Darren Chait co-founded Hugo (meeting note SaaS) with long-time friend, Josh Lowy in San Francisco in 2016 after moving from Sydney, Australia.Â
Darren, an Australian lawyer, and Josh, a SF-based product manager were bewildered by the state of meetings. So much had changed about the way we work but meetings remained the same – so they built Hugo.
Having now signed up more than 5,000 users, Hugo has turned email into a core driver for engagement. The team cite their SaaS onboarding emails as the reason they’re able to convert so many signups into Daily Active Users…
How?
This post explains…
An Age Old Solution – SaaS Onboarding Emails
It’s an interesting time for email.
It’s lived a good 50-year life, and if you believe the Slack-fueled rhetoric, in our lifetime we’ll see the end of email as we know it. Everyone will communicate asynchronously using integrated chat apps and all live happily ever after.Â
Either way, today it remains the most effective channel to communicate with B2B SaaS users outside your product. You would be hard pressed to find a SaaS app in 2019 that doesn’t use email to activate and engage signups.
Yes Slack believe that email is less efficient for internal communication, but of course, they still have to send onboarding emails… that contain onboarding chat messages:
But, with the volume of emails we receive everyday, it’s getting harder and harder for SaaS companies to get the open and conversation rates they need.
For Hugo, this is especially critical with our mission to change the way you meet. Adopting Hugo involves creating the habit to set agendas before each meeting and write shareable, actionable meeting notes during or after the meeting. Users adopt this way to become Daily Active Users (DAUs) – our north star.
Like most other SaaS companies, we turned to email to drive this behavior.
But, to differentiate, we set out to replicate the experience enjoyed by customers of high-touch customer success teams, who typically have Average Contract Values (ACV) much higher than what Hugo charges (free for teams of up to 40, $399 up to 100 and custom pricing for 101+).
We have more data available to us than human Customer Success Managers can identify in high touch human relationships.
So, why can’t we be better at high touch personalized communication to successfully onboard users, and get them to daily active?
Here’s how we did it…
The first step to our email-centric solution was to make a list of all the typical reasons why a human Customer Success Manager would reach out to their client.
- Increasing engagement
- Decreasing engagement
- Using the product in non-conventional ways
- Running into bugs or errors
- Other interactions that would typically start a human conversation
Next, we defined what those triggers look like, and put analytics events on each of them, ensuring they put all relevant context in the event properties. For example ‘Error Modal Shown’, with the modal copy and details of the error contained in the event properties.Â
Finally, we built human-like email sequences in our email automation software (Hugo uses Customer.io because of its deep integration with Segment and great UI). Literally overnight we saw engagement increase, along with the volume and quality of conversations the team were having with customers.
Some examples of the 45+ emails we wrote and implemented include:
- Night Owl / Weekend Warrior: If we haven’t been in touch with a user for at least a week and they have an app session late at night or over the weekend in their local time zone, our CEO sends them a ‘personal’ email saying he saw they were using Hugo late or over the weekend, asking them what they’re working on and if we can help with anything. These have to be the highest quality, most personal conversations.
- When a user gets an error modal or toast: We email the user advising them that we know they just had an issue, apologizing and explaining what caused it (at a high level based on the analytics properties). We also automatically add the user’s ID to the engineering ticket, so we can let them know once it’s fixed. Ironically, those users who have had issues and had it handled that way end up happier and more engaged than the users who haven’t even had an issue!
- A new addition to this one is proactive support emails. If we receive an error from our Salesforce integration for example, we’ll send the user some suggested solutions to the error they just saw in the app from our support center. If that doesn’t work they can just reply and open a support ticket. We all know that few users who encounter errors go looking for a solution in a help center or reaching out to the support team, but this way we’re seeing much higher error resolution rates and delighting customers after a negative experience.
- Feedback on notes and agendas: Being a meeting notes platform, the first time a user sets an agenda or writes a meeting note, we generate an email with ‘feedback’ on that note or agenda. We have flags in the analytics event as to whether they’ve used various features for that note or agenda, for example shared to Slack, created actions in their task or project management tools, tagged teammates, synced with their CRM etc. Then we recommend how they can improve their note or agenda next time!
- Team growth and swag pack: An effective but simple campaign congratulates users as they grow their Hugo team. Based on the speed at which they send out invites, we even send them an email offering a swag pack – they just reply with the shipping address. It reinforces the behavior we’re looking and makes early users feel appreciated by us.
We shipped the latest emails in July 2019, here are the stats:
Within 30 days we doubled our Daily Active Users. 30 days later it had doubled again:
Best of all, we now wake up to email after email from customers – full of feedback, ideas, bugs to fix and great user stories.Â
The old challenge of starting customer conversations was over, and every customer felt like they had a Customer Success Manager there to support them getting started with Hugo.
The notion of low touch for low value accounts and high touch for high value accounts in Customer Success is now a myth.
With the tools available to SaaS companies in 2019, there’s no reason why everyone can’t get high touch value at a low touch cost.
What did we learn?
- Extend analytics far beyond knowing what users did, to being a trigger for outreach and proactive user engagement.
- Many of the behaviors that would trigger a human customer success manager to take action can as easily trigger software to take action.
- Customer conversations remain as important as ever, but automated communication can be a trigger, so all you have to do is respond and continue the conversation with customers.
- The right software stack makes this possible. Clean analytics with good product coverage, centralized using solutions like Segment, and connected to great downstream tools like Customer.io.
What did you think of Hugo’s SaaS onboarding emails?
Let me know in the comments below…