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The easiest way for designers to send email newsletters for themselves and their clients.

Getting personal with your automated emails

Posted by David Greiner on June 6, 2007 3:48 PM

Ever since we launched Campaign Monitor in late 2004, we've always prided ourselves on being a very open company. Pretty much every post-launch feature we added was based on requests from real customers. We use our blog, our newsletters and our built-in support system to capture as much customer feedback as we can get our hands on.

As well as trying to give our customers as much opportunity as possible to tell us what they want, there's a final thing we do that's more important than all of the others combined. We ask. Every Campaign Monitor customer gets an email a few days after signing up where we thank them for giving us a try and ask for any feedback they might have to help us improve.

For the first 2 years, we tried to get pretty fancy with this approach and sent a HTML email with a built in form so they could give us feedback right there in the email client. We also segmented our customers and sent different questions to different people based on how they used the app. If you signed up but didn't send a test campaign, you'd get a different email to someone who did.

This approach worked fairly well, but something about these emails always bothered me. They were too automated. Too robot-like. It didn't look like there were real people on the other end anxiously waiting for any feedback they might have. In a recent experiment, we ditched the fancy built-in survey version and went for an extremely simple, personal plain text email. Here's a basic version:

Subject: Did you fall for Campaign Monitor?

Dear Dave,

Many thanks for signing up to Campaign Monitor and having a look
around. Looking at your account, we noticed you hadn’t sent a
campaign or really got your hands dirty with it just yet.

If Campaign Monitor didn’t really grab you, we’d love to know why
so we can right any wrongs. Just reply to this email and tell it
like it is. We read every bit of feedback we can get our hands on
and would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks again for checking us out,

Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson
Campaign Monitor founders

So what happened? The quantity and quality of the feedback shot through the roof. More than double the normal amounts of feedback have been coming in since. Not only that, but the responses have been more detailed and you can tell more effort has gone into crafting them. When people know they're talking to a person and not a database, they really open up.

As well as getting priceless feedback from prospective customers, these emails have also been a great way to get a conversation started. What starts as a missing feature can quickly turn into us suggesting an alternative approach, and before long we've got a strong relationship that never would have formed unless we got in touch. Now don't get me wrong, we never hound our customers. There's a fine line between asking for feedback and generally pissing people off. This is a simple, one-off email and they won't hear from us again unless they have any questions for us.

Here's more proof this approach is working for us. Just yesterday I spotted a great blog post from a new customer that decided to go for us based purely on the personal and "non salesy" nature of this email. It really is the little things that can make such a big difference.

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