Knowtify Blog

Driving user engagement. One email at a time. This is a blog about user engagement, smart digest emails & building a SaaS business.

[knowtify-blog]

How to create emails your users actually WANT to receive

Generally, people hate to receive emails from businesses. And I don’t blame them. The vast majority of these emails weren’t built FOR the person receiving them. Hardly, in fact.

Typically, when businesses design an email campaign or initiative, they look to answer one question:

How can I use email to get people to buy more of my shit?

Or some variation on that (how can I get them to sign up for my event? download my app? login to my software? etc). Whatever the variety, the fundamental motivation is the same. And in reality it’s often more along the lines of, How can I manipulate people into thinking they want to open this email and score myself a few awareness points…and maybe even a click or two.

And as a result, as you could imagine, the attention many of these emails receive is very low. Open rates as low as 5–10% and even lower engagement.

BUT…because email is relatively cheap, even low engagement levels have been able to produce a return for the companies sending these emails. I know it seems crazy to think that an initiative which is rejected by ~95% of the people targeted is considered successful, but in the email game, this is the case.

However, this is really not a sustainable approach for most businesses — especially for those of us in the SaaS/subscription world where thoughtful, long-term user engagement is inextricably tied to success.

Don’t get me wrong…I’m all for selling more of your shit. That’s what we’re all here for. But I just think that you can achieve that goal in a more sustainable way if you were to….

START SENDING EMAILS YOUR USERS ACTUALLY WANT TO RECEIVE

And doing this is becoming easier and easier as more services (like Knowtify) pop up to help business build these “smarter” email initiatives.

So…that’s all great. Now, how does a company going about building these emails that its users want to receive?

Of course, there’s no definitive blueprint for this, but there are certain guidelines that will help get you to the promise land.

Here are a few:

#1 — Ask the right question when creating your email initiatives

This is probably the most important (and hardest step) in building smart, thoughtful email programs. Instead of asking yourself, “How can this email help me sell more shit?”, taking the time to ask yourself,

“Is this an email my users will want to receive?”

is a major, major first step. As you can probably see — it’s not the question itself that is most important. It’s the mental shift from thinking only about how an email program can benefit your business to actually considering the needs and wants of your users. Big shift.

But I might push you to be even more proactive in this process.

Instead of asking, “will my users value this?” after you’ve conceived of and/or designed an email program, I would encourage you, as a part of your early product/feature development process, to ask yourself, “what emails would my users like to receive? And why?”

This is a much more powerful and effective approach. It requires that you know your users very, very well. It requires you know what they value from your product; their daily habits, what other products they may use in conjunction with yours; how they define success; etc.

And if you know your users well, creating an email (or series of email programs) they would want to receive becomes much, much easier.

#2 — Personalize, personalize, personalize

After you’ve made the mental shift and started asking the right question of your email initiatives, the next most important rule (er-guideline) for creating emails that users want to read is to make them as personal as possible.

Users know when your email isn’t meant just for them. It’s not hard to sniff out when one is a part of a general mailing blast. And it doesn’t feel good. It just doesn’t feel great to be a faceless member of a blast campaign.

That’s why — whenever possible, your emails should be personalized down to the individual level (meaning the content of each email is tailored to each reader). And I’m not just talking about {first_name} here. I’m talking about the actual content of email. Daily/weekly digest emails are typically the most engaging emails you can send your users, because they are highly personalized and super thoughtful.

DocSend’s weekly digest is a great example. I send a bunch of documents via DocSend’s service, but never login to see the activity associated to those deliveries. It’s not that this information isn’t helpful or important to me, it’s just that logging in to find this information is not high on my priority list. So, when I get these weekly wrap-ups in my inbox, I am very happy. I’m pleasantly surprised actually. It is definitely an email I WANT TO RECEIVE. It’s an email all about me — my account and activity generated from it. All information that is important to me. I love this email.

#3 — If not personal, be very relevant

I realize that there are times when your emails can’t be personalized down to the individual level, but in these cases, it’s important to still be as relevant as possible.

For example, if you run a content hub, make great efforts to understand what types of articles each of your users would like to receive — and send them emails with just those articles.

If you are an e-commerce platform, craft emails that show each user items that are relevant to his/her taste.

Many smart, behavioral emails fit this bill. While they are not completely personalized, when done well, they deliver information to a user that is tailored to his/her use of the product.

This email from Ghost is a good example. I received this email one day after I had created an account, but before I created a post. It was very helpful in reminding me to give the platform a test drive. They wouldn’t have sent it if I had created a post.

Smart, relevant stuff.

Think about user-types as well

Another important thing to consider when creating your email programs is the different user types that may be using your app.

For example, if you run a marketplace app, you will have users on both ends of a transaction (vendor and consumer).

Or if you run a B2B collaboration app, you may have Admin-level users, Team Members, Collaborators, etc.

The point is that each one of these different user-types use your app for different reasons. The information they value is different. Therefore you should have different versions of your email strategies to insure that you are communicating with them in the most relevant way possible.

For example, take a B2B CRM app. In many cases with these apps you will have Managers and Salespeople as user-types. Salespeople are constantly using the app to manage and track their activities at a very detailed level while Managers are using the app to get an overview of his/her team’s performance. In this case, you shouldn’t be sending the same exact emails to both groups. You should be tailoring your email strategy to match their behavior with the app as well as the value he/she gets from it. For example, you might want to send Managers a weekly digest email with an overview of team’s pipeline activity, while you would want to send a tactical daily email the Salespeople to highlight activity from the day before and his/her upcoming tasks.

It’s easy to forget about your various user-types when designing your email strategies. If you want to stay relevant and deliver value, you shouldn’t.

#4 — Be Timely

By this I don’t mean be punctual. I mean be strategic about when you deliver your emails to your users. Being strategic about your email timing is a great opportunity to show your users that you understand and care about their preferences. And in many cases, the timing of your emails will determine the actual value of your email.

Obviously, the timing of a check-in reminder email is of upmost important. It’s kind of the point of the email…

And I’m not just talking about finding the right time of day to optimize for “open rates” either. I’m talking about being very mindful about when your users need or want to receive your emails.

For example, sending a reminder email six hours before an event for which your user may need to prepare is an email any user would welcome. Sending that same exact email 10 minutes before that event (or 10 minutes after) would have a much different effect (like…pissing your users off). Same exact email. Same exact content. Different times. Very different results.

Sending an email to alert someone to check-in for their flight 24-hours before the flight is super helpful. Many people love this option to check-in, but without an email reminder, most would never remember to login to do it. Definitely an email you want to receive.

An very welcome immediate email from Fiverr.com. When you’ve been waiting for a project to finish, getting this email immediately upon its completion is exactly what you want as a user.

Real-time event emails

Some emails need to be sent in real-time — at the moment of an event occurring in your app. Password changes, purchase confirmations, news alerts, friend requests (maybe), etc. Users want to receive these emails, but only if they are delivered immediately.

Having to wait for a purchase confirmation email may destroy trust in your business.

Making people wait for a password change email will cause frustration and may mean they don’t login to your app.

When something important happens that requires a user’s attention — this is an email you’d want to send your users immediately.

In many of these cases, the fact that you are sending these emails immediately is a major part of their value.

The Nuzzle daily digest — one of the best examples of a great daily content wrap-up.

Digest emails FTW

Other emails make more sense sent on a regular schedule — daily, weekly, monthly (or any other regular schedule that makes sense for your users). Digest emails are, in many ways, defined by their timing, their cadence.

There are a long list of examples of great digest emails. From weekly analytics emails to daily content emails, these emails are some of the most engaging emails you can send your users (digest emails sent through Knowtify consistently average 40% open rates) — much of that due to their smart, regular timing (as well as their tremendous personalization).

Daily analytics digest email from Hookfeed. Absolutely addicting for those who want a regular snapshot of their SaaS business.

So, when designing your email programs, be sure to keep timing in mind. Be sure to go beyond just want content your user will want to read and ask yourself,

“When would my users want/need to receive this information for it to be most valuable?”

And if you want to take it to yet another level…go ahead and ask your users directly. The smartest companies create default timing for their emails, but offer their users a way to configure preferences for the timing of their emails — real-time notifications, daily, weekly, etc. This is a good way to insure that you are sending emails WHEN your users want to receive them.

#5 — Look good and be readable

One of the best digest emails, the Medium keeps the design very simple, but elegant and very readable.

This may sound shallow, but it’s important. When we say ‘look good’ in the context of email, I’m not necessarily talking about high design. I’m talking more about a smart email design that presents content in a clear, legible and logical manner — across all devices and screen sizes. Because when it comes to email design — if it’s not readable, it’s…well…not going to be read. Let alone loved.

In many ways, the technical constraints of email design force you to keep designs simple. The more complicated you try to get with design, the more likely it’s going to break on different email clients. So, make your emails look clean, nice and, above all else, legible.

One more thing on design—generally emails that contain images have much higher engagement rates. So, we highly recommend using at least one image in your emails.

#6—Use subject line and preview text wisely

Quora has mastered the dynamic subject line with their daily digests

This may seem like a small detail, but it can be super powerful and greatly contribute to the value your users derive from your emails.

Paying attention to your subject lines and preview text (the initial ~100 characters of text that shows up in an email client after the subject line) is more than just optimizing for open rates. It’s actually about being thoughtful about your users’ experience with your email. A subject line and preview text offers a reader a very quick way to get context for what is contained in the email. This gives a user the ability to make a decision on how he/she wants to treat that email. Is it something to read now or something that can be saved for later? This is an important decision for most busy people who receive a lot of emails. Helping someone make that decision without having to open the email is very thoughtful. I know it may seem counter-intuitive, but even if the user doesn’t open your email, he/she may get value just from the subject/preview text. And that is something.

When it comes to subject lines, the more dynamic/personalized you can make them, the better. Quora has mastered the art of the subject line in their daily digest emails. They dynamically insert the title of the first article in the digest into the subject line. This gives the reader the ability to quickly determine whether or not he/she wants to open that email….which, ironically, in most cases is the reason he/she does. A very brilliant strategy that is definitely worth doing if you can.

And in conclusion…

As you can see, just a few small guidelines/best practices can put you well on your way to shipping emails that your users actually WANT to receive. As I mentioned earlier, it can be done. It’s not even that hard. It just takes a commitment to changing a mindset and putting in the effort.

And in the case you weren’t paying attention (or simply prefer the Cliff Notes), here’s a quick recap of the top six guidelines detailed above.

Ask the right question when creating your email initiatives—hint: it’s all about your users

Personalize, personalize, personalize—right down to the individual level, when possible

If not personal, at least relevant—take your users actions and preferences into account when crafting your emails

Be timely—not punctual, but strategic and thoughtful. Don’t just ask ‘what’, but ‘when’ as well.

Look good and be readable—Users do like well designed emails, but keep it simple, clear and legible across devices & clients

Use subject line and preview text wisely—small detail, but they can have a big impact

Bottom line—be thoughtful about your email programs and campaigns. Take the time to consider your users, their daily habits, what kind of information they would want in your emails and when they would want to receive them. And then put in the effort to make that happen.

Your emails (like with any feature you build in your app) should, as their primary purpose, be bringing continuous value to your users.

[knowtify-blog]

Our simple feature prioritization process

Prioritization product development is pretty easy in the early days when you're building the first version of your product. Well...maybe I shouldn't say 'easy', but certainly not that hard. 

But then you get your first users and/or paying customers.

And then you get a couple more employees - maybe a couple of departments start to form. 

And then you start talking to investors.

And then maybe you get some press. 

And then prioritization becomes...not so easy. With a lot more stakeholders, it becomes much more complicated, stressful and, often times, ground zero for internal strife & infighting. Prioritization activities can become an arena where tech and non-tech teams clash in heated battles of egos, biases, instincts, and conflicting accountability. 

But it doesn't need to be this way. It can be better. It's never going to be easy, but it can be better. 

We have a process that we've been using for a couple of months at Knowtify that has been working very well for us. Thought we'd share. 

Before we get into detail around the actual process, it's important to share the underlying beliefs and principals from which the process is borne. 

We have a strong believe that there are various perspectives and considerations that contribute to good product decisions. Perspectives from sales, customer success, marketing & engineering all play important roles in these decisions. We don't subscribe to a "Product Ownership" model of product development. In fact, quite the opposite. We realize that the product is at the core of everything our business is and will ever become - so to relegate "ownership" of this to one person or department is something that seems nonsensical to us. 

Given this, it was super important to us to insure that our product prioritization process included a way for each of the various perspectives and voices to be represented.  

THE PRIORITIZATION SCORING EXERCISE

Every week, we hold a 45 minute prioritization meeting. Yes, every week. At our stage, things move very quickly - both from a product development to a customer development perspective - so a weekly meeting is the right cadence for us right now. Probably won't always be this way, but for now, this is working. 

The goal of this meeting it to create an ordered list of priorities that will determine our work for the next week or two. 

To aid in this, we created a quick prioritization "calculator" (ok, Google spreadsheet) that enables us "quantify" these decisions. Our scoring methodology is super simple and is based on only two factors for each feature/project:

Impact on our business

Amount of work required

Yup. It's that simple. Yes, we could get a lot more robust with this, but simplicity was very important for us.

Our "calculator" looks like this: 

You can see it for yourself on this Google spreadsheet. More details on the calculations:

Potential Impact

Each feature is assessed for its potential impact on the business as a whole (this is important). Every person on the team is required to score each of the features on this metric before the meeting. We give each feature a score between 1-10. The higher the score, the more potential impact it could have on our business.

Amount of Work

This is obviously a score that is mostly driven by the engineering team. But other team members are able to contribute to this score if there are other unusual, non-technical activities that are required for the feature that should be considered. Will it require an elaborate landing page to be built? a separate explainer video? etc. Anything out of the ordinary. 

The Amount of Work is also given a score between 1-10, but in this case 1 means "a lot of work" while 10 means "piece of cake". This is opposite the way Impact is scored, but you'll see why in a minute. 

Total Score

To get a total priority score for each feature, we simply add the scores for Impact & Amount of Work together (I told you it was simple). So a feature that would have big impact (call it a 9), but would require a lot of work (score of 1) would have a total score of 10. This would be the same as a feature with low impact (2), but is easy to build (8). 

The point of this scoring system is to help identify the features that are going to give us the "biggest bang for our buck."

THE DISCUSSION

While we use this calculator to quantify our prioritization, by far the most valuable piece of this process are the discussions we have during our prioritization meetings.

At the beginning of each meeting, we go down the list of features and everyone around the table explains his/her Impact score for that feature. This is where we really get to understand the various perspectives in the company and it's always enlightening. This meeting becomes a forum for things that often go unsaid or under-communicated during the week. Engineering is often not aware of the things for which the  customers are asking. And very often, the customer teams are unaware of the pieces of the product that engineering find most important.  

These discussions also lead to a great deal of clarity on how each person on the team defines a feature. The customer team may think of a feature one way while engineering may think of it as something different. Through these discussions, we are able to mold, shape and better define these features. On a few occasions, we have been able to split some of the features into separate chunks, each with their own Impact rating. 

After each discussion, everyone is able to adjust his/her score for each feature. We then take the average of the scores to determine a final Impact number for each feature. 

We then have a quick discussion around the Amount of Work for each feature, confirm the scores in that column and add these number to the final Impact numbers to come up with a Total Prioritization Score.  

The higher the Total Prioritization Score, the better. Generally, we simply take the features with the highest score and get to work on them. 

It's simple & collaborative. It has proven really effective for us. 

If you're interested in trying it out, I have made our spreadsheet public. You can find it here - it will save you a few minutes in setting it up.

As always, would love your feedback on this or on any other process that is working for your team. 

Thanks!

[knowtify-blog]

Interview with Matt Goldman - founder of Hookfeed.com

Matt Goldman has pretty much been building web businesses since he was able to tap a keyboard. Most recently he launched his own product development company, SmallHQ, focused on developing simple, yet powerful tools for entrepreneurs and small businesses. He has built Minimanalytics.com, Hookfeed.com and has created one of the most popular podcasts for startups - the Rocketship Podcast - in his "spare time" :)

We love all of Matt's work, but we especially love his focus on simplicity...as well as his appreciation for the digest email. We recently talked to Matt about Hookfeed and his use of the digest email. 

MATT: I started a company called Small HQ with my girlfriend, Joelle, in early-2013 after leaving the web agency where we worked together previously. We spent several months working on our first product, Minimalytics, which would send you a daily email with analytics from various services pulled together into one simple report. All the while, we were also working on HookFeed, a news stream of events from various web services. At some point along the way, we shifted focus to HookFeed and began iterating through multiple vastly different versions, ending up where we are today.

KNOWTIFY: Give us a quick pitch for Hookfeed.

MATT: Today, HookFeed is a great tool for SaaS/E-Commerce Customer Management. Our goal is to bring together big-picture metrics, with customer-level insights, to help you run your business. Most analytics apps focus on data abstracted from your customer base which has limited use. 

Stripe is great at the basics of collecting credit card charges, issuing refunds, and managing the logic behind recurring subscriptions. But that’s just scratching the surface of what it takes to run your SaaS. Every customer has a history with your product, and we strive to reveal that history, and make you more awesome at running your business.

KNOWTIFY: From where did the inspiration for Hookfeed come?

MATT: We were using Stripe in Minimalytics and other previous products, and would continually build in (crappy) functionality to do some of what HookFeed does today. It just made sense to break that out into its own product :-) However, I don’t think I realized this until I’d built the same functionality multiple times, and then needed to make an update inside of each app due to an API change.

KNOWTIFY: I know that Hookfeed has evolved a lot since it’s first iteration. I’m interested in understanding the things that drove that evolution. How did you decide how you were going to build out the vision for the app and the specific feature set? Customer feedback, analytics, competition, etc?

MATT: Little of what we’ve done so far has been based on customer feedback, analytics, or competition. In fact, whenever we follow any of those feedback mechanisms, we go astray. Today, we use HookFeed literally every day and couldn’t run our business without it. What works best for us is looking at how we use our product, and what would make it work better for us. That is the best driver of our roadmap. Customer feedback is incredibly valuable/supportive, but in our case (and likely your case) it can’t be relied on to set product direction. Especially when your product is solving a problem in a different way - customers tend to try it expecting different functionality and then they give feedback based on the category they’re trying to fit your product into. This can be very detrimental as it pushes you towards an existing  product category and discourages innovation. It’s up to you to ensure that you’re actually innovating in the right direction.

KNOWTIFY: In many ways, Hookfeed is all about giving SaaS applications a window into the financial impact of retaining their customers (and in the case of expiring credit cards, giving them very actionable data). So...can you tell us some of the ways you are keeping your users engaged with the service?

MATT: We encourage our customers to invite their teammates and ideally subscribe different teammates to receive different alerts. For example, Stacy in Accounting may need to know when charges are refunded, but Bill in Growth doesn’t. We offer several alerts which you can’t currently receive from Stripe which help you run your business on a daily basis. When you need more information on a customer (when their charge fails, subscription renews, downgrades occur, etc), you can quickly dig into our web interface to find the info you need, and act on it.

KNOWTIFY: One of the things we love about Hookfeed is your smart use of emails - particularly your daily digest emails. How important are those emails for keeping your users engaged?

MATT: They are critical to the product. We’re always working on finding ways to increase engagement with the insights we present to our customers, about their customers. Digests allow us to keep you in the loop, without requiring that HookFeed be open in your browser all day long.

A constant challenge is determining which information to include in daily digest emails since many companies use Stripe (a flexible payments API) in very different ways. For example, not all companies have recurring revenue.

KNOWTIFY: What are your future plans for Hookfeed? Where would you like to see it go?

MATT: We will continue making HookFeed the absolute best tool to manage your business and customers. We can’t share much more than that, but if you follow us on Twitter here, we’ll keep you in the loop :-) https://twitter.com/HookFeed

[knowtify-blog]

How Companies Like Starbucks Can Use Internal Weekly Digests to Connect with Employees

Before I became a designer, I was a barista at Starbucks (typical of people who don't know what to do with their lives). Although it's one of the best companies to work for and I had an amazing team, one of the problems I've encountered repeatedly over the years still remains unsolved: How do you get employees to take advantage of Starbucks's 401k match? I still run a blog for baristas and have friends at Starbucks, so it'd be amazing if I could help them out.

Fortunately, I think this is a problem where an email digest can help (... but I'm probably biased, for obvious reasons). 

The big problem

Starbucks's benefits package includes a generous 4-6% 401k match for part-time employees. This is so good, it's unreal... it makes Starbucks one of the few part-time jobs where employees can actually save money! But it only works if people actually take advantage of it. From my experience, employees know of it, they may even want to do it... but most fail to. 

I once worked with a co-worker in her mid 50s who was struggling to cover her bills, and wanting to help, I asked if she had been contributing to her 401k (because you can take a low-interest loan from it). She'd been employed for almost 10 years so I assumed she must had a decent chunk saved up, but it turns out she had never started her retirement plan! She's a warm lady who survived breast cancer, so I was very saddened to hear about her predicament.

And she wasn't the only person who failed to set up their 401k. In fact, I met so many people who "didn't understand it" or "never got around to it" that I decided to write an unofficial guide to Starbucks's 401k (It now ranks either 1st or 2nd when you Google "Starbucks 401k.")!

This happens because employees lack the mental bandwidth to "figure it out" and fall victim to the status quo bias. This shouldn't be a surprise, because being a Starbucks barista is actually more difficult than you’d think, and many employees also go to school or have 2nd jobs. 

They actually do get a piece of physical mail with information about this, but it happens once a year (I think), and then they have to set up their 401k plan online. Switching from physical to digital creates serious friction, especially if it's something they don't fully understand. And coupled with our natural planning fallacy, this means most people just never get around to it. 

A smaller problem

Many employees lack trust in corporate. Starbucks is actually one of the most employee friendly companies, but it suffers from the same problem most large organizations have: lack of communication with front-line employees.

Most of the communications that came through were things we were REQUIRED to read. It felt like "corporate" was this distant entity that made our policies but had no direct exposure to customers like we did. In reality, Starbucks does its research, even going as far to as opening stealth stores to test new products -- they know what they're doing (most of the time). 

Sure, employees can go online and scan Starbucks headlines if they really want to. But this is a job, not a career to retail employees. Once they are off the clock, they stop working. 

I believe a weekly digest email can solve these problems

Information about 401k and Starbucks news can be sent through email in a weekly digest. I think this will be effective because:

1.) The higher frequency (compared to physical mail) will ensure 401k (as well as other benefits) stay on top-of-mind. Taking action also becomes easier because you're already online. 

2.) Regular communication with corporate will slowly build trust with employees. 

The issue then becomes getting employees to open these emails. Because they stop "working" once they're off-the-clock, they're going to ignore these emails unless there's something they really need. And let's be honest... it's not very exciting to read an email about benefits and Starbucks news. 

So how do you get employees to "work" outside of work?

The solution: include their weekly schedule in the email. 

Baristas almost never get the same schedule week-to-week and occasionally they'll forget when they work or show up at the wrong time. Having a digital copy would be a HUGE immediate utility and will guarantee this email gets opened multiple times throughout the week. 

And, they'll LOVE Starbucks for doing it. 

This is how it could look like:

I actually showed this to baristas and the response has been great!

One reader responded:

Are you okay with me talking to someone who can actually do something to make that happen? I am a current partner who works at a Seattle store rather close to the Support Center. We get people from almost every department in our store and on a few occasions they have listened to us and our problems and fixed them. I would love to see your email idea happen and I know it would help so many people.

There we have it -- it's a win/win.

I hope Starbucks makes it happen!

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Although I wrote this specifically for Starbucks, the same principles apply to many other organizations. An internal digest can be an ideal medium to send timely reminders and company communications. Can your organization benefit from a weekly digest?

[knowtify-blog]

How to Use Digest Emails to Help Users Build Habits

YogaBuddy is an easy way for yoga teachers to host classes anywhere and students to find them. In fact, I actually tried yoga for the first time ever through Kristen D's class a few weeks ago (It was in the park -- just like the splash screen!). It's a great way to blow off steam and relax my body during lunch.

As a psychology buff (and a fan of Kristen's class and YogaBuddy), I'm always trying to find better ways to integrate a new hobby into my routine and develop a habit.

What can help me solidify this habit?

When starting a new hobby, the beginner phase is fragile and requires the most hand-holding, because every day progress is stalled, it becomes increasingly more difficult to build that activity into a habit. 

As beginner at yoga, I'd love to see a few basic techniques in emails. I don't have the time to seek out instruction, but if they came in my inbox as a low effort way to learn, like an animated gif, I'd watch it. It could come as a "pose of the week" along with a few personal stats. 

The instructional email could look something like this:

While watching others perform an action, our mirror neurons fire and nudges us to imitate it. The cool thing is, the action gets performed in the brain regardless of whether you actually perform it physically. Now that yoga is on the mind, following up with a list of classes in the area is a great call-to-action. 

If that is successful, we can get more advanced....

We can segment people who hasn't attended class in a week or more and send them an email with a different pose. They should get an email with an "office friendly" pose  -- stuff that people could do in street or office attire that won't involving lying on the floor or crazy stretches. It should also come with a different personal message. 

The re-engagement email could look like this:

Knowing the people behind the app thought about me shows a great deal of empathy... and I'd probably feel warm and fuzzy. I'd also be more likely to practice a pose that fits my context. This is a great way to re-engage users without being too obvious about it. 

We could even go further and also experiment with a "Featured Instructor of the Week" email. An important aspect of yoga is being part of a community, and I think this is a great way to humanize and show the personality of instructors. For something like this, the mere exposure effect will also comes into play and subconsciously build comfort with users. 

The community building email could look like this:

Heck, if this is successful we can even do an email with featured students!

Again, a strong component of Yoga is community and it's great to know you're part of a something bigger. For the students who were featured, it's a cool story and they'd probably want to share it with their network, but for the longer term, they'd be tied to the consistency principle and more likely to be an ambassador for the brand. 

In closing

I think starting with a "pose of the week" email is a great idea.

As an intermediate level boxing hobbyist, I see advanced techniques as something to aspire to, but it's also refreshing to see the basics and brush up on them. This sort of email would appeal to all skill levels, and following up with local classes is a natural call-to-action -- I'd love to see something like this get done. 

These are just some of my thoughts on using digest emails to help users build new habits. Although I used YogaBuddy in this example, this can really be applied to anything. 

You can learn more about building great digest emails from Derek Skaletsky, our in-house email guru. 

I also want to thank Fiticle for giving me the idea of teaching proper form with animated gifs... because I totally ripped that idea offa them. 

[knowtify-blog]

Why we prefer to talk about User Engagement over Customer Success

Without question, I'm a big subscriber to the #CustomerSuccess movement. I have built Customer Success teams, I write about Customer Success - hell, at Knowtify, we've built a product that, in many ways, supports the Customer Success practice. 

But I have this nagging concern that the recent Customer Success movement and, more specifically, the rapid growth in the functional practice of Customer Success may actually be doing a disservice to the very concept it was meant to empower & amplify.

Huh?

The Function vs the Concept

I recently wrote a blog post that was published on the BlueNose blog. In it I talk about why we're hiring Customer Success before we hire Sales at Knowtify. One of the comments to the post (from Andy Douillard) was good and actually planted the seed for this post. Andy started his comment with: 

I'm a firm believer that customer success is more than a role or a team.  In order to achieve true success in both the short and long term, companies should invest in team members who care about and focus on providing their customers with value regardless of the functional departments these team members may report to (product, marketing, sales, success, etc.).

Of course, Andy's right. What he's pointing out is an important distinction between the CONCEPT of Customer Success (the belief that the fundamental goal of a business is to do what ever it takes to make your customers successful with your product) and the functional ROLE of a Customer Success manager in an organization.

The problem I have is how the CONCEPT has become so closely tied with the ROLE or the TITLE. 

Why is this a problem?

In some organizations, it's not. But in others there is a risk. 

Because whenever you give someone a title in an organization, you are assigning responsibility. With a title comes ownership. With title comes responsibility. With title comes accountability.

So....we've come to a place where a specific department (or a specific person) is "accountable" for the success of your customers. 

So, when someone comes running out of the board room screaming,

"Our customers aren't successful enough!"

The product team answers, "Don't look at me. Sandy's in charge of that."

And the marketing team says, "Don't look at me. Isn't that what Sandy's supposed to be doing?"

And the sales team says, "Not my problem. Talk to Sandy."

Of course, I'm exaggerating a bit. This certainly isn't the way all companies with a Customer Success department function - but it's probably happening a lot more than it should. 

The point is this - when someone carries the title of "Customer Success", it is too easy to assign blame that person when your customers aren't succeeding as you hoped they would.

And in turn, it's far too easy for all other functions to be let off the hook.

It's too easy for the product team to be satisfied releasing functional (vs usable or delightful features). 

It's too easy for marketing to create vague messaging that drives a lot of mis-aligned users into the top of the funnel.

It's too easy for sales to mis-represent the product during a sales pitch in order to close a deal

Etc

Why? Because none of them are responsible for the success of the customer. There's a whole department for that...

Customer Success vs User Engagement

And this is why we prefer to talk about User Engagement instead of Customer Success at Knowtify. Because this term - User Engagement - doesn't carry with it the same baggage - the same sense of individual ownership - as Customer Success does today.

User Engagement is still a concept and/or a metric that can be more easily shared across everyone in the organization. No one person owns User Engagement, so it is something everyone can come together on. Product, design, UX, marketing, sales, customer success, even the C-Suite - all contribute to building a complete experience that drives engagement with your product. 

And the best part is that there is no one that carries the title, "VP of User Engagement", so no single person or department carries it's weight. 

If you can bring that same sense of shared ownership to the concept of Customer Success (even with a functional Customer Success department), then more power to you. Otherwise, you may want to think about using a term like "User Engagement" that everyone can contribute to in an unbiased way.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this... 

[knowtify-blog]

Introducing...Section level rules!

What if I told you it is possible to send targeted, personalized messages in your emails. 

You mean, like how Google and Facebook shows me relevant ads? 

Yes, something like that. 

Well, I imagine that I'd drive engagement way up.

Right,  in fact, you could drive email engagement higher than Facebook and Twitter combined. 

Wow. That sounds great. Where I can get a piece of that? 

Knowtify, duh. 

------

We released a new feature!!! We call it "Section-level Rules" and we're really proud of it. With Section-level Rules, you can set rules in specific sections of your email, so that only certain users see that content. 

Here's how it works:

Let's say there's a message you only want to users in San Francisco to see. In this case, it's a message about a job fair being held in San Francisco. 

You simply add a rule to that section. 

After the rule is applied, only people like Janice, who lives in San Francisco, will see the job fair message.

Pretty powerful stuff. With Section-level rules, we're making creating dynamic and hyper-personalized emails a breeze. 

A couple other uses cases to get the creative juices flowing: 

Upgrade message for a dating app

Coupon for an online clothing store

As I said, the opportunities for this functionality are vast. We'll have more examples to share very soon. We're very much looking forward to seeing the great things our users do with it. 

The future of smart emails is here. If you'd like to check it out for yourself, you can signup for a free account at Knowtify or email us for a personal demo at [email protected].

Would love to hear your feedback on this new feature! 

[knowtify-blog]

The Gekko Daily Digest - the product of Knowtify Hack Day #1

On Friday, we held our first Knowtify Hack Day. As I mentioned in the earlier post, we decided a while ago to hold at least one internal hack day per quarter at Knowtify. 

Get a better understanding of our own platform: For me, this is probably the most important benefit of a hack day. There's nothing like building a new product off your own platform to identify areas for improvement. By putting yourself in a position closer to that of an actual user, you get a much better perspective on what you are trying to build. And we certainly did that.

Good team challenge: A nice, focused, time-boxed project helps to either bring the team together (or expose cracks!). It forces quick creativity, communications, etc. 

Raise awareness for your primary app/platform: There is no denying that hack days should help promote your main product/app - either to the general public or to the development community. 

Build additional products: This doesn't have to be a goal of a hack day - but for me, it's a great way to set a clear vision for the work. Trying to produce the v1 of an actual product is a day is not always easy, but it's a great goal. Even if you don't get to a full v1, the product you start may actually be something really cool and open up some opportunities. 

And if none of that other stuff happens, it's never bad to step away from the daily grind and play around for a day.

WHAT WE BUILT - THE GEKKO DAILY DIGEST

We started the day hoping to build out a random idea we had walking back from lunch the week before. The idea was to build out a daily digest email (off our platform) that would be useful to early stage investors. We would hack together information from various data sources - Product Hunt and AngelList to start - and ship investors important, timely info about startups/products making waves. 

The digest looks like this:

You can sign up for the Gekko Digest here. We think it's a cool product  and we think it will offer some surprising value over time. 

HOW WE BUILT IT

For more detail on how we built it, you can check out our live blog. At the last minute, we decided to live blog the hack day in order to create a little real-time community as well as to create a record for ourselves going forward. We really liked that experience and definitely plan to continue doing that for our future hack days.

At a high-level, we were able to work with the Product Hunt and AngelList APIs to gather the data we wanted. We found them both to be really great, really clear APIs. After getting through a few snags around matching the companies from both sources, we were able to combine information in our table and set up a schedule to aggregate it. From there, it was just about shipping it over to Knowtify and setting up the actual email in our system. 

We'd definitely like to thank the crews from both Product Hunt & AngelList (especially Andreas from PH & Joshua from AL) for the support through the day. And to several others for pointing us to different data sources and helpful feedback. 

With that said, feel free to signup for the Gekko Daily here. It's likely that we'll be iterating a bit more over the next few days, but we're pretty happy with the v1. Love to hear your thoughts!

[knowtify-blog]

Knowtify HackDay #1 - and we're live blogging it!

Today we are holding our first (of hopefully many) internal Knowtify HackDays. We decided that we are going to hold at least one internal HackDay per quarter. The "rules" of our HackDays (as of now) are very simple:

It's one day;

We have to build something that incorporates our own API; and

Whatever we build can't be something for our product (in other words, we don't want our HackDays to become normal development days with a fancy name. 

So, that's it. Pretty straight forward. 

We had a random idea last week that we talked about while walking back to the office from lunch. We don't know exactly what it will become today, but the basic idea is to build a daily digest email for early-stage investors that 'mashes up' data from various sources to give them immediate insights into some of the products that are making waves. We're going to start with data from Product Hunt and AngelList and see where that takes us. We have some ideas to start, but as is the risk and opportunity with HackDays...we don't know what we'll uncover as we build.

OH...AND WE'RE LIVE BLOGGING IT

At some point, Dane thought it would be fun to live blog our HackDay. Not sure exactly why, but we thought it was a fun idea. Even if no one cares to tune in, I think having an archive of the process during the HackDay will be valuable for us in the future. 

So, last night he put together a quick live blog site (built off Reddit) where we'll be posting our progress. You can find it at: http://www.knowtify.io/live

We would love to see you there and get your input. Feel free to comment on the live blog site, ping us on Twitter, or email us at [email protected]. 

With that said...let the hacking begin!

[knowtify-blog]

Interview with Andrey Petrov - Founder of Briefmetrics

I first learned about Briefmetrics about a month ago and it has quickly become one of my favorite apps/services. 

Briefmetrics is a service that enables you to build yourself a weekly digest email from your Google Analytics account. I love this for a couple of reasons. Obviously, I obviously love their use of the digest email as the basis for their service. Smart, smart stuff. Secondly, I love how they targeted. It's the perfect app for this service. The data in Google Analytics is super important, but logging into it always feels like such a chore. Almost rather drink castor oil. But a simple summary email in my inbox. Yes, please...and thank you. 

I could say more about Briefmetrics, but figured it would be better to hear from Andrey Petrov, the maker of BriefMetrics, instead. So, without further ado...

KNOWTIFY: Tell us about yourself. What is your background?

ANDREY: I’ve been building software since I was a teenager. I have a Computer Science degree from the University of Toronto (in Canada, where I grew up). I founded a couple of startups, one was funded by Y-Combinator, another was acquired by Google where I worked on Google Analytics until last year.

KNOWTIFY: Give us your quick pitch for Briefmetrics.

ANDREY: Briefmetrics emails you simple weekly summaries of your website's analytics.

My goal is to provide opinionated analytics—highlight the parts that are important. It might not be perfect for every scenario, but it should get you most of the way there every Monday morning.

KNOWTIFY: From where did the inspiration for Briefmetrics come?

When I worked on Google Analytics, one of the big frictions I noticed was that people would neglect signing in to check their stats, or navigating the Google Analytics frontend would just take too much effort (over 30 clicks to get the equivalent of a Briefmetrics report).

Before Google, I worked on a social analytics service (SocialGrapple) and email reports was always requested by customers. Ultimately, this was also something I really needed, too.

KNOWTIFY: Obviously, we love your focus on email delivery. Tell us why this was important for you?

I do lots of little projects and use Google Analytics for all of them. I needed something to help bring quick easy-to-consume analytics reports and I knew other people needed this too.

KNOWTIFY: Who are your current users? For whom is this most valuable?  

My customers fall into two categories: 

(A) Web design agencies who build websites for other clients. They use the Agency tier of Briefmetrics which lets them whitelabel reports for their clients to get them exposed to analytics and become more engaged with their websites. More engaged clients means more work for the agencies.

(B) Startups and hobbyists. These are people more like me, who run one or a bunch of sites and want to reduce the pain of using Google Analytics for themselves. 

Web design firms have the potential of getting direct monetary business benefits from Briefmetrics, whereas startups and hobbyists save time and get more passive exposure to valuable analytics.

KNOWTIFY: What are your plans for Briefmetrics? Where would you like to see it go?

At the core, Briefmetrics is a tool I can’t live without. My goal is to make it a tool which many other people can’t live without too.

There are many important features on the roadmap:

More conversion-related and Adwords insights where applicable.

Monthly reports focusing on long-term trends (are more and more of your visitors using a phone rather than a desktop? Are you suddenly popular in Indonesia? etc.)

Reports for other services, some for other analytics services like Mixpanel or Kissmetrics, or even ecommerce platforms like Stripe payments or Shopify reports.

I’m building Briefmetrics on my own for now, so it’s very important to allocate time carefully. I’m hoping that the core Briefmetrics product will be polished enough soon such that I can spend more time building new features on the roadmap.

KNOWTIFY: Any final thoughts/pitches? 

If you use Google Analytics, I hope you’ll give Briefmetrics a spot in your inbox.

It’s very important to me to keep Briefmetrics aligned with what my customers need, so if there is something I can do to earn your business then don’t hesitate to send me an email at [email protected]. :)

Thanks for the insights, Andrey! Oh...and for Briefmetrics. You've got a fan here :)

[knowtify-blog]

Who owns User Engagement?

I was recently having a random conversation about User Engagement with a SaaS investor. Eventually, he asked the inevitable question, "So...who in an organization owns User Engagement?"

He wasn't the first one to ask and certainly won't be the last. This question is asked a lot - and not just in reference to "User Engagement", but in the context of many important, high-level business metrics (like Leads, Revenue, Net-Churn, etc).

People always want to know - who "owns" each of these metrics?

This question of metric ownership has always confused me and, admittedly, makes me a little crazy. It makes me think of a great quote I heard a while ago in an interview with Stephen Daldry (one of the world's top film & theater directors). I'm paraphrasing a bit (because I don't remember the exact quote), but when talking about the collaborative nature of making a film, one of the things Daldry said was:

"I get really upset when I work with actors and they say to me, 'My character wouldn't do this or my character wouldn't do that.' I don't know where they get this. Maybe they learn it in some acting class, but my response is always the same - 'That's ok. But it's not your character. It's OUR character.'"

But for some reason, in many businesses - especially early-stage, growing businesses (I say early stage, but that may not be the case - I'm just most exposed to these types of businesses) - this idea of 'sole ownership' seems to be a dominant management strategy. 

The idea is that everyone in the company must have "ownership" over some specific, major business metric.

Marketing owns leads.

Sales owns revenue.

Product owns user engagement.

Customer Success owns churn. 

Finance owns profitability. 

Etc

(*of course, ironically, the only people that generally don't own anything are the ones in management that create these ownership rules...but that's a whole other post)

The people that create these ownership structures will claim that they create them because they are motivating - people like to feel a sense of ownership...with ownership comes freedom - they will say.

Or they create them because they claim people need very clear goals in order to perform at their best. People need to know for what they are accountable in order to do their best work. 

But really, in the vast majority of cases, they are creating these ownership structures so that they, in management, can simplify their own lives. They want to create a 1:1 relationship between a high-level metric and a person (or department) so that they can force 'accountability' (ie - blame) and know who to target if something isn't going well. It's a management short cut. 

But I don't subscribe to this methodology. I much prefer Mr. Daldry's perspective.

Because, like producing a film, building a business is a highly collaborative, creative pursuit. It requires the skills, energies and efforts of a group of uniquely talented & passionate (crazy?) people.  And the reality is that the results of any high-level business metric ARE NOT the expression of the efforts of any single person or department. These high-level metrics are what I would call output metrics that are the result of the combined work of the entire organization. 

For example, let's look at the User Engagement metric, since this was the one that started this whole rant. 

Instead of asking, "Who owns User Engagement?", let's ask, "What contributes to strong User Engagement?"

There are a bunch of things - including (but not limited to):

Like I said...a bunch of things. Let's go through them:

The Concept: Starting at the beginning. If you are building a business on top of a concept that just doesn't provide much value (for example, my recently shuttered app that allowed people to time how long it takes them to brush their teeth and compete against their friends), then it's going to be tough to drive good User Engagement. But...who owns the Concept? The founder(s)? CEO? The Board? Product? Marketing?

Initial expectations: Mismatched expectations can be a killer for user engagement. If users expect something different than what your product delivers, it's going to be very hard to keep them engaged (even if your product does provide some value). So, what contributes to "expectation setting"? Marketing messages? The Sales pitch? Word-of-mouth? Product?

Product-Market fit: This is related to expectations, but a bit different. If you just haven't figured out what the user pain is and/or how to solve it, then your engagement is going to be low. But what & who contribute to Product-Market fit? The concept? The product - features, functionality? The market? Competition? 

Onboarding: More and more, good onboarding is becoming essential for laying a good foundation for engagement. If you can't quickly and efficiently get users to the value of your product, you're going to have a hard time keeping them engaged for longer than a month. But who owns onboarding? Product? Customer Success? 

Usability: This goes without saying. If your product doesn't make it easy for your users to derive consistent value...you aren't going to see good engagement numbers. So, who owns usability? Just UX? Product management? Design? Engineering?  

Education: Keeping users educated of ways to continuously drive value from your product is essential to driving engagement. This can take on the form of in-app help/support assets, marketing messages, training webinars, certification programs, user conferences, etc. Education can be a huge deal. But who owns education? Customer Success? Marketing? Community?

Social Proof/Network effects: If your app is dependent on the 'network effect', the engagement of your users will obviously be highly dependent on the number of engaged users on the network. Chicken, meet egg. But even if you are not a network app, engagement with your app will definitely be highly correlated with social proof. The more people using & talking about your app, the greater your likelihood of driving strong engagement. How do you drive social proof and larger networks? Who manages that? Growth team? Marketing? Community? Product?

Emotional attachment: Ahhh...the soft stuff. But maybe the most important contributor to long-term user engagement with your app. If users are emotionally attached to your product, brand, people, etc...they will be more engaged. But how the hell do you manage this? And who contributes to it? CEO? Marketing? Design? Customer Success?

Integration: The more your app is integrated into the normal workflow and experience of your users, the more engaged they will be. And this includes both technical and non-technical integration. The technical integration makes sense. If you have an email support app and it integrates with Gmail, you're going to see more engagement from Gmail users than if you didn't. If you have a sales-related app and don't integrate with Salesforce...good luck. Offline, if your product works very naturally into the regular flow of someone's work/activity/behaviors, you will see stronger engagement (like how Instagram very naturally and easily created a flow for sharing pictures). So, who controls integration? Engineering? Smart UX? Strong understanding of the customer-type & experience? Is that Marketing? Customer Success? 

Continuous awareness: This is super important in today's world. With short attention spans and a zillion apps competing for that attention, simply keeping user aware...let alone engaged...with your product is a huge challenge. But be sure, without awareness, there is no engagement. So how do your maintain awareness? Smart digest emails? Other notifications? Integrations? 

And there are probably several more things that I'm not thinking about that could be added to this list. If you have ideas - go ahead and post them in the comments. 

The point is - there are many, many factors that contribute to good (or bad) User Engagement. And...not surprisingly, many different people, roles and departments that contribute as well. So...if you were to really answer the question, "Who owns User Engagement?", instead of producing a single person or department, it would look something like this: 

While this is of course not totally accurate and will certainly look different for every business/app/company, the point is the same.

Who owns User Engagement? In short - no one. And everyone. We all do. Just like no one person involved with a film production owns the story, in a software company, no one person can own User Engagement. Everyone does. 

Trying to force ownership of a specific metric on a specific person not only is a flawed approach, it's actually very dangerous. When you make one department/person accountable for User Engagement, you give everyone else an excuse not to care about it. And that is simply bad management. You are ignoring the complexities of the problem and disrespecting the contributions of your entire team. And, in the end, you are making your ultimate goal - driving strong User Engagement - much, much harder to achieve. 

An attempt at simplifying management structures results in the fundamental breakdown of the collaboration that is required for success. Not good.

So, while some may claim that people love "ownership" - I would argue differently. I think people love to feel that they are contributing to something bigger then themselves. I would argue that people don't like to be treated like Pavlov's dogs.  I would argue that people like to collaborate on, contribute to and have a voice in the building of something great. 

And if you find people that much prefer individual 'ownership' to this, I would suggest that they aren't great people to have on your team. 

They should play tennis.

Ask a different question

What I'd love to see is for everyone to stop asking this "Who owns User Engagement?" question. As you can probably tell, I don't think it's a very good question and a waste of valuable energy. Instead, the question we should all be asking (on a daily basis) is

"How can we improve User Engagement?" 

This is a question that will result in actual actionable answers. This is the question that will make you take a hard look at all the things that contribute to User Engagement and find ways to make them better. This is the question that will break down walls and drive actual business results.

Stop spending so much time worrying about the 'who' and get to work solving the 'how.'

If you must pinpoint an owner of User Engagement....

I realize the above advice is going to be very difficult for some companies with ownership obsessions to handle, so...if you must have an 'owner' of User Engagement, I suggest creating a new post/role. A Head of User Engagement. This role could truly be responsible for User Engagement metrics. Well...so long as he/she has the ability & authority to effectively work cross functionally and really drive the initiatives that would contribute to better engagement. 

This would be a much better solution than trying to force this metric on any of your current functional departments, roles or people.

Again...if you insist.

Deep breath :)

[knowtify-blog]

The MuckRack Daily - Interview with Greg Galant

One of my favorite daily digests for the past 3-4 years has been the MuckRack Daily. As a fun, elegant summary of the days important news stories - from the perspective of the world's top journalists - the MuckRack Daily has become a staple of (not just) my mornings. 

The MuckRack Daily is produced by the editors at MuckRack - an essential SaaS service for anyone in PR. MuckRack's product is the easiest way to track & build out relationships with journalists on (and off) social media. If you're in PR, you probably already know about it. If you are, and don't, check it out - you'll thank me :) 

MuckRack was started by one of my favorite entrepreneurs - Greg Galant (who is also the founder of the Shorty Awards). And while I could  spend time outlining all the good things about the MuckRack Daily (as well as MuckRack's other digest email - their MuckRack alerts)...I figured it'd be much more interesting to hear from the chief MuckRaker himself.

So I talked to Greg. And here's what he had to say:

GREG: Muck Rack let you effectively pitch story ideas to the right journalists to get press, monitor what's being said about your company, receive alerts when there are new PR opportunities and track how successful your PR efforts have been.

Muck Rack also allows journalists to get verified in our authoritative directory, build a beautiful portfolio and track the impact of their work.

KNOWTIFY: You actually have two great daily digest initiatives - the Muck Rack Daily and what you call Alerts from your main product. What is the difference between the two?

GREG: The Muck Rack Daily (http://muckrack.com/daily/email) is a free email written by our writers that summarizes what journalists are saying about the news in general and the media industry. It’s won critical acclaim from both the journalism and PR words by offering an inside look at how the news it made. It also has news about journalists changing jobs, job posting and highlights great work journalists are doing.

Muck Rack Alerts (http://muckrack.com/alerts/), on the other hand, sends you an email (either as-it-happens or in daily digest form) when a journalist tweets, links to or writes about your company, competitors or any other keyword. Our customers tell us it’s more useful than Google Alerts because it comes faster and includes what journalists say on Twitter. Thanks to an early warning from a Muck Rack Alert, MasterCard was able to correct a mistake in an article shortly after it was published.

KNOWTIFY: Tell us about the origin of the Muck Rack Daily. Where did it come from? What was the original idea?

GREG: When we started Muck Rack in 2009 there were only a couple hundred journalists on Twitter, so it was easy to keep up with what they were saying. Just a year later thousands of journalists had signed up for Muck Rack, and it was impossible to keep track of all of them. So the basic idea for the Muck Rack Daily was to have one email that summarizes everything journalists were tweeting to save our readers time. As Peter Kafka put it in AllThingsD when we launched, “Straightforward stuff, but it’s something that isn’t being done yet.”

It’s evolved to have more of an attitude than when we started and offer more of an inside look into how journalists operate and how the news is made.

KNOWTIFY: What has the Muck Rack Daily meant to your business?

GREG: The Muck Rack Daily is a cornerstone of our business. It’s given our brand a lot of credibility with both journalists and PR pros, which has made it easier for us to get meetings with potential customers and even drive conversions to our pro product. It also creates a strong incentive for journalists to join Muck Rack, since being quoted in the Daily will increase their visibility with their peers.

The Daily also has had a lot of second order benefits: We’ve been able to put on a series of events hosted by news outlets including the Wall Street Journal, AP, LA Times, FT and NBC News that we’ve filled up with our audience from the Daily. We’ve also been able to do media partnerships with other events (where we promote them in the Daily in exchange for access to and exposure at the event), whereas otherwise we’d have had to do a paid sponsorship.

KNOWTIFY: For Muck Rack, how important are these daily touch points with your users?

GREG: What websites do you visit every day? If you can answer more than three then you’re in the minority. Being able to connect with your users every day is very powerful, but it’s very hard to do that on the web and it’s increasingly hard to do it through social media. Having an open-worthy email is one of the only ways to connect with users on a daily basis. But remember, the content has to be awesome because the “mark as spam” button is only one click away.

----------

Thanks to Greg for taking the time to talk to us this week. We are big fans of the MuckRack digest strategy and look forward to it continuing to evolve. If you have any questions for Greg, he is available on Twitter at all hours of the day and night :) Cheers!

[knowtify-blog]

Why we love Todoist, and how they can make their email digests better

Keeping a team focused and organized is difficult. There's an abundance of productivity apps in the market. How do you know which one is right for you?

Here at Knowtify, we needed help staying organized with a few specific projects. And we tried many solutions, but for one reason for another, they didn't fit our workflow - I felt like I was doing more work to try to get work done. No good. 

Enter Todoist

We heard good things about Todoist and decide to give it a shot. It's been a few weeks... and we're still using it! The ability to quickly create, assign, and complete tasks is amazing. Visually, the interface is simple and well organized. And we can start discussions about tasks in real-time - it fits great into our workflow! We love their delightful finishing touches too - for instance, when all tasks are completed, you see a different message based on the time:

Their daily digest email

The completed tasks and productivity chart is great for keeping me engaged and motivated! The Karma chart underneath is a bit confusing, because as a new user I'm not sure it means. But I think they're definitely on the right track here with these data-viz charts. 

What I'd also love to see is a snapshot of yesterday's activity, speaking of which....

By default, I'd receive a notification about every action taken, which in theory is good for staying in the loop, but in reality you get something like this:

Yup, that's a lot of emails. I started ignoring them after a while.

Sure, I could go into settings and manually change my notifications, but the power of defaults are strong. Although I haven't seen the numbers, I imagine many users going through the same experience will stick with it.

Jakob Nielsen writes,

"Users rely on defaults in many other areas of user interface design. For example, they rarely utilize fancy customization features, making it important to optimize the default user experience..."

Having smarter defaults and bundling related actions into fewer emails would definitely help. 

I would also offload some of this into their daily digest. 

Their daily digest could look like this:

Seeing a summarized recap of yesterdays activity is a great way to stay motivated without being overwhelmed by a sudden barrage of emails, and knowing what tasks are due today keeps me focused. This is more concrete and actionable in comparison to their existing digest.

Actually, they could have 2 digests.

Two different digests

While the new daily digests will cover the nitty-gritty and help me plan my day, the weekly digests (their existing emails) are great for higher level overviews of my productivity. These digests provide complementary information and I see it working great in tandem. 

If users find daily recaps and actionable tasks as useful as I think they will, their productivity should shoot straight up, which will then be reflected on the awesome charts in their weekly emails - this is an awesome way to keep users engaged in a positive feedback loop! 

Anyway, we love Todoist and will continue to use it for future projects. A more actionable daily digest would totally help us, and we think it'd help other users too. We'd love to see it happen!

[knowtify-blog]

The Wiser Daily

Sharing relevant content within an organization can be a frustrating, fragmented & broken experience. But of course it could be better. Wouldn't it be great if you could not only filter the web's best content by the context of your workplace and your co-workers, but also collaborate on the thoughts and opinions said content generates from those people?

Well...that's exactly what the team at Wiser has been working hard to bring to a workplace near you (hopefully very near you...hopefully YOUR workplace). Wiser's goal is to make sharing content found on the web - articles, blog posts, etc - with your colleagues more efficient, more collaborative, more intelligent, and...quite frankly, more fun.  

As a matter of fact, a lot of Wiser's functionality can be executed through email. Users can share posts by simply emailing a unique Wiser email address and those posts are added to the cue for the following day's digest email. Smart stuff.

The Wiser Daily Digest

It's a great digest which offers just enough content from each article to allow the user to decide whether or not to read more. I also like the big font in the detail section which also makes the experience easy on a mobile device.

What we'd like to see next

This is a great digest and I know they are constantly improving it, but a few unsolicited suggestions from us for future iterations: 

I would actually recommend getting rid of the summary section at the beginning of the email. It displays the same articles as the main section, so it's basically just adding more "bulk" to the email without a whole lot of value. Also, the text is so small, that it's not great for reading on a phone. I would just skip it. I think the whole email would go smoother.

Strategically, I would really love to see them add some activity statistics to help drive more activity in the app (which is their ultimate goal). Currently, this email doesn't provide me any look into how many articles have been shared in my network, who's sharing most, how many comments, etc. Doing this, even in a subtle way, would really help drive more in-app engagement.

The SHARE buttons under each article are probably premature. I may be wrong (I'd like to see click rates on that button), but I'm guessing that most people wouldn't share an article without reading more that what's provided. Might want to go with READ MORE here...

Finally, I would love to see some call to action at the end of the email to help me get the most out of Wiser's technology/functionality.

How to sign up for Wiser

You can sign up for Wiser on their homepage. They have a free tier for small teams, but if you want a fully-collaborative experience with Wiser, you will need a paid account. 

**UPDATE: WISER DISCOUNT**

The good folks at Wiser have created an exclusive offer to readers of this blog. If you want to sign up and receive an extended, 3-month trial of Wiser, you can sign up at this URL:  http://getwiser.com/knowtify

Thanks to the Wiser team. Hope you all enjoy!

(ps - if you want to learn even more about Wiser, you can see their chart topping entry on Product Hunt here.)

[knowtify-blog]

Engage your Decision Makers with a smart digest email

The Decision Maker. 

For those who sell software to enterprise buyers (or any business buyers, actually), you know who I'm talking about. Decision Makers are what we call those people that must approve the decision to buy your software.

But very often, your Decision Makers, while definitely your customer, are not the same as your Users. 

It is not at all unusual that the people who make the decision to purchase your app...never use it.

But is this a bad thing? Well...it depends. 

If the Decision Makers don't login your app because it doesn't solve a problem for them - but it's meant to - then it's a bad thing. You have a product issue. Fix it.

But if your app is not designed to solve the problem of Decision Makers, then the fact that they don't login it isn't a problem. If your product is delivering great value to the people who it was built for (your Users), and it doesn't make sense for the Decision Makers to use it, then: 

Don't worry about Decision Makers not logging into your app.

Yes, that's right. Don't worry about it. If they don't need to use your app, then don't worry about whether or not they login.

With that said - this does not mean that your Decision Makers should not be engaged with your product. Quite the opposite. It's very, very important to keep your Decision Makers engaged with your product. In many cases, your renewal depends on it. 

If you let Decision Makers go 10 months without thinking about your product or even being aware of the value it is delivering, then securing that retention & renewal is going to be a difficult task.

Huh? I thought you said we shouldn't worry if our Decision Makers don't login. 

I did. And you shouldn't. But logging in does not = engagement. You can keep people engaged with app even if they don't log in.

What? How?

Well...in the case of Decision Makers, you know of one app that they are definitely logging into every day. Probably more than 20 times per day. 

Email. 

They (along with everyone else) live in their inboxes, so why not take advantage of this. Why spend an infinite amount of energy trying to get them to login to your app. Why make them remember your URL...try to remember their damn password...fumble through your dashboard to find valuable information...only to call in their team to help out of frustration.

Why not just send them an email? Honestly...it's really the only medium you have to reach these people on a regular basis...

Ok, email. Got it. But what am I supposed to say?

Well...I would argue it's not what you should say - it's what your app could say.

I guarantee that there is information or data being generated from your app that would be interesting for your Decision Makers. Maybe more than interesting. Maybe important. Or maybe even...essential. Information that, if she had easy access to it, would increase the likelihood of retention/renewal by orders of magnitude.

If you are CRM/sales app - maybe it's high-level insights into the sales pipeline 

If you are a Task Management app - maybe it's data around team productivity

If you are a Product Roadmap app - maybe it's updated views on the roadmap or upcoming trouble spots. 

If you are an accounting software - maybe it's reporting on cash, receivables, etc

If you are a social media management app - maybe it's brand mentions or stats on the most effective posts.

If you are an e-signature app, maybe is # of contracts signed, by whom, etc.

Etc.

I'm sure it won't take you much time to think of the data your app is generating that would be valuable to your Decision Makers. Give it a shot. It probably won't take more than 60 seconds. 

Develop a targeted digest email.

A well designed (and I'm not just talking about how it looks) digest email highlighting interesting/important/essential information for your Decision Makers may be the key to driving engagement from this population.

In fact, if you are able to get your Decision Makers hooked on your digest email, the likelihood of securing retention & renewal is very high. Because, Ms. Decision Maker, if you cancel your subscription, that daily or weekly bit of gold goes away...

Trust me. This works.

And, you never know, it may just get them to login to your app as well.

So, how do you build a digest email for your Decision Makers?

Well...first you have to identify your Decision Makers. If your app has user levels (such as Team Members, Managers and/or Admins), then it might be pretty easy. If you don't have user levels, then ask your Sales and/or Customer Success teams. They will immediately be able to identify the Decision Makers. Bonus points for the team that has their Decision Makers tagged in their CRM :)

Once you have them identified, here are some tips for building digest emails for Decision Makers (on top of our general tips for developing good digest emails):

Really understand what information is valuable for your Decision Makers - don't be afraid to ask them directly. These should be custom, personalized emails with the most relevant information possible. Do NOT send your Decision Makers generic emails. In no way do your Decision Makers want to be 'marketed to'. This is an easy way to turn them off and get them to ignore (or block) your emails. And if they ignore/block your emails, keeping them engaged will be near impossible. 

Consider timing - many times a weekly digest makes more sense for Decision Makers (vs Users who will generally need a daily digest). But this totally depends on your app.

Consider their attention spans. In many cases, less is more with Decision Makers. Give them a taste of the value of your app and let her ask her team (or you) for more. This is especially a good idea with your first iteration of this digest. 

Visuals help. Consuming data in visual format is probably preferable for most Decision Makers.  

In short, keeping Decision Makers engaged with app is absolutely essential for the long-term retention and growth of your product. But requiring them to login to get at the important information is not only inconsiderate, it's ineffective.

A smart, daily or weekly digest email may just be the key to keeping these important players 'in the game.' 

We'd love to hear of any experiences people have had with digest emails for Decision Makers. Let us know your thoughts!

[knowtify-blog]

A Missed Customer Success Opportunity

I don't want to out any company or specific person, but I wanted to point out a classic missed Customer Success opportunity that I experienced yesterday. I think it's a good reflection of the difference between Customer Support and Customer Success.

The Backstory

While using a SaaS product (that operates as a Gmail plugin), I was looking for some information about a specific feature. I decided to look for an answer in their help section.

But...I couldn't find a help section. I searched the plugin interface on Gmail - nothing. I even went to their website to see if I could find a link to a help section. Nope. I did find a support@<productname>.com email address. So I emailed them.

And their team responded pretty quickly and very politely. I got an email back from someone on their support/success team within 20 minutes with an answer to my question: 

Yes, he answered my question perfectly. Yes, he did it in a timely manner and with great energy. 

I give him an A for his Customer SUPPORT.

But I give him a D for his Customer SUCCESS.

And here's the difference:

Customer Support answers questions.

Customer Success delivers value. 

A Customer Support mentality works like this - 'He asked a question, I'm going to answer it.' Very Pavlovian. 

A Customer Success mentality, on the other hand, works like this - 'He asked a question, but that may not be the root of his problem. Let me make sure I solve the issue he's having and make sure that he is maximizing his value from our product.'

In this specific instance - yes, I was looking for their Help section, but I wasn't looking for their help section because I wanted to confirm that they have one. I'm not a Zendesk sales person. I was looking for their help section because I had a problem using their product. 

By telling me where their help section was, he may have answered my immediate question, but I then had to click on the link he sent & go through the process of searching for an answer to my question. And of course...I didn't find an one :(  

Problem - NOT solved. Did I email him back to tell him I couldn't find my answer? Of course not...I had already spent enough time on this issue and it wasn't worth additional time. But it does mean that I won't be using that feature. Which may mean that I'm not getting the full experience from their product. Which may mean that I'll be a churned account sometime in the near future. 

How would Customer Success approach this?

Someone with a Customer Success mentality looks at my question and:

Recognizes that I'm not looking for a help section. I'm looking for an answer to a specific question (a solution to a problem).

Recognizes that I might be frustrated because I've gone though the process of trying to find a help section, couldn't, and ended up taking the time to write an email.

Is grateful that I didn't just give up after not finding the help section and actually took the time to have a direct interaction.

Understands that this is an opportunity to not only solve a problem for me, but also to establish a relationship.

Recognizes that my experience may be indicative of a bigger issue that needs solving.

Someone with a Customer Success mentality responds to my email this way:

This response does a few good things:

It tells me they recognize my frustration and makes me feel appreciated. Which...immediately eases my frustration. 

Points me to the help section for my reference, but shows me that he realizes this isn't the root of my email. He shows me that he is really interested in solving my problem.

Starts a dialogue with me. Which could very well lead to showing me additional features that would secure my loyalty and/or growth.

I absolutely would have responded to this email and asked my question. And he would have been able to answer it. And my problem would have been solved. I would have started using the feature and getting more value from the product. 

I know this may sound subtle and just a matter of semantics, but I assure you, it's not. For every business, especially SaaS businesses, success is a GAME OF INCHES. And the seemingly small differences between a reactive Customer Support effort and a proactive Customer Success effort may just be the difference between winning and losing...

[Bonus point for the Customer Success person who takes my request and figures out an easier way for users to access the help section.]

[knowtify-blog]

Flip the Switch: When Customer Success Should Feed your Sales Team

I had dinner with a bunch of SaaS peeps earlier this week and the conversation at the table provided inspiration for this post.

The conversation centered around the challenges of fitting a SaaS offering with a freemium and/or free-trial model into the traditional Marketing - Sales - Customer Success work flow.  

And by traditional Marketing - Sales - Customer Success work flow, I mean the normal "order of operations" for (inbound) deal flow, conversion and activation. You know...it looks something like this:

Make total sense - in the context of a more traditional software business. And it more-or-less makes sense in the context of an 'enterprise' SaaS offering.

But what about a business that has a freemium offering, or a free trial period, that drives a ton of signups at the top of the funnel. I talked to someone last night who ran sales for a SaaS app that was driving 600-1,000 signups PER DAY to their freemium offering. That's a huge monthly flow into top-of-the-funnel. But the question was - what are these people that are signing up for the freemium offer or trial?

Are they prospects?

Are they leads?

Are they users?

Are they customers?

Well...yes. They are all these things. 

But if they are all these things, how do we deal with them in the context of the traditional "order of operations"? I would argue that you don't. I would argue that this model demands a bit of a rewrite to the traditional flow.

Why a rewrite?

This freemium/trial flow brings poses two main challenges to the normal workflow:

First of all, a freemium model generates a ton of volume (if it's working). A ton of 'leads' coming into the top of the funnel. Way more than a cost-effective sales team can handle.

Secondly, these top-of-the-funnel leads are actually users. The business has made the decision to let prospects try the product for free before making a purchase decision. So the traditional 'sales qualifying' process (as sales people know it) isn't really applicable. 

What do you do?

Flip the Switch - Customer Success moves up 

The good news is that a large amount of freemium/trial traffic is mostly a good problem to have. But it does demand some significant changes IMHO. My suggestion is to flip the normal 'order of operations' and make it look more like this:

In my opinion, you have to treat all of these signups as users/customers. This means that the 'qualification' of whether or not these new users will become paid conversions should happen by the Customer Success team. Not the sales team.

Why? Because the qualification of these users will be based on more than what sales people are used to assessing. They should be qualified based on normal qualification measures (size of opportunity, use case, industry, etc)...as well as ACTUAL USER DATA.

This is why your Customer Success team will be much better suited to handle this qualification. Not to mention that they will be much better suited to actually impact it. The usage piece, I mean.

They will have the skills and mentality to understand what users are prime for conversion and/or growth. They should be able to shape a model based on user behavior that will really help determine those free users most likely to convert. 

Few things need to happen to make this work:

1. Sales, Marketing & Customer Success all need to have a good idea of what a sales qualified lead looks like from a more traditional perspective. You will likely determine that the sales team is only going to get involved with opportunities that have the potential to be a certain size (expressed in revenue). Things like:

Size of company

Industry

Use case

Title of user

Etc.

With that model in place, every signup (as best you can) should be qualified on these criteria. Of course you won't be able to determine this for every signup (especially if you are doing big numbers), but you should do the best you can.

2. Next, Customer success needs to have a model of behavior that can be used to predict conversion. If you have historic data on free customers that converted and their user behavior prior to conversion, you can use a tool like Totango or Gainsight to see if any patterns emerge. If you are early stage and don't have that data, you are going to have to make some assumptions (ie - users who do these 3 things are more likely to convert). Don't wait until you have 'enough data' to put this process in place. Do the best you can with what you've got and get to work. 

3. Then you should put together an execution plan that will help you to optimize conversions and revenue. It could look something like this:

And, by the way, this should go without saying, but it probably doesn't in many companies. With large amounts of freemium/trial signups, it is essential that your Customer Success team works very closely with your product team to absolutely nail the early experience (call it The First 30-Day Experience) of your users. I'm not just talking about in-app onboarding (although that is important), I'm talking about the first 30-day experience. The goal of your freemium plan should be to drive more signups than any one team can manage - so much of this needs to come right from the product.

If you have a Product team who doesn't like to work closely with the Customer team (because who are these non-designers/engineers telling me how to build MY product?!?), then I suggest you abandon your freemium plans. Your Customer team absolutely must be a part of designing this experience. 

Couple big take-aways

It's important to recognize that the SaaS model and the Post-Sale World challenges every piece of the traditional software business operations model. So, don't be afraid to break 'normal' molds and processes to try something that works better for your business.

Customer Success, as a function, continues to grow in importance in the SaaS world. It is quickly becoming the 'glue' that holds SaaS businesses together. Great to see.

Hope this line of thinking helps. Love your feedback...