The 17 emails we send to engage customers, reduce churn & increase revenue

Josh Pigford on February 17, 2015

From the start of Baremetrics I’ve wanted to stay away from being a faceless company. Given we’re a B2B company, that’s relatively easy. We’re not dealing with 10,000 or 100,000 customers here, so making sure each and every customer gets some sort of interaction just makes sense.

Keeping in touch with users makes for happier people and ultimately results in lower churn. But what are some ways to do that?

Here’s a breakdown of all the ways we stay in touch with users, including the exact emails we send in the days, weeks and months after sign up.

Onboarding

We send out a series of emails in the days after a user signs up. The purpose of these are to convey the value Baremetrics can provide and surface features they may not have known about.

We know that if users perform certain tasks, they’re less likely to churn, so the goal is to funnel them in that direction.

It’s worth noting that we’re constantly tweaking and A/B testing these, and you should likely do the same with some personalization. What works for our customers and product likely won’t work as well for yours.

Day 1: Welcome (Founder)

This usually gets sent within an hour or so of sign up. The purpose here is to instantly give them a connection to someone inside Baremetrics. A lot of people take me up on the offer for a phone call, which is great.

Day 2: Welcome (Support)

The purpose of this is to give them another point of contact as well as to funnel them towards documentation and articles that can help them get more out of Baremetrics.

Day 3: Team Members

The more of your team that uses Baremetrics, the less likely you are to churn. The purpose of this email is to help push them towards adding more team members.

Day 5: Notifications

Another feature-push email. Notifications make Baremetrics a regular part of a user’s daily workflow, so we want as many people as possible to use them.

Day 6: Plans

This email comes from me instead of Kaegan. No particular reason here other than to mix it up and reiterate that the lines of communication are always open for both of us.

Day 8: Non-Stripe Transactions

Day 10: Failed Charges

Day 12: Forecast

Day 14: Ending

We put a nice tidy bow on the whole cycle of emails letting them know they won’t be receiving any more and to make sure they know they can/should reach out if they need anything.

Follow Up

We do a series of follow up emails after they’ve been using Baremetrics for a while. You’ll notice there are two from me and two from Kaegan.

The ones from me go to the account owner (who’s typically also the business owner), while Kaegan’s go to the additional users on each account.

We want both the business owner and their entire team to get as much value as possible out of Baremetrics.

1 Month Followup (Josh)

1 Month Followup (Keagan)

3 Month Followup (Josh)

3 Month Followup (Kaegan)

Upsells

After a customer has been with us for a few months, we send an email upselling an annual subscription. This is an example for users on our Startup plan. Every plan level has a similar email, tweaked with the actual monthly savings.

Cancellations

Early on in your business, the key to dealing with cancellations and understanding why each one happens. Following a cancellation, I email the user to try and understand more about what we weren’t doing well for them, then I save their response and some pertinent data points into a spread sheet.

In-app interactions

We use Intercom for all of this, and it’s amazing. One thing Intercom lets you do, in addition to emails, are in-app messages. We use them sprinkled throughout the customers first couple of months with us as a way to engage them more.

Welcome Tweet

Free Stickers: First week of signup

Applying these to your business

Now, obviously a lot of these are very much Baremetrics-specific (especially those feature emails), but the timing and goals of many of these articles can definitely be put to use for your product.

The purpose here is to increase engagement with not only your product but also the people behind your product.

The highest-impact of all of these are those welcome emails. I have phone calls with new customers nearly ever day because of them. They’re a quick win…no reason you can’t start doing them today.

I mentioned earlier that we use Intercom for all of these. Their A/B testing is fantastic for constantly testing and I highly recommend it.

If you want to learn more about creating emails like these (also known as lifecycle emails), my buddy Patrick McKenzie has a great video course that’s worth every penny. I purchased it a couple of years ago and it has significantly influenced the way I interact with new customers.

What about you? What are ways that you interact with new customers?

Josh Pigford