🗞 What's New: Sending the right email at the right time

Founders and marketers tend to suck at email, defaulting to generic forms:

• Avoiding timing mistakes can reduce unsubscribes, and maximize the impact of your onboarding emails. This guide can help you avoid sending the wrong emails at the wrong time!
• Cold outreach can be a major pain, but this quick strategy can help you get in touch with the right people, get your product noticed, and close the deal.
• Founder Johan Cutych went from idea to exit, to terminating his project, to starting something entirely new. Below, he shares how he pivoted, how he handles imposter syndrome, and what's next.

This issue is sponsored by Bug Bashes! Bugs kill product adoption. Eliminate them with the help of the Bug Bashes community. They'll host a bugbash, and their community will test your app for FREE. Get video bug reports, console logs, and more. There's only a few slots available, so submit your app now!

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🕐 Sending the Right Email at the Right Time

by Kalo Yankulov

Email marketing specifically, especially for SaaS, is just hard. We work around email automation tools, resort to ugly hacks, and even involve the dev team to send the right emails at the right time. But even then, things still break.

I've been a marketer for years, but I still mess up. A bug recently caused our system to send one of our old email broadcasts to everyone on our list. And, it's not just me:

*Source: Reddit

Whether it's an accident or not, sending erroneous emails annoy the heck out of everyone. That's why I built Encharge to help founders do email marketing better.

In this post, I'll go over some practical tips to avoid sending the wrong emails at the wrong times, like I did!

Wrong email, wrong time

Sending emails at the wrong time results in unsubscribes. Before you hit that "Send" button, follow these tips to avoid timing mistakes, and maximize the impact of your onboarding emails:

1: Map out your customer journey:

The customer journey is the path that a customer takes when interacting with a brand or business. It usually involves multiple touchpoints and interactions, from initial awareness to the final purchase, and beyond.

A simplified customer journey usually looks like this:

*Source: Encharge

However, what happens in real life is far more complex. Forrester has a good illustration that represents the average behavior of consumers:

*Source: Forrester

A customer journey map may seem unnecessary to some, but it's essential to perfecting email timing. It helps you:

• Study your customer's communication preferences: Take note of how they buy. Do they prefer to research on their own? Email and talk to a salesperson? Do they consume content?
• Determine all the touchpoints: Decide which channel to use for outreach, and assign appropriate communications to emails. You don't want to smother them with multiple messages!

2: Plan your segmentation and triggers early on:

Untargeted emails without a holistic game plan will lead to disgruntled customers, confused subscribers, and annoyed readers.

Segmenting by behavior is important, because these emails have the highest likelihood of impacting the user. You can also segment by demographics and lead scores. Don't forget to also consider:

• Where they are in the funnel: Leads (further classified into the lead magnet they downloaded), free trials, expired trials, scheduled a demo, paying users, customers who canceled, etc.
• Their plan: Freemium, free, plus plan, pro plan, enterprise plan, etc.
• Their industry: SaaS, e-commerce, education, etc.

Your segmentation depends entirely on you and your email strategy, but you have to plan your architecture early on. One easy way to segment your users during onboarding is by asking them questions that can sort them into buckets:

Don't stop after segmenting the email list. Consider your triggers. Here are some good examples:

• Verified their email.
• Uploaded a list of contacts.
• Wrote an email.
• Set up a campaign.

Track email metrics to learn how your email campaigns performed. Lastly, for best results:

• When planning your segmentation, start with a few core criteria, like the ones we suggested above. Then, further break it down based on more specific attributes, like the user's behavior or engagement level.
• Opt for time-based and trigger-based emails. Emails that are triggered by actions or particular events are much more timely and effective.
• It can be a bit overwhelming to plan the whole thing. There are always email experts for you to hire or consult. It's best to do this early on, when it's easier to implement!

3: Build your email onboarding flows:

A comprehensive email onboarding plan includes a series of emails that are designed to take customers through the various stages of onboarding, including introduction, education, and activation.

But, what emails should you send? How long should they be? How frequent? Every product is different, but here are six types of emails you should send during onboarding:

• Verification emails: This email invites users to confirm their account information. Send this right after they sign up for your SaaS:

• Welcome emails: The most popular and most read emails, welcome emails are usually the first marketing email sent to users. It introduces your SaaS, and explains how your software is about to solve your user's problems:

You could play with layouts and graphics:

Or, it could be in plain text:

• Nurture emails: These are the series of emails sent after the welcome email. They show the value of your product, nudging users to continually use your software. They can also tell users what to do next:

They can be resource emails, with links to helpful guides and tutorials:

Or, maybe they can invite users to a chat session about your software:

• Transactional emails: Transactional emails are dynamic messages sent to confirm user activities or processes. They keep users informed about exciting events tied to their accounts. They can also include important notifications:

Or invitations:

Or, send a usage update email with a gentle push to upgrade:

• "Trial is ending" reminders: These emails are sent to give users a heads up when the trial is expiring, or if their payment method is about to get charged. Send them 1-2 days before the free trial ends, and on the day the trial actually expires:

• "Trial expired" notification emails: Messages to inform users that their free trial period has ended, and they will need to subscribe or purchase to continue usage:

Timing

Now that you know the types of emails, let's talk about the timing of when to send these emails. In general, send emails following the Fibonacci sequence: Frequently at first, then gradually spaced out over time.

The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where the next number is the result of adding the two numbers before it, like: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…

For example, you could follow this flow for a seven day SaaS free trial:

• Verification email: As soon as the user signs up.
• Welcome email: As soon as the user verifies their email.
• Nurture email one: Day one.
• Nurture email two: Day two.
• Nurture email three: Day three.
• Nurture email four: Day five.
• "Trial is ending" email: Last day.

Transactional emails will be scattered between these emails. Balance the time-based emails and behavior-triggered ones.

More tips

Here are tips 4-8:

4. Pick an email marketing platform that lets you send emails at the right time.

5. Run QA to ensure that timing and triggers are correct.

6. Be on the lookout for feedback.

7. Do regular checks for bugs, broken flows, etc.

8. Prepare for future optimizations.

To read more on these tips, check out the full Indie Hackers post here!

Remember that onboarding flows are never truly finished. With constantly changing customer preferences and new features to introduce, you'll need to monitor that your email marketing remains effective!

Will you implement any of these tips? Share your thoughts below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

🤖 Instagram is testing a new AI chatbot experience in DMs.

📈 Maximizing advertising ROI.

💲 Ending your annual plan pricing with ".99" may hurt your sales.

⭐️ Five skills you need to become a rockstar marketer.

👂 Here's how Airbnb used social listening to generate millions of impressions in 24 hours.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

📧 A Quick Outreach Strategy

by Heleana Tiburca

Outreach is a hard nut to crack. We've tried it multiple times, and still got bad results.

We did all of the outreach tactics: Warm up your email, figure out your persona, source a good list of leads, and never send from your own domain.

Didn't work.

We did what the pros recommended and sold the meeting, not the solution. It didn't work.

Eventually, I wondered whether the problem was the message. Turns out, I was right.

Read on for more!

Targeting tip

The problem is that, when you target VPs of marketing (or similar roles) in large SaaS companies, everybody is trying to get on a call with them.

Those 30 minutes are super valuable, so you have to earn them.

That's why we switched to selling the next email, not booking the next meeting.

The email

The email contained information about a strategy that would help them double their organic reach by creating videos for the content they are already ranking for. It's what we do best at Videodeck.

We pitched a free content plan of ideas similar to the content that they were already doing well with. It did amazing!

We got over 60 leads from companies ranging from $100K pre-seed rounds to $900M series G. The average was at $50M raised.

We closed multiple clients at around $40K in new revenue! These types of clients usually order more, and stick around. They are also amazing people to work with, since they clearly understand the value of what you offer.

Quick takeaways

• Never start cold outreach before you clearly define your value prop.
• Know the pain points that your product or service addresses well, and offer solutions.
• Offer value. Your lead's time is valuable, so make it super worthwhile to talk to you.
• Don't pitch like everyone else. Find what works best for your business.
• Work with pros if you don't know what you're doing (send me a message, and I can share who we work with!).

What's your top email strategy? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

🔥 Landing Page Hot Tips

by Rob Hope

Strengthen your landing page with these design, development, and conversion tips:

Highlight your unique selling proposition (USP) among your features.

A grid or list of many features can be overwhelming for a visitor who is learning about your product for the first time.

Begin with your highlighted USP. Emphasize the benefits of choosing you over the competition.

Subscribe to Rob's One Page Love newsletter for his favorite UI, design, and development finds.

💡 Johan Cutych's Idea, Exit, Closing, and New Idea

by Johan Cutych

Hi, indie hackers! I'm Johan Cutych, and it's been almost three years since we started Welder, a high-quality remote video podcast recorder.

The project was terminated in Q1 2023, and I wanted to do it justice by writing about the journey. It was tough and hard. I was struggling with impostor syndrome all the time, feeling that I was not good enough, that we were not good enough, that we would not make it, and that our next product would fail also.

But the opposite is true. Whenever it gets hard, something new and amazing sparks to restore my energy. I love that feeling, and I love my team. Yesterday, I was feeling down, but we were all in the office laughing so much that it broke apart my bad mood. I felt great, and grateful for the people I work with.

Here's how it all started!

The story

Welder got great traction early on in the pandemic, since everyone was home with a lot of time to record podcasts.

After a year of working hard, and helping tons of podcasters record amazing content, we talked to VCs and decided to exit Welder to VEED.

We were good at building a product, but we struggled with growth. The exit was a massive opportunity for us to join a fast-growing bootstrapped business full of like-minded founders. We learned so much about growth, and got great resources to build the best remote podcasting tool ever.

The pivot

We also decided to pivot into livestreaming. The product was called VEED LIVE, and our mission was to allow anyone to easily create content that works for their business. We believe that creating podcasts, doing interviews, and streaming updates is the easiest way to produce valuable content for one's target audience. There's a lot involved, from planning the content, to recording, editing, repurposing, and distributing it.

VEED had it all under one roof, but we made mistakes. It's not easy to integrate one big product into another. Users come from many different channels, and have many different needs.

And then, there was the competition. The market grew fast through the first year of COVID-19. We saw it as a 12 month window to grab market share, but once the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions ended, the demand for streaming and remote podcasting fell drastically.

Many content creators realized that they couldn't stand out without putting in a ton of effort, and that was not sustainable for them. Those indie and small business podcasters were most of our clients.

We also made a few bad product decisions. The biggest one was relying too much on our ideas and imagination, and too little on signals from users. Even though we knew that doing this was a mistake, we still did it.

All of this led to good results, but not great ones. VEED is a fast-growing startup with great goals and high tempo. A product like VEED LIVE would take years of commitment to build into something game changing, and by then, the market could move somewhere else completely.

We missed the timing. That's why we decided to terminate VEED LIVE in Q1 2023, which was almost three years in. I loved it so much.

It's always darkest before the dawn

After closing VEED LIVE, we were really tired. Then, AI came out, and our brain neurons started to fire at 200% again!

That's when we came up with the idea for Magic Cut, which lets you make professional video edits with AI. We have everything we need in VEED to pull it off, and turn it into a game changer.

We built the prototype in just three hours, and we knew it was going to work. A day after, we pitched it to the leadership team and got full buy-in.

We are now opening up Magic Cut for early access, and I am very pumped about it! We are building another tool called Surfkey, an AI Reddit marketing tool, on the side.

I am so looking forward to what our next chapter will bring. It's exciting to be back in the building and launching phase, and I can't imagine doing anything else!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Kalo Yankulov, Darko, Heleana Tiburca, Rob Hope, and Johan Cutych for contributing posts. —Channing