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How I have optimized writing emails to follow up with Customers

How I have optimized writing emails to follow up with Customers

Ben Schottenstein

How I saved 4 hours during my week from writing emails

I meet with a lot of customers! In some weeks as many as 30+ different customers, all of whom are asking unique questions about Coda and related to their specific use case 🤯 . Each of these meetings is an opportunity for me to aid in accelerating their journey to unlocking the power of Coda, and help them solve whatever problem in their workflow or documentation that brought them to Coda. Often customers are eager and ready to get started building - they just need to be connected to the right resources to unblock them and ensure the discover the full potential of Coda.

Coming out of my customer meetings I know a ton about their needs including the use cases that brought them to Coda, what features they are trying to leverage, their Coda product experience and much more. Luckily, the team here at Coda has a ton of learning resources, templates, videos, and more available for our customers. While we have great search and content discovery experiences, customers still often need a light human touch to guide them to the specific resources they need for their product discovery journey. That’s where I come in!

How I used to do it

After my calls I used to look at my notes and based off of the needs of the customer that I just spoke with I would curate some resources to share with them. I didn’t want to just dump a dozen links in an email, so I would be very intentional and add a bit of prose about the concept I was sharing resources for, and then hyperlink in a few resources for each concept. This process of writing about 3-5 topics and hyperlinking in 8-10 links would take ~10 minutes per call, and over the course of a week would look something like this:

Calls

Time Per Follow-Up

Total Time Spent

10 mins

4 hrs 10 mins

There are no rows in this table

⁠

That’s a lot of time spent emailing customers!!!!

How Coda saved me 3.5 hours

Using the tool on the next page -

Draft an Email⁠

- I was able to reduce the time I spent writing these follow up emails from 10 minutes → 1 minute! Not only that, but I set up a tool that guarantees that the customers I’m working with are getting high quality content after each of my calls, a win-win for me and my customers!

Calls

Time Per Follow-Up

Total Time Spent

1 min

25 mins

There are no rows in this table

⁠

How to use the tool

I drafted content for each of the topics that I most frequently talked about with my customers and put it in the Content column of the

Email Content⁠

table. I then go through and and click the add or remove buttons to include that section of content in the email that I am writing. You can select which greeting, intro, main email content, outro, and goodbye you want to include in your email and the tool with craft your message in the

Email Copy⁠

table.

From here I simply copy and paste this into an email and hit send!

For you to use this tool, I would simply recommend replacing the sections that I have added with text specific to your work, and get started. You can also add more sections to each group of content to give yourself more options for your email drafting tool!

Hope this helps save you 4 hours too!

Bonus customer quote

⁠

“Ben wrote the best customer email after my call with him. So much thoughtfully curate content specific to my needs - it was amazing! Me want cooookkieeeeeee.”

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