Episode Details

Educational series, product onboarding, upsell sequences… regardless of where you look in your funnel, there’s marketing emails to be audited. 

Like any investigation, an email audit combines thorough observations, deductive reasoning and extra points for style and bold decisions. 

Our hope with this 3 part series is that you can add another feather in your detective hat. Whether you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service or you’re in-house and you want to level up your company’s email game. 

We’re going to cover research and questions you should ask yourself before the audit, what to look for in your actual audit, tips, tactics and finally what improvements to suggest and experiment with.

Today’s main takeaway is:
Users have ideal paths to discovering your product or service, understand these moments deeply and use email to guide users along this path. 

Alright JT, email onboarding is close to my heart, I’ve built many of these in-house but I’ve also had the pleasure of consulting and auditing the onboarding series for a few SaaS and tech companies.

It’s fascinating to get to see all the different ways you can welcome users to your product via email.

Before we talk about what order to tackle things, let’s talk about great email onboarding.

What’s great onboarding?

Great email onboarding consists of guiding/helping users through a series of “aha” moments as they interact with your brand and product. Users receive units of value for each step as they gain confidence in the product’s ability to complete their jobs to be done.

In a product-led company, this should be corroborated by the product/ux team. What wow moments exist in the ideal path, and use email to guide them along this path.

Data is part 1, story is part 2 and where marketing shines. What are some examples of aha moments?

Aha moments example
I’ve been thinking through what an “aha” series of steps might look like for a free Convertkit user:

• A close friend recommends Convertkit as the ideal place to start for my newsletter
• I have a quick read through backlinko’s guide to convertkit and get a real good sense of what the product can do
• I’m able to quickly signup and import my subscribers from Mailchimp
• I’m able to build my first signup form and connect it to my WP site
• I watch a 20 minute video tutorial on intro to advanced automations in Pro plans
• I successfully connect my signup form to my WP site

What email onboarding should and should not be
Ultimately, great email onboarding convinces users to stick around and boosts overall engagement and retention.

Email onboarding should be used to:

• Tell the company’s story
• Answer questions/objections
• Demonstrate how the product solves user’s pain 
• Nudge users to specific common conversion actions
• Show the art of the possible
• Tie what the user has done in their account

Email onboarding should not be used to:

• Get everyone to buy immediately 
• Send the same call to action
• Seem cold and impersonal

An extension of your brand and product

• Coordinate with product experience to be integrated with it
• Doesn’t trip over the feet of product-based emails or sales emails
• Build trust/rapport
• Be referenceable down the line when user needs info, point of contact, etc

Understanding your customers and users
Before diving into any email audit, it’s important to get into your users’ headspace. 

Obviously this differs whether you're leading this audit in-house or as a consultant. 

Often when you are contracting, you won’t have a ton of customer research data avai