I am an early adopter and I often sign up for alpha/beta/etc invites to try out your web service. Sometimes you take these requests months in advance of launch and I’m fine with that. But if you finally decide to give me an invite by emailing me back, please remind me of what your service does.
Unless I am really excited about it – I’ll forget about you within a week at least. I’ve seen far too many examples where I receive the “Hey we’re open now” email only to have completely forgotten what the service does – and you don’t remind me. This is often followed by “Move To Trash” button clicking.
Here’s an example I just received from Kindling – a web service I had completely forgotten about and signed up many months ago for.
Dear Beta Users,
The time has come for Kindling’s public launch! We wanted you to be the first to know about the upcoming launch of Kindling 1.0 on November 19, 2008.
New and Improved Features
We have had an extremely successful Beta period and are thrilled to see so many people using Kindling. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for all of your valuable feedback. We take each and every suggestion into consideration and have added some of the most popular suggestions to Kindling’s 1.0 features.….[yada, yada, yada]….
We’re excited to move to this next phase of Kindling and are proud to count you among our first official Kindling users! As always, we are happy to answer questions about the transition for Beta users and more
After reading this, I have no idea what your service does.
Here’s a better email…
“Dear Beta Users,
Hey, Remember Us? You signed up for our beta period and we just want to inform you that we are getting ready to officially launch our idea management and collaboration tool to the public. This great new tool allows you to submit, collaborate, comment, and vote on ideas within a team and with your users. Check out our video here.
Here are some great new features that will be available when we launch…
[proceed with your marketing jargon]“
Now isn’t that much more clear? Email marketing appears to be a lost art – especially for web application developers. Email marketing is a cornerstone of an effective web strategy, and if you are going to do it – please do it right. Good email marketing provides a clear but concise message with the goal of spreading information and sending the reader to a target. You have about two or three sentences to convince your reader to continue and not delete. Remind them right away why they should continue reading your pitch.
Do you have good/bad examples of email marketing? Share your thoughts in comments or on your blog.
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I have the urge to write a fake bad email, but that would be counter productive. I just wanted you to now I was considering putting my creative energy into this idea later tonight. Maybe if beer swims to the special parts of my brain providing a mind tickle I’ll do it. Meanwhile I plan to watch an episode of Star Trek on DVD.
@John – I look forward to what you come up with!
I was going through my email inbox… Here is a great example of an effective beta signup email marketing from Veoh…
“Thanks for your interest in the VeohTV beta!
VeohTV is a free specialized video browser that turns online video into Internet Television.
Watch video from thousands of web sites, in one easy-to-use full screen application. Watch streaming video from major television networks such as Fox and CBS, to independently-produced content available on sites such as YouTube, Google Video, Veoh.com and MySpace.”
Bam – right to the point then they give you a link.
Hi Andy,
One of my colleagues at Arc90 stumbled upon your post this morning and forwarded it to me… I’m Jen and I’m responsible for writing all of the Kindling marketing materials here at Arc.
I know it’s been a while since your post, so I’ll remind you that Kindling is an idea management and collaboration tool for groups and companies. :)
I want to thank you for writing this post. Writing about one project or product all the time surely has an affect on my ability to put myself in another user’s shoes. This, as you point out, is problematic! Your words hit home and reminded me to take a step back when writing to our users to make sure that we’re communicating in the right way.
Thanks again for the reminder; I really do appreciate it!
Best,
Jen at Arc90 (and Kindling!)
Jen’s last blog post..Acknowledging the leaders
@Jen – I know how you feel … I have the same problem! The more entrenched you get in something the tighter the vacuum becomes. Most of the time comments on this blog make me realize what’s outside the box. It’s hard to think outside your vacuum but it becomes refreshing if you can do this regularly… It’s hard but I’m trying as well. Thanks for leaving a comment!