# The Dinner Party Strategy: A SaaS Customer Onboarding Framework with Val Geisler Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI9Msr4ZVAo Duration: 12 min Language: English Words: 2029 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/hI9Msr4ZVAo --- [0:00] [Music] [Music] [0:14] [Applause] hey everybody come on in um I agree with Leon on a lot of things but I say gif yeah thank you judge me if you will for that I'm gonna talk you guys through a email onboarding framework so you can use this framework for onboarding but you can also use it for email campaigns in general it's called the dinner-party strategy I love metaphors to help people connect to things that might not make sense otherwise it also helps it stick in your brain which is really it's a lot back to what Lana said jokes and things that you relate to stick in your brain so hopefully this will stick in yours [0:59] and you are in the right place if you bought a ticket for micro comp but also if you send emails to an existing list for your brand and this is for you if you feel completely overwhelmed by the idea of segmenting your list and then if you aren't sure what kind of emails to send besides links to your latest blog post I feel like a lot of brands maybe just write blog posts and then send out links and there are other emails to send as well and if you don't want to over email your list I hear that a lot like I don't want to bother people you won't be [1:33] bothering people if you do it right so a little bit about me and that's me Val Geisler I am an email marketing conversion copywriter and strategist it is a mouthful I worked in house as the first marketing hire an email marketing software companies that is a friend of Micro Kampf convertkit I spent some time they are learning everything I know could possibly know about email marketing and I write email onboarding tear downs on my blog so you can go to my website and there's tear downs of various software companies watch out I'm coming for you I am obsessed with churn reduction through email and if you are [2:15] concerned about churn or your customer numbers and sales isn't always the first place to turn look at the customers you've already attracted and keep them and I've worked with brands like access Ally pick beacon podía acuity and more on this and so one thing I know for sure is that there's no right answer for all email marketing what works for your business might not work for everyone or what works for someone else might not work for you testing everything an email is about testing and that's why I love it I'm a data and information person I love setting and sending emails out and seeing what kind of results we get and [2:54] then tweaking and making changes from there and you cannot set it and forget it if you wrote an email onboarding campaign three six years ago it's time to revisit it and you can be an email pro so the dinner-party strategy these are gifts but they're not working what it's working oh it doesn't work down here but you see it Cheers okay so so you have here are some examples of onboarding emails so I sign up for free trials I sign up for a lot of free trials and I get the emails so you have a couple of examples here the county one looks like a really long one [3:35] but that's actually two different trials I signed up for and calendly three emails over the course of 30 days harvest stands for deep dive which is not a free trial a paid signup for deep dive and in my first month I got two emails from them and then the last one we have four emails so the point here is that most software companies are not sending enough emails in that trial period once you have a 14 day trial of 30 day trial a paid first month even with a 30 day money-back guarantee maybe you want to be in communication with your customers deep dive I forgot [4:17] actually I had a calendar reminder to cancel after my first month but I forgot that I had deep dive because I never heard from them so dinner party strategy how to plan a party you usually have when you have people over to your house you might have like a welcome you have a little bit of time before you that you walk in and serve them dinner immediately there's maybe some appetizer as a main course side dishes which are my favorite so they get an exclamation point and dessert and then you hopefully enjoy the evening and you invite people to come back and so that's what you're [4:50] gonna do in your emails so this is the welcome email I'll walk you through each one as an example of each one of those this is a welcome email from drift and drift is a very I mean obviously they do conversational marketing they coined that term so I think so they really get what they're doing here but it's a very friendly they're welcome emailed by the way welcome welcome to X welcome to insert yours company name is the most used welcome email you will stand out immediately if you do not have the subject line welcome to my brand if you just write something else just saying [5:29] hey and this is Dave just saying hey shout out to the Dave's in the room there is a little video of him and you can see how casual it is right like he's in a room with the door there's like a fire alarm behind him it's not highly produced you do not have to have a video crew and tons of money to make really personal emails that people relate to the second step of the dinner party strategy is appetizers this is where you're bringing in value so we're not talking about the product yet you maybe are linking to it but we're not like shoving features down your face we're [6:03] giving you value and so this is an email from a proposal software and they're talking about the most used feature in a proposal in why people come to a proposal software is to have a template to make things simple for their lives so this is adding value to the customer's life by showing them how to get the most it is about the product but it's also about the customer so the main course this is your product this is why people signed up for your trial and that's the email that comes next and this is a 100% product focused email you still relate the product back to the customer it's [6:39] never all about you so again not shoving features down their virtual throats but really focusing on the customer now on the third email not the first not the second but the third side dishes so this is more value I'm Co schedule I gave you two images here so on the left hand side that is one long email so if you think long emails don't work think again try it test it but this is one big long email introducing this very long piece of content that they created that is an e-book a little bit of an online course but it's completely free to their subscribers and it's [7:19] nothing but value obviously that piece of content tells people how to use Co schedule in their skyrocketing their marketing results but they're purely creating content for the purpose of driving people to using their product dessert is a little bonus so this is where you are getting closer to the end of the trial and you might want to give people a little bonus to take action to get them converted and so this is Deb Sato and other proposals software and they are talking about using their referral programs so they're encouraging people to give referrals and they're actually gonna give them time extra time on their their software for free in [8:00] exchange for those referrals so again this is like what's in it for them to to actually talk about your product and create some virality around it the last thing in our dinner party is that we get give some kind of return invite we invite people to come back on this is Monday comm which is also another proposal software I don't I don't know I chose all of those but Monday comm does a great job of asking people to come back so onboarding does not end when the trial ends ok onboarding goes on even if they don't convert you have an you have a huge opportunity with everyone who did [8:40] not convert from your free trial to talk to them again and invite them to come back you can see here this is a actually is a very short email so the smaller one is the the whole email and then that the body of the email is really brief but it is saying just come back we're not they're not offering a whole new free trial they're they do offer an extension on your free trial but they're not giving some kind of major give away they're not really impacting their bottom line because this is already a customer who hasn't converted so extending their trial can be a way to get them to come back so you [9:17] want to avoid the spam trap in all these emails the the key to getting people to convert from your emails is getting them to actually see and open your emails and to do that you want to be useful you want to be personal which Ileana talked about and you want to limit distractions right so you're onboarding emails all have a job this framework gives you those jobs that they are going to do and you can this is another example of an email that does nothing but that there are two links in this email but they point to the same place it's very distraction free it's super [9:52] useful and really personal to that particular customers journey so I want to make sure that in this very brief little talk that you have a few takeaways so creating high-value onboarding campaigns for your customers is really doable and even if you have never done it before you can build and connect your with your customers build a relationship with your customers and it changes your business it absolutely changes your business I've seen it in action and I'm here to help you do it for yourself through this talk you can take this framework and apply it to your own customer journey and watch it in action so Einstein said that everything in life [10:31] should be as simple as possible but not simpler and that's true for email so I want you to put it to work and then I'm on Twitter pretty active I think I'm connected with a lot of you already but if you're not already connected with me I'm at love girl love Val Geisler I can see my own name and that is where you can tell me what you learned from today's talk or you know phone a chat further in general please remember though that this is not just theory this is what I do every single day I focus on email onboarding you can see when you check out my blog that that [11:04] is something I'm pretty obsessed with so there there the Zach same principles that you can use for any campaign - so we talked about onboarding specifically but you can use this for any campaign driven emails the the idea of having them walking them through an entire customer journey whether it's onboarding retention promotion win-back campaigns there's all kinds of ways you can use this framework and if you have questions I am at hey girl at Belle goes o calm and Val geyser calm is my website thank you [11:40] you --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). 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