Yury is unhappy with the conversion rate. Average conversion rate is 2.91% according to Hubspot. Ours was 1.6% as of ~12 hours after sending. Currently 19%.
Yury rewrote the subject line not long before we sent it to be more direct. I had written it specifically to pique curiosity. I’m not sure the direct subject lines are necessarily more effective.
I wrote this message to Yury to share my concerns and ideas for an alternative approach:
Sorry to bother you on the weekend, Yury. I’m having trouble getting my mind off the email and the clickthrough rate. Two things that I think are important and we should consider when sending the next one:
- Current clickthrough rate is 1.9%. That will likely rise a little. Hubspot says average clickthrough rate is 2.9%. Would we like it to be higher? Yes, but it doesn’t look catastrophic. It’s natural that, as we add subscribers, clickthrough rate will go down, especially since some of those are coming from 1.0 and 2.0 launches so they’re potentially very stale.
- Do you know for a fact that very straightforward subject lines perform best? I sent emails weekly to my audience of several thousand developers for 4-5 years, and I don’t recall that being the case for me. I know I have personally gotten emails with subject lines containing product names that I may have been interested in once upon a time but don’t even remember anymore. If we’re sending people who signed up for our 1.0 and 2.0 events a subject line that’s something like “EdgeDB 4.0 and Cloud launch,” there’s a really good chance those people don’t even know what EdgeDB is anymore unless they’ve been using it regularly since then (and if they have, they’re probably already registered for the event). If we want to optimize clickthrough rate, we need to focus not on what we want to say but on what they want to hear… or what will generate enough curiosity to get them to open. To get more people out the end of the funnel, we can start by plugging leaks along the way. (That said, open rate isn’t too bad, so it may be good to consider a better call-to-action too. I think ours was pretty weak, and we can probably find something more compelling.)
For our next email, I’d propose a short article with a title/subject line something like “What we learned by shipping new EdgeDB versions 3x as frequently.”
- It’s relevant to developers, who are exactly the people we want to reach.
- It’s relevant even if you don’t care about EdgeDB.
- It makes another email make sense, since this is a unique piece of content that is about our launch but not a rerun of the last email which was a pitch for the launch itself.
- That means it gives us an excuse to talk about the launch (and get people’s attention on it) without just saying, “Hey, remember us? We’re the people who emailed you last week, and we can’t help notice you didn’t click to register.”
- I can write some of this from a devrel perspective, and I could work with some people in engineering to get their take on that side of it. With those two perspectives, I think we could write something that would give people something to think about. We can talk about how scary it was to commit to not shipping a boatload of features with every release and even to potentially shipping a version with no real headline features. Then we can tell about the advantages and why we think it was ultimately the right move. It can be a bit like a meatier version of what we wrote in the 3.0 changelog.
- This is something people can forward because we’re going to share unique learnings and value, instead of just plugging our launch. We give something away first to get more attention on what we want them to buy.
- The ending could be something like, “We didn’t ship nearly as much this time, but we think we’ve still put together a launch that is compelling and brings a lot to the table for developers. If you want to see what a smaller launch looks like and assess how we did, please join us for Developer Day — our launch event for the latest EdgeDB release and our EdgeDB Cloud managed database service. Maybe you’ll find your next database, or maybe you’ll just pick up some tips for how you might increase your release cadence while still making releases something users can get excited about!”
- The cool thing about marketing to people who are doing the same thing as us is that we can harness that to teach them how to do the things we’re doing for them. In the process, they still hear our pitch, but to them it could feel like more than just a sales pitch — it could also feel like a learning opportunity, if we frame it that way. This gives them a reason to attend, even if they aren’t interested in the pitch, and it gives us a chance to win them over even if they thought they didn’t want to hear it in the first place.
We could even then take the content of this email and post it on the blog, share it to HN, reddit, etc, ahead of the launch to reach more people who aren’t on our list.This doesn’t have to be the idea, but I think it could be one worth trying. It’s more work than another email repeating the pitch for 4.0 and Cloud, but I think that’s exactly what could make it more effective… or at least effective to a different type of recipient that wasn’t compelled to open or click through on the email we already sent.