a single source, nothing corroborates it

Cut the welcome email until it feels too short

Length is what makes a new user skim past a welcome email and read the offer of help as boilerplate, so removing everything inessential lifts replies sharply. Halving the winner again keeps returning gains long after it feels wrong, and the same question applies to every element: does removing it cost anything.

The method

1. 01

   Cut your onboarding email to a fraction of its length to get replies: length itself is what makes users skip it and assume the offer of help is a template.

2. 02

   Then cut it in half again - the shortening keeps paying off well past the point it feels too short.

3. 03

   Run it as a test you can set up in under an hour: remove everything unnecessary from your welcome email, cut another half, then measure positive replies against the original.

4. 04

   Ask of every element in a piece of work whether removing it would cost you anything of value, and cut it when the answer is no - this applies to templates, banner images and formatting in your emails.

What it returned

• 150

  Netlify's 150+ word welcome email, personalized, plain and sent by a real person within a day, replied to 1% of the time; a 37-word version got 4%.

• 37

  Trimming the 37-word winner to 14 words doubled replies again to 8%, one in twelve users; 90% shorter than the original produced eight times the replies.

• 13%

  A plain-text meetup invitation from Pinecone got 13% more opens than the templated version, drew replies where the template got none, held the same clickthrough rate among openers, and cut preparation time by 30-50%.

Sources

• To Get More Replies, Say LessGreg Kogan · gkogan.co · First A/B Test: Original vs Short Email · 2017-05-05
• Would Anything (of Value) Be Lost?Greg Kogan · gkogan.co · 2024-07-27