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?
So, when I first started boxing, I watched instructional videos outside class, and got critique from my coaches when I was in the gym -- this created a feedback loop that allowed me to nail down the fundamentals and make quick progress early. And getting better felt great; humans are hardwired with a reward system that releases dopamine whenever we make incremental progress. So boxing became fun... and a 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.
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Originally posted on the Knowtify blog. Emails designed with Knowtify.io.
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.
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.
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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!
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.)
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!
If you are reading this blog, it is likely that you have, at the very least, started to think about creating (or improving on) a daily/weekly digest email to your users. Or better yet, a series of them.
In either case, given our (and our customers’) experience building these emails, we thought we could breakdown the process a bit and offer a framework to make the process a little easier.
This process/framework assumes that you are not using Knowtify. If you'd like to learn more about how how Knowtify can ease most of the pain in this process, drop us an email. Or better yet, sign up for our beta release.
THE EMAIL DIGEST DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
At a high level, the process looks like the process of developing any new initiative - Strategy >> Execution >> Measurement - but with some very specific phases the execution. It looks something like this:
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at each of these phases in order to better understand the details & decisions that drive them.
PHASE 1: THE STRATEGY PHASE
Welcome to the STRATEGY phase - where all good initiatives start. If the word ‘strategy’ is too boring and corporate for you, feel free to call it the IDEA or CONCEPT or CREATION or <your word here> phase. Your call.
Whatever you end up calling this phase, it is here where you will be be ideating on what form your email digests should take. While this is a very important part of the process (maybe the most important), we definitely encourage you to avoid falling into a state of paralysis by analysis. Like any important feature, developing email digests should be an iterative process and you should plan to make changes/improvements over time.*
*With that said, an email digest is a little different than other features you release in your app in that, with an email, you are inviting yourself into the inboxes of you users. If you deliver something of very little value, they may quickly decide to not open your future emails or, even worse, unsubscribe. So, while you should plan to iterate, you should be mindful not to initially deliver something of such little value that users will write you off forever…
Some initial tips for the STRATEGY phase:
It seems obvious, but it’s very important to approach this (or any) initiative from a user-centric perspective. Begin the exercise by closing your eyes and imagine that you are looking at the inbox of one of your users. Imagine one of your emails popping into their stream. If that were your inbox, what would you hope to see in that email when you open it? What information would you be excited to find? What would the subject line have to say in order to get you open it (not just the first time, but the second time and beyond)? The biggest mistake you can make in this phase is starting by asking yourself, "What do we want our users to see?” instead of “What do our users want to see?”
Expanding on that last point, understand that in order for these emails to be valuable to your users, they should abide by some (if not all) the Top Six Elements of a Good Digest email.
Try not to worry about what data you have available (or easily available) in your system at this phase. Don’t be limited by technical restraints here. This is a time for ideation. Shoot for a great solution - and worry about execution later. Yes, you may have to adjust things during execution, but deal with that at the right time. And this isn’t the right time.
Also, don't worry about (visual) design at this phase. Stay high-level. It’s ok to throw ideas on the board or in the sketch book, but don’t dive deep into how the email will look, yet.
What questions you should you be asking (& answering) during the STRATEGY phase?
Here are some questions that should drive the discussion during this phase. You should find answers - or at least hypotheses - for most of them before moving on to the next phase.
What do our users want to see in their inboxes? What data/information will be most helpful for them? (*don't be afraid to actually ask your users about this - it may make your job a lot easier)
How often do users need to see this information? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
Is the data that we deliver quickly 'perishable' (ie - breaking news, social media posts), requiring daily notifications (or more frequent)?
Are there daily items for which users should be reminded (ie - CRM tasks, calendar events, etc)?
Are there stats or activities that make sense rolled up into a weekly summary (ie - CRM pipeline activity; pending approvals; etc)?
Does it make sense to break up the information we want to send our users into multiple digests (in many cases, yes, it does)?
How do we balance highly personalized content (ie - YOUR tasks; YOUR activity; etc) with more 'global' content (top posts in the system; product recommendations; etc)?
How often should we send these emails? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Should we send different emails on different days of the week (show them information about most shared content on Mon/Wed/Fri, while on T/TH show information about their followers?)
Is there a smart way to segment our users to deliver more relevant & helpful content to different groups (ie - sending manager-level users some overview stats vs sending team-member users actionable tasks)?
And finally - what are our goals with these emails? Are we trying to drive users back to our app or are we trying to give them helpful information that saves them from having to log into the app (ie - task reminders)? Maybe are we trying to instill trust that the system is working (ie - X payments were received yesterday, etc) or maybe we are trying to drive purchases. Make sure to have goals in mind as you move forward, but as mentioned before, your goals should be secondary to those of your users. Your goals won't matter much if your users don't open your emails.
Who should be involved with the work in this phase?
Obviously, this depends on your organization, but assuming that you have a medium-sized organization with different people inhabiting specific roles (vs a team of two developers), the people that MUST be involved with this phase of the conversation (and leading the initiative) are the people most responsible for user engagement and/or the people closest to your users. This means at the very least your Product Manager and a member/leader of your Customer Success team. These folks will have the best instincts when it comes to what will be valuable for your users and help you achieve your ultimate goals in this initiative.
Optional in this discussion are engineering & design. I know these groups will be upset to hear themselves deemed optional, but the reality is that their presence in this phase may drive the discussion too far down the ‘technical feasibility’ or the ‘how’s it going to look’ path. Of course, every organization and every individual is different, but it’s important to keep this phase focused on the user, so just make sure that the individuals involved stay focused on user needs/wants.
Also optional in this particular discussion is the CEO (again, depending on the makeup of your organization). Obviously, we think these email digests are of utmost importance to the success of your product, so in many cases, the CEO might want to be involved. Others might want to as well. But, another word of warning - be sure that if your CEO is involved, he/she doesn’t drive the conversation too far in the ‘what are we going to get out of this’ direction vs ‘what is going to be good for our users.’ Admittedly, I need to be reminded of this at times...
What is the output of this phase?
Coming out of the STRATEGY phase, you should have a pretty good outline of your plan for your email digest. I suggest producing quick, annotated sketches with various options. Rough out the content you want to include in the emails, some thoughts on user segmentation & the frequency of the email(s). This will drive your next few phases.
PHASE 2: DATA
With your strategy in hand, you will move on to take a look at the data in your system to understand the best way to get that data into your emails. This is an essential phase because the value of your digest emails will very much be dependent on the value of the data you include in them. During this phase, you will be looking at the data your system produces, how/where it is stored, what you are aggregating, how you are aggregating, etc. The goal is to identify any gaps between what data you'd like to include in your digest emails and the data currently being collected in your app's backend. This is also a phase that may open up additional opportunities for your digest that you hadn't thought about before.
Some tips during this phase:
Understand the difference between data points that will help you segment your user base (ie - active vs inactive users; different user-levels; Red Sox vs Yankee fan; feature usage; etc) and the data that will serve as content in your digest (number of new friends; upcoming tasks; hot articles; etc). Sometimes, there will be data points that can serve as both. You don't have to know everything at this point, but you should be clear in your thinking about "segmentation data" vs "content data."
Understand the difference between highly personalized, user-level data and global, system-level data. In Knowtify, we simply refer to these as "User" and "Global" data points.
User-level data is any piece of data that is attached to a specific user. This data changes as you switch between users. User A has a different number of followers, or comments, or appointments than User B.
Global data is data that is common among all your users - global across your app. For example, the most popular posts in your app, average spend per user, most followed users, etc.
Don't fall into the trap of including data in your email digests just because you have it available. Your engineering team may say, “we’ve been collecting information on how many times people login on a desktop vs mobile - we could easily include this data in our digest emails,” but if it's not data that is going to be valuable to your users in the context of a daily/weekly digest email, don't use it. Don’t fall prey to ‘data creep’ (the new ‘feature creep’)
At the same time, don’t throw away important data points for your users because you aren’t currently aggregating that data in the back end. Some data points will be more difficult to get than others, but just because you don’t have it today, don’t dismiss immediately dismiss it.
What questions you should you be asking (& answering) during the DATA phase?
How is our data currently organized in our back-end?
Are we aggregating the data points around each user that we want to use in our email digests?
Do we currently have a way of generating the 'global' data that we want to use in our digests?
If no, what is the best way to get this done?
Who should be involved with the work in this phase?
Obviously, this is where your engineering team will come into the discussion. More specifically, the person/people most knowledgeable about 'your data.' Most likely, this will become a discussion between your Product Manager and someone on the dev team. It will likely be a negotiation between the data points you want to include in your emails per your strategy and what is currently or easily available. There may be some compromises made at this point, but don’t run away from things that might take some work - if they are high value, the work will be worth it.
What is the output of this phase?
Coming out of the DATA PHASE, you should know exactly what data you will be able to include in your emails in the short term and what kind of data will be available in the medium/long term. You might also want to have a plan for executing on any data points that you want to include further off in the future.
PHASE 3: EMAIL DESIGN
During this phase, not only will you be deciding on the look & feel of your email, but also ensuring that your design will look good on the million-and-one different devices and email clients that exist today. Because of this variance in devices/clients, this phase is becoming more and more challenging.
Some tips during this stage:
Set your expectations - really understand that designing for email is different than designing for web browsers. There are many more email clients than there are web browsers and optimizing for them is not easy - and leads to many design compromises. This can be very frustrating for many designers.
Do your research. If you haven't designed or built responsive email templates that work on many different email clients, make sure to research the nuances before opening InDesign.
Brush up on your CSS and media queries - you’re going to need them.
Pay attention to the length of your email. It's difficult to get anyone to stay engaged with a long email. Keep that in mind. If you overload it with information, you will probably be working against yourself. If there is that much valuable information you want to share with your users, think about breaking it up into multiple digests (not all on the same day, of course!).
Pay attention to hierarchies - both in terms of content as well as visual hierarchy. Make it easy for readers to quickly find the most valuable information.
What questions you should you be asking (& answering) during the DESIGN phase?
What devices and email clients are most of my users currently using?
How can I design something that will be consistent with my brand AND look good on multiple email clients and devices?
What types of design elements will be most likely to 'break'?
How can I create a smart visual hierarchy that works across viewing experiences?
Who should be involved in this discussion?
Obviously your designer is most heavily involved at this point and he/she will need to collaborate with someone from your engineering team with strong front-end (CSS) skills. Creating a design of this email is the easy part - its the coding it that becomes tricky.
Your Product Manager will also need to be involved to manage the back & forth typical in this stage.
PHASE 4: CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
During this phase, you will be writing the actual copy/content of your emails.
Some tips during this stage:
Don't be too wordy. These emails are, generally, much more about the data than they are about the copy. You are updating people on activity and delivering actionable nuggets, so don't make it hard for your users to access them.
At the same time, write with personality. Just because these digest emails are automated doesn't mean they need to be robotic. The content should be written in your brand's voice.
Pay attention to subject lines, the 'from' email as well as the preview text. Each of these will have an impact on your open rates. Test and iterate.
What questions you should you be asking (& answering) during the CONTENT phase?
How should I craft my subject & preview text to insure our users know these emails are valuable for them (and not just marketing spam)?
How can I test and iterate on these elements?
Can we/should we have personalized/unique data in our subject lines?
How can I pare down the copy to insure these emails are opened and acted upon?
Am I able to change up the content over time - maybe to promote new features, or update our users on an upcoming event, or insert a customer survey form, etc? What will the process of adding new content to the digest look like?
PHASE 5: EMAIL DELIVERY
This stage is part strategy and part technical.
During this phase, you will be deciding on the best time to deliver your digest emails as well as segmenting your users. That’s the strategic part.
At the same time you will be developing a system to schedule and cue your emails and to ensure deliverability. Fun stuff.
Some tips during this stage:
When deciding on timing your emails, think deeply about your users’ daily behaviors and the kind of data you are delivering to them. For example, if you have a calendar app and are delivering a daily schedule to business executives, you should deliver your email early - like 6a in the morning (or maybe even the night before). However, if you have a social restaurant recommendation app, you might want to send your emails in the afternoons, when people are making dinner plans.
Take time zone into consideration. This is especially important if the timing of your email is important.
Think hard about segmenting your user base. You’ve probably done a lot of this in the original STRATEGY PHASE, but you should revisit it here before launch.
When building an email scheduler module, make sure to test that it can handle the number of emails you plan to send. Look out for overlapping jobs, etc that may cause some of your emails to not be sent on the schedule you plan.
Ensuring email deliverability is a significant challenge. We don’t recommend you attempt to send emails from your own servers. We highly recommend that you use a service that specializes in email delivery. Spam filters are nasty - if no one sees your emails, all your efforts here will be for naught.
What questions you should you be asking (& answering) during the DELIVERY phase?
When should I be delivering these emails? Should I have one universal time or should I mix it up based on time zones, etc.?
Should I A/B test delivery times?
What should a ‘test’ release look like? Should I select a segment of my use as a test group before releasing to the entire world? If so, how should I determine those users?
On the technical side, should I be sending these emails from my own server or should I be using a delivery service? If service, which one?
PHASE 6: MEASUREMENT
Obviously, as with every new feature, measuring the effectiveness of your digest emails is a very important part of the development process.
Some tips during this stage:
Have a deep understanding of your users and how each type of user will use & value your email digests. Driving people back to your app from your emails may be a good thing to measure for some of your users, but don’t apply that logic to users that don’t need to use your product everyday to get value. For many of those users, the real value of your application will be your email digests.
Remember the lag time inherent in email measurement. People open emails and take action on them at different times. Trying to measure the effectiveness in ‘real time’ may not be effective. Over time, try to understand the engagement pattern your users have with your emails. Do they open your emails within the first hour of receiving it or do they open them over the course of the day? Or do they save them up and review multiple days of emails at once? Understanding this will help you determine the effectiveness of your initiative.
Don’t passively measure - measure with the intent of directing change. Don’t look at the numbers if you aren’t using them improve over time. Otherwise, it may be fun, but it’s not very effective.
What questions you should you be asking (& answering) during the MEASUREMENT phase?
What metric(s) will help me understand if my email digests are valuable to my users?
What kind of behaviors am I hoping to drive with this initiative?
What kind of qualitative feedback can I gather directly from my users that will help me understand what is working and what I can improve on?
How will I know if this initiative is a success?
PHASE 7: ITERATE
I don’t think I have to go into too much detail on this phase, but I will say that an iterative approach to these emails isn’t something you should worry about only once you get to the ‘end’ of this process. You should commit to an iterative process for your digest emails right from the beginning. By approaching this initiative with iteration in mind, you will create better emails for your users and generate better results for yourself.
Start by sending your first version of your digest email(s) to a targeted group of users. Get feedback & iterate. Broaden out to a wider group. Get feedback & iterate. Extend to your whole user base and do the same.
And then, over time, freshen up your digests. Don’t let them go stale. Use them to communicate new features/initiatives. Add more interesting data as you add features. Allow users to configure and customize.
As your app grows & evolves, so must your email digests. These will become your most important touch points with your users - treat them as such...
Obviously, here at Knowtify HQ, we spend the majority of our time studying, building and supporting the development of smart digest emails. Because of this, we get to see examples of digest emails that that work incredibly well - and some that fall flat. While there is no 'one size fits all' recipe for an effective digest email (much of it is dependent on the unique qualities of your application, your business & your users), there are certainly some common elements that help contribute to success.
I'm sure this list will grow and evolve over time, here are our TOP SIX guidelines for building effective digest emails.
1 - BE USER-CENTRIC
This is by far the most important guideline. As with any feature you develop, the digests that are designed/developed from a user-centric perspective are simply more effective. The digest that are created by answering the question, "what information can we deliver to our users that will make their experience with our app more convenient, more pleasurable and more valuable" are much more effective and successful than the digests that are created by answering the question "how can we manipulate our users to do things we want them to do"? (you know who you are)
As you are probably aware, these digest emails are highly effective for driving user engagement - but that doesn't mean it needs to be forced. The emails that try to 'force' engagement ultimately turn readers off. Design your digests in a user-centric fashion.
Every user in your system is unique and your emails should treat them as such. There is nothing more off-putting to a user than receiving a generic, mass email that dismisses their unique usage of your app. A few quick suggestions for personalizing your digest emails (with more coming in a future post):
This may sound silly & obvious, but you use their name in the email. This is low-hanging fruit, but important. Want to take it to the next level? Include their picture in the email.
Use user-specific data in your email. By this, we mean, use information and/or data that is unique to each user. This is very obvious for some apps (YOUR tasks, changes in YOUR network, etc), but not for others. Don't just show users "hot posts for today" - show them "hot posts from your network" instead. Fitbit's digest email works so well because it focuses almost exclusively on on highlighting the personal data generated by their users. Every email is unique & relevant.
Create different digest emails for different segments of your user base. The most obvious example for this is an app (such as a CRM or product management app) with different user-types (or user-levels). Admin-level users are interested in different data/information than are Manager-level users. And Manager-level users are interested in different data/information than are Team Member-level users. Trying to craft a single digest email that will appease the needs/wants of these different user-types is ill-advised. You can (and should) also think about ways to segment your user base using metrics more tied to specific usage patterns (active vs inactive users; users of one feature vs another; etc). As much as possible, your segmentation should be based on the unique value that each user segment derives from your app. Create your digest emails to reflect those values.
Customize the language in your emails based on user-specific data. For example, if a user has a positive data point (ie - new friend count up 75%!), use a congratulatory message. On the flip side, if they have a negative data point (ie - no new posts created), craft a message that points them to some tips for improvement. Getting down to this granular level will take your digests to a whole new level.
3 - MAKE THEM ACTIONABLE
This is both good for you AND for your users. For your users, it is very frustrating to receive emails that contain good/interesting information - that they can't take any action on it.
The starting point for this is simply providing smart links in your email. If you are showing a blog post headline in your email, make sure the reader can link to the post. If you mention a person who commented on the post, make sure to link to his/her profile from your email.
The next level is to provide actual 'actions' in your email. Include "share" or "mark as done" or "follow on twitter" buttons/links within your email. Let your user actually act on the data you are providing.
And all this works in your favor. Ultimately, you want your users to be more engaged with your app. Enabling action in your digest emails is a great way to drive that engagement.
4 - TIME THEM WELL
By "Timing", I mean both "how often" and "what time".
"How often" refers to daily vs weekly vs monthly (or some variation of that). You need to be mindful to not over, or under, send these emails. If the information if valuable on a daily basis, create a daily digest. If the data is more useful on a weekly basis, create a weekly digest. Create one of each if it makes sense for your users.
"What time" refers to the time of day you want your users to receive your email. Obviously, you want to optimize your open rates, but in order to do so, you need to really understand your users 'life flow' (yes, I just made this term up) and determine when they would most likely want/need this information. If they need the data right before a morning scrum meeting, then deliver first thing in the morning. If they want it when they have some down time to really digest it, then send it to them during an afternoon 'lull time.' The best digest emails are sent at a time at which the recipients most value the information.
5 - HAVE PERSONALITY
The tone and personality of your digest emails should be consistent with your brand. Just because these digest emails will be mostly automated doesn't mean they have to be robotic. Add some flair. Add some personality. Help people look forward to opening your emails.
6 - BE DYNAMIC - DON'T GET STALE
This is one of the big problems with digest emails today - they become incredibly stale. Keeping these digests fresh and ever-evolving is very important. Here are a few suggestions for making more dynamic digest emails:
Add custom/unique commentary to your emails. This does require some manual work, but one of the best things about the Product Hunt daily emails is the commentary that the founder adds at the beginning of each email.
Change up some of the design elements. Try changing an image or colored background to keep things fresh. If you are a weather app, send a gray digest for cloudy days and a yellow one for sunny days. Play and be creative.
Send different emails with slightly different data during the week. For example, try sending an email with one type of information on Monday/Wednesday/Friday and a different set of information on Tuesday/Thursday.
Iterate over time. This is very important. As your users and their usage evolve, so should your digests. As you app evolves, so should your digests. Don't get stuck with stale digest emails!
As I mentioned, this list of important elements will most definitely grow and change over time, but we hope this serves as a really good starting point. Let us know if you have any suggestions that we missed!
Welcome to our first "digest email critique" on this blog. We plan to regularly look at samples of good and bad digest emails sent from some of our favorite apps and give 'em the old Siskel & Ebert treatement (with the goal of advancing the art of email engagement, of course). Our first subject...
Umano app
I am a bike commuter, so audio content is super important for me. I spend at least 1hr/day consuming audio content - so I was super excited to be recommended to Umano. Umano is a mobile app that records people reading articles so that that you can consume audio versions. It's great.
So, when I received my first "digest" email from Umano this week, I was also super excited. Given all the competition (podcasts, audio books, music) for my ear canals on my daily commute, this kind of engagement is really, really important for Umano.
So, I applaud the team at Umano for putting together these emails in the first place. Their mere existence is great thing (for them and their users).
The good: Nice clean layout and great action buttons
First of all, the email was well designed - clean layout. I liked seeing the default images that defined each article and the clear headline for each. It made the email very easy to scan.
I also commend the email for the action buttons under each article - they give the user has the opportunity to LISTEN to the article or ADD it to his/her Umano playlist. By far, the most valuable action for me was ADDING TO PLAYLIST given that that is how I consume the content on Umano. I would have liked this to be the most obvious button on the screen (vs LISTEN NOW).
On a side note, I really hope the Umano team is measuring the engagement of these two buttons closely. These metrics could represent the key to making these emails truly effective. It may be the case that the LISTEN NOW button is never used and it would make sense to highlight the ADD button instead; or replace it with a "Refer article to a Friend" button (or something like that).
The "could be better": Relevance, Length & smarter actions
By far, the biggest issue I have with this email is its relevance to me (or lack thereof). The email is simply showing me the "Most Popular" articles on the Umano platform. I'm assuming that every user of Umano received this same exact email - and it felt that way. Generic. I looked through all the articles in the email (there were 8 featured) and I only added one to my playlist.
The good news is that I engaged with this email and added an article to my playlist. To that degree, this specific email was 'successful'. The bad news is that 1 out of 8 articles isn't a great percentage, so I may not be so fast to open the next email I get from Umano (mind you, I will b/c I'm me, but other users with the same experience may not).
The better approach would have been to deliver me more relevant articles. Umano has data around my preferences in their system (I entered them manually when I set up my account) as well as a history of the articles that I have listened to and liked. I also have friends that I am connected to in the app that are generating their own data. I would have loved to see Umano use that data to deliver me a more relevant email digest. Show me the articles that:
I will like {based on my profile/preference/usage data};
my network is engaging with; and then
generally popular or trending content
This would have made this email much more engaging for me.
I also was missing data around my 'network'. Has anyone else from my Facebook network signed up? If no...why not an action that helps me grow my network - good for me and Umano.
The email was also a little long. It's a small point, but I think it's hard to get people to scroll down and engage with a long email. If they were to cut down the article "excerpts" to 2 lines, instead of 3, they could shorten the email quite a bit.
Finally, I didn't really know what the three social icons are at the bottom of the email. They are links to Umano's social profiles, but they seem a little strange just floating there and not really providing any value. Personally, I would recommend some kind of referral message/action here - "Love Umano? Refer a friend" which would allow me to post to my networks. This strategy loses value over time, but it's something you could use for early users and depreciate it over time.
Again...I'm very grateful that Umano has started with their digest emails. With a little tweaking, these messages can prove to be essential to their ongoing user engagement.
