A single most effective SaaS email follow-up you're probably not using yet

Email follow-ups are a growing trend in SaaS startups community — every successful founder I’ve met swears by it. At Jitbit we are no exception. Over the course of last two years we’ve sent thousands of emails to customers and prospects.

We’ve tried different types of follow-ups with different sequences — pretty much the same things that everyone else is doing. But lately I’ve come up with a follow-up that is five times more effective than anything else we’ve tried.

30 minutes after a trial sign-up

Basically we just send a personal email from one of the founders 30 minutes after a user signed up for a trial. Yes, it’s really simple, but yet it proved to be incredibly effective. This is what it looks like for our hosted help desk app:

Subject: Enjoying your Hosted Help Desk so far?

Hi

I’m Max, a co-founder of Jitbit. Sorry for another email, but I really like contacting our users personally to get to know them better. I have just one quick question: why have you signed up for Jitbit SaaS Helpdesk?

If you have a minute to answer, that would be great. Knowing why you’ve signed up would be really helpful in making sure we’re moving in the right direction. Just hit “reply” and let me know.

If you have any questions of your own, I’d be happy to answer.

Thanks, Max Co-founder, Jitbit

It roughly has a 20% response rate, which is huge comparing to other follow-ups we have, and it helps us achieve several things at once.

Getting marketing insight

This email message is a very good place to put a question related to the sign up process. You’ve got to be careful of what question to pick. For example “what features do you miss the most?” is a bad question to ask here: it’s been 30 minutes, they don’t know yet.

We ask users why did they sign up. In other words, what made them convert from visitors to trial users. We’ve been getting tons of valuable answers. I assume that’s because user’s memory is still fresh and he remembers exactly what made him sign up.

Solving user problems quickly

30 minutes after a trial sign up is a great point in customer’s lifecycle. At this point users often encounter problems. Whether they can solve them makes them either stay or go. And that’s when the follow-up comes in.

This follow-up helps you solve initial problems users have with your app therefore making them stay. We helped lots of users with their issues through this email message and many metrics, such as trial retention and engagement, went up. It also helps you identify problem spots that you can fix, which in its turn also leads to higher conversion rates.

Direct connection with a potential customer

Since users tend to respond to this follow-up, it gets you a lot more prospects you can talk directly to. It works really well for us — we have an awesome customer support department and it gives us an opportunity to show a potential customer that we are actually nice and helpful.

Users, who contacted us directly are twice more likely to convert to customers, so we are trying to talk to as much users as possible. This follow-up helps us a lot.

So there you have it — the best SaaS email follow-up we’ve used so far. It helps us achieve so many things and does it incredibly effectively. I suggest you give it a try and please share your results in comments.