When a Startup Sends a Passive-Aggressive Email Every Day
Can I refocus this conversation away from you and Weebly?  Both for avoidance of personalizing this and to avoid this turning on the specifics of this post and their copy, because the takeaway message for most people reading this is "Should we implement lifecycle emails or not?" rather than "What exact words should I use?" or "What frequency is appropriate for a zero engagement user?"<p>Bob started using software from FooCorp.  Bob, for whatever reason, was not a great fit for FooCorp, and as a consequence has zero engagement.  FooCorp is unable to examine the inside of Bob's head, and must make predictions on Bob's behavior based on their model of his decisionmaking processes as informed by their experience with numerous similarly situated customers.<p>FooCorp made numerous attempts to improve their business relationship with Bob, despite the risk of annoying Bob.  They can justify this by pointing to observable evidence that, if they mail 100 Bobs, statistically Bobs actually do start using the FooSoft, and (anecdotally) their customer support team gets emails and blog posts saying "Thanks for being so attentive to my needs!!1"  This is actually not shocking to FooCorp, because FooCorp has years of experience with onboarding customers onto FooSoft, and they have talked to <i>hundreds</i> of people who, when asked "Why did you not finish using FooSoft?", responded "I got busy. / I forgot about it. / I didn't do that.  Wait, I did that?  Wow.  Um, hold on, I want to log in right now and fix that.  No seriously.  That was something I was going to do."<p>Also, when you get down to brass tacks, if Bob has zero engagement with the product, Bob will not pay for the product, and thus the downside risk of annoying Bob is to a first approximation zero.  Bob might, because it is 2013, feel that Bob's opinion of FooCorp is very important to FooCorp even if Bob is not a paying customer, because social media and branding and word of mouth.  Bob may not run a software company, but if Bob were to hypothetically talk to people who did, Bob might hear it is difficult to pay engineering salaries with word of mouth but monthly recurring subscription revenues do not have this downside.  Thus a speculative hit to word of mouth does not weight very persuasively against a demonstrable massive increase in recurring subscription revenues.