search

PostHog / meta

This is a place to discuss non-product issues in public.
MIT License
18 stars 4 forks source link

Messaging: Automated newsletter invites to engineers #122

Closed joethreepwood closed 1 year ago

joethreepwood commented 1 year ago

Context

We just launched automated PostHog for Startups invites for founders via https://github.com/PostHog/meta/issues/121

An idea I proposed in the subsequent marketing sprint was doing similar automation to invite users who say they are engineers to subscribe to the Product for Engineers newsletter. Feedback is welcome.

Goal

More newsletter subscriptions. This is an OKR for Marketing.

Proposal

This would be a simple personal message sent to all users who specify themselves as engineers. The email, which would come from Joe or Andy, would tell users about the newsletter and provide a link to subscribe. That's it.

To prevent this from immediately annoying users or interfering with the onboarding processes, we add this email to the end of the Cloud onboarding flow.

  1. This will only be sent to users who have the Completed_onboarding_emails = true property (added after the campaign is otherwise completed)
  2. The email will only send to users who list themselves as engineers
  3. This email will send at a weekday, 5 days after the onboarding campaign is complete

Alternatives considered

It was suggested in the sprint that we could instead:

  1. Run this as a holdout test and only target a proportion of engineers (@andyvan-ph)
  2. Wait to see how https://github.com/PostHog/meta/issues/121 performed first (@joethreepwood)
  3. Add this to the signup flow somehow instead of relying on email (@charlescook-ph)

However, these each have issues.

  1. A holdout test would limit the reach of the campaign and be more conservative, but wouldn't get us more information. If the idea is to see if users will complain then we should roll out aggressively to find out as fast as possible, so we can act on it. A limited roll out would mean this campaign needs to run for longer to get the result.
  2. https://github.com/PostHog/meta/issues/121 is targeting a different group, with a different incentive so would not be indicative. It's also a small user set, so would take a very long time to reach a statistically relevant result.
  3. @smallbrownbike and I discussed, and quickly determined the potential gain (newsletter subscriptions) was not worth the likely impact to conversion.

Preview

Screenshot 2023-08-01 at 12 20 20
charlescook-ph commented 1 year ago

Apologies for the basic question - will we be able to screen out people who have already subscribed to the newsletter?

Overall agree with this! Only suggestion I'd make is the subject is quite bland/corporate sounding? e.g. something like 'Super secret invite to PostHog newsletter' or something more fun feels more in keeping with the brand.

joethreepwood commented 1 year ago

That's a good point. The simplest way would be to trigger an event when a user subscribes, but we can't do that AFAIK.

There's no Zapier integration with Substack, so we can't do an automation to take out the cohort either.

@andyvan-ph any ideas?

charlescook-ph commented 1 year ago

Worst case, we could just say 'if you're not already, why not subscribe' but obv that's less smooth

ivanagas commented 1 year ago

Some ideas, feel free to take or leave any of them:

andyvan-ph commented 1 year ago

+1 to Ian's suggestions

joethreepwood commented 1 year ago

Should we include a couple of links to past articles?

Sure.

Would be cool (I think) if it came from Andy and he mentions he writes it.

Happy with this. @andyvan-ph want to draft something and post it here? I'll then put it in and set up a Customer.io alias.

Idea to add it in product, once someone checks all the onboarding steps? I don't know if everyone gets these or just the first user in org.

I've actually just put a proposal to include this in the onboarding email flow already. We could put it in the product too, but that's probably a @raquelmsmith call.

Maybe mention: "If you've already subscribed, reply and let us know what you think we should write about next?"

Will let Andy decide for his draft.

raquelmsmith commented 1 year ago

I'd like to pass on the in-app component if that's okay :)

joethreepwood commented 1 year ago

Closed this async with Andy and have it ready to deploy in Onboarding 3.0 project, so will close this out for now.

Further updates will go at: https://github.com/PostHog/meta/issues/123