Winning Winback: How SparkToro prioritizes feature requests, builds relationships, and shares killer pasta recipes with a combo feedback-retention-winback email

0:00: I want to maximize the rate of response while not asking people to give feedback that they didn’t feel was critical or key, right? 

 0:10: So I’m not trying to push you like, hey, everybody, you need to reply no matter what, you’ve got to tell me something. 

 0:15: Welcome to email swipes where we peek behind the scenes at the emails that catch your attention and earn their place in your swipe file. 

 0:22: Every other week, we’ll talk to an email expert about an experiment they ran and in the following episode, we’ll dive into strategies and methods used in the email so you can inform and inspire your own email work. 

 0:32: I’m Mickey Elvas, the copywriter behind winning emails for eight and nine figure Sass and e commerce brands like Shopify for Stigmatic and Sprout Social. 

 0:40: And I know that hearing the background stories to these emails will help you turn pie in the sky insights into plug and play actions, ready to make inspiration tactical. 

 0:48: Let’s go first. 

 0:49: Let’s read today’s email. 

 0:53: How do Nicky super quick questions and even a two word answer is appreciated. 

 0:57: Number one, how much value do you get from your free spark tour? 

 1:00: Account. 

 1:01: And what are you using it for? 

 1:03: Number two? 

 1:04: What if anything holds you back from using Spark Tora more upgrading your account and, or trying more searches Casey and I read every word you send us and take that feedback to heart. 

 1:13: Oh And if it’s been a while since you tried Spark of good news, we’ve got a bunch of upgrades, more data coverage, a new press tab and enhanced text insights. 

 1:21: Perfect for optimizing your Facebook ad campaigns using in social posts or to inform content strategy. 

 1:27: Give it a spin. 

 1:27: You’ve got 10 free searches every month. 

 1:29: Thanks. 

 1:30: A bundle R Fishkin. 

 1:31: Yes, this is my actual email P S. 

 1:34: If you want any tips on queries to try applying results to your marketing tactics, favorite pasta recipes, et cetera. 

 1:39: I’m always happy to help ran. 

 1:43: Thanks so much for joining. 

 1:44: Tell us who you are and what you do. 

 1:46: Sure. 

 1:47: Yeah. 

 1:47: Thanks for having me, Nikki. 

 1:48: I am the co founder and CEO of two companies. 

 1:52: One is Spark Toro which is in the audience research software space. 

 1:56: And the other one is Snack Bar Studio which is making an indie video game. 

 2:01: Super cool. 

 2:02: Yeah. 

 2:02: Previously I started and ran a company called Mas which was in the S E O software space and wrote a book that a lot of people know called Lost and founder, which is a painfully honest field guide to the start up world. 

 2:14: I like to help people do better marketing and build better companies. 

 2:17: Super cool. 

 2:18: Yeah, I feel like that book was probably and like, I mean, Maz was huge as well, but I feel like your book really put you. 

 2:24: It’s funny. 

 2:24: It’s the Lost and Found Guide. 

 2:25: But I feel like it put you on the map to be all funny. 

 2:30: I mean, the hope is, yeah, after the journey, right. 

 2:33: Of lost and founder that, like, I found myself a little bit more, found things that make me happy and also make my companies more able to have the success that they promise, which is so huge. 

 2:46: I feel like when we get started in the digital space, we’re so excited to just impact and you know, be successful and then it’s like, wait a second, what is this giving me in my life and then that turns around into the company and feeds the company and gives you real success. 

 3:00: So it’s pretty nice loop when it works. 

 3:02: Right. 

 3:03: Exactly. 

 3:03: Nothing always works. 

 3:04: Nothing ever always works. 

 3:06: So you might as well be happy while you’re doing it. 

 3:07: I mean, this is certainly a huge part of the shift between my early career, right? 

 3:12: My 17 years at Mas versus the last few years with Spa Toro and now snack bar, which is just the prioritization of different things, right? 

 3:19: Maz was growth at all costs blitz scaling hyper growth trying to be a billion dollar company raised tons of venture capital and made promises to those investors that we would Tenex their money. 

 3:33: Right. 

 3:33: And I think, you know, Maz was more successful than the vast majority of venture investments and still not successful, which is by the sort of promise that you make. 

 3:45: I don’t even think my suspicion is Maz didn’t even get its investors two times their money maybe right around two times their money. 

 3:52: Yeah, that’s obviously not the rate of return they’re looking for. 

 3:56: That’s very sobering, frustrating. 

 3:59: Yes. 

 3:59: Ok. 

 4:00: So pivoting to this email that I got from Spark Taro, first of all, I’m actually just curious because you mentioned like growth at all costs and all that. 

 4:07: So has this kind of feedback request and email and more personal sort of email. 

 4:14: Is that a shift from the way things were at law? 

 4:17: It’s interesting. 

 4:17: It’s almost a throwback in the very early years of Maz. 

 4:21: I wrote almost all the emails personally and send them out very personally. 

 4:27: I think in the really early days of Maz, a lot of the time, Geraldine, my wife who’s a now a James Beard award winning best selling author, she would write a lot of the emails or rewrite my emails, which is kind of fun. 

 4:38: But, but as the company got bigger and more formal and more corporate, that personal touch was lost. 

 4:45: I didn’t love that with Spark Toro. 

 4:47: It’s quite easy, Nikki because there’s only three of us, right? 

 4:50: So either the emails coming from me or Amanda or very unlikely Casey, my co-founder in our CTO who is not as big a fan of email as Amanda and I are. 

 5:02: But it’s funny he’s mentioned in the email always, he wrote the software like he makes the product happen. 

 5:07: He just doesn’t like he’s not in it for the glory. 

 5:11: That’s awesome. 

 5:12: Plus all the feedback, you know, it’s probably really useful for him. 

 5:15: So having him in the email loop, but not necessarily that sender name, I will say one of the things that’s very nice. 

 5:23: This is something I regret from my time at mas is that engineers were kept sequestered from customer interactions initially at sort of the request of the engineering team. 

 5:36: They were like, well, we’re bogged down, we have lots of work, you know, we don’t have time to review all these things and I should have insisted because having K C see every customer service request that comes in has literally changed his mind about feature prioritization, right? 

 5:53: And he has come around to the idea, you know, I’ll have something and I’ll suggest something in case he will say, you know, I get all our support emails. 

 6:00: I don’t think people want that. 

 6:01: And conversely, I’ll say, hey, I really think we should prioritize this in case he’s kind of I don’t know about that and then a lot of support emails will come in. 

 6:09: He’ll go, I’m building it. 

 6:11: Wow. 

 6:12: That’s so awesome power of feedback. 

 6:14: I don’t think we could do without it. 

 6:15: No, for sure not. 

 6:16: It’s amazing when companies try to do it without feedback. 

 6:20: You know, there’s this constant mantra that people repeat in start up world, talk to your customers and all day, every day, talk to our customers in case he talks to our customers and Amanda talks to our customers and it’s life changing, right? 

 6:32: Or at least outcome changing. 

 6:34: I don’t know why it’s so hard to do. 

 6:35: I think there’s that like tension between wanting to just sit in a corner and build things, which is kind of the artist’s way. 

 6:41: And I think there is something beautiful and something that I respect about wanting to be an artist and your company, your start up, your business is your art, your product is your art. 

 6:51: You want to own and control that not someone else outside, you know, art, the committee is awful. 

 6:56: So I have respect for that. 

 6:58: And also there’s this nuance of it’s really hard to make something that people love and want and are willing to pay for and really help them through intuition alone. 

 7:08: Yes. 

 7:09: And through your own experience of OK, this is what I want. 

 7:11: So it must be what everyone wants. 

 7:14: Having that humility sometimes takes experience. 

 7:17: I find it odd that especially the sort of venture investor class thinks that 20 year old recent college graduates are the founders worthy of the most billions of dollars. 

 7:27: I find that strange. 

 7:28: It’s all about optics. 

 7:29: Right. 

 7:30: I think it’s weird that people gave me money in my twenties. 

 7:33: So, but you weren’t going to complain about it. 

 7:35: I’m grateful. 

 7:36: But also, yeah, a few years to b would have made a difference. 

 7:40: Oh, that’s interesting. 

 7:41: Huh? 

 7:42: You really felt like a difference in experience from the few years. 

 7:45: Yeah. 

 7:45: I mean, I became certainly more, more mature in my thinking, more emotionally resilient. 

 7:53: You know, I had very high highs and very low lows in my twenties. 

 7:58: I, I don’t know if that’s hormones or what it is. 

 8:01: You know, the fact that everything was new, but also the immaturity of leadership and management, especially people management. 

 8:07: I think that’s why you get a lot of broken cultures and sort of awful experiences for employees and teams and investors and founders and all that kind of stuff is that there isn’t a lot of emotional maturity among a ton of the especially this is not to single them out, but like the tech sector start up world has this youth obsession and obviously male obsession and that doesn’t always create the best cultures. 

 8:34: Cool, I mean, not cool but not cool. 

 8:38: Insightful. 

 8:41: Alrighty. 

 8:42: OK. 

 8:42: So you were writing all the emails at mas. 

 8:44: Are you writing all the emails now for Sparta as well? 

 8:47: No, I write maybe 10% 20% of our emails that go out. 

 8:53: Amanda writes the overwhelming majority So she sends the email newsletter every two weeks, which is fairly substantive and involved and takes a lot of work and she and I have combined on our on boarding sequence. 

 9:07: A few of those emails are mostly me. 

 9:09: A few of them are mostly her. 

 9:11: And then occasionally we’ll have a whatever special one off email that goes out to people when we release a new feature or have a big event or something, right? 

 9:20: We have this big event coming up in Seattle called Spark Together. 

 9:23: And I think last year she wrote the email sequence for that and this year I did. 

 9:28: Yeah. 

 9:28: So we kind of trade off depends on who’s busy. 

 9:30: She’s got two kids, sometimes they’re sick, you know, and she’s indisposed and sometimes I’m traveling or working on something else. 

 9:37: So, yeah, we just tag team. 

 9:39: That’s cool because from the copywriter perspective, like the consultant perspective, I’ll often write emails from different team members, you know, just to give variety and you’re actually doing that. 

 9:48: It’s like the legit version. 

 9:50: Yeah. 

 9:50: Yeah. 

 9:50: And you know, I think that we try and do something that not a lot of companies, especially software as a service, you know, B to B types of companies do, which is flavor our emails and all of our content with our personalities, right? 

 10:06: So if you get an email from us, it is not going to sound very corporate and generic. 

 10:10: At least I hope it won’t if it does, please hit reply and tell me so we can put a I for this. 

 10:19: Oh my God. 

 10:19: I want you to know that a human being wrote it and human beings might make mistakes and grammar might not be perfect. 

 10:25: And hopefully there’s going to be some humor in there which anyone who’s ever tried to use A I to generate humor. 

 10:31: Impossible. 

 10:32: Yeah, comedian is going to be the last job put out of business by an A I. 

 10:36: So there’s also sort of, I want to say perspectives in there, right? 

 10:40: Like we have our unique perspective on how we see the space of digital marketing. 

 10:46: Like what we think is true in the world and what we think is good and bad, right? 

 10:51: For example, I think monopoly power is bad. 

 10:54: Like I don’t think that Google and Meta and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon should be able to dominate the industry the way that they do. 

 11:03: I think that’s mostly a failure of antitrust and you can feel it in my content and my blog posts and my emails and in my social posts, we don’t try to separate business and personal very much. 

 11:16: That’s cool because that’s the added value with the email. 

 11:20: So yes, you’re getting the actual content or the help and the, you know, on boarding tutorials and things like that. 

 11:25: But there’s so much to following a company and using a product. 

 11:29: Not just because you like the product, but because you like the builders behind the product. 

 11:33: So filtering that through is really giving that layer of value and also longevity that they’re going to stick to and be loyal to you and not just find a competitor that, you know, is a dollar a month cheaper. 

 11:45: It’s easy to migrate to because nobody switches for a dollar a month, it’s hard. 

 11:50: I mean, I will say we have quite a unique business in that way as well in that. 

 11:56: Spar Toro is not a lock you in type of product, right? 

 12:00: It’s a research tool. 

 12:01: So when you need to do the research, you go and do it. 

 12:04: And for many of our customers, they sign up for a month or two or three and then they quit and then six months later or a year later, they come back for a few months and then they quit again and then they come back that recidivism is something that we not only enable but encourage. 

 12:21: If you need to save a few bucks, we’ll send you an email before your billing comes up and say like, hey, if you’re not using Spataro right now, it’s a good time to pause your subscription or cancel it. 

 12:30: You can come back later, you’re not going to lose any of your stuff. 

 12:34: Research reports will be there for you whenever you want them and that I think is extremely different to most, almost all venture backed software companies because they have to worry a lot about lifetime value of a single subscription period because that’s how they’re going to raise their next round. 

 12:50: That’s how they’re gonna, you know, pitch the V CS, right. 

 12:53: The V CS have all these metrics that they want you to hit, that are not necessarily aligned with how customers perceive value and especially how they perceive like the kindness and generosity of the company. 

 13:07: And it’s very refreshing. 

 13:08: That’s actual customer experience versus pretend customer experience. 

 13:13: Yeah, I mean, because we basically get to serve only one boss customers, right. 

 13:19: We don’t have these sort of other more important voices in the room telling us, hey, you need to do this for these other reasons. 

 13:27: Like our incentives are essentially just how do we make our customers happy and delighted, you know, when we talked earlier about building that second company and choosing to forgo venture this time around and structuring it different, keeping the team super small, making it very personal. 

 13:43: Like all these things are in alignment and they all fit around this ethos of just wanting to run this company and sort of the way you’d run a little cafe in a small town, you know, right where, you know, all the people they come in, if they had a good meal and they had good service, they’ll come back, but they’re not on a subscription plan. 

 14:02: You can’t lock them into spending a certain kind of here every night. 

 14:07: You got to have great food, better have good diversity of food, like the tables, better be comfortable, you know, prices better be decent. 

 14:14: I think that kind of thinking encourages companies that produce really great products and serve people well, as opposed to optimize for maximum growth rate and investor returns, which is not often correlated with making customers happy. 

 14:32: So I guess where does this feedback request fit into all that, both the overall email on boarding? 

 14:38: And then also, I mean, it’s pretty clear where it fits into in this ethos is you want to hear what the customers have to say. 

 14:45: I mean, for us, it’s like it helps with the classic things, right? 

 14:48: It definitely helps with prioritization and which product features to build. 

 14:52: It lets us know where people are frustrated or having problems. 

 14:56: It also tells us when we are going in the right or wrong direction. 

 14:58: We can very clearly feel slight contact spa Toro or the original version in 2020 when we launched was built on Twitter data, fast forward a couple of years and Twitter gets bought. 

 15:11: And the result of that is two things. 

 15:14: One, some of the API S that we used were taken away. 

 15:18: And so we couldn’t get data from them. 

 15:19: We could still crawl Twitter plenty easily. 

 15:22: And so we could have gotten that data. 

 15:23: But the other problem was that the Twitter ecosystem became, it went from a place where individual communities had lots of conversations around their community topics. 

 15:35: So for example, you know, you, you could go to gardening Twitter and see lots of people talking about gardening and different plants and I don’t know, weed killers and whatever the topics were. 

 15:44: So what we found because we were basically we monitoring like every post from, you know, 100 million plus accounts was that 60 to 70% of the conversation that had been topically relevant and was interesting for audience research purposes had become just the topic. 

 16:01: Du Jour, it kind of became like news headline where people were just, yeah, this is what’s in the news quote unquote. 

 16:08: So that’s what we’re talking about versus all our additional interest. 

 16:11: Exactly. 

 16:12: Exactly. 

 16:12: So Twitter just became this, like, not a place for niche communities to congress and chat about their thing, but sort of a place where almost everyone was commenting on what was going on with Twitter itself, with Elon himself, with whatever issue he or sort of the Twitter verse was surfacing a lot of like media, you know, popular media and new stuff. 

 16:33: Twitter always had a heavy component of that, but it became overwhelmingly dominant and we lost a lot of those other conversations. 

 16:40: The biggest problem for us especially was that people stopped following new people in their little communities. 

 16:47: And so even when those gardeners were having relevant conversations, you know, if a new gardening source emerged, Twitter wouldn’t be the place that they’d go anymore. 

 16:56: They wouldn’t build a community on Twitter anymore. 

 16:59: So I’m making this short story too long. 

 17:01: We moved off of Twitter last year, built a new data set that is structured around click stream data. 

 17:07: So we work with data. 

 17:08: So has a large click stream panel, global click stream panel, about 10 million users in the panel here in the US. 

 17:14: And then data from Google and social data, primarily from linkedin this time. 

 17:20: And so connecting up those sources proved to be challenging. 

 17:23: But Casey managed to do it. 

 17:25: We launched that early this year. 

 17:26: The frustrating part was when we launched it. 

 17:29: Initially, we built it just for the US and then the plan is roll out other countries and we have seen an overwhelming number of customer service emails support emails, inquiries. 

 17:39: When are you coming to the UK? 

 17:40: When are you coming to Canada? 

 17:41: When are you coming to Israel? 

 17:42: When are you coming into France? 

 17:43: When you come to Germany? 

 17:44: When are you coming to Japan? 

 17:45: And so basically, we’ve been able to categorize those and we know UK and Canada are the ones that people request the most. 

 17:51: And so we’re going to try and have those prioritized in the next 60 days. 

 17:54: Casey basically threw out a bunch of other priorities, put those in front, you know, that’s really from feedback, right? 

 18:00: I was gonna say feedback. 

 18:04: So this feedback request, does it go out often? 

 18:06: Does it go out more than once to the same customer. 

 18:09: Does it go out in a specific slot in the cycle? 

 18:12: I believe it goes out in a slot in the cycle to both new and recurring customers. 

 18:18: So for example, if you signed up last year for a couple of months and then you cancel your subscription and you became a subscriber again this year, you would get that email again, asking for feedback which fits in very much with how people use it. 

 18:31: Like you mentioned, people are always canceling and starting and canceling and starting. 

 18:34: Nice. 

 18:35: Very cool. 

 18:36: OK. 

 18:36: So I guess when you were thinking about writing this, what was the creation process like because there’s a couple different parts to it, I guess we’ll start nitpicking it. 

 18:44: The first thing I found interesting is the two questions that you decided to ask two questions instead of just one. 

 18:50: But then I was studying it more and they’re kind of one question depending on who you are. 

 18:55: So it’s kind of like if you’re type a, you answer one, if you’re type b, then you answer two. 

 19:00: Was that your thought? 

 19:02: I would say some intentionality around that it wasn’t the full conceit of the email. 

 19:08: But as I was writing it, I think that came to the forefront as being useful. 

 19:11: And I mean, the overarching vision here was I want to maximize the rate of response while not asking people to give feedback that they didn’t feel was critical or key, right? 

 19:25: I’m not trying to push you like, hey everybody you need to reply no matter what you’ve got to tell me something. 

 19:31: I don’t need that right. 

 19:33: I am trying to get as many responses to the. 

 19:36: Is there something important? 

 19:37: Was there something missing? 

 19:38: Is there a problem? 

 19:39: Something holding you back? 

 19:41: Something you wish that you saw something you particularly love those kinds of responses. 

 19:45: I am trying to elicit. 

 19:47: It’s interesting. 

 19:47: It’s almost like you’re feeding bias. 

 19:49: So the email like ignore this if you have a middle ground, not super important feedback to you. 

 19:56: That’s really smart. 

 19:57: So in my version, which was from a while ago, it also has the feature updates. 

 20:01: Do you put that in constantly or is that something that only happen that every like 6 to 9 months? 

 20:08: So right now there’s two or three, maybe three new features inside spark to the V two that I just talked about. 

 20:16: Those three new features are not included in the email yet and they will be probably after the summer, we have like two more features. 

 20:23: So we don’t update it every time we release something new but kind of in a batch. 

 20:29: That’s so cool because it’s always a struggle when you’re doing evergreen emails. 

 20:32: Like how can you put the updated stuff? 

 20:35: So that’s cool that you’re revisiting it whenever you know, from time to time substantive and also when it’s sustainable that you’re not going in every single time you launch a little bug fix, you know. 

 20:46: Yeah. 

 20:46: Yeah. 

 20:46: Yeah. 

 20:46: I mean, that would be a little intense. 

 20:48: Our team is too small to do something like that, but it’s also their overall features, you know, and you’re catching everyone. 

 20:56: So it’s like, oh, I saw that one but I didn’t see that one. 

 20:58: So it’s a great win back to throw into the feedback, especially now that you mentioned that for the people who are kind of just in the middle ground, you know, you’ll catch them with new features. 

 21:08: And if that value is not there to give feedback, it’s there to check out new features. 

 21:13: So that’s pretty cool. 

 21:14: Yeah. 

 21:14: Right. 

 21:14: Exactly. 

 21:15: I mean, I think that this is part of the way that we get past customers to think about us again. 

 21:20: Right? 

 21:20: Is to give them a heads up and we’re privileged that a huge percent of our subscribers also subscribe to the email newsletter. 

 21:28: So that’s a place where every time there’s a new feature we call it out. 

 21:31: That’s great. 

 21:31: My favorite part though is that the P S about the pasta recipes? 

 21:35: I actually, I get, I get a not insubstantial number of replies to that part in particular because it’s that human connection and it’s fun too. 

 21:46: Right. 

 21:46: You know, someone will reply and be like, oh, I love this and I’ll reply with no, no, no, you cannot make spaghetti, ala carbonara with cream. 

 21:53: You must, you use the Ban Marie over the boiling water to like get the right texture with the egg mixture and you don’t eat any cream, I promise. 

 22:06: But cream always makes everything better. 

 22:10: Not this, I mean, as someone who’s lactose intolerant, not so much. 

 22:16: So, that’s pretty cool good tip. 

 22:18: So what kind of responses do you get aside from, you know, poster requests and like aside from the feature requests or things like that, just more emotional request, things that kind of tap you into the customer mindset. 

 22:31: What kind of or relationship? 

 22:33: I guess, I think one thing that helps us a lot is when we see a this is a little bit second order. 

 22:41: But one thing that we really like to look at is who is replying around a particular topic. 

 22:47: This was true. 

 22:48: A couple of years ago, we saw a lot of agencies talking about user management, which wasn’t something we had enabled and that was clearly a feature that or like a missing feature that needed to be built. 

 23:00: And so that became a priority because we saw those people replying and because we noticed that we are getting more agency sign ups. 

 23:08: And similarly, this is not to say we dismiss feedback, but when we get feedback from what I call like non right fit types of customers, we worry about that. 

 23:19: Last, for example, we’ve had a healthy number of requests for sock two compliance, but we are an enterprise software company. 

 23:27: We don’t serve enterprises. 

 23:29: We are very inexpensive. 

 23:31: Right. 

 23:31: There’s a free version of $50 a month, version 100 and $50 and then 300 bucks a month is the most that we charge anybody. 

 23:38: So, you know what? 

 23:39: We just don’t worry about those kinds of things or, or being able to take payment via wire or being able to take payment via bank transfers or, you know, that kind of stuff. 

 23:49: I know that that’s how big companies do things, but we’re not a serving big company, right? 

 23:54: Go pay brand, watch 50 grand a month, whatever, whatever it is they charge. 

 23:59: I think it’s more like 50 grand a year but still, you know, very different, you know, an order of magnitude or two above the spark to pricing. 

 24:07: And so we don’t really think of ourselves in competition with those folks and we also don’t think about ourselves as prioritizing those types of customers. 

 24:15: So that data is really interesting when we get the reply, right, let’s say like account exec at I B M or Wells Fargo or something. 

 24:22: And we kind of go well, it’s not the word, not taking your feedback if you have product feedback, like we’re into it. 

 24:28: But if it’s structural stuff, we don’t worry as much about those as we would with small medium business, small agency consulting group, that kind of thing. 

 24:37: Yeah, really knowing who your customers are. 

 24:39: Not trying to serve everybody. 

 24:42: Yeah. 

 24:42: I don’t think you can serve everybody. 

 24:44: Right. 

 24:44: I think, especially at our size, like, our ability to focus is strongly correlated with our ability to serve the right customers. 

 24:51: Well, and I’d much rather serve a smaller group really well than everyone. 

 24:56: A little bit worse. 

 24:57: Yeah. 

 24:58: It’s just important in general when you get feedback and being able to prioritize it and say, ok, this is not coming from enough people. 

 25:04: This is not coming from the right people. 

 25:06: And although it’s so emotionally, I mean, I find anytime I see feedback, it’s like, yes, we’ll do it. 

 25:11: No, we can’t wait even just like clients feedback, you know, it’s like we should change that. 

 25:17: And I’m like, we can’t, I will take our dev teams like six months. 

 25:20: It’s like, but a customer wants it. 

 25:23: Yeah, I’m just preparing myself. 

 25:25: I’m like psyching myself up for all the feedback that we’re going to get with the video game because that, that’s a whole another ball game for sure. 

 25:34: Right. 

 25:35: And it’s super interesting Nikki, because the whole job of A B to B software product is reduce friction, remove challenge, make it so that less effort equals more impact. 

 25:45: And a video game is introduce intentional challenge, add friction to places so that you create fun. 

 25:53: And that is a, it’s a fascinating way to build software, right? 

 25:58: Because video games are essentially a piece of software, but it’s not you know, it’s the opposite of what I’ve been doing the rest of my career. 

 26:06: So, it’s a challenge. 

 26:07: That’s such a cool mental shift and perspective. 

 26:12: So it should be fun to use awful software because it’s basically a video game. 

 26:17: Yeah. 

 26:17: I’m not sure that when they designed it poorly they intentionally thought about the fun you would have resolving that friction. 

 26:27: Chatting. 

 26:27: Support. 

 26:28: 15. 

 26:28: How do I get slack to integrate with Outlook and why can’t I get this email to go here? 

 26:35: Yeah, I don’t think they were talking about like, oh, well, let’s make that a really joyful experience. 

 26:39: Add some juicy graphics that like show up when you can’t get it going like that, that awful spinning circle. 

 26:46: Yeah, that’s actually only on Mac, right? 

 26:49: We’ll have clipping the villain come in and I am ruining your day. 

 26:54: Now. 

 26:55: Any other changes to this email that you tweak from time to time aside from the product updates? 

 27:01: One thing I’m trying to do this will probably be in a future update. 

 27:04: I want to make every email shorter. 

 27:06: Yeah, I think that length is correlated with the bad kind of friction. 

 27:11: I also think that even a personal email from a human being asking you for something and it’s your friend. 

 27:17: If you see a few paragraphs, you’re like, oh, I just don’t know. 

 27:21: Let me get to this later. 

 27:23: Let me worry about it later. 

 27:24: I really, I would love to see us be able to communicate all the key things we need to communicate in three lines, four lines, a few bullet points and maybe we might even do the thing where we have the most salient, most important critical piece in the email. 

 27:41: And then that a link to some whatever a blog post or help article or something with more details about stuff or a follow up email. 

 27:48: It could be a second email. 

 27:49: Yeah, because the attention spans will never go up, right? 

 27:53: They, they only go down over time. 

 27:56: Ok. 

 27:56: That transitions very nicely which emails catch your attention in your inbox that you know, you have the attention for them. 

 28:03: What emails do you like to swipe from or read and get inspired by? 

 28:07: Gosh, a wide variety actually. 

 28:10: So I’m an email addict. 

 28:11: I love email. 

 28:12: I think it’s great. 

 28:13: I love that. 

 28:14: It lets me prioritize everything in one place. 

 28:16: I hate getting messages on like linkedin or my God. 

 28:19: I check my Twitter D MS, I don’t know a month ago and I felt terrible. 

 28:23: You know, those people who D M me a year ago having everything come to that one place is fantastic for me and I appreciate emails that have done their homework on who I am. 

 28:36: You know, this is something that I wish we could do more of in Sparta. 

 28:38: I think we’re trying to get there with more by asking more questions when people sign up about who they are so that we can personalize and segment emails more, Amanda actually was working on a sequence that sends separate emails to people who run an agency versus work as a consultant in an agency versus work in house versus run an in house team versus are their own creator. 

 29:01: That’s so beautiful to hear because I think being able to speak personally to the problems and challenges is huge. 

 29:08: So when I get an email that says, hey, you know, I whatever, you know, I read a bunch of your blog posts, I watched a bunch of your videos. 

 29:15: I think this thing is going to be interesting to you. 

 29:17: Those tend to be when they’ve really done the work and it’s not just a line, those tend to be the ones that get my attention even if they’re from a salesperson, right? 

 29:27: Even if somebody’s just cold selling me, if they’ve done their homework and it shows and it’s personal and it is well with me, I can handle even medium length or longer email, probably more effective and like, you know, novel. 

 29:41: Next, I get a lot of those. 

 29:43: I have long email conversations with people about things and yeah, it works fine for me. 

 29:48: I’m very rare. 

 29:48: This is not advice, do not write your emails for people like me. 

 29:52: There’s like one of me, but it is advice in write your emails for who you’re writing it for. 

 29:59: If you’re a novel person. 

 30:01: You need a novel email. 

 30:04: My theory is no one who enjoys a long email will be angry that they got a shorter one that communicated the same thing makes sense. 

 30:13: Yes. 

 30:14: All right. 

 30:14: Thanks so much. 

 30:15: This was a very enlightening both in the email space and also just the start up world and building companies and customer feedback and all that. 

 30:24: So, customer experience, I guess so. 

 30:26: Thanks so much. 

 30:27: My pleasure. 

 30:28: Thanks for joining me for email, story time. 

 30:30: If you enjoyed today’s story, give this podcast a review. 

 30:33: So email marketers like you can have more fun with email. 

 30:36: See you next week when we dig into this story’s takeaways.