Your guide to better email

Stop sleeping on this powerful growth channel

Welcome back to a (belated) ninth edition of The Gist by Growth Unhinged.

The Gist is my attempt to get to the point — giving you one specific action item to grow faster. You can catch up on the most popular editions here:

• Time savings is not your value proposition

• Smart trials

• Usage paywalls

• In-product experiments

Today I want to talk about a powerful channel for growth that you’re probably sleeping on.

It’s not new. It’s not exciting. But it’s cheap and it works, time and again.

I’m talking about EMAIL. And it could make you 🤑🤑🤑

Let’s dive in 👇

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The Gist

Revisit your automated email program to improve activation, conversion and retention — with no incremental CAC.

Why you should care

Simply put, you need a way to engage and nurture users outside of your product in order to draw them back.

That’s because very few users meaningfully engage with a new product during their first visit:

• In my experience, 40-60% of new users drop off without doing anything — never to return again.

• Only ~3-10% of users ever upgrade to a paid plan.

• Even for customers who do upgrade, a surprisingly large share don’t buy until 30+ days after they initially signed up for the product.

In a B2B context, email is ubiquitously adopted and still effective for driving both awareness as well as action. Just consider this email newsletter — it’s something most folks still open and it’s extremely easy to share with a colleague or friend 😉. While I’m bullish on the promise of other communication channels (like Slack Connect, communities, text messaging, WhatsApp), email reigns supreme.

But email programs fall victim to SaaS entropy. We’re constantly moving to a state of email disorder:

• Product sends more and more emails introducing new features

• Marketing wants to highlight case studies, ROI proof points and customer use cases

• Sales comes over the top to suggest hopping on a demo

• Growth adds to the mix with upgrade CTA emails, trial reminders, promo offers and one-off email experiments

• Interns join in with that accidental yet ubiquitous *TEST* [copy goes here] message

It’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Tell me more

I’ll walk through the components of GOOD email nurture, what you can do to take your email from good to GREAT and bonus email opportunities to save for later.

What good email nurture looks like: