Episode Details

Hey everyone, this is part 3 of 3 on marketing email audits. Whether you’re in-house or you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service, our hope is that you can level up your email game.

In the last 2 episodes, we covered research tips and questions you should ask yourself before the audit and we also covered the actual audit and what to look for, tips and tactics.

In today’s episode, we’ll cover what email improvements to suggest and experiment with, we’ll take a nice deep dive in behaviour-triggered emails.

So you’ve dived into the user’s world, you’ve gone through all the emails and suggested improvements on the first emails and how to avoid selling too early. Now you want to figure out what you should suggest in terms of improvements.

What are some of the highest impact experiments you’ve led?

One spot I like to start is inactive users. When it comes to reactivating users, B2C can be very similar to B2B. B2C calls them abandoned cart emails, and they don’t have to be treated too differently in SaaS B2B, but it’s easy to do this wrong.

Re-activating dormant users

By day 3-4 of your onboarding sequence, it makes total sense to sell but probably only to users who have gotten started.

50-70% of free users have either left the product or are kicking the tires on several other options. We call these dormant or inactive users.

They check you out really fast and give up. The majority of these are users you will never convert in the first place.

But amongst this group of inactive users there's plenty who would convert if they get invited back into the product. The approach needs to be creative and helpful. We need to delight these inactive users, not sell them.

The angle should rather be showcasing similar customers who have completed similar jobs to be done.

Triggered-based behaviour emails

Most onboarding series are not tied to what users have completed so far in the product, it’s 100% time-based and not outcome-driven and assumes all users are ready to buy 15 minutes into their journey. 

Outcome driven trigger-based emails (instead of time), based on what users have completed and not completed in the product.

Here’s how I’ve approached implementing this as an experiment:

I would suggest starting with 3 main cohorts of users: 

1. Discover
2. Getting started
3. Upgrade

Most series push users quickly past steps 1 and 2 and hammers step 3 for many emails to follow. 

(1) Discover
The first activity cohort (Discover) is all about getting users to their first unit of value. For Convertkit, that might be importing your subscribers from Mailchimp, or maybe creating their first form. This is all about getting users to a quick win, browse all the different signup form options and connect it to your site. 

Instead of waiting 15 minutes before the next email, a triggered email could send after sign up form creation congratulating the user on connecting Convertkit to their site, reminding them how easy it is to swap forms and pushing them to the next cohort of users.

If users who signup become inactive and are not able to create a signup form or do anything else after 15 minutes, it’s safe to assume we’ve lost these folks and instead of pushing them a discount or a promotion, we should be teasing them about existing customer signup pages, focusing on that first win. We need to re-activate these users before we worry about selling to them. 

Coordinate with the product team here for best results. What is the typical time to conversion event. 

Also, it is worth thinking about consequences and complexity of moving to an activated track or not.

(2) Getting started
Users enter the second activity cohort/group as soon as they complete their first unit of value. 

The stage is all about convincing users t