2. Personal Welcome Email from Founder

Another common pattern is to send a secondary welcome email from the Founder. This email is usually sent a few hours later or the next day.

I have tried this in the past and it was so successful that it started taking me hours every day to reply to every user who wrote back. So, I had to disable it. I am still feeling guilty about not being able to send this email. ☺

3. Proactive Support Email

I don’t think I have seen this pattern somewhere else before. But, we are using it successfully at JotForm. We send it a day after the signup. It has the same problem as my founder email. The response rate is so high that we had to keep it turned off time to time. We enable it back when the support team catches up with the load.

4. New User Tutorials

I was very impressed with the tutorials Loggly sent when we signed up. They sent an email pretty much every day. Since I am really interested in understanding the product I glanced over every single email.

Emails contain high quality tutorials about various topics on Loggly. If you add up all the tutorials they have sent me it could become some book. I am impressed.

5. New Content Digests

If you constantly have fresh content, sending a digest email is a great way to get them to re-engage with your product.

6. Most Popular Posts

In a similar fashion, content sites can send a list of most popular content for the previous week/month.

7. Newsletters

Another common pattern is to send monthly newsletters.

I have to be honest I am not a big fan of newsletters. Send your announcements focused on a single topic at a time.

Newsletters are still good if you don’t have any big announcements. They are better than sending nothing.

8. New Feature Announcements

This one is my favorite. Send your announcements one topic at a time. You are sending an email because there is something important happening right now. You signal that there is something really important happening. So, they should stop and look up.

9. Celebrating a Milestone

Don’t miss the opportunities to celebrate with your users when your product reaches an important milestone. We sent one when we reached 1 million users and another one when our form templates gallery reached 5,000 templates.

10. Invitation to an Event

Organizing a webinar or an event is a good reason to email your users. This one is common on products with enterprise sales cycles.

11. Survey Users

You can either survey your users about your product or you can do an industry survey within your niche.

<shameless plug>If you need to create a survey today, JotForm is the best tool for the job. We have all kinds of ready to use survey templates and all kinds of cool widgets you can add up to your surveys.</shameless plug>

12. Share Survey Results

Once you complete the industry survey, here comes the fun part: Send them the results of your survey. People love sharing industry survey results with their friends and colleagues.

13. Run a Giveaway

People love sweepstakes and giveaways with prizes. For example, you can send free t-shirts to first 100 people who perform an action.

14. Run a Contest

Contest and competitions are great when you need to get your users to adopt a new program. When we were planning to launch an App Store for JotForm we decided to run a competition for developers.

15. Announce Results for the Competition

Once your competition ends you have another great reason to announce the results of your competition.