⚡️ Launch Week Results and the Simple Zapier Hack that Supercharged our Customer Discovery.
We just did a soft launch of our app, but before we shared the page we set up a simple Zapier zap that super powered our customer discovery.
Backstory: Reflection.app is a new project for us at Holstee.com and our first app.
About a week before we completed our MVP for Reflection.app we pushed our landing page live: https://www.reflection.app/ to capture early interest.
Here is our flow for every new early access sign up:
Every new signup is added to a list in Klaviyo (our email tool).
This triggers a short (few sentence) email that comes from me and it gets sent about 10 minutes after sign up and is intended to help us understand the goals of the user.
I wanted to collect all the data in a spreadsheet but also wanted to keep it personal and easy for our customers. I wanted people to be able to respond to the email rather than kick them out to survey or form. (I read and respond to every email so it was important to me that the tools we use reflect our personal approach - even if we are leveraging tools to help us make that happen.)
So I created a new forward only email address for this email only. This email goes to two places:
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Helpscout our help ticket tool for managing customer communication
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Zapier where we created a zap that adds each email response to a Google Doc spreadsheet.
We sent a simple email to our community at Holstee (about 40K).
The email had a 23% open rate and a 2.9% click rate. Which is on par with our expectations.
In the first few days we had about 960 early access request sign ups.
About 55% conversation rate from landing page to email sign up.
Incredibly though, nearly half of all sign ups responded to that email. So my Helpscout inbox exploded with 500+ thoughtful insights about what our customers were hoping to achieve through our new app.
The emails were in Helpscout so I could easily respond without impacting my personal email account, but also in a spreadsheet so I could easily find and mark patterns and responses.
I am slowly responding to each customer and adding them to the app — about 30 new people a day.
My desire to read and thoughtfully respond to each email is naturally throttling new users, ensuring we are able to keep up with all customer requests and the app remains stable for everyone as we squash any bugs.
Responding to hundreds of emails, isn’t really scalable but it is offering us incredible insight into who are customers are and what they are hoping to achieve — and at this stage with our MVP understanding our users needs is our top priority.
It also allows me to build a personal relationship with our earliest customers and supporters. Which I find personally fulfilling :-)
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Maybe something similar could work for your project?
Have you had success with other ways of collecting customer feedback to help you fine tune our product market fit?
Leave a comment, would love to hear from y'all.
Very cool @daverad, congrats on all the engagement. A 50% reply rate on the welcome email is phenomenal!
To help tune our product market fit for new sign ups, I set up a similar "user intent survey" , located in app during the opening signup sequence. We created the survey modal with Appcues, to understand what their primary goal is with our app. The form response gets passed via zapier to our email campaign handler (Intercom) as a tag on the user. Once the user is tagged, we can send them targeted email campaign content that speaks to their personal interests and intent. :)
That sounds awesome. Love how you are able to feed that response back to customers, and send messaging that is more relevant for them based on their answers. I hadn't heard of appcues will take a look!
Totally - we're working on a case study with them currently that may be published as early as next week. The article will include technical details on how to set it up. Would you like me to share it with you when it comes out?