How we doubled our open rates by making one simple change

At Tability, we give all new users a free 14 day trial of our platform, complete with demo data, product tours on every page, and an onboarding accelerator that can help any organization get up to speed with Tability and OKRs quickly. Content is important for us because a framework like OKRs is not always easy to adopt, and you can't teach it through clever empty states.

This is why we produce many guides and tutorials, but this only works is the end-user manages to reach this content.

When onboarding drip emails can make or break the experience

We’ve refined our onboarding messages over time to work in concert with the content that we have, giving our users tips on how to explore the product, and information on how to run effective goal processes. The in-product experience is quite smooth but our biggest struggle was to get users to also read the guides that would set them up for success.

Our main driver to push people to the guides is our onboarding drip campaign. But, this campaign had low open rates.

We were A/B testing each email, and regardless of group, the emails were hovering in the low 20% range. At the time were iterating on value-specific subject lines (Customizable dashboards in just a few clicks or Let’s make it easy to keep goals up to date), basically making our onboarding emails more of a sales or marketing email.

And the open rates reflected that.

Less selling, more teaching

One of the things we’ve learned about people who are trialing Tability is that they are generally looking for direct help with their processes. Our goal setting AI was born out of this need when we saw that new users were having issues getting started since they didn’t know what to put into Tability. Solving that problem allowed us to not only give the user the help they needed, but also to get better engagement with those users. Their barrier to entry was removed and they could give the product a fair shake. 

We took a similar approach to our overall onboarding flow inside of the product. Instead of letting people explore, we would direct users to perform specific actions in a specific order to help them understand the best way of trialing Tability.

Making subject lines prescriptive

So how does this apply to our emails? We needed to be prescriptive with how we presented them to the user. Instead of focusing on the value of doing something (in the subject line at least), we should instead let the user know what the key action they should perform in their trial was.

We did more to branch the messages we sent based on behaviors already taken in the product (sending someone an email saying to publish goals, when they’ve already published goals, is so 2010). This allowed us to explicitly state what the next best thing to do in the product was.

• First, publish a plan to gain access to the trial.
• After a plan is published, invite team members.
• Then, perform a weekly check-in on the goals that were created, or
• Schedule a demo with the team if you want 1:1 help to get started. 

Instead of treating the trial like an advertisement, we looked at it as a full activation. Users weren’t signing up to see what we did– they could see that from the website without taking the time to sign up. If they signed up, there was a higher likelihood that they wanted to experience it more deeply. 

So we changed our emails to be more focused on what they needed to do in what order, similar to how we set up the demo workspace. We structured our subject lines using the following template:

“Action item: add your goals to a plan”

This approach focused on explicit next steps to do (ex: “Try it: check out our custom dashboards” instead of highlighting features and hoping they’d go back to the product. This saw our open rates for those emails improve to 40-50% which isn’t bad at all for a free trial onboarding sequence.

What did we learn?

In free trials, our users want to understand not just how the product works, but also how they should specifically approach the product. Not only are we selling Tability, but we’re also selling simplicity– especially with a complicated process like OKRs, having a product that is simple and will guide you from one step to the next is critical.

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