I used to send a five-day welcome email sequence that had advice, lists of features and friendly reminders to upgrade. The open rates were okay. Less than ten percent of people who tried the product ever finished the main setup inside the app.
We completely stopped using the messages and made each email focus on one specific action. The second email now takes the user to connecting their main data source along with a video that shows them how to do it in just one minute.
That one change raised the activation rate for trial users from eight percent, to twenty-two percent in a few weeks. People do not want emails that try to cheer them on; they want a way to get their first result.
What is the one onboarding email strategy that worked best for you?
I m the PM on a B2B product (not an engineer, so plain words). A lot of our customer data was cleared long ago for one thing, like dashboards and monthly reports. Now someone wants to use the same tables for an AI feature.
A made-up example: support tickets that were fine for counting volume are now going to be summarized, word for word, by an outside model.
Every shortcut removes a bit of friction, and some of that friction was doing a job. I'd like to hear which parts of your workflow you handed over and which you took back.
When a tool makes something easy, you rarely notice what the difficulty used to give you. Writing a first draft by hand forced me to decide what I actually thought. Reading user feedback line by line made me notice phrasing that a summary flattens. Writing a spec from scratch was slow, and the slowness was where I found the holes.
