Patrick McKenzie – Hacking Lifecycle Emails

Archive : Patrick McKenzie – Hacking Lifecycle Emails

How Your Business Can Increase Sales Through Better Use of Email… Guaranteed

Hiya guys,

Like many of you, I write and sell software. I want better software to win over better-marketed software. I want users to do things which are clearly in their own best interests, without needing to be sold to. I want to spend time worrying about the product rather than about the marketing.

The world does not care what I want, and it doesn’t care what you want either.

Sometimes this is a little soul-crushing.

The engineer in me wants to believe that business success is primarily based on product quality . Since you can’t increase product quality by 10% just by emailing people better, it should be impossible to increase sales by 10% using just email. Right? Right?

Wrong.

You can increase sales by 10% with email… if it is the right email. This gives my inner engineer existential crises all the time, let me tell you.

The savviest software firms rely less on mailing blasts and more on sending the right email to the right person at the right time, asking for one little nudge to their behavior.

This technique is called “lifecycle emails” and it is scandalously effective.

It lets you:

Decrease churn by identifying and getting in touch with dissatisfied customers before they cancel.

Increase conversion rates by guiding your customers through the free trial more effectively.

Increase trials of your software by converting more website visitors into trialers, through getting permission to contact them and then educating them until they’re ready to try (and buy) (and buy).

Increase revenue by driving up the average lifetime value of your existing customer base… in ways they will thank you for .

Increase customer happiness by educating them on how to user your software to make their lives better, answering common questions before they’re even asked, and knocking their socks off with your perceived responsiveness to their needs… while saving you time talking one-on-one.

Sending The Right Email, To The Right Person, At The Right Time

You would think that, since software companies are in the data business, our marketing would be pretty data-oriented, right? If so, you’ve never worked at a software company. The sign in screen for a typical software company uses more custom code than the entire Marketing Department. Marketing generally is one-size-fits-none, with everyone visiting the website or reading the newsletter or interacting with the demo getting the exact same experience.

This is unfortunate, because we know our customers are unique , including in ways we can actually measure. For example, we know that first-time users of our software have very different needs than customers who have been happily using it for years. Unfortunately, the website and our marketing channels treat them exactly the same.

Lifecycle emails use information we have about customers to make informed guesses about what they’re experiencing right now.

Then we send them messages tailored to where they are.

Having problems with the free trial? -> Send your customer a guide to getting over the hump.

Didn’t install the tracking code?

-> Send your customer instructions.

Didn’t log in yet?

-> Remind your customer why they should get started today.

The typical software company has less than a 2% conversion rate on their free trials, which means that altering the behavior of any two trialers out of a thousand would increase sales by 10% . Not only do lifecycle emails routinely achieve that, customers will frequently be ecstatic to receive our emails , because it will appear that the system has accurately predicted their needs and provided them with something exactly responsive to those needs .

How WPEngine Increased Sales With Lifecycle Emails

Let’s pretend you sell blog hosting, and you charge fifty times what your competitors do. You might envision that being a hard sale to make. WPEngine manages to make that sale very frequently indeed — they have revenue in the millions — partly because they have a product which is legitimately awesome (I use it for my own blog) and partly because they’re savvy about selling it. They were, for example, savvy enough to hire me to work on one sales channel — a drip marketing campaign. Drip marketing means sending a timed sequence of emails to educate, persuade, and only then sell.

WPEngine has a particular landing page which offers a speed test for your website. To take advantage of it, you need to provide an email address and your site’s URL. It works exactly as advertised: it will load your site using a reliable third-party testing service, tell you how long it took, and give you recommendations for making it faster. The landing page also includes an offer for a one-month course on optimizing one’s site’s speed, scalability, and security. Because this is directly aligned with the customer need that brings people to this page in the first place, prospects ask WPEngine for this course quite frequently.

One day after the prospect signs up, WPEngine mails them some more tips on making their site faster. They should turn on gzip — here’s how. They should distribute static content over a CDN — here’s how. They should combine and minify Javascript and CSS files — here’s how. These are all table-stakes for WordPress experts with engineering degrees who live-and-breathe pageload speed optimization, but they’re new and useful for site owners.

A few days later, WPEngine follows up on that with more valuable advice, this time about scalability. They tell you how to architect a WordPress site such that it won’t blow up if you get on Hacker News… or Oprah. (Explanatory note for geeks: she runs a TV show. It’s sort of a big deal. Her monthly active uniques are higher than Twitter’s.)

A few days after that, WPEngine again comes back, this time with advice on security, avoiding recent WordPress vulnerabilities, locking down problematic plugins, and the like.

Over the course of the month, the prospect’s relationship with WPEngine changes. WPEngine is no longer just a page they landed on — they are a trusted source of very valuable expert advice about everything WordPress. The prospect might have had time to implement some of that advice, and they’ve seen their life get better .

Only after having educated their customer and established trust does WPEngine start selling… and sell they do!

After all, their customers are mostly businesses, and businesses only have limited tolerance for playing around with httpd.conf settings… but they’re frequently willing to write a check to have someone take care of that for them. And WPEngine has just spent weeks in their inbox convincing them that they are exactly that someone. The drip marketing campaign provably brings WPEngine huge amounts of revenue.

Patrick’s advice on starting a drip campaign for WPEngine was an epic win for us — it permanently moved the needle on signups after just a week of work. And it’s easy to measure and therefore to improve.
—
Jason Cohen, Founder & CEO, WPEngine

Why You Aren’t Using Lifecycle Emails (Even Though You Want To) And Why You Won’t Start Today, Either

Having implemented lifecycle emails, and similar marketing-via-engineering strategies, for myself and over a dozen consulting clients, I can tell you that a) 99% of you aren’t doing this and b) that won’t change any time soon. Even the savviest folks I work with have issues which stop them from getting these projects out the door. Here’s a few of them:

“We want to start sending lifecycle emails, but we don’t know how to get started.”

“We don’t have an email list and don’t know how to start building one.”

“We don’t know how to write emails that actually work.”

“We’re the Marketing team, but we’d need Engineering to figure who gets what email when, and they’re too busy building product.”

“We’re the Engineering team, but we’d need Marketing to write these emails, and they’re too busy doing… what do marketers actually do, anyhow?!”

“We don’t know how to measure the ROI on our email campaigns.”

One option for getting past these problems is to just muddle through them. That works for some people. If it works for you, great ! Close out of this page right now and get back to work on implementation. If you need help, it is available on the Internet… if you know where to look. (A word of caution: Googling for anything related to marketing or email gets you very close to the Make Money Online slime pit.)

Can you hire a consultant to do this? Yes*. Why the asterix? Well, first you have to find a consultant who actually knows what they are doing. Then you have to convince them to work with you. The people you most want to hire are a) in absolutely crushing demand right now, b) book up months in advance, and c) can charge whatever they want.

What would you expect the combination of crushing demand and constrained supply to do to prices?

Yeah, exactly . I once quoted a consulting client $20,000 for a project and they asked me — dead serious — whether that was my daily rate or my weekly rate. That is how crazy the market is right now.

(Believe it or not, there are many folks who charge quite a bit more than I do. It’s very rational for businesses to pay whatever the sticker price is, because some well-executed lifecycle email campaigns can generate $200 in sales per email sent .)

I Am Totally Not BSing You About That $200-An-Email Number

Subject line: Get One Free Month of (Insert Service Name Here) By Switching To Annual Billing

Contents: Three lines of copy which virtually writes itself. “Thank you for being a loyal customer of ours. As a reward for your loyalty, we’d like to extend you a special offer: instead of paying $200 a month for the next 12 months (a total of $2,400) for the service, we’ll let you buy a year of service in advance for $2,200 (a $200 savings — essentially, your next month is free). [Click here] to switch today.”

Getting their money now helps with cash flow, especially for organizations with significant client acquisition costs.

Switching clients to yearly payment drastically reduces churn, which is one of the most significant long-term concerns for SaaS organizations.

Customers like being singled out for particular attention.

Follow the logic:

You could erroneously believe that just 1% to 2% of clients will migrate to yearly billing. With regular execution (“Let’s put yearly billing as an offer on our price page”), you’d get 1%. What if you executed clever execution (“Let’s present yearly billing as an exclusive perk to just our most loyal clients, who we already know get the greatest value from the product, so that an 11x increase in upfront pricing doesn’t matter to them.”) 10% conversion rate. Bam.

Each email sent generates $200 in income. From a single campaign. This took thirty minutes to complete.

Drip marketing and loyalty rewards are two examples of what lifecycle emails may be used for. If you want additional concrete ideas to generate money in your business in the next two weeks, you may enroll in a course I designed. If your emails are as successful as the math predicts, you’ll have a positive ROI in fewer than five emails.

Why Should You Sell This Advice? Isn’t that Internet Marketing scumbaggery?

In a typical year, I work with five to ten customers. I’m asked to collaborate with hundreds of people. I was sick of saying “no” to folks.

As a developer, my natural instinct was to design software to organize and automate everything I ended up doing for most of my customers, such as lifecycle email campaigns. However, I did something unusual for us engineers and really, you know, talked to people. My clients informed me that they did not require software to send email. There are already a lot of decent solutions for that (I review six of them in the course).

My customers were desperate for a solution to develop internal email specialists so they wouldn’t have to rely on pricey consultants to achieve progress.

As a result, this course. Its goal is to train brilliant engineers and marketers at forward-thinking software firms in a new set of money-making ideas and approaches. It costs somewhere between “one night at a business hotel to attend a conference” and “a one-day training course on this topic.”

This implies that this course is not appropriate for everyone.

Do you have a product that has yet to be shipped? Something should be shipped. Do not purchase this course. Lifecycle emails that are well-implemented do not ship software.

Are you a first-time entrepreneur? I admire you since I’ve bootstrapped two software companies myself. Do not purchase this course. Lifecycle emails are not your top priority right now. Go read my site (it’s free and includes 1,000 pieces of advise tailored to your circumstance) and come back to this when you have four to five digits in monthly recurring revenue.

Do you require assistance? Handholding is available in the documentation for email service providers such as MailChimp. Do not purchase this course. It is intended for marketers and engineers who do not need to learn how to use a graphical email interface or write SQL queries; rather, they need to learn about the key strategic and tactical decisions that their specific business requires to 10x the results it currently receives from email.

Do you think the pricing is too high? Return to growing your company. Do not purchase this course. If your projected ROI on lifetime emails does not chuckle in the general direction of my pricing, I recommend that you prioritize something else for your business.

Who exactly is this for?

Do you work for or own a software or software-as-a-service SaaS company? (Ideally, selling directly to corporate customers?)

Are you involved in either the product or marketing side of things?

Do you want a step-by-step guide to implementing a strategy with a high, measurable return on investment?

Do you want to learn how to send customers emails that they want to receive and that will make a significant difference in your business?

If you responded “yes” to any of the questions above, you should take this course.

Your company already provides value to its consumers. Sending lifecycle emails benefits both you and your clients. This course will reduce your implementation time by weeks. You’ll also save thousands of dollars by not hiring a consultant or wasting time trying to reinvent the field from the ground up.

I’m sure you’re aware that dirty slimeballs have previously abused email marketing to hawk male-enhancing snake oil fortunes made at home in Gucci bags. You are not one of them. Your software genuinely improves the lives of your customers. I’m not them either; I only give tested, ethical advice that actually works when it comes to selling software. You and your customers will benefit from following my advice when selling your software, so we should trade.

Enroll in the Hacking Lifecycle Emails course.

What will you get out of this course?

How to create landing pages that will 5x10x your list opt-in rates… which you will never, ever refer to as a list again because it poisons your relationship (see Chapter 2)

How to write subject lines that boost your open rates from 20% to 40%, 50%, and 60%

How to choose which customers should receive which emails (and how to do so without bothering the Engineering team, if that’s an issue for you)

How to optimize your existing emails to capitalize on low-hanging fruit, such as copy improvements (Chapter 3)

How to perform Deep Magic optimizations such as redesigning emails to target the email client a specific user uses (and why you probably shouldn’t — see Chapter 4)

How to choose between the various email service providers available, based on your emailing requirements and who in your organization (engineering? marketing?) will be in charge of the email campaign (Chapter 5)

So, what is the content of your course?

What exactly is included?

5 hours of video lessons ( Chapter List ) to help you get started (and supercharge) your lifecycle email campaigns. You can view them in your browser or download them. There will be no DRM nonsense.

WPEngine’s drip campaign’s exact subject lines, which permanently increased their rate of paying customer acquisition. (Chapter 2 details your entire drip marketing campaign from start to finish.)

Six Lifecycle Emails’ Exact Subject Lines and Copy (and why they work) (One of them is the email that costs $200 per email.)

Annotated Emails That Sell: a discussion of the purpose of the words, formatting choices, and information selection.

As an added bonus, SendGrid, Postmark, Mailgun, Customer.io, and Intercom.io all provided discounted services to anyone enrolled in this course. (You can find coupon codes / signup links along with my reviews of each service in Chapter 5. I’m not getting paid to recommend them to you; I’m just doing it because they’re by far the best options for SaaS companies, as discussed in Chapter 5.)