in San Francisco in 2016 after moving from Sydney, Australia.
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...
It’s an interesting time for
.
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.
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
:
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
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?
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.
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.
Finally, we built human-like email sequences in our email automation software (Hugo uses
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:
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.
The old challenge of starting
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 you think of Hugo's SaaS onboarding emails?Let me know in the comments below…