanding recipient data is just a drop in the bucket of what you need to know to make smart decisions about email for your company.

But how does what you do with email compare to other companies? 

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an email you could get next week to give you more insight into this?

Complete this short 7 question survey.

Fill it out and everyone wins.

Sincerely,
Colin

P.S. Last week I helped a few people by proofreading emails and making suggestions. I actually like doing this, so if you want me to proofread something you wrote, please send it on with a note about when someone would receive it.

Hi from Portland, Oregon! I’m attending XOXO Festival this week.

Over the weekend a story blew up about an email response from the CEO of Paypal. Andy MacMillan (one of the organizers of XOXO) had GBP £40,000 being withheld by Paypal, and try as he might, he couldn’t get it back.

So he asked the internet for help, and ultimately got this response from Paypal’s CEO:

I’ve highlighted a few of the things that David Marcus, CEO of Paypal did in his email that were effective.

1. Your problem = solved In the first sentence, he committed to making the problem go away & releasing the funds
2. We’re under new managementTried to rebuild trust: New CEO, 5 months in. Things will be different.
3. Help me, help you Told Andy his preferred path forward: Continue using paypal and tell me what’s wrong. I will make the product better for you.
4. You’re our only hope More than that, your feedback will save all paypal customers.
5. I care that your problem gets solved At least send me a one liner when you receive the money so I know when to stop making heads roll.
6. Want my first born child? Here’s my mobile number - a gesture above and beyond. I know you’ll never use it but I want you to know Im serious.

Do you think this email from David Marcus is effective?

Around the net, it was met with quite a lot of skepticism. But in my read of the email, it struck me as a genuine attempt to right a wrong.

I’d love to hear from you. What’s your opinion on David Marcus’ response? And what other CEO email stories do you have?

Sincerely,

Colin

P.S. If you’re in Portland, Oregon and will be attending XOXO, let’s grab coffee!

P.P.S Follow us on Angel list. Help us get visibility with investors to help us grow Customer.io and keep writing this email.

How much time do you spend improving the copy in your transactional emails from your company? My guess is not much…

You know which emails are transactional, right? Receipts, Password Resets, Signup Confirmation Emails.

You’ve probably got a spreadsheet somewhere in your company that lists every one of these transactional emails you send.

Jakob Nielsen, the renowned usability expert did a study on transactional emails back in 2008. Here’s what he said:

Unfortunately, most companies don't seem to view email creation as a user interface design activity, possibly because messages are often text-only, and thus don't seem "designy."

Judging by many of the messages we tested, email design often seems to be a side effect of the software implementation and consists of copy written by the programmer late at night. Alternatively (and even worse), some messages are hard-hitting, written by aggressive sales people without a true understanding of Internet marketing's emphasis on relationship building” Jakob Nielsen

Does that sound like you? Late night, written by a dev sounds like every company I've been a part of before Customer.io!

What you can do today to improve your transactional emails?

1. First, let people know when to expect an email

For example, If someone just purchased something, you can tell them on your site that the confirmation is in their email like Amazon does:

2. Make sure people recognize emails from you

When someone goes to their inbox, you want them to immediately know what emails from you look like by the from address and subject

Not having a "from" name increases the likelihood you'll be automatically sent to spam, and if a user doesn't recognize the sender, they're more likely to manually send you to spam.

A few examples of from names I like:

• “Colin from Customer.io” <colin@customer.io>
• “37Signals” <billing@37signals.com>
• “David Tisch via Skillshare” <hello@skillshare.com>

3. Have clear, explicit subject lines

Your goal with transactional email isn’t to intrigue the reader. Your goal is to inform. So there’s no need to trick people into opening your email with subjects like:

“You’ll never believe how much we charged you this month!”

Here are some good clear examples from my inbox:

• Reset password for your Visual Website Optimizer account
• Receipt from Cards Against Humanity for $25.00
• Reservation Confirmed - Seamless Transition

4. Get to the point

If you’re sending a receipt, like the one below from Apple, you don’t want to lead with the other things you can buy. Clearly define what the email is about, and what the additional marketing content is.

Apple does this well by putting recommendations in a grey sidebar with a clear title.

Rule of thumb: Be very careful about what additional content you add. If it may confuse users about the subject of the email, don’t add it.

5. Lastly, think about your sign-off

Your sign-off is an incredibly easy way to make a more personal connection with people. Don’t be afraid to use personal, informal sign-offs.

A few examples:

Yours,
Stripe

xoxo,
TimeHop

Enjoy your week!
Skillshare

And my favorite... Ron Burgundy (from the movie, “Anchorman”)

So whatcha waiting for? Review a few of your transactional emails, and see if you can make some of these simple improvements.

Until next week, happy emailing,
Colin

P.S. I recently redid our homepage - http://customer.io. I started thursday morning and finished late friday night. I’d welcome feedback from you all on the redesign and copy.