3 cool retention hacks you can automate today

1. Welcome email + next steps

After a new user signs up you’ll want to automate a welcome email. Why? Most people who sign up will click around your app and never come back. You want to remind them that you exist. Also, people just like feeling welcome. Don’t send a generic email using a template. Write it in your own words. Make sure they can answer.
Automate a welcome email with some cool tricks or interesting things they can do in your app. Try to help them do the most basic things they can do with it. It can be a list of the top 3 things they can do easily today or examples of what other users are doing to inspire them.

2. Offer free stuff 2 days later

Another email you’ll want to automate is a reminder for 2 days later. Send some free resources (e.g. a video explaining how to do something with your app or a blog post). You want your users to remember to log in again.
Here we are targeting users who:

1. Created an account and never came back. These people might not have completed your most basic onboarding. You’ll want to help them do that.
2. Users who completed your onboarding but didn’t do much after that. You’ll want to help them take the next step. That might be doing another action or exploring a more advanced feature.

3. Make it personal

Finally, 2 days later you’ll want to send an automated email that offers personalized help. We are targeting at 2 types of users:

1. “Cold” users. Users who didn’t complete the onboarding yet, even after our last email and that will most likely never come back to the app again.
2. Power users. They completed the onboarding but could do more. You’ll want to help them do more.

For the first type, this might be the type of user who didn’t find what they were looking for. You want to understand what that was to learn from it and improve your product.
For the power users, these are the type of users you want to have an active conversation with. They can help you test beta features in the future and if they like your product, they’ll recommend it to others.

Send a Calendly link to get them to schedule a call with you or ask some questions they can answer over email.

But how?

A quick way to automate all these emails (with templates for these actions and all) is to use palabra.io, a free tool for no-coders to automate emails easily.