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Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling

blog.palabra.io

151–160 of 178 posts

Re: Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling

#151
Please DO NOT send me emails with “a name and a face” if it isn’t from that person manually. I see through it and it makes me think you think I’m stupid and easy to manipulate.

Please. For the love of god. Just start being honest with your customers.

Re: Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "positive response", are you saying that human "from" names yield a higher click-through rate?

Yes, it does. It is widely thought to be true and certainly matches my experience at statistical significance.

Keep in mind the adage "you get what you measure". If you optimize for CTR, you are not necessarily optimizing for user satisfaction/loyalty.

Case in point: Netflix's auto-play feature used to drive me bonkers, so much that I would try other streaming services first. How could they think this feature was a good idea? The only plausible explanation I've heard is that they were optimizing for user engagement. Users click around more to prevent the video from auto playing.

Re: Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling

#153
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect,your order is #56 You don't have to ask for a number, just give them one.

You'd need a ticketing system so people even remember what their number is. And for what upside when names work fine?

Do names work fine when 3 John's walk in in a row?

Re: Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling

#154
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's American business culture. You are expected to be fake happy.

While friendliness and happiness can be positive, I think in sales it's often emotional warfare, for example with door-to-door sales. A vacuum cleaner salesman will try to manufacture a personal connection with strategic taps on the shoulder, asking about the kids/grandkids and the spouse, but ultimately this is so that rejection becomes emotionally difficult for the untrained and unprepared customer. I see these ema…

There's a difference in intent which isn't obvious from the atonal text medium. Humans are pretty good at spotting fake in person. Thus the desire to shake a hand and look in the eye. Over email, I think many people have developed a decent sense for it, but it's much harder to distinguish the two.

Re: Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling

#155
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment reminds me of “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” And “For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”

I see a pretty glaring difference between the parent comment and your examples: the former is an example of a human response to the stimuli of being communicated with, the latter examples...well aren't . At all. They're reactions to features of software (Dropbox is the easy one to guess, is the other Airbnb?). How would you resolve this apparent dichotomy? Maybe there's something in your comparison that went unstated…

The first one is the iPod I think. HN is a bubble that is far from representative of the general public that these products/emails are aimed at. I assume that point of the parent comment is to remind people that top-voted advice from HN about how non-engineers will react to something should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.

Re: Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling

#156
post #2

Good points in here, but I disagree about using a person's name as the From address. If I'm getting an email from Notion, I want it to show up as "From: Notion" in my inbox, not "From: Ivan". I have several companies that do this and I never know who the email is from, which adds some cognitive friction I don't need when triaging my inbox. You can put your name in the subject line if you want.

This wouldn't be so bad if popular UIs like gmail weren't so opposed to displaying email addresses in an email client. In many places they display exclusively the name. It's very confusing, especially if the people you email have strange names for their contacts, which then get displayed in your client.

Re: Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling

#157
post #112
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it happens all the time (according to my tiny sample size). A tong time ago, I was in an American coffee shop (probably Starbucks, I guess), and they asked for my name. I found that very strange and weird. You would neither be able to spell or pronouce it, so let's just go with James. This trend is beginning in Denmark as well, and I don't like it. It'd be easier for everyone if you just assign me a number and an…

I'm used to it now but when I first encountered the practice of food service staff asking for my name, I did find it very strange and not a little uncomfortable (it felt like an invasion of my privacy). It also has some serious downsides for foreigners/tourists/immigrants who: (1) may not speak English (analogous scenario: imagine going to a Starbucks in Japan and having the cashier repeatedly ask for your name in Ja…

When traveling in a foreign country its not uncommon to invent a name on the local language to make interacting with locals easier.

Re: Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coffee shops ask for your name so they can write it on the cup to make sure you get the right order at the pickup counter. It's a quality control measure. I guess they could ask you to think up a random number instead, but some people would find that mildly offputting I think .

Some places will just give you an order number, which usually increases sequentially, and has the side-benefit that you have a vague measure of how far your order is from being completed. Although, having the person's name is also nice, because people tend to be good at recognizing when their name is called.

Replacing names with numbers? How dystopian!

This is of course a joke, I am a fan of the number system. The honour system also works fine here in Australia, they just call out the order and you go and take it after a tiny delay to see if the guy who was there first goes for it.

Re: Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling

#159
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm used to it now but when I first encountered the practice of food service staff asking for my name, I did find it very strange and not a little uncomfortable (it felt like an invasion of my privacy). It also has some serious downsides for foreigners/tourists/immigrants who: (1) may not speak English (analogous scenario: imagine going to a Starbucks in Japan and having the cashier repeatedly ask for your name in Ja…

When traveling in a foreign country its not uncommon to invent a name on the local language to make interacting with locals easier.

Even when not traveling, for people with 'unusual' names it's not uncommon to use a more easily recognisable 'cafe name' to get around this issue.

Re: Lessons learned from onboarding emails with no HTML styling

#160
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm used to it now but when I first encountered the practice of food service staff asking for my name, I did find it very strange and not a little uncomfortable (it felt like an invasion of my privacy). It also has some serious downsides for foreigners/tourists/immigrants who: (1) may not speak English (analogous scenario: imagine going to a Starbucks in Japan and having the cashier repeatedly ask for your name in Ja…

When traveling in a foreign country its not uncommon to invent a name on the local language to make interacting with locals easier.

I'm not sure that it is that common. I mean, wouldn't it seem strange to take on the moniker of Takeshi while travelling in Japan, or Juan in Mexico, or Alexei in Moscow just to be able to order at Starbucks?

p.s. I should add the caveat that Starbucks baristas in Japan do not ask for names. It's culturally inappropriate there so Starbucks doesn't implement their names policy in Japan.

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