The results from our email interview experiment are in and, thank goodness, our customers saved the puppies.
* I didn’t get a chance to send follow-up emails for either of these emails.
Note these results include two new emails that weren’t detailed in the original blog post. The “French Vanilla” email was the result of a friend telling me I had done everything wrong and that he could do a much better job:
French Vanilla
The Why? Email was inspired by my friend Adam Loving at Linksy who sent out an email to his customers asking for 2-3 words about their online marketing challenges:
Why?
Interesting stuff:
- Follow-up emails produced the most interviews. Each person who didn’t reply to my first email got another email a couple days later repeating my request for their time. Doing that more than doubled the number of interviews I got to do. Highly recommend FollowUpThen.
- Overall, the interview conversion rate was low. 7% on average, with the “winning” email converting at 12%.
- Sample size was probably too small to claim anything scientific, but “Rocky Road” generated “3x” the interviews “Vanilla” did.
- The “Why?” email performed well, but didn’t really let me dive as deep as I would have liked into my customer’s pain.
- Our readers are smarter than I am. I thought “Chocolate” would win, but ya’ll were right:
Looks like this experiment provides two takeaways:
- Be sure to follow-up on requests for interviews.
- Being humorous/unique/edgy helps. Not a lot, but it helps.
Join the experiment – follow along via Email or RSS for updates on our next post: Customer Interviews using Mechanical Turk.
Now you have me super curious about whether these numbers scale! 7% sounds pretty good to me if all you have to do is increase the number of emails sent. Of course, 12% is even better. Thanks a ton for sharing the details of this interesting experiment.
Was the follow-up email identical to the initial email or did it contain different text like “I haven’t heard back”?