The Efficiency of Inefficiency
About a month ago I was getting ready to send out an email blast asking for feedback when I took a moment to stop and think.
I asked myself, If I got this in my inbox, how likely would I be to reply to it? and immediately answered, Not very.
The problem with online tools is that they make it incredibly easy to solve problems, but in doing so, they sometimes lead you to solve the wrong problem efficiently.
With customer communication, the problem is not “contact customers and get it over with”.
Contacting your customer – whether it’s via email, phone, or carrier pigeon – is a means to an end: listening to what they have to say.
As some of you know, I’m the product manager for KISSmetrics, and the task at hand that day was to reach out to our earliest beta customers to check in – find out how they were using our product, nudge the ones who weren’t yet using it, and hopefully remind folks to send me some brutally honest feedback.
I had about 70 people to contact who fell neatly into two camps: those who were engaged and actively using the product, and those who had started the process but weren’t really engaged yet.
Clearly, the efficient solution was to prepare an email for each group and use Campaign Monitor to blast them out in a matter of moments. Or was it?
I’ve sent out enough email newsletters and mass survey invitations to know what the average response rate is – 15% if you’re lucky, less than 10% normally.
And I had a hypothesis as to why. Bulk emails – no matter how carefully you craft the text – lack that sense of urgency. It’s hard to imagine that there’s an actual human on the other end anxiously awaiting your reply. So even if you flag it for a response, you don’t feel any hurry to get back to the sender, and it gets buried in your inbox.
So I chose the deliberately inefficient method and got around a 40% response rate.
With some help from copy and paste, I sent out individual emails to each beta customer. In taking the time to slow down, I remembered the people who’d had specific questions and added personalized notes.
Yes, it took longer – close to an entire day instead of the 5 minutes that a blast would’ve taken. But it also brought in thoughtful questions and suggestions and kicked off longer conversations – the kind of feedback most startups wring their hands over not getting.
Is it practical to send out individual emails when your customer base is closer to 7,000 than 70? Of course not. But there’s no reason why you can’t select a random 10%, or even 1% of your customers to get the individual treatment.
Next time you’re thinking of sending out an email newsletter or a survey invitation, think about the kind of feedback you need. Are you trying to answer “what?” or “which?” If you need to answer “what”, be efficient: take the inefficient route.
P.S. Yes, I know — the best way to validate my hypothesis would have been to split-test and send half of my followups via mass email and the other half individually. Maybe next time!
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