The equivalent of the Kens playing guitars
Season 6, Issue 11, customer newsletters
Hi Barbie Mehketeer,
While Barbie references are getting old, the image of men strumming acoustic guitars to woo girls is a pretty bang on metaphor for customer newsletters.
We’ve covered emails before, so here’s a recap of previous deep dives:
Product emails
Subject lines
Lead nurture
Can you tell I think email marketing is great? Anyway, how are customer emails different?
Well, they’re a customer, not an unknown or a lead
They have access to your product (and hopefully use it)
You have wayyyy more information about them to segment them and drive different outcomes
And this means your motivation for them, the outcomes you can derive from them, and the tone you put in them are all different. You could have a generic “newsletter” of news, content, and product updates that goes out to leads and customers alike and call it a day, there’s nothing wrong with that (especially if you’re at max capacity, putting ongoing emails together is way more work than anyone realises.)
But, if you consider all the things you have to say, the things you want to achieve, and what other emails are going out at what cadence, you may find you have reason to start a customer email. If you’re already running a customer specific email program, take this issue as a reflection exercise and review what you’ve got!
Goal: Drive NPS
While you might have more specific or niche goals for your customer newsletter, it will all probably fall under the umbrella of “drive loyalty, engagement, and long term relationships”, i.e. push your customers to be ‘promoters’ in NPS terms.
Your customer newsletter is all part of the customer experience, in and out of your product.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at what your smaller goals (that apply to individual emails or sections within an email rather than the whole program) might be:
Continuous education (reminders about existing value or announcements for new value, which could also include usage or activation stats)
Drive engagement with the product as a whole or individual features
Upsell or cross sell
Highlight use cases (through case studies, testimonials, ROI pieces, or other content)
Customer appreciation, including anniversaries or birthdays
You can also invite them to customer exclusive events, or other perks available through your customer rewards program:
Examples
Product usage emails are super easy to find from the large products like Spotify and Google. Their super niche analytics on what you’re doing might not be something you have available to you, but it would definitely be worth speaking to whoever owns product analytics and asking them for a full list of what’s available!
I was looking through Really Good Emails for examples of customer emails, checked out this one from Grammarly, and then promptly received this email:
Product changes
At Perkbox (where I used to work, for the newer Mehketeers) we changed the product a lot depending on seasonality. For example, we’d group themed perks together for days like Valentine’s day or Mother’s day, or whatever, and so we’d always be promoting these little changes through the newsletter. Here’s what we did last month in case you missed it, here’s what we’re doing this month, all creating FOMO and reminding people that we’re always doing something worth logging back in for.
None of the perks were new, they were just grouped together in different ways. Perkbox was also one of those products where you can contact the admins but not the users, so we wanted to always be giving the admins reasons to bring up the platform and remind their employees to log on and check it out.
If you’ve got a product which includes content that’s always being added to a library, this is also something that you can put into the customer newsletter that might not be “big” enough to promote to leads.
Here’s an example of that from HerHelp, an Australian women’s health and wellbeing app/community:
They also do “User of the month”:
I’ve used this in B2B customer newsletters and it works there too. One trick is to get customer success to feed you good usage stories, reach out to the customer and tell them you want to highlight them (makes them feel good), get permission, but don’t ask for a quote or testimonial.
Give first, then ask them for a case study after. They’ll be more likely to give you the time and space when you’ve made them feel special (and they might get something out of being mentioned to all your other customers so see if anything comes out of it!)
What makes a good customer email?
The distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is really more about effective vs ineffective, and mirrors a lot of general marketing advice. Talk about the value to the customer, don’t brag about how good you are, give them actually helpful content, and don’t be clickbaity or annoying.
A good customer newsletter comes at a time that’s good for the customer, not when you forget it’s due and rush to put it out on a Friday afternoon.
If you sell accounting software, don’t send your customer update at the end of the month - that’s when your customer is the most busy and unable to action anything you send them. Send it a few weeks before they get busy, so they’ve got time to absorb how your product can help them during tax time, and they go into that period armed with knowledge about how they’re going to use your product to do their job.
While we’re on cadence, customer newsletters can be more irregular than a standard newsletter. Consider monthly, quarterly, and even yearly. But again, don’t just default to the end or start of that time period, it could be in the middle, it could be 3 weeks after the start of the quarter, whatever. If you use defaults, so does everyone else, and then you’re competing for inbox space.
You might also want to use the seasons, which slightly misalign with quarters, as your trigger. This can help you create themes as well, like “spring clean your data” or “summer of sun, sand, and cyber security”. Your brand can really shine when you do something like this, even if it’s not “fun”!
Make assumptions in your CTAs
One thing that always bugs me if I’m an active user of a platform is getting an email that asks me to do something like “start” using the platform, “set up” my account, and so on. I’m an active user, I don’t need these prompts, I need deeper prompts like how to “level up” the way I’m using it, or find out about an under utilised feature.
I know the pain of a platform not having deep links — i.e. you cannot link someone to inside the product, you can only link them to a generic login page. If you have this issue, find someone in the product team who is held accountable for product usage metrics and tell them if they can deliver deep links, you can make them look REALLY good at their job.
Regardless, if an email is going out to customers, there’s some safe assumptions you can make, and express them through your copy. For example, assuming everyone already has an account and doesn’t need to set one up (unless you’re segmenting active from inactive or they’re going through onboarding etc.)
There’s a both good and bad example in here of exactly what I’m talking about. The body copy says “30% discount on a licence for your friend” - not for you because we know you’re a customer, but invite a friend and give them 30% off. However, this is lost in the button! Instead of “get” they could have used “Give CleanMyMac with 30% Off”
Sometimes customer =/= user
I’ve worked on products where we didn’t have direct access to the users, and could only market to the account holders or admins. This is tough, because you need to basically ask them to do your job for you, give them all the tools, and then cross your fingers and hope for the best.
This is where you need to think outside the box. If your customers are largely office based, you can do physical materials mailed out to their locations, with posters, merch, and just generally create a physical presence so at least you’re top of mind. This costs way more than an email though, so it might be something you drip feed to customers across the span of a year (i.e. send to one different customer a week, every week.)
When they’re remote or work from home, it’s quite difficult to reach them. My best advice is find your champion, shower them with love, and give them marketing materials to promote across Slack/Teams, internal emails, team updates, and so on. Write the snippets for them so all they have to do is copy and paste.
Never do this one thing
My biggest pet peeve… sending a customer newsletter… with content… that’s gated. It drives me mad. I just came here FROM EMAIL. YOU HAVE MY EMAIL. Please, for all that is good, do not send links to gated content. Send me to the file. Please.
Just one link
I’ve been thinking about turning each of the Mehdeeka seasons into physical copies, like how the Guardian turned their long read articles into a magazine.
P.S. Sorry today’s issue was late! I forgot to schedule it….
Ciao,
Kayla