This is a curated post from the Customer.io blog

Last Thursday we opened Customer.io’s doors for anyone to sign up. For the unfamiliar, we’re a niche email product targeted at SaaS companies.

Believe it or not, when John and I started Customer.io, we were scared to send emails. When people signed up, we didn’t say anything other than “thanks for signing up”.

We put up a splash page in January and were quietly collecting email addresses until June. Our thinking was: “Saying anything is bad. We’ve got one shot at emailing people to check out our product. Let’s make it perfect”.

That’s the dumbest thing we’ve done and here’s why:
A month after signing up, most people don’t remember they signed up. After 6 months, forget it. The entire list of people is cold. Dead. Gone.

After 6 months, you have to reconvert the person to your product. Whatever goodwill you have earned has evaporated.

So what did we do about it?
One day, with encouragement from Ramit Sethi, I started emailing everyone who had signed up. And over 4 emails I improved our open-rates so we had over 50% of people on our list reading the emails.

 

Read on … The dumbest thing Customer.io has done