$5 tool: How I send a personal message (incl. follow ups) to 100's of sign-ups

We are fortunate enough to have hundreds of people signing up every week.

Obviously, every sign-up is an opportunity: Someone found us, was intrigued enough to sign up and test the product. We want to leverage that. Not every sign up will buy, but every sign up can provide valuable feedback or insights.

However, without a good process, the follow-ups quickly occupied a good chunk of my workday… I ran into a bunch of problems:

• The sign-ups piled up in our list of new users when I was working on other things.
• Our product analytics tool doesn’t let me tick off/mark sign-ups in the people view.
• I didn’t want to set up a custom Slack notifier for every sign-up because it would make Slack notifications redundant. But I also kept forgetting to follow up within 24h…
• Each follow up took too long to be effective.

So in short: I struggled to reach out on time and personalized. And the leads went stale…

Customer research and communication are key for a product development. And since personalized messages work much better, I didn’t want to fully automate. So I looked for a better process and tooling.

The new process needed to tick the following boxes:

[X] Filter out personal email addresses from the sign-up list.
[X] Let me reach out within 24h after sign up.
[X] Reach out with a personalized message.
[X] Auto-follow up twice (a lot of sales happen after the 2nd and 3rd follow-up).

I looked for a simple tool to help me do that - and found Vocus: It does exactly what I need (and a tiny bit more). And even the $5 plan is enough for now because it packs the two things I need: Email templates with placeholders (they call this Snippets) and automatic follow-ups 😍.

And it comes at a really fair price!

Since I cannot add images, the tutorial is a bit tedious to follow. I've shared a link at the bottom where you can see this write up incl. images.

But here it is in a nutshell:

1. On Vocus: Create a Snippet incl. placeholders for name or company name
2. On Vocus: Create the automatic follow-ups (incl. placeholders)
3. On Vocus: Attach the follow-up to the snippet
4. On Formbricks: Create an onboarding survey and add it to your onboarding
5. On Formbricks: Attach the email of the user to the submissions. Activate email notifications
6. On Gmail: Filter out all sign ups with personal emails (@gmail.com etc)
7. On Gmail: For every sign up, look at the data of the onboarding survey and do a bit of research checking out the company website
8. On Gmail: Load the Vocus templates, fill in the data (Name, Company name, etc) and add a sentence which shows that you've looked into the company.
9. On Gmail: Let Vocus send the follow ups until the person responds (or all follow ups are sent)
10. Done :)

For me, this is the perfect balance of keeping control over personalization and automating away the tedious stuff (templating, follow-ups, mental load of having to think of doing a daily task in different tools).

It’s simple, cheap, and effective.

Have a look at the full write up with screenshots and the texts I use to reach out at https://formbricks.com/blog/how-to-follow-up-with-sign-ups

Keep shipping 🚢