Writing a good auto-responder to say thank you

September 12, 2011 Josh Ledgard — 2 Comments

When someone signs up for your site/service/list you get a second chance to make a first impression… But how should you use it? Here are some general guidelines and a good example from a KickoffLabs customer.

1. Say thank you – You just got paid with someone attention. Show some gratitude.

2. Add some personality – Someone trusted your brand/message enough to give you their contact information. That creates a layer of trust so you can accentuate what they probably liked about your message.

3. Assign a call to action – You want them to do something next… even if it’s just to wait for your next newsletter. Make sure that call to action is clear and don’t make it complicated.

4. Provide context – They may not read it right away. Make sure you remind them why they got the mail. Smile

5. Make sure someone can reply – I hate getting mails from donot-reply@somewhere.com don’t you? I want to know someone is accountable for this mail.

Here is a great example from a KickoffLabs customer (What If Conference) in their auto-response.

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http://twitter.com/kdaigle Kyle Daigle

We’ve had better luck by taking a non-automated approach. It’s definitely more time consuming but we’ve seen better responses than the automated version. We wrote about it more here: http://blog.getsimmer.com/2012/09/30/how-writing-a-personal-email-is-helping-our-customer-development/

One improvement which we would love is the ability to delay the thank you email to make it appear more personal.

http://www.kickofflabs.com/ Josh Ledgard

Great post. I buffered some love back your direction while I wait for my personal mail.

We made a point to email all of our first 1,000 sign-ups directly. Still kept the automated mail. But you are right that a personal touch dramatically increases engagement.