Nikki: But that could really mean a few different things. 

 0:02: How many new features is a whole bunch of new features? 

 0:05: Is it 10? 

 0:06: Is it 20? 

 0:07: Is it 5? 

 0:08: Is it 2? 

 0:10: 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. 

 0:16: Every other week, we’ll talk to an email expert about an experiment they ran, and in the following episode, we’ll dive into the strategies and methods used in the email so you can inform and inspire your own email work. 

 0:27: I’m Nikki Elvas, the copywriter behind. 

 0:29: Emails for 8 and 9 figure sassin e-commerce brands like Shopify, For Sigmatic, and Sprout Social. 

 0:34: 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. 

 0:40: Ready to make inspiration tactical? 

 0:42: Let’s go. 

 0:43: First, a quick recap of the email we discussed last week that we’ll be digging into today. 

 0:50: Your DTRC plan will increase from $24 a month to $29 a month in November. 

 0:55: Here’s why. 

 0:56: It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly a decade since we submitted our app for review in the App Store. 

 1:01: We’ve come so far in 9 years, and we have you to thank for it. 

 1:05: We are so grateful. 

 1:07: Since those early days, we’ve grown from just 3 family members to 28 almost family team members, all dedicated to making your deliveries faster, smoother and more cost effective. 

 1:18: We’ve worked incredibly hard to make DTtrack the best delivery app on the market. 

 1:22: In the past 9 years, we’ve added hundreds of features, despite keeping our pricing the same since inception. 

 1:29: To continue delivering the product and support you deserve, we need to ensure our pricing reflects where our product stands today and where we plan to take it. 

 1:36: On November 1st, Dre’s pricing will increase from $24 per month to $29 per month. 

 1:42: The new price will take effect from your first new billing period on or after November 2022. 

 1:48: Here’s how you can keep your current pricing for another year. 

 1:51: We meant it when we wrote that we’re so grateful for your trust and loyalty, and we’d like to offer you a full year’s extension with our current pricing when you switch to our annual plan. 

 1:59: Lock in the current price. 

 2:01: Pay only 24 dollars per month until November 2023, when you switch to an annual plan before our November 2022 price increase. 

 2:09: A lot has changed. 

 2:10: Take advantage with a 1 to 1 growth consultation. 

 2:13: If you haven’t had a chance to see all our new features, check them out here. 

 2:16: Or better yet, book a free growth session with our onboarding team to make sure you’re taking advantage of everything DTrack has to offer your business and vision. 

 2:24: Book your growth session. 

 2:27: I love this idea that Good UX is not the same across the board. 

 2:31: Like I mentioned, the DTreck users were not tech savvy, and so the DTreck team found that big, ugly, in your face buttons worked way better. 

 2:38: They were in touch with their customers and they understood that despite the design going against all the trends and all the best practices, this is what it takes for the drivers to adopt the software and actually use it to complete their jobs, which brings me to a very underrated topic in the Sass world in general, adoption, i.e. getting your is to actually use your tool. 

 2:57: I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. 

 2:59: Acquisition definitely gets front and center attention in the marketing world. 

 3:03: Next up is retention, and yes, adoption falls under retention, but I would argue that it’s a separate stage within retention that gets less spotlight than the other retention strategies like win backs or engaging at-risk users. 

 3:16: And yet adoption should take up a whole lot of our brain space, especially when the user is not the same as the buyer, which is so often the case. 

 3:23: In DTrack’s case, the C-suite, or the IT team of the delivery companies were purchasing this logistical software, and yet it was the everyday truckers who had to use the app. 

 3:33: They aren’t the ones seeing the initial marketing material. 

 3:36: They aren’t the ones debating pros and cons, and they’re just handed an app and told to use it. 

 3:40: Will they use it? 

 3:41: They could just avoid using it, even though it’s a requirement. 

 3:44: That could be a reality depending on the workplace culture. 

 3:47: And then all the buying costs, all the decision making, all the migration costs down the drain. 

 3:52: Even in better case scenarios where they only use it for the bare minimum, it’s such a lost opportunity to gain deep adoption and thus longer retention, when you have a whole suite of additional features that they could be adopting. 

 4:03: So takeaway number one is to separate your customers and users and create a game plan for adoption. 

 4:08: Especially if those two groups differ. 

 4:10: It could be a series of workshops. 

 4:12: That was something that the DTAC team was really good at, by the way. 

 4:15: It could be activation sequences geared to each differing group, the one for the buyers with strategies for successful company rollout, and the one for users on boarding them to all the ins and outs. 

 4:25: Sometimes even getting the users involved in the buying process helps them feel invested, and definitely, definitely, getting them involved in product design is critical. 

 4:33: If you calculate it, the D-track pricing increase was an increase of $5 a month, which in the grand scheme of things for these companies is not a lot of money. 

 4:42: And yet, the team did not get complacent. 

 4:44: They didn’t say, it’s just $5 a month, big deal. 

 4:47: They took their customers’ money seriously. 

 4:49: This is in contrast to the brands that I’ve seen who minimize company spend because they’re trying to increase perceived value or decrease the perception of money being spent. 

 4:58: Now, the businesses who are saying it’s just another $30 a month and you’ll make thousands back, they are right. 

 5:04: But money is not logical. 

 5:06: An increase of $5 a month may only be a drop in the bucket, if even that, but it’s an increase. 

 5:12: It feels big, it feels different. 

 5:13: It changes status quo. 

 5:15: It brings up the question of, wait, is this really the best vendor for my needs? 

 5:19: That small change can have big ramifications. 

 5:22: The Dreck team was right to be nervous about this small. 

 5:25: increase. 

 5:26: And on the flip side, you will never lose by working harder to showcase value and sell harder. 

 5:31: Like I mentioned in the episode, it was a blessing that they had to take this so seriously. 

 5:35: So takeaway number 2 is that money is not logical, and any change in status quo is going to bring up the migration question unless you answer it first by selling your value all over again. 

 5:46: What I loved about the slack pricing increase table that I swiped into the DTtrack email is that it was the perfect embodiment of the principle of show versus tell. 

 5:55: Before I put the table in, I told the customers that DTtrack had implemented a whole bunch of new features that they were iterating and improving the customer experience, but that could really mean a few different things. 

 6:06: How many new features is a whole bunch of new features? 

 6:09: Is it 10? 

 6:10: Is it 20? 

 6:11: Is it 5? 

 6:12: Is it 2? 

 6:13: Is an improved customer experience improved for my needs or for someone else’s needs for a different customer sets needs? 

 6:20: There are too many questions, you’re asking for blind trust, which is the real crux of the show versus tell principle. 

 6:26: When you show and not tell, there’s no room for skepticism. 

 6:30: When you show, you are proving. 

 6:32: Once there’s a table with all the new feature sets, there are no more questions. 

 6:35: I can see clearly how many new features, what kinds of new features, how they affected my life, and how my customer experience is now different due to the improvements. 

 6:43: And I myself can evaluate things properly and see the actual value that I’m experiencing. 

 6:47: So take away number 3, show versus tell. 

 6:50: Show versus tell is a really strong psychological principle that you should aim to include whenever you write copy. 

 6:56: Seriously, don’t write a word without sweeping for show versus tell. 

 7:00: If you’re wondering what I mean by sweeping, check out the Copy hacker’s tutorial Tuesdays on Copy sweeps. 

 7:05: They are a fabulous strategy for editing your copy and getting it to be really super strong and effective. 

 7:11: My original subject line was very similar to the slack subject line, but like I mentioned, I tweaked it to mirror theirs. 

 7:17: Both theirs and mine had a lot of clarity of what was inside the email, and then a little bit of curiosity. 

 7:22: This is my absolute favorite way to write subject lines for both crisis emails and transactional emails. 

 7:27: Both of these types of emails need absolute clarity, and I’ll get into why and take away number 6. 

 7:32: But when you have a subject line with a lot of clarity, you risk the user thinking that they understand the whole message. 

 7:36: The email and not opening the actual email to read more. 

 7:40: That’s where the curiosity piece comes in. 

 7:42: You still need to entice the click. 

 7:44: So this kind of mosh is perfect. 

 7:45: You get the main crux of the message, but you show that there’s more to the story and that they should open the email to read more. 

 7:51: So takeaway number 4 is that for emails that need a lot of clarity, you’ll want to include a curiosity element as well. 

 7:56: Make sure you mush clarity. 

 7:57: Don’t sacrifice the clarity, but include a piece that helps the reader feel compelled to open the email. 

 8:03: So you might be wondering why I only swiped the subject line and why I didn’t swipe the header as well. 

 8:07: And while I do think there’s something really strong about that first time language, that they’re only increasing their pricing for the first time now, the clarity in the pricing increase was more important for the DTrack users. 

 8:17: And in general, specificity is a really important copy principle, especially when you’re communicating something that needs a lot of clarity. 

 8:23: The Slack plans are a little more complicated because each user is paying a different price based on their tier as well as how much based on how many users they have, so they weren’t able to get specific. 

 8:33: DTrack had much more simple pricing, so we could get specific with the actual fee the pricing increase would incur. 

 8:40: So takeaway number 5 is really similar to takeaway number 6, except instead of sweeping for show versus tell, make sure you sweep for specificity. 

 8:48: I mentioned in the main episode that you should check out the transactional emails playbook to find out why transactional emails do really well, but I’m going to give you a little spoiler because why not? 

 8:56: Let’s talk about one aspect of doing transactional emails well and crisis emails too. 

 9:01: And yes, I have a crisis emails playbook too. 

 9:03: The link is the same, Nikiwa.com/email-playbooks. 

 9:07: Anyway, Emails and transactional emails both need super clear subject lines, but they need them for different reasons. 

 9:13: Crisis emails need super clear subject lines because you need to communicate very clearly what’s going on to assage the crisis. 

 9:20: Transactional emails need super clear subject lines because people look for transactional emails. 

 9:25: They’re called confirmation emails for a reason. 

 9:27: They provide confirmation. 

 9:29: They want the details. 

 9:30: They want to know the order went through. 

 9:31: They search when they want to troubleshoot shipping, they want receipts for their taxes. 

 9:34: They just want them for all sorts of reasons. 

 9:37: And therefore, these emails need a bit of standardization so that the customer can easily find them and recognize them easily too, when they land in the inbox. 

 9:45: But perhaps even more important than this clarity and standardization is the idea we were talking about before, that we need to tease the open. 

 9:52: Because again, these emails do really well. 

 9:53: The last thing we want to do with an email that gets high opens is to leave a dead end. 

 9:58: We want to encourage further action. 

 9:59: What kind of further action? 

 10:01: I’m giving away too much already. 

 10:02: Go read the full playbooks and get your transactional and crisis emails working harder. 

 10:07: Oh wait, let me wrap up with the takeaway. 

 10:09: Takeaway number 5. 

 10:10: Don’t get too cute with transactional emails, and definitely don’t get cute with crisis emails. 

 10:15: Thanks for geeking out with me about that email story. 

 10:18: If you enjoyed either of these episodes, you’ll probably enjoy getting my emails. 

 10:21: Plus you’ll never miss another episode. 

 10:23: Sign up at Nikkialbus.com/subscribe, and yes, that link is in the show notes.