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To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

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Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#31

Post by dkersten »

lpolovets wrote: post #23

I had a similar experience at LinkedIn in its early days. Back when we had maybe 500k members, we A/B tested the hell out of our invite messages. These messages were critical because no one had heard of LinkedIn at the time (~2004ish) and no one knew what social networking was or why they would want to sign up. And getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us. We A/B tested many invite email for…

> getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us

So important that you resorted to every dark pattern in the book, it seems. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I don't know any of my tech friends who haven't had a bad experience with linkedin tricking them into spamming invites or similar.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#32

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

lpolovets wrote: post #23

I had a similar experience at LinkedIn in its early days. Back when we had maybe 500k members, we A/B tested the hell out of our invite messages. These messages were critical because no one had heard of LinkedIn at the time (~2004ish) and no one knew what social networking was or why they would want to sign up. And getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us. We A/B tested many invite email for…

Interesting, I wonder how much of it may have been due to other reasons than just the brevity.

I wonder how much of it might also have been due to that, e.g, people generally enjoy helping other people, and so are likely to respond positively to what appears to be someone else outlining what they'd "like" for you to do.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#33

Post by R0b0t1 »

scott_s wrote: post #28
skj wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my managers gave me some guidelines here. If it's more than 100 words, cap it at 100 and schedule a meeting. It clearly is information-dense to the degree where a quick question/answer session will be helpful. From my own experience, I make sure to never ask more than one question in an email. If you ask more, people will answer the first and ignore the rest.

I still find it useful to write those emails, even if I'm asking to talk to someone. The email serves as an agenda, it forces me to reason through the issue, and it serves as a long-term record of the issue. But the request for the meeting should come first .

I find reading the emails preferential to a meeting myself, but I guess a meeting is sometimes the only way to get people to pay attention.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#35

Post by EGreg »

mepiethree wrote: post #21
EGreg wrote: post #9

Maybe if you made it a two word email and removed the signature it would get 16x the engagement. Or if you had an empty email and put the question in the subject you’d get 32x engagement. Attention spans these days are terrible.

Two word email: Subject: Hey Body: Whaddya want?

No post body was provided.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#36

Post by ricardobeat »

What about the effects on branding / user perception of the message? While the first short email feels ok, the straight-shooter 'Hi, I can see you signed up, what do you want from us?' version feels awkwardly impolite.

I find it still obvious that it is an automated message and the attempt at 'being human' makes it even less appealing. This kind of metric chasing most likely results in dark patterns and subpar experiences.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#37

Post by goldemerald »

These results seems quite suspicious to me. In all instances the author only received 1 email in reply. If you run these results through an A/B testing calculator, they aren't statistically significant. That's even the case for the 1% conversion compared to the shortest email 8% conversion. I like the thesis statement that short emails convert users better, but the experimental results certainly aren't strong enough to support that claim. I'd love to see an updated version of the article now that 3 years have passed and see what the conversion rate is.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#38

Post by stuff4ben »

Let me give you some advice...talk less, smile more, don't let them know what you're against or what you're for. Until that is you get their attention, then make the deal. Cuz if you want to get ahead, fools who run their mouths off wind up dead (broke).

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#39

Post by leetcrew »

iflp wrote: post #3

> Even if you follow all the best practices around emails, genuinely want to help them, and spend a long time writing a personalized email, people still don’t respond. How do you write a personalized email for a new user?

unless you're going to have an actual human do it, I think it might be better to just not try. I get tons of messages on linkedin from recruiters who say something like "wow impressive profile! based on your experience at {current role}, we think you'd be a great fit for company XYZ". except company XYZ is always some web service company in a totally different domain. my current job is working on a niche desktop c++ product. if I'm a "great fit", so is anyone else with a pulse and a cs degree.

if I get a generic message saying "hey I'm recruiting for company XYZ, here's what we do", I might respond if it sounds interesting. I'm definitely not going to respond if you make it obvious that a bot scraped my profile and didn't understand anything about it.

Re: To Get More Replies, Say Less (2017)

#40

Post by [deleted] »

stuff4ben wrote: post #38

Let me give you some advice...talk less, smile more, don't let them know what you're against or what you're for. Until that is you get their attention, then make the deal. Cuz if you want to get ahead, fools who run their mouths off wind up dead (broke).

[deleted]
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