Our welcome email had a 51% open rate and a 4% click rate. We assumed the copy was the problem, so we rewrote it. Twice. The numbers did not move, which is usually the signal that you are optimising the wrong thing.
The email was not the funnel
People were opening the product, not the email. When we looked at what activated accounts had in common, it was not that they had read anything. It was that they had invited a second person within the first session.
So we moved the ask
We took the invite step out of the email and put it in the product, immediately after the first workspace is created, with the three colleagues we could already infer from the email domain pre-filled. Activation went from 22% to 38% in six weeks.
What we learned
An email can only ask. The product can ask at the moment the answer is obvious. If a step matters, it probably does not belong in an inbox.
We still send the welcome email. It is now three sentences long and mostly exists so the address is warm for the ones that matter later.
