You Should Be Emailing Your Users From Day One

Today’s post will focus on a few of the support lessons I learned while working on Everblog.us. I consider support as:

  • Anything that involves working directly with a user to fix a problem
  • Any feature that is not part of the core product. (Authentication, user management, etc.)

Email Your Users At Sign Up!

  1. Get permission to email the user in the future
  2. Send the user an email welcoming them to the site

Adding a check box and sending out an email are two very simple things that I should have implemented into the sign-up process. To be honest, these basic features weren’t even on my radar. Due to this oversight I lost an opportunity to start and continue a dialogue with people who want to support my site. I set myself up for various failures by not connecting with my users. The first email I sent to Everblog.us users was to re-authenticate their account after the “Great Evernote Password Reset of 2013”. I was scrambling and didn’t know who to send emails to. To make matters worse I had no idea how they would react to the message or if it would even get through their spam filters. If I would have started having conversations earlier with my user base it wouldn’t have seemed like such a big deal to send out the update in the first place.

Email Your Users Monthly

The first month or so I was a beast, I added features left and right – PDF support, RSS feeds, better notebook management and much more. The only place I announced any of these updates was in the Everblog Blog. It was better than nothing, but only a handful of users took advantage of the new features. In fact, I received a few requests for features that were already implemented from users that were unaware of the updates. If I had a recurring newsletter I am sure the features would have had better adoption and users would be happier.

Keep The Communication Going

Another important thing that I did not do, and will make sure to do next time, is create a forum for the site. It sounds old-school, but I think that it would of made a huge difference in how I managed the relationship with my users. It would have made my life a little easier in terms of answering questions about the site. Plus there is the added potential of crowd sourcing. If I can’t answer a question maybe one of the users can

I want to close out each one of these articles with a few “Startup Protips”

Raul’s Startup Protips

Keep an open dialogue with your users from day one with emails and a forum