How we built our onboarding email flow (with actual performance data)

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

PostHog improved their onboarding emails through many versions, focusing on personalization and timing. They found users like valuable, well-spaced emails and rarely unsubscribe. The latest flow uses fun, personal messages that help users activate features.

Key takeaways:

1. Personalize emails based on user roles and interests.
2. Space emails out to about one per week to avoid annoyance.
3. Make emails useful and avoid pushy sales language.

Highlights from Article

I’d observed from other companies that we needed to at least add a welcome email for new users, and I wanted to add checks after 24, 96, and 168 hours to see if users had ingested events. If yes, we’d send them some basic usage advice. If no, we’d offer them help. This was the very least I felt we could do.

• Focusing on non-engaged users after singup.

What does good look like for an email onboarding flow? Benchmarks vary wildly by industry, implementation, and product. As a rule though, the guideline benchmarks I use from my experience in other startups are:Open rate: Anything above 40% is OK. 50% is the goal.Click-through-rate: Anything above 4% is OK. 6% is the goal. Conversion rate: Anything above 3% is OK. 5% is the goal. Unsubscribe rate: Anything below 1% is OK. 0% is the goal.

How this works is simple: when a user signs up, they can optionally tell us what their role is. If their role_at_organization = engineer we trigger an email from me telling them about our Product for Engineers newsletter.

Best of all, though, because it was personalized and came from me directly, it also earned a steady trickle of replies.

It’s also where, following some feedback, I decided to more directly embrace the PostHog tone of voice and make everything a little bit more sassy and anarchic.

• Added character

First, I wanted to more actively encourage cross-sell again, but this time with a focus on doing it just for products that combined really well

The new onboarding features a new loop when users first sign up that assesses whether they’ve successfully ingested any data across any of our products. If they haven’t we first attempt to help them with that before moving on

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

See other recent things I’ve read here.