Email Marketing Clues for Beta Web Services

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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