How I Use Missive to Grow Missive.

My name is Luis; I joined Missive at the end of 2019 to fill the challenging position of Growth Lead. It can be a somewhat ambiguous and broad title, but it suits the objective and span of the tasks.

Lately, we've been working closely with a few customers who wish to share their stories on how they use Missive in their daily operations. I thought maybe some of you might be interested to know how we use Missive in Missive.

This article is divided into six major projects, each one with an explanation of how I use Missive to execute them.

1. Homepage redesign

The first big project I worked on was to redesign the homepage. Its narrative was quite feature-centric, instead of focusing on Missive's value proposition.

Naturally, a to-do list was needed. So I created a conversation in Missive with a checklist of all the elements required to get the project done.

Inside this general project space, I linked other conversations with more specific subjects, such as design mockups, screenshots of other websites for inspiration, links about UI, etc.

Creating conversations scoped by theme allowed me to run the project nice and orderly. I could ask for feedback on each subject separately, and still keep a birds-eye view of everything.

2. Social proofing

We needed to add social proofing to the new homepage. So we came up with the idea of creating a Hall of Praise to address the lack of reviews on the website. The Hall of Praise is a central place where we show all the amazing feedback we received from customers.

The most challenging part of this project was to get consent from all these customers; we needed to contact dozens of them. Each email was personalized to include the quote they had kindly shared with us. This is how we did it:

We created a shared label "Quotes" to identify all emails that contained a quote.

Then we created a canned response with the body of the email. We created an "Approved" nested shared label inside "Quotes". We used it to mark the emails where customers gave the green light to cite their words in the Hall.

In case you find it useful, feel free to copy the text we used:

I would say we got an 85% positive response rate.

3. Customer Stories

Case studies are fantastic tools to explain the value of your product in a real-life scenario. Nothing speaks louder than a genuine customer describing how, by using your product, their business improved.

Missive is awesome, totally changed the way we work as a business.

Jonathan J. | Scratch

In this case, we selected a few customers and emailed them to know if they would be onboard. Missive shined in this project since many collaboration features were employed — for instance, the internal chat feature, which was used to discuss which candidates were ideal.

Or further along the process, once a mockup was done, I could quickly receive feedback from the screenshots I posted in the project's conversation.

To keep candidates organized, I created a shared label "Case Study" and a rule that automatically snoozed conversations that had the label mentioned above. This ensured a proper follow-up in case no reply was received from the candidate.

Make sure to read some of our compelling case studies.

4. Blog posts

An essential part of our marketing strategy was giving new life to our blog by trying to steer off from posting only about feature announcements.

We're now focusing on creating practical guides of how you can use Missive and get a tangible benefit from it. Like this post on how to delegate email or this other about providing stellar customer support.

I usually create a conversation for the blog post and tag it with a "Blog" shared label. This will automatically share the discussion with other stakeholders, but they will not be bothered with notifications until I choose to tag someone.

Once I'm done drafting the text, I usually @mention a teammate who acts as an editor. He starts giving feedback, checks typos, etc.

Once I have the final version, I start working on the local instance of Missive on my computer and push the branch in Github. Missive hosts and maintains an integration with Github, so all activity is shown directly in the app.

I usually merge the initial blog post conversation with the pull request to keep everything in a single thread. If changes are needed in my code, all comments will appear in one Missive conversation.

5. Newsletter

Keeping a newsletter exciting is hard, especially for a small SaaS. Fortunately, we found a format that has been embraced positively amongst our customers.

One of the most visited pages on our website is the changelog. Unlike other companies, we don't stick to technical entries. We include many types of content there, from new features and bug fixes to new blog posts.

Once again, the collaborative nature of Missive is a great time saver.

I usually build our custom newsletter (you can download it here) and upload it to the email marketing tool we use and send a test to my email. I then @mention the team and ask for feedback.

If customers respond to the newsletter, we can also turn their feedback into actionable tasks and assign them to the appropriate team member — all within the same app.