Hacking Lifecycle Emails: discount ends today

Hiya guys! Patrick here. You signed up for periodic emails from me about making and selling software.

Last week I launched my training course on lifecycle emails. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. I want to share a bit with you, partly to brag (I'm shameless), partly to convince any of you who are on the fence, and partially to remind you that today is the last day for the early adopter discount.

How Lifecycle Emails Made This Software Business Tens of Thousands Of Dollars

Last Friday Kareem from SocialWOD, which helps crossfit gyms acquire more roll-two-of-me-into-either-bicep customers, had a great writeup on what he has been trying with lifecycle emails.

Kareem actually reverse engineered the drip marketing sequence I wrote for WPEngine (you know, the one that durably increased their paid customer signup rate) and re-implemented it for his business. Bonus points for doing lots of work, though if he had known I was coming out with the course, he could have just watched Chapter 2. Anyhow, it worked fantastically:

I can write unequivocally that our [email campaign] is directly responsible for tens of thousands of dollars in annual revenue.

Not a bad result for a bootstrapped company with a niche product, eh? I'm totally pumped that Kareem was that successful -- I feel like benchpressing something. OK, no I don't, but I'm still happy. Kareem isn't the most successful case study I know of, but he's the one I could actually talk about. Seriously, take a gander at his writeup and how very straightforward educating his customers over email was. It was a solid first attempt at implementing this, and already produced massive wins for his business. Hat's off, Kareem.

Annual Billing, the SaaS Cashflow Crunch, and a Happy Story

So in the last couple of emails I've been talking a lot about this notion of sending seasoned customers an email asking them to switch to annual billing. This gets you a big wad of cash up-front and decreases churn rates, yadda yadda. At Business of Software (my favorite conference ever) I met a software entrepreneur who has recently taken this advice to heart.

Let's put it this way: I've generally quoted a 10% upgrade rate to annual billing. If your software costs $200 a month this shakes out to making you $200 per email you send. Fairly nice, right? His company... blew that out of the water. In doing so, they actually got their first-month cash flow from new customers to exactly equal their cost of customer acquisition... meaning it costs no cash to recruit a new paying customer.

What would you do if you could buy customers for nothing? Well, the right answer is "scale to the effing moon." So that company did, and they now have the classic hockeystick graph in what you might think is a boring B2B segment.

For more details on this topic, see Chapter 3, video 3 for the course (the one on increasing revenue), or you can actually read the sales letter -- it talks about it in-depth in the middle.

How'd The Lauch Go, Anyhow?

Customer reaction to the course has been pretty fantastic. We sold over a hundred. It's a great number: enough to make it worthwhile, not so many that I'm totally overwhelmed dealing with customers.

Folks generally found out about the course from one of three places: this mailing list, Hacker News, and Twitter. It should surprise absolutely none of you that the sales numbers are close to 75:20:5 from that. Email: it works.

Anyhow, since launching, I've been making a few tweaks to things to improve the course for customers. The big one is that a surprising number of folks would prefer to read rather than view/listen to the content, so I'm getting all five hours of video transcribed. Everyone who has already bought the course will get those when it is ready -- my freelancer guesses late October. (It's a mountain of work. Glad I don't have to do it.)

So, if you haven't bought yet, you've still got a few hours to get in on the early adopter discount. I encourage you to join 100 other savvy software businesses, if (and only if) the course is right for you.

You should only buy the course if you're interested in benefits like:

  • Decrease churn by identifying and getting in touch with dissatisfied customers before they cancel.
  • Increase conversion rates by guiding your customers through the free trial more effectively.
  • Increase trials of your software by converting more website visitors into trialers, through getting permission to contact them and then educating them until they're ready to try (and buy).
  • Increase revenue by driving up the average lifetime value of your existing customer base... in ways they will thank you for.
  • Increase customer happiness by educating them on how to use your software to make their lives better, answering common questions before they're even asked, and knocking their socks off with your perceived responsiveness to their needs... while saving you time talking one-on-one.

What specifically does the course include?

  • 5 hours of video lessons (you can see the chapter list on the course page) to start (and supercharge) your lifecycle email campaigns. Watch them in your browser or download them. No DRM nonsense.
  • The Exact Subject Lines of WPEngine's drip campaign, which permanently increased their rate of paying customer acquisition. (Chapter 2 lays out your entire drip marketing campaign for you, soup to nuts)
  • The Exact Subject Lines & Copy of 6 Lifecycle Emails (and why they work) (One of them is the $200-an-email email)
  • Annotated Emails That Sell: discussion of what the words, formatting choices, and information selection is supposed to accomplish.
  • Bonus: SendGrid, Postmark, Mailgun, Customer.io, and Intercom.io all offered discounted service to anyone taking this course. (You can find coupon codes / signup links along with my reviews of each service in Chapter 5. I don't get a kickback for recommending them to you -- I'm just doing it because they are far and away the best options for SaaS companies, for reasons Chapter 5 discusses at length.)

This course isn't right for everybody on the list. Some of you are pre-product or freelancers -- if so, skip this one. If you run a SaaS business with a successful product that customers happily pay money for, and you're wondering on how you can increase sales, decrease churn, and delight your customers, this will pretty much print money for your business.

Again, check out the course on the site.

This is my last email to y'all about lifecycle emails for a while -- next week we're back to our normal have-nothing-to-sell-to-you programming. I've got two topics I've been wanting to talk about for a while, so help me choose between them: either a) how to run a high-end consulting business or b) how to generate and validate software product ideas prior to actually writing the darn thing. Drop me an email (just hit Reply: I read all replies and reply to most of them) if either of these sound interesting to you, or if there's anything else you'd like to hear about.

Regards,

Patrick McKenzie