Email go brrp š§šµ
Season 6, Issue 5, product update emails gone wild
Aloha Mehketeer,
Email is such an underrated channel and non-marketers always underestimate how long it takes to put together a good email! Collating topics and information, copywriting, design, proofing, it can honestly go on for weeks just to send one email.
Lately Iāve gotten a barrage of product update emails from various companies so I thought Iād save them and weād do a good olā compare and contrast.
Letās get straight into it.
Things that can go into a product focused email
A common sentiment is āwe need to market our product moreā coupled with āweāre not really sure how to do thatā. Some ideas are more obvious than others, but hereās a list:
New releases: for a new product, it can be on its own, or save up your feature releases and smaller improvements to put into a combo email
Roadmap announcements: Whatās coming up
How Customer X uses product or feature Y - Iāll talk more about why I love having use case focused emails below!
Reminders of older releases: You can do this two ways, for contract renewal cycles you can take the ālook how much weāve given you over the past 12 monthsā approach, or you can do check ins a few months or quarters after a big release to collect feedback on it
The questions that get asked frequently arenāt static, meaning the popular questions change with time. Ask your support, sales, and customer success teams what the hot questions from customers and prospects are at the moment, and send out a ācurrentā FAQ
If you have a help centre, templates, an āacademyā or ālearning hubā or similar for your product, you should treat this as evergreen content and regularly re-promote it through emails as well - donāt neglect all the work your support team does!
And remember you donāt have to separate āproductā emails and other emails. Sprinkling a little bit of product here and there in your regular customer newsletter, nurture flow, or invites to your webinars helps create a cohesive product marketing strategy thatās interwoven with all your other marketing efforts.
Email example 1:
Now that Iāve uploaded this image to Substack I see how jankey my screenshotting and stiching together is - but thatās all on brand for this newsletter so I wonāt be fixing it.
Alright, what I liked about this newsletter:
They went to the effort of making gifs for it!
Related reading, AKA my thoughts on interactive product demos:
They follow the book when it comes to the copy, starting with a problem statement, introducing the feature, following up with a value proposition, and lastly mentioning use cases.
They donāt say more than they need to, the copy is concise and clear.
What could be better about this email:
The subject line kind of assumes youāre an engaged user who will know what theyāre talking about, it could take a lesson from the body copy about value and use cases
The email just ends. I checked their other emails and they usually have a sign off, so maybe it was an oopsie
Even without the sign off, they could have linked to a roadmap, a suggestion box, a CTA that leads back to the product, or what would have been 10/10 is including a customer testimonial about the feature from a beta tester or power user.
Email example 2:
Notion is a common example of good brand and marketing in tech, but this is a weaker example of a product email, where theyāve inflated small things a bit too much, and now itās an overly long, underwhelming update.
Each of the updates gets two descriptions of what it does. Thereās no use case, persona, value proposition, or even anything exciting. The first two gifs are underwhelming. Compare the messy mouse movement of the first gif with the third, as well as the actual information being presented:
Do we need a gif to show us how to click a āshareā button? No, but seeing the automation that follows a single action in the third gif is helpful. The three gifs are followed up with two static images, so were the first two gifs necessary?
The best part of the email is the list at the end. Little fixes = big improvements is good messaging, and the first dot point includes value and ROI. They should have moved this to the top of the email - the intro thatās there is stiff.
Notion reuses these gifs on socials
Hereās a recent LinkedIn post from Notion where they used a much higher production quality gif to announce a feature launch. I do like that theyāre building these product and feature specific gif libraries, because itās evergreen content they can recyle over and over with ādid you know you could do xyzā style content across all of their channels.
Why I love Customer X using feature Y emails
Thereās two ways to look at this - from the perspective of the marketer doing the work, and then from the perspective of the person receiving the email.
For marketers
Hunting through your customer facing team members and finding an example of where a customer has used your product for something unique or new can be difficult, but serves a bunch of puposes:
You get a new use case to highlight
You get a new testimonial (or full case study if you can get it)
You get to build rapport with that customer by showering them with praise for being a super user and telling them youāre going to tell all your other customers and prospects about them
For email recipients
This emailās about emails (how meta) but Iāll expand this section to more channels because itās a big one:
If an existing customer is considering churning from your product, these kinds of updates can keep them around, either by giving them a new value to gain, allowing them to get rid of another tool that does the same thing and consolidate their budget, or by just keeping them engaged and converting them to a power user because theyāre so familiar with all the things they can do with your product
In-app messaging is difficult because of timing, if someone has opened up your product, theyāre most likely there to get a job done, not to go on a tangent and take a tour of a new feature. Emailing them use cases allows them to see it, get interested, and come back to it at a time that suits them, rather than immediately closing a pop up because theyāre in the middle of something and not even reading it
Recap
Vary the reasons why you send out product focused emails, and drip feed bits and bobs about product into your regular comms emails
For releases, save up your little pieces to make it worthy of an email, but donāt take it too far, youāll look like a uni student getting rid of all their contractions to bump their word count up
Focus on the holy product marketing tenets: use cases, value props, ROI, testimonials, not functional descriptions
Never forget a call to action (the deadliest of marketing sins)
Product updates can be repurposed as evergreen content, donāt let ālaunchā work be one and done
Reminder - refer a friend and get stickers!
Mehdeeka now has merch, can you believe it? I took the mail/post theme of the rebrand, mashed it up with the overarching goal of helping marketers wearing many hats, and we have the V1 of hats on stamps. Above is my dog, Major, and a couple of the stickers on my laptop!!
To get your own, simply use this button to refer two friends or colleagues:
Hereās a space that looks like itād be incredible to read a book in.
Last year, āFat Bear Weekā took the internet by storm. Itās back on!
And finally, a screenshot of my inbox, with an incredibly timed marketing email from Peak Design:
C-c-c-c-ya later
Kayla