In this blog we are going to cover the core email template categories we use at Prelo. We’ll focus on the key email templates you need to help you operationalise your startup and excite your customers. 🎉
Email marketing is a “grind” for solopreneurs 😬. Building email drip campaigns and creating standard response emails are even tougher tasks when you’re also trying to grow your Startup.
That’s why we’ve curated a comprehensive list of easily customizable 80 email templates. These templates have been put together to help you run your business operations effectively.
…but before we get started, I’d love to connect with you!
Soooo, let’s do it follow me on twitter (DMs always open) 📨
Back to the Blog 👇
We understand what it takes to be a solopreneur. One minute you are a graphics designer on Canva, the next you are a copywriter on Hubspot crafting email messages to prospects.
My cofounder and I were solopreneurs for a combined 20 years, so we feel your pain. We started off writing our emails manually, but this just wasn’t scalable. So we tried a different approach. We used our own templates and that seems to be working well for us.
It’s ok to write a few emails manually, but once you start onboarding more customers (paying or free) it’s important to keep them excited about your business. Scalable email templates allow you to quickly draft email messages. This demonstrates a certain cadence and assures your customers that you care.
Here are the 4 key email template categories we use at Prelo
💡 Core Email Template Categories
- Introduction & Welcome.
- Nurture (Trial Ending, New Feature, Key Milestones) .
- Operational (Billing Issue, Subscription Renewal).
- Information (Maintenance, Policy Changes).
💡 Introductions & Welcome Email Templates
Your first impression is extremely important when connecting with your prospects and existing customers.
If you do a good job of the subject line your email open rate should be above 37%. Nothing worse than sending out a welcome email, only for your prospects to immediately unsubscribe. Believe me, we’ve been there. That’s why we’ve added email templates into Prelo.
In this example below, all you need to do is add some personalization to the subject line of the email and you’re good to go.
💡 Nurturing Email Templates (Trial Ending, New Features, Key Milestones)
A high churn rate is a killer for many small businesses. Everyone knows that it’s much easier to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. The SaaS industry has a churn rate for the first year that hovers somewhere between 5% – 7%.
When we started we had a 44% attrition rate. Essentially in our first 3 months, just over 40% of our customers left us!
We expected this to happen. Prelo was launched as an mvp (prototype). We wanted to create a minimum viable product so that we could validate the business idea we had. We just didn’t want to spend $$$ like our previous Startup. So we focused on building the right product for the right audience.
Thanks to those customers who believed in us, we’ve improved Prelo over the past 6 months. Churn and attrition has been well managed. We now have some amazing email templates and structure that’ll help you to stay connected with your customers.
It took me a while to realize that nurturing your customers is not a “one and done” process. You have to regularly keep them posted on the latest development within the company. Here are 3 simple ways to get your customers excited about your Startup.
- Share a customer milestone (see template above)
- Tell customers about a new feature or service
- Announce a partnership or collaboration that adds value
💡 Operational Email Templates (Billing issues & subscription renewals)
Scaling a Startup requires us to engage with our customers regularly. However, keeping the engagement authentic can be challenging, so we use our email templates to manage repetitive operational tasks.
Below is a simple pricing update email template to remind customers of an impending price increase. Of course it is necessary to personalize these email templates. Always add your company name and include your customer’s first name.
Administrative and operational email templates take many forms. It doesn’t matter if you are sending out a “trial ending” email or a “subscription renewal email” the objective is to save time while keeping the interaction authentic.
💡 Cancellation Email Templates – What not to do
Every business has some degree of churn, as I’d mentioned earlier, customers have to move on. They move on because they’ve outgrown your service or they are no longer trading.
This is expected, and the COVID outbreak was one such circumstance. The key is to make sure you say thank you for their support and take the opportunity to ask for some feedback.
I’ve seen a few people try to include their request for some feedback in the cancellation process. While I think this is a great idea, there is a caveat – feedback requests cannot be compulsory.
It’s OK to Include a cancellation reason into your cancellation process, but none of the input fields should be compulsory. I’ve seen so many customers berate companies for forcing them to fill out “cancellation reason” forms. If you do that, it will ultimately lead to inaccurate data.
We share below an example of a cancellation email template. This email template does two things
- It expresses gratitude with a simple “thank you”
- Then it asks for some feedback to help improve their product.
💡 Information Email Templates (Maintenance & Policy Updates)
If you are a tech startup then you’ll be familiar with maintenance emails. We have maintenance email templates for these on Prelo.
If you are looking for companies that do a great job sending email messages to their customers to inform them of planned IT maintenance activities, I would suggest checking out Digital Ocean, Slack and others.
More often than not, these maintenance emails are just for information. We’ve not yet had to send out a maintenance outage email at Prelo but if we did, we have just the email template for the job.
There are a couple of rules when it comes to sending out maintenance emails. The number one rule is, to make sure that the email subject line has the words “scheduled maintenance” in the copy.
Prelo – Scheduled Maintenance 6th June 2022 is a great example for a subject line email header. Always make sure that the body of the email states the affected time zone(s).
Policies and terms of service are constantly changing. If your product or your business stores or accesses personal data, you’ll need to stay up to date with the latest policy changes. Of course staying up to date means communicating with your customers on what’s changed and how this may affect them.
We’ve shared a simple privacy email template to help you craft a simple email message that keeps your customers abreast of the latest policy changes.
💡 Closing Statements
There is no denying the fact that email templates are huge time savers for solopreneurs but you cannot simply copy-paste email templates without personalizing them. Copy and paste is guaranteed to ruin your brand… so we advise against this.
In this blog, we have touched on the 4 core email templates categories we use to operate Prelo. We’ve shared some tweaks to help you position these emails for your startup. Regardless of whether you run a product or service based business, these emails work.
The end goal for us as solopreneurs is to authentically connect with our customers without burning out as a result.
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On twitter : 🐤 @oluadedj
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We’ll catch up again soon because we many blogs coming up.
Olu
Founder, Prelo
I tweet about helping founders win!
