It looks like Quip links to their webpage in the first sentence of their email. So it only takes one second to figure out who they are if you care. Besides, new functionality emails are mostly aimed at active users anyway.
It's not optimal to send identical emails to every user, but everybody knows that already. There are million ways to segment your users. You can send different emails to power users and casual users. Different emails to disengaged users. Different emails to admins vs non-admins. There are always a million things to optimize and A/B test.
I'd go as far as saying that at this point if a "New Features" email isn't enough to get you re-engaged then you aren't the type of user they need to be optimizing for at all. And that goes for basically any startup pre-P/M fit.
> It's not optimal to send identical emails to every user, but everybody knows that already.
Do they? I don't think so. The company being discussed doesn't know it (or knows it but doesn't do it), and they're not alone.
Eh... might have come across as mean-ish, but it's nothing personal against Quip. They just did something I see a lot of companies do, which is gloss over some of the finer points of email engagement.
There is a time and place for complex, context aware email marketing, but they're probably not there yet.
That being said, it wouldn't hurt to start off with a simple sentence that reminds/reaffirms the value of their product to everyone.
I think most newsletters could benefit from this, particularly if they're going out ~once a month or less. patio11 does a good job of this with a quick two sentence introduction: (1) who is it and (2) why am I getting this.
If you want to see a classic example of failing to do this, have a look at the basecamp website (https://basecamp.com/). Here's the game - pretend REALLY hard that you have no idea what Basecamp is and does (like me, yesterday), then visit that homepage to find out. It doesn't tell you, at least, nowhere obvious. Sure, they talk a lot about "helping people to complete projects", but that could mean a communications tool, a scheduler, a bug tracker, whatever.
This is a surprisingly common problem with landing pages. The people putting it up are so used to knowing exactly what the service is that they forget they have to explain the very basics to everyone else.
1. Set up launch page with a name that has nothing to do with what the product does. 2. Collect emails 3. Wait 4 months 4. Email me and assume that of course I remember who you are, what you do, and why I was interested.
It's mind-bendingly crazy to email me and assume such a thing yet it happens over and over. I used to email them back and say "Who are you? Why don't you just say who and what you are in the first sentence of your email?"
At the risk of being accused of pandering to the community, patio11 actually does a remarkably awesome job of not doing this in his newsletters. The first sentence of his email is always "Hey this is patio11, you signed up to receive my thoughts about software, unsubscribe at the bottom if you don't want this anymore."
Have a strategy before sending me that "re-engagement" email. Why have I become disengaged in the first place? Maybe I wasn't blown away by the workflow your application presented to me. Waiting for me to forget that experience is the perfect opportunity to use me to test a completely different workflow.
Either way, staying top of mind is not about "checking in" every once in a while.. it's about getting your users to depend on your product.
intercom will let you do exactly what the OP suggests: segment and message your users based on how they use (or don't use!) your product, as well as who they are and how important they are to your business!
disclosure: I am an early investor. but don't worry, intercom will be around for a while: they just raised $23M from Bessemer [2].
[2]: http://insideintercom.io/silicon-valley-outsider-raised-30m-...
I wish you would just plain stop emailing me. Signing up for your service should not be license for you to spam my inbox. Yes, I know, technically I did give you approval to email me. But you email me more often than my mother, and my mother emails me a lot. Stop it. You're creepy and annoying. If you were a coworker, I'd report you to HR or the police for stalking me.
I would live to have this sort of problems. My email is in github for quite some time, and I get a lot of spam.
