How do emails influence users to finish the onboarding process?
Time and time again, it has been proven that transactional emails are not a channel to ignore. They can have a significant impact on your business, in the long run. In fact, transactional emails typically have open rates of 40-50%, and click rates around 10-20%.
However, in order to measure the impact of the emails you send, you have to analyse them within the right context. Why are you sending these emails? What is the goal you want your users to reach?
Analysing the impact of emails sent through the onboarding process
In InnerTrends you can access an out-of-the-box, dedicated report that informs you of how emails influence users to finish the onboarding process.
InnerTrends knows exactly the context of your business: what onboarding means for your company, which are the accounts that finish and those that do not finish the onboarding, and what are the emails that users receive until that moment. That's why we can analyse the influence of these emails - the overall influence and the individual influence of each email - and determine whether or not sending these emails helped users finish the onboarding process.
By comparing the conversion rate of the users that opened an email and converted with the conversion rate of the users that didn’t open that email and converted, we’ll have three categories of emails:
1. Successful emails - they refer to the situations when the users who received and opened such an email had a higher conversion rate than the users who received one but didn’t open it. Here is an example:
2. Emails with no impact - they refer to the cases when the conversion rate of the users who opened the email was often identical or close to the conversion rate of the users that didn’t open the email. Such emails have no impact on your bottom line, regardless of their open rate or click rate.
3. Negative impact emails - we also found scenarios where the conversion rate of the users who didn’t open the email was higher than the one for the users who did open the email. In such a case, here’s how the metrics show up as reported by the email service provider:
You might compare this email with your previous campaigns and think that the email did really well.
When you go the extra mile and also check the conversion rate of the targeted users that didn’t open the email, you'll get this:
Stopping this campaign will actually bring you more conversions.
The content of the email and the moment when the user receives the email are the main factors that will influence users in one direction or another.
The image above is actually a real example of an email promoting a special offer. The email was also sent to the users that did not finish the onboarding process. The users who opened the email before getting to the end of their account setup were more likely to drop off.
The decision, in this case, was easy: stop sending these emails to users who are still going through the onboarding process.
This is not a golden rule. On another set of data, purchase emails actually had a significant impact on user onboarding. In that case, it turned out that users were more willing to spend time with the product after reading the special offers emails.
What's the best moment to target users during the onboarding process?
Read this article, which will tell you exactly when, why, and how to target users during the onboarding process.