Crafting a better work experience

When I started my career, my first experience with team emails was chaotic. We had multiple inboxes, scattered conversations, and constant back-and-forth about who was handling what. It was a nightmare.

At my last job, we used Missive, and it was like night and day compared to my previous experience. However, it wasn't until I discovered some of its hidden features that things really clicked for me.

Over the past few years, I've used Missive daily, and for the last year, I've been helping Missive customers uncover all its hidden gems. Today, I want to share the five features that transformed how I handle communication. These aren't the flashy features – they're the practical, everyday tools that can make a difference.

1. Merging Email Threads

You know when someone starts a new email thread about something you're already discussing in another thread? This used to drive me crazy. But in Missive, you just drag one conversation onto the other, and they merge into a single thread. Everything stays in order, nothing gets lost, and suddenly all your context is in one place.

Real-world examples where this shines:

• When a customer replies to an old email instead of the original thread for the same issue
• Multiple customers reporting the same issue
• Getting quotes from different suppliers
• Project discussions that branch off and need to be reconnected

Pro tip: You cannot undo the merging. BUT you can move messages of merged conversations to new private or shared ones.

2. Your Sidebar, Your Rules

At first glance, customizing your sidebar might not sound revolutionary. But trust me – it's like finally organizing your desk after years of chaos.

Here's what makes it special:

• Move your most-used mailboxes to the top
• Hide the stuff you rarely touch
• Group things however they make sense to YOU
• Create separate sections for different projects or clients

Here's how different teams use this:‍

Support Teams:

• Support Team Inbox at the top
• Urgent issues section with labels
• Team chat of the Support team
• Archived mailbox hidden but accessible

Sales Teams:

• Hot lead labels front and center
• Separate sections for each pipeline stage
• Quick access to Sales team room
• 'Follow-up' label visible pinned

Project Managers:

• Project-specific inboxes grouped
• Client communication sections
• Team room easily accessible
• Deadline-sensitive items labels

Pro tip: You can also create whole new sections. Just drag an item on top of the +More button in the sidebar.

3. Type # and Save Hours

This feature is really powerful: inserting canned responses inline. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Just type a hashtag followed by your response name, and boom – your full message appears right where you're typing. No more copying and pasting, no more digging through templates.

My team's favorite uses:

• #hi: Personalized welcome messages for new email requests
• #followup: 'Thanks for reaching out'
• #lmka: 'Let me know if you need anything else, I'd be happy to help'
• #meet: Inserts a link with my Calendly availability link
• #thanks: Thank you messages with next steps

Power User Tips:

1. Create variations of common responses (formal vs casual)
2. Include variables for personalization
3. Set up team-wide responses for consistency
4. For intensive-use phrases, use short, memorable hashtags
5. Create responses in multiple languages

4. The Command Bar (Ctrl/Cmd + K)

If you learn one keyboard shortcut in Missive, make it this one. Press Cmd+K on Mac (or Ctrl+K on Windows), and you've got instant access to pretty much everything.

Things you can do from the command bar:

• Create new emails, events, or tasks
• Access settings and preferences
• Switch between 1:1 rooms
• Search for specific messages
• Manage rules and labels
• Open contact books
• Set a status
• And much more!

If I were to time-track myself for a week with and without using the command bar. The difference? About 3 minutes saved each day just from reducing mouse usage and menu navigation. Compound this to a year, and you'll see how powerful it can be.

5. Custom Thread Names That Actually Make Sense

This last one's simple but brilliant. You can rename your email threads to whatever you want.

Smart ways to use this:

• Add project phase indicators (e.g., "Brand Design - Phase 2 Feedback")
• Include priority levels (e.g., "URGENT: Server Issue Resolution")
• Add dates for time-sensitive stuff (e.g., "Q4 Planning - Due Oct 30")
• Tag conversations by department (e.g., "HR: New Hire Onboarding - Sarah")

Putting It All Together: Power User Workflows

The real magic happens when you combine some of these features.

Here's how I handle an inbound request from big leads:

1. Pin 'Big Leads' label to the sidebar
2. Merge all email communication and Calendly invites
3. Use the command bar for quick navigation between my other tasks

For support teams, try this workflow:

1. Merge support requests from the same customer
2. Rename threads with issue types and status
3. Use canned responses for common solutions
4. Organize sidebar by priority levels

The Impact on Your Daily Work

Let's talk numbers. Depending on your use case, after implementing these features across your team:

• Email response time will drop by at least a few minutes per day
• Context switching will be reduced significantly
• Team coordination will improve

Getting Started

Don't try to implement everything at once. Start with the feature that addresses your biggest pain point:

• Drowning in split conversations? Start with merging
• Spending too much time on repeated responses? Focus on creating/using inline canned responses
• Can't find anything? Organize that sidebar
• Lost in endless threads? Start renaming conversations

‍

Give them a shot. Start with one, get comfortable, then move on to the next. You might be surprised at how much time you save.

When talking about Missive, I often dropped this bomb:

— We never did any marketing.

Well, looking back, it’s a lie. Or let’s just say that it’s an understatement.

Or maybe I was being lazy and not recollecting the many small things we did.

Now that the Missive team is growing fast (read more), I realized, you must tell your team the complete story to equip them with success.

I’m writing this for our future Head of marketing. It’s a list of all of the things we did marketing-wise for the last ten-ish years. As you can see, not so much.

To me it's a testament that, yes, if you build something that people like, they will find you.

Now, imagine with a marketing team...

Note: We got our first customer on Jul. 20, 2016 and we are now at ~$500k USD MRR eight years later.

Everything we did marketing-wise

1. First homepage, at this point Missive was free to use beta. 2015

2. We have a Blog we updated sporadically. 2015 - 2024

3. Multiple ProductHunt launches. 2015-2023

4. A Brief History of Email Apps. - A failed attempt at creating valuable content. Was fun to do, but was a miserable failure. 2015

5. Twitter - Hello Word 2015

6. Email cold outreach to a few people we admired to get feedback and validate the product. No more than 50 emails total were sent. 2015

7. Second homepage and the release of our paid plans. 2016

8. Twitter - I monitored conversations about competitors, email clients, etc. and mentioned Missive in replies. 2016-2023

9. Nailed basic SEO vitals. 2016-2024

10. Open sourced EmojiMart component, now used by big startups (e.g. Figma!). It's a big driver of traffic and backlinks. 2016-2024

11. Attending the Inbox Awesome conference in NYC, the conference was for email marketers, not our target audience. Here is a picture of me on a panel about how to make people open and read your email newsletters. I had 0 clue what I was doing. I attended two years in a row because we like the title "Inbox Awesome" 🤣. 2016-2017

12. Getting both our desktop and mobile javascript apps featured on the App Store and writing about it. This established us as a legitimate player in the email client space. 2017

13. Published VS competitor landing pages, to this day, these are our most valuable content. 2016-2024

14. Developed integrations with popular SaaS (Asana, Salesforce, Aircall, etc.). This created nice co-marketing opportunities like being featured in their app/integration store. 2019-2023

15. Third homepage (current one). 2020

16. We deprecated a really popular feature, read tracking, we explained our reasoning in a blog post. This was an important decision, it helped defined our company culture and product direction. It mostly created churn for solo-user customers.

17. We hired consultants to do SEO + write content. We did with two firms, both times the firm owners were paid Missive users. In both instances we paid $10k/month and the experiment went on for around six months. Six months is not a lot in the SEO world, but each time, both we and the consultant learned that writing good content on an app like Missive is really hard and can't be done by pay-to-hire-content-writers. 2022 & 2024

18. We ditched Google analytics, for privacy reasons, read more. I'm still not so sure about this one, it does feel like we did some privacy-posturing. Now, this might be a potential friction for our future marketing team. We have no plan to re-visit this at the moment.

19. We created a homemade affiliate program. 2022 - 2024

20. MRR milestone blog posts + Hacker news traffic 2021-2024

21. We created many case studies to showcase how Missive is used by people in different industries. Those were pushed on LinkedIn and X.2020-2023

22. We sent a total of forty newsletters, all were a summary of our progress pushing out the content of our changelog. 2016-2024

23. We offer weekly webinars potential customers can attend to learn more about the product and each webinar offers a dedicated Q&A at the end. Those webinars have been a great success, specially for people coming from other competitors looking for a validation that the switch to Missive is a good decision. 2020 - 2024

24. We attended our first trade show in an industry where we find some of our bigger customers, logistic companies. I wrote an article about our experience. 2024

25. We got serious with G2 and other review sites and started earning multiple customer reviews and earning multiple badges. 2024

26. All co-founders did couple of podcasts & interviews over the years. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, ...) 2016 - 2024

27. I developed our product metric pipeline with Segment and Mixpanel. This will be useful for the future marketing team. 2024

This list is really a testament of how small our team was and how focused on the product we were. We were lucky enough those small initiatives created enough traction to where we are today. Having said that, reading it again, it shows unequivocally how amateurish our marketing efforts were.

It's time to bring expertise and structure, our marketing efforts should be as good as the quality of our product. And thus, we are looking for a Head of Marketing. If you are interested, please reach out (email).

The time and energy invested in our product metrics pipeline allowed us to answer questions like which industries are extracting the most value out of Missive.

Starting with metrics

After crunching our numbers (organization size, core functionalities usage, ease of onboarding), the answer was:

1. Logistics/Transportation (mostly brokers & carriers)
2. Travel/Property management (luxury travel agencies, tour operators)
3. Finance/Legal (accountants, law firms)
4. Retail (various sectors)
5. Manufacturing (various sectors)

With this insight, our next question was: where can we meet as many people from these industries in person? Our first instinct was to attend industry-specific trade shows.

With that in mind, three weeks ago, we identified FreightWaves Future of Supply Chain in Atlanta as the biggest short-term opportunity. We contacted the organizers and negotiated an interesting package:

1. A 7-minute demo on the live stage
2. A 6x6 booth
3. A 10-minute interview on "What the Truck?!?" radio show

Organization

Once confirmed, we had two weeks to organize the whole trip. Two team members would go: Janie (COO) and myself (CEO). The first thing I did was to make noise about our attendance. I posted on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and the Hampton founders community. My angle was to be transparent about us having zero experience and going there to learn as much as possible.

Instantly, people started to reach out privately to give tips on how we should approach this to get as much ROI as possible. I want to personally thank two people. Vic Cherubini, who proactively reached out, organized his thoughts around trade shows before our call, and shared valuable insights:

I also want to thank Maxime Villemure, an ex-pro poker player turned logistics entrepreneur, who reached out on X and proposed a call to teach me everything about 3PL/Logistics and his industry.

With these personal coaching sessions and Janie’s firsthand experience with trade shows, we understood the need to reach out to as many people as possible before the show.

1. Contacted our existing customers in the industry
2. Make noise on LinkedIn/X
3. Cold outreach to attendees

The first two were easy. The last was harder as we did not have a list of attendees. However, the Future of Supply Chain website had logos of all the businesses attending. We took screenshots, then used ChatGPT-4o to identify the domain names related to all logos. We then passed that domain list to Hunter.io and got a list of possible email addresses to reach out to.

Janie then proceeded to message people on LinkedIn or cold-reach them via email about our presence at the event.

Execution

All in all, we successfully scheduled two demos through these messages. Not bad, but not great. The good news is the conference wasn’t huge, so all attendees saw our booth, making pre-booking meetings less important.

Vic provided excellent tips for our booth, but we ended up having no time to implement most of them. We kept things simple. Arnaud quickly created a video that we looped on the TV:

<figure>  <div class="video-container">   <iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed//5Z6S7w2_rk0?quality=high&modestbranding=1&showinfo=0&rel=0&theme=light&autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>  </div></figure>

I used my laptop to demo the product directly to attendees. All in all, we did 33 demos at the booth. I did a good job with the demo on the main stage, both highlighting the pain of brokers dealing with a massive volume of emails and the solutions Missive has to offer (team inboxes, AI, rules & automation, custom integrations and analytics).

Many people also discovered the product while listening to the radio interview I did live on the What the truck?!? Radio show.

We mostly encountered three types of leads:

1. Potential customers (brokers)
2. Potential industry-specific integrations (TMS)
3. Content/marketing partnerships (industry influencers, founders)
4. Big shots (investors, VPs of large logistics businesses)

We scanned their badges and took screenshots of the person to remember post-event who and what. Janie also took notes in the lead retrieval app. Janie spent our airport transit day following-up with everyone we talked to or showed interest.

From our conversations, I assume we can hope to convert at least 5 organizations, all having need for 50 seats each, to Missive.

Conclusion

We have yet to assess the ROI of this trip to Atlanta, but just as an experience it was an absolute eye-opener and I came away wanting to invest way more resources into attending industry specific trade shows.

One quote from Paul Graham I absolutely abide by is “action produces information”, and we absolutely did with this first trade show.

At Missive, we're not fans of meetings. However, we’ve just started doing all-hands, few times a year, to keep in sync.

The idea is, prior to each, I send a written memo about our vision, challenges, strategies, and roadmap – a snapshot of our current status.

After writing the first one, I decided why not share it with our customers. Here it is, our second memo.

👋 Hello team,

It has been 51 days since our first all-hands; that timespan is 14% of the year. Time flies by incredibly fast, looking back it’s a constant reminder of how time-constrained we are. For this second memo I plan to share updates on various subjects, list the things we’ve achieved, then go over things we have planned for the next few weeks.

On Missive + Tasks

Arnaud and Etienne have been working on scoping the upcoming task improvements.

Our goal is to integrate conversations and tasks in a natural way to improve visibility and accountability. As you can imagine, this requires a few core changes to ensure simplicity and ease of use. Let's dive in!

Currently, in Missive, you can assign and close a conversation. This is useful for customer support, where you don’t need to be descriptive about what needs to be done. The act of assigning a customer question is good enough, your colleague will reply to the customer and then close the conversation.

When you need to be more descriptive about the work that needs to be accomplished, Missive offers the ability to create tasks within conversations, each of which can be assigned to a colleague. For instance, you might create a task for your assistant to export a specific PDF report and attach it to one of your drafts.

Having two different mechanisms (assigned conversations and tasks) to keep track of what needs to be done creates complexity. Ultimately, whether it's an assigned conversation or an assigned task, the key is to have tools to plan your day and know what you and your colleagues need to focus on.

This upcoming update will thus not only focus on bringing a My tasks view but also bridge the gap between assigned conversations and tasks. So both can be managed using the same tools (My tasks, Calendars, Due date, etc.)

On the technical side of things, Rafael started brainstorming and scoping the architecture and database changes required for these new functionalities. It has been decided that Denys will be responsible for building the first prototypes of those changes on the backend, and Etienne will lead the front-end.

On SOC 2

Our SOC 2 Type 1 audit started last Tuesday, May 14th. We should receive our SOC 2 Type 1 certification pretty soon.

Going through the different SOC 2 controls was a really interesting and beneficial experience in terms of battle-proofing our different security and privacy processes.

Getting this certification will streamline the onboarding process for larger customers. Instead of filling out custom security questionnaires for each customer, our certification letter will likely serve as a replacement.

The SOC 2 certification will also enhance the credibility of Missive for customers of all sizes, not just the larger ones.

On Product Metrics

It took us more than eight years to include product metrics in Missive, but we finally did it. For most of our history, we were completely blind to how people were using Missive or how our initiatives were impacting users, apart from our direct conversations with customers.

As we scale the team and become less involved in every customer conversation, it is crucial to build a flexible metric dashboard. The workflow is built using Segment for data ingestion and Mixpanel for visualization.

My next step is to build a workflow for Luis and Janie to help them follow up with potential customers. The data in Mixpanel will allow them to reach out with relevant information based on product usage, such as:

• Have they created rules?
• Have they created labels?
• What are their use cases?
• Have they connected email accounts?
• Have they had any failed payments?

If you don’t have access to Mixpanel, just ask, and I will invite you.

On Price Increase

On April 15, we released a yearly subscription option, increased the price of all our plans, and removed some plan limitations. This price increase had several goals:

• Decrease the gap between the price of Missive and our competitors.
• Increase the incentive for organizations to subscribe to the new yearly subscription.
• Auto-filter solo users who were churning at a high rate due to a lack of value in the collaborative features central to the Missive experience.

Here are the results of the price increase on our MRR:

We can observe the immediate 10% price increase for all seats, followed by many organizations removing seats they had added to lock in the legacy pricing. We also see numerous organizations switching their subscriptions from monthly to yearly in the following days. This bump and slump in the MRR is expected as more organizations switch to the yearly plan and receive a 20% discount.

Interestingly, before the price increase, the Starter plan was the least popular option among our users. The six-month history limit and the small price difference between the Starter and Productive plans led most new users to choose the Productive plan.

Since April 15, the Starter plan has become the most popular. This is great because it leaves room for those organizations to eventually upgrade to the Productive plan for features like rules and integrations.

On Affiliates

Following the price increase, we also increased the rewards affiliates can get when referring customers to us. Interested to learn more about our affiliate program? I recently wrote a blog post about it here.

On Webinars and Customer Interviews

Luis has taken over the duty of doing webinars. He is still doing the bi-weekly team inbox webinar. He also created one specifically tailored for users on the Productive plan about the rules and integrations.

Luis is also conducting user interviews using the JTBD (jobs to be done) framework. The results of all interviews he made so far can be consulted on Notion.

These interviews, along with our product metrics, will help us better understand our customers and how they use Missive. The ultimate goal is to learn to speak their language, allowing us to better tailor our marketing and sales initiatives.

On Support

Philippe Langlois is doing a great job with support, the number of support messages has stayed relatively the same but the first reply time and handle time has been constantly decreasing over the last few weeks.

Philippe also started to systematically reply to all customers having had a successful interaction with him to get a potential review at Trustpilot, G2 and others. We can clearly see when he started doing this:

On Marketing

For the past few months, we collaborated with a marketing agency to produce content and structure our marketing efforts. However, both parties agreed that we had reached the full potential of this partnership and decided to end it. Moving forward, we will bring all marketing efforts in-house.

I have a strong bias towards action over strategizing, which made it challenging for me to maximize this partnership. Paul Graham’s quote, "If you're not sure what to do as an entrepreneur, do anything. Action produces information," resonates strongly with me.

As an organization, we can't rely on a perfectly fine-tuned recipe for marketing, development, product, etc., because the ingredients are never exactly the same. We need to figure things out ourselves, fail, adapt, and eventually win.

There are no shortcuts; we need to do the hard work ourselves.

On Development

We are now five months in our experiment of scaling up the team with senior developers having years of experience with Ruby/Rails. In those 5 months we have made a lot of progress into not making Missive so dependent on one man, Rafael.

• Implement CI on GitHub (specs and code formatter).
• Created and deployed monitoring system for developers access to production server.
• 1Password secrets to ease development and improve production security posture.
• Automatic deployment from GitHub to multiple Heroku apps to ultimately let devs other than Raf deploy to production.
• Better GitHub integration in Missive.
• Production DB backup monitoring.
• Updated to the latest Rails version.
• Updated to Ruby 3.3.
• Automated user data exports to reduce manual operations requirements.
• Greg, Denys and Louis-Michel all got familiar with part of the code base only Rafael was familiar with.

Louis-Michel and Denys have each started working on features that are extremely high on our Canny board, so we are quite excited about the next few months.

On The New Office

We just moved to our new office in Quebec city. For Etienne, Rafael and myself, it’s nothing new as it’s the same office where the first line of codes for Missive were coded in 2015 in what was the now defunct co-working space, Abri.co.

Keep all in mind that 36% of our staff is not located in Quebec, so we will stay predominantly a remote first culture. Conversations should happen online (text, video) most of the time.

Rails World + Offsite

We were extremely happy to have secured six tickets to attend the next Rails World in Toronto next September. We will take advantage of the conference to fly everyone to Quebec city a few days before the conference. It will be the first time the whole company will meet in person!

See more information about Rails Word in our Notion.

Customer Field Trip

End of May Janie and I will fly to New-York for 3 days to meet our best customers from the Big Apple. This will be a first for me as I’ve rarely met customers in real life apart from the few we have in Quebec city! I will probably also go to the bay area and LA soon to do the same. Why? From every business-oriented person I talked to, it is an absolute must to meet your best customers in person:

• You show them that you care. You make them fans for life.
• You gather real honest feedback you would never have got from just an email or phone call.
• You can work on their pain and expand their use of your product.
• They can help us expand our network and share insights on how to sell to their industry.

Trade shows and Conferences

On June 4th and 5th, Janie and I will be attending our first trade show, the Future of Supply Chain. This event focuses on transportation and logistics businesses, which are key customer segments for us. These businesses typically have a large number of user seats and are heavy users of our assignment, chat, and task features.

We will have a small booth, and I will be giving a 7-minute demonstration of Missive on the main stage.

We aim to connect with potential big customers and hopefully secure new business. This will be a valuable learning experience for us and help us define what we need going forward to improve go to market strategies.

Next, we plan to participate in more events within the logistics and transportation industries. Additionally, we will explore opportunities in the travel and hospitality industry, where we also have a strong customer base.

‍

At Missive, we were blessed with eight years of organic growth. As a small team of developers with limited resources, we never invested much in marketing.

One of the few initiatives we did, was quite “cliché” for developer entrepreneurs… we coded an affiliate system from scratch. Two years in, it’s time to assess if it was successful.

Why an affiliate program?

Our customers have always been extremely enthusiastic about Missive, so naturally, developing an affiliate program made sense. This would allow us to delegate our marketing to our customers while they could benefit from their efforts by reducing their monthly invoices. A developer’s dream!

Why build it from scratch?

Missive is a collaborative email client that deals with sensitive customer data, which we take very seriously. It was always out of the question to insert third-party scripts into our app for privacy and security reasons. That meant no easy product metrics, no easy marketing attribution, and most importantly in this case, not being able to create an affiliate program using an off-the-shelf solution.

Building it ourselves also meant we could have more control on the affiliate experience. For instance, every organization owner can automatically open its affiliate dashboard from Missive and see their balance and potential gain.

On rewards

We pay a monthly reward for each seat in a referred organization that upgrades to a paid plan, and do so for up to 5 months. If a seat cancels, let’s say, after two months, the total reward will be limited to only those two months. This way every referral is always profitable.

• Up to $25 per Starter user referred.
• Up to $50 per Productive user referred.
• Up to $75 per Business user referred.

Rewards are either credited directly to customer invoices or paid out in cash, once balances exceed $250. We use PayPal for payouts up to $5,000 and do bank wire transfers for larger sums.

To this date we have paid or credited more than $115,000 to our affiliates. The lion’s share of the payouts was given to just two affiliates, where the biggest one earned more than $60,000 in cash payouts. Our best affiliate was an existing Missive customer who runs a digital advertising business.

On affiliates doing paid advertising

We initially let affiliates do paid advertising with no limitation. Some did so on our brand keyword, “Missive”. I believe the bulk of the $115,000 we paid out was earned this way. We recently changed our mind on this, it is now against our program terms to advertise on search that include our brand “Missive” keyword. The advertising effort of affiliates should be focused on people not already familiar with Missive.

On customers referring other customers

Only around 15% of the total earnings were paid to 55 customers via credits applied to their invoices. Few customers referred others through the program, and thus few received credits on their invoices. Most of our customers, when doing word of mouth, don’t even bother using our affiliate program.

Final takeaways

First, if we want the affiliate program to be a significant part of our new business we need to better market it. The program itself is a product.

Second, we should increase the value of the rewards, especially given we now prevent our affiliates from doing advertising on customers already familiar with Missive.

Starting today, the rewards for referred users subscribing to our latest plans will be increased to:

• Up to $60 per Starter user referred. + 240% increase
• Up to $100 per Productive user referred. + 200% increase
• Up to $145 per Business user referred. + 193% increase

With these new rewards I believe our customer base will have more incentive to share their affiliate link. It will also become more profitable for professional affiliates or influencers.

If you want to try it yourself, just create a Missive account, then from the app open your settings and select the Rewards option!

At Missive, we're not fans of meetings. However, we’ve just started doing all-hands, few times a year, to keep in sync.

The idea is, prior to each, I send a written memo about our vision, challenges, strategies, and roadmap – a snapshot of our current status.

After writing the first one, I decided why not share it with our customers. Here it is, memo numero uno.

👋 Hello team,

Things have changed a lot in the last few months for us at Missive. It's important that we all share a common understanding of our journey, our goals, and the path ahead.

Instead of lengthy all-hands meetings where only I talk, I'll capture our vision, challenges, strategies, and roadmap in writing first so you can participate and ask questions.

I wrote each section of this memo to convey specific insights or updates, designed for clarity and brevity. While some sections are brief, each is important. Feel free to engage with each part as it resonates with your role and interests, but I encourage a thorough read to grasp the full picture of where we stand and where we're headed.

On origins

In 2013, Rafael, Etienne, and I started working together on a product called ConferenceBadge, a simple name badge designing tool for event organizers. The product quickly gained traction, allowing us to work full-time on it. However, early on, regardless of sales increasing, we decided that was not what we wanted to do with most of our time.

We wanted to work on a more ambitious project, Missive. The initial idea, devised by Etienne, was: Could we create a collaborative email draft editor? This idea quickly morphed into the first Missive prototype, a full-fledged collaborative email client merged with team chat.

From its inception, Missive was a bold move. By rejecting a safe path for something more ambitious — discarding a successful, revenue-generating, bootstrapped product like ConferenceBadge to work on an unproven idea — many called us crazy.

There, I see two guiding principles, which I think we all should keep and apply forward:

1. Level up: Build a foundation, a quick win, something achievable with your current means/skills. Then use this as a foundation to propel yourself to the next level.
2. Long-term thinking: Do not limit yourself or your ambitions to your current situation, think long-term where you want to be, and start acting now.

ConferenceBadge was our foundation, it gave us the means and de-risked our path to working on a product normally built by teams massively funded.

On our long journey

For much of Missive's history, we were a small team of three, ruthlessly prioritizing listening to and delighting our customers.

Our process to decide what to work on next was simple: do customer support ourselves and set out to improve some of the bigger pains our customers were experiencing at that moment. This shows on our changelog, a long list of incremental improvements.

This process worked magically at first, we could fix issues at a speed unmatched by our competitors and ship innovative features at a blistering pace.

After 8 years and more than 3500 paid customers, it started to show its limitations. As we've grown, so has our to-do list. Not too long ago, I found myself knee-deep in customer support, with Rafael and Etienne tackling bug reports that seemed to multiply overnight.

The three of us, juggling everything, had become too big of a liability. We didn't have enough time to do anything meaningful.

Working on a project like Missive can be extremely satisfying when you have the space and time to experiment. Lately, we were more and more heads down, just trying to make things work.

After a couple of attempts at scaling the team unsuccessfully, we were exhausted.

Then, on a rainy November day at a microbrewery near the office, we each took turns, Rafael, Etienne, and I, discussing what we wanted and where we wanted to go. What transpired was that we were absolutely not exhausted from working on Missive, but mostly we were exhausted from doing it alone. On that day, we laid down a plan.

1. Hire someone to help us hire. (Janie)
2. Move from our gloomy shared office to a nice HQ. (in construction…)
3. Hire someone to help us with customer support. (Philippe, Luis)
4. Hire experienced developers. (Louis-Michel, Grzegorz, Denys)
5. Hire a talented designer. (Arnaud)

Fast forward 5 months later and I believe we are on track. The team has grown, each of you brings something unique to the table, be it from past collaborations, as a customer, or through your work experiences. Your fresh perspectives and skills are exactly what Missive needs to leap forward. With more hands on deck, we're not just looking to distribute the workload; we're aiming to multiply our capabilities.

I’m confident in saying we are extremely talented and we have what it takes to make a big impact.

I personally set a high bar for ourselves, aspiring to be mentioned in the same breath as Notion and Linear; products known not just for their utility but for their innovative edge and the quality of their user experience.

We were a tiny team, now that we are a bit bigger, we are still going to punch far above our weight.

On mission

We have the ambition of being a meeting-less culture, that’s even why some of you were interested to apply to a job at Missive. Now to be meeting-less, there's a requirement, we need alignment, we need to agree on where we are going. To that effect I wrote this mission statement:

We are toolmakers. Our tools improve communication by breaking silos and ease collaboration. They are built for teams having an outsized impact on the world, like us.

Toolmakers love their craft. They are obsessed with the end result. They build in service of others. They don’t get lost in convoluted processes. They are always focused on creating the best possible product, in the end it’s the only thing that matters.

Missive 3.0

With more time to think, one of our goals this year is to redefine what Missive is. Aiming to make it not just a shared inbox app but a platform that helps small and medium-sized businesses plan around all the work that revolves around their communications.

This is how we’ve been using Missive at Missive for years now. But it’s not just us, our hubris, it’s also what our most fanatic users have wanted for years:

Etienne and Arnaud will spearhead this project and work together on UI improvements and improvements around task management.

Let me give you an example, a freight transportation broker using Missive will exchange hundreds of emails a day with businesses wanting to deliver parcels.

From these emails, hundreds of tasks need to be completed by different people. Currently, such a customer might use the basic task functionality in Missive to achieve this, but it's not an ideal experience.

They are most likely to fall back on using a platform like ClickUp or Asana to manage those tasks, alongside Missive. The feedback we've consistently received is clear: such users would prefer a seamless experience within Missive, where task management is integrated directly into the communication flow. The current task's implementation is too simplistic and conversation-centric. Once tasks are created, they are lost in the sea of conversations and there is no accountability possible.

I believe there's a significant market opportunity here, as virtually every business that relies heavily on daily communication via email or any other text communication channels could benefit from such a built-in way to manage tasks around communication.

We need to make this vision a reality on the product side but also to clearly articulate this via our brand and our different marketing initiatives. This will set us apart from traditional help desks.

On AI

AI is on everyone’s radar; it’s the new hot thing. To me, it would be a mistake to market ourselves as an AI product or define all of our roadmap around it. Of course, short-term it would be great, free media and a lot of attention. But long term all products will have AI built-in. This won’t be a differentiator at all. There is no moat in AI.

Now, I’m not saying it's not important, it is, what I’m trying to articulate it’s that AI should not be the main part of our DNA. We will experiment with it, we will create buzz with it, it’s just not what will set us apart.

On collaboration

As I wrote before, we were a small team, for a long time. We know we’ve developed ways of working that are not compatible with collaborating with more people. With the help of Louis-Michel, Denys and Greg on the tech side of things, we already started changing some of our practices.

I expect you, the new team members, to teach us, the original three, how to work and collaborate in a bigger team. But I expect us to teach you how to be mighty efficient. This will create tensions, it’s good and expected.

As toolmakers, our goal is to create the best product, not implement the best processes. The processes are only good if they help us achieve the best product.

On growth

Growth is the consequence of a great product. There is no shortcut. Any growth initiative should be about putting fuel on an already strong fire.

Historically, growth has been around 2%-6% month over month. We always had a solid stream of new inbound users.

This nice consistent growth, hides a darker reality, for every new users and existing ones who grow with us (seat expansion) we have a lot of users who churn, and usually, after a short period of time.

In this graphic, subscriptions = paid organizations. Above purple is good, orange is bad.

To increase our growth rate we need to work on that orange part and better nurture our inbound users. The recipe is simple:

1. Better product (make it simple, reduce the confusion)
2. Better support
3. Better documentation
4. Better onboarding
5. Yearly plan
6. Impactful brand/marketing
7. Better product metrics

We need to be more deliberate and eloquent about what Missive is by simplifying the product and the message.

On our changelog

I got curious writing this memo and parsed the data from our changelog and generated a graph showing the number of release elements either tagged as New, Improved or Fixed per quarter over the years.

The trends of both New and Improved features are decreasing faster than the Fixed one. With more and more technical debt and customers to care for, a tiny team can’t forever beat the odds.

On our tool stack

We use Missive, more than anything else, even when it’s not the best fit. We stick to it, we live with its weaknesses… then we improve it. This experience is our fuel; it guides us into creating a better product from a first hand experience.

We avoid using too many tools. Having a simple stack has more advantages than using the perfect tool for every job. The cognitive cost of learning and maintaining many platforms is high. Let’s not fall into this trap.

On the upcoming price increase

On Feb 28th, we announced a price increase. One goal is to make monthly plans more expensive and attract more customers to the new yearly plans.

The announcement email was sent to all ~6k+ admins and owners of paying organizations. We received 124 replies, with 34% neutral, 40% positive, and 26% negative, but none were hyper-negative. So technically, only 0.25% of users replied negatively, which is not bad.

Most of the replies inquired about the possibility of getting their grandfathered seats rolled up into a yearly subscription with a 20% discount. Originally, it was decided that if you upgraded to a yearly subscription, you would move to the new pricing. We decided it would be fair game not to do so. This change allowed me to reply with the following message, to which most responded extremely positively.

I expect to see a lot of customers switching to the yearly subscription next April and May.

On competitors

Who are our competitors? Missive being a pretty general email/collaboration solution, there are a lot of them. From Front to Spark, Superhuman and even to Intercom and Slack.

Should we care? No, we should always refrain from being obsessed with one or listen to only people who switched over to Missive from one of them. We are not copy cats chasing a space with a discounted product.

A lot of our users come from Front, just search for Front on this page to see. Because of this there are strong demands for us to implement their exact feature set. We sometimes do but most of the time we don’t.

We need to find our way.

――――

The end. That's it, this is the starting point, what are we going to achieve together? See you all, tomorrow, at the 🙌 all-hands!

Philippe Lehoux

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Emails, emails, emails. We can't predict next week's weather, but our forecast for your inbox next week is straightforward:

You'll get plenty of new office emails tomorrow, with chances of junk mail.

Your emails take up more than a quarter of your workweek, so it’s a no-brainer that you would have a lot of catching up to do after a week-long vacation.

Fortunately, nowadays, you can set up an automated office email reply to save you time and manage your emails. Automated email replies can provide information needed by the sender while you are unavailable, or respond to business inquiries or job applications you receive.

You don’t want to mess it up and send an automated email saying you might not ever respond or set it up to reply to all the emails you’ve received (we wonder why that’s even possible).

You can thank us later, but we made sure we covered the basics, including the best templates and do’s and don’ts. Also, we included a section on setting up Gmail or Outlook for automated email replies. You'll save time managing emails and you can go on a vacation without having to check your inbox.

What is an Automatic Email Reply?

An automatic email reply or out-of-office email is an automated response sent on your behalf when receiving messages that meet certain conditions.

Most email clients let you set up auto-replies to answer emails automatically within a set period using a pre-written email template. In other words, your emails will answer themselves with a pre-written message when this feature is on. For example, an out-of-office reply informs the sender of your absence, the duration, and a contact person while you are away.

An automatic email reply can be used for various situations like being sick, out to a conference, on vacation, on maternity leave, or on annual leave. It can also be used for business inquiries or job applications. Whether you're out of the office or you don’t want to always type the same reply to every email while analyzing the inquiry or application, automatic email replies are for you.

Best Automatic Email Reply Templates

An automatic email reply is only as good as the template. We’ve created templates for common situations when automatic email replies are useful. In addition, our templates use variables to personalize your emails in Missive.

The great thing about Missive is that you can create rules to decide when to send your out-of-office email (the dates you will be away) or choose specific people or conditions to send your responses (for example, only people within your company like template #3).

Setting up auto-replies in Missive is easy. Just follow this guide.

Here are the best auto-reply email templates to start using for professional replies.

1. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template for a Holiday

Holidays are the times in a year when you see distant family and get long weekends, not reply to emails. Different businesses have different holiday policies, so it's important to set up an automated ooo messageto let others know when you start and return from a holiday.

2. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template for a Vacation

Who doesn’t need a vacation sometimes? Well this ooo message is perfect for that, and we made sure it is professional; no need to mention the piña colada here.

3. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template for Internal Emails

Whether you are on holiday or you are on a sick leave, you might need to let your colleagues know of your absence. Here, make sure you use a rule to send this ooo message only to emails coming from within the company (e.g., emails with the domain @companyname.com) to avoid sending this template to external parties.

4. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template for Maternity Leave

The gift of life grants some well-deserved time off work. Depending on your line of work and company policy, you might have a shorter or longer maternity (or paternity) leave, and it's important to notify people. Try this autoresponder:

5. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template for a Sick Leave

When you get sick, the best thing is to stay at home. Whether you will be out of office for a long period or just for the day, it is best to let people contacting you there will be a delay in your response.

6. Auto-Reply Email Template for Someone No Longer With Company

Imagine still receiving emails from your old job. It would be weird, right? Well, if someone isn’t on the payroll anymore, you better make sure the sender that the ex-employee person won’t be replying to any of those emails anymore.

7. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template Offering Alternative Contact Methods

Sometimes your email may not be the best way to reach you. You might be out of the office or in a meeting only reachable by phone. If you want to offer another way to get in touch, this is it. This autoresponder template is best for situations where the recipient may need to reach the sender urgently, even if you’re out of the office.

8. New Support Request Auto-Reply Email Template

This one is handy if you’re on the support team. People who require immediate assistance want help and they want it FAST. If you reply right away saying you will look into their urgent problem, it gives the sense you are caring.

9. General Business Inquiry Auto-Reply Email Template

This one will usually be used to reply to your general business email. Replying right away gives a sense that you care about the inquiry, but it also gives you time to give a more personal reply to the inquiry.

10. New Lead Auto-Reply Email Template

New leads are not customers yet. You want to make the best impression to maximize your chances of turning a lead into a client. Make sure you set up an automated reply and show you care for potential customers.

11. Job Application Auto-Reply Email Template

Candidates for open positions are harder to come by these days. It can also be a stressful process for candidates. A quick reply will show you care and that you are interested in the application.

Thank you for your interest in {{ company_name | description: "company name" | confirm }}. We aim to get back to potential candidates for the {{ job_name | description: “job title" | confirm }} position within {{ number_day | description: “Number of business days to reply" | confirm }}.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us.

Best regards,

[Your signature]

How to Create Professional Automatic Email Reply Templates?

When writing an automatic email reply, keep it short and professional. You might be on a vacation drinking mojitos, but the sender still expects a professional response.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing an automated email reply:

• Keep it short: You should keep it simple and only include all the information necessary to the sender, including why you are away, the period you are away for, and how to contact you or who to contact during your absence.
• Keep it professional: do not include unnecessary details about your absence. Remember, this is a professional email. You might be on vacation enjoying the minibar, but you have to remain professional while using your work email.
• Warn the person you are redirecting emails to: You don’t want to be leaving extra work for your colleagues while you're away. Remember, you wouldn’t drop a ton of paperwork in their office, so don’t do it when you're away!
• Check for grammar mistakes: You might consider yourself the grammar god, but we are never immune to a typo or a grammar mistake, especially if you write your reply in a rush. Reread and double-check with an online corrector. You wouldn’t want to look bad for a tiny typo in your automatic reply.
• Be clear about the alternative contact method: You want to include who to contact or how to contact you while you are away. You also want to include whether you will monitor your emails or not.
• Include a professional email signature: this will give all your information to the sender and make it look more professional.

Now that we have covered what to do, let's go over a few common mistakes you should avoid when creating your auto-replies:

1. Turn off your automatic email reply when you come back to work. You would not want clients or colleagues to get that reply while you are sitting in your office.
2. Do not include the option of urgent contact if you do not want to be disturbed. If you allow this option, you might receive calls for things you don’t judge urgent but that the sender does.
3. Do not try to be funny. You might be the funniest person in the office, but a joke on paper is rarely as good as it is when you tell it in person. Imagine trying to make a joke on dinosaurs and coming upon a grumpysaurus (see how awful it is when it’s written instead of told).

Automated Email Replies Made Simple

Writing an automatic email reply is about keeping it short, concise, and professional. If used when you’re out-of-office, you want the recipient to know how long you'll be away, why, and who to contact.

If you are not using Missive, you can easily set up automated email replies in Outlook and Gmail.

Setting Up Automated Email Replies in Outlook

Setting up in Outlook has fewer steps, but more limited options compared to Google and Missive. Here's how to set up an automated reply:

1. Select file → Automatic reply → Send automatic replies
2. Choose when to send by these messages by clicking Only send during this time range
3. Choose date and times for the automatic reply
4. Use one of our templates or type your own reply
5. Click OK

Setting Up Automated Email Replies in Gmail

Setting up in Gmail is very easy. Here’s how to create one:

1. First, you’ll need to enable templates. For this, go to Setting → See all settings → Advanced → Templates
2. Click on Enable
3. Now, it’s time to compose your template (or use one of ours). To do so, in the Compose field, type your template
4. Click on the three dots → Templates → Save draft as template → Save as new template
5. Type the template name and click on Save

You can also create filters so your templates only send when an incoming message meets certain criteria. You can use a common word that will appear in the email, specific senders, or subject that will trigger your automated email reply.

Here’s how to create a filter:

1. In the search bar (on main page), click on Show search options
2. Choose your common word, sender or object and type it in the search bar, then click on Search
3. Check if you have satisfying results → Search bar → Show search options → Create filter → Send template → Select your template → Create filter

Now that you have the basics and the best templates, it’s your time to shine and increase productivity. You’ll save time using those templates and automated email replies.

Feel free to use and adapt the templates to your context. You can also modify the used variables to fit your needs.

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Managing properties comes with its load of communication. Whether you’re emailing potential occupants or resolving problems with your tenants, there's so much you can handle by yourself.

To help you build and maintain great landlord-tenant relationships, we’ve crafted email templates that will make it effortless to respond to maintenance issues, send rent reminders or follow up emails, and more.

Let’s jump right in.

The Best Property Management Email Templates For Your Rentals

We've crafted a list of the best property management email templates to help you in your everyday job and remove the hassle of managing resident communication.

If you’re using Missive, our collaborative email inbox, you can copy/paste these templates into your canned responses and share them with your team.

Application Communication

We’ve all heard it over and over again. First impressions matter. It’s especially true when it comes to attracting and retaining quality tenants for your rental. The application process will set the tone and influence a tenant's decision to move into one of your properties.

I know what you’re thinking right now:

Wait, I don’t need an email template for the application process; most of my leads come from my Facebook Marketplace listings. I don't even do any email marketing!

The good news is that our templates can save you a lot of time, no matter if you're sending your messages via email or Facebook Messenger. If you’re using Missive, you can manage your Facebook Messenger account inside the app and benefit even more from the email templates.

Our application communication templates are a great way to help you communicate effectively with applicants throughout the process.

New Application Auto-Reply

Here’s a template for an auto-reply you could send when receiving a rental application:

Approved Application

In the case the applicant has passed the credit check and the application has been approved, here’s a follow up email template you could use:

Declined Application

Sadly, some applicants aren’t always approved. We have created a thank you email template you can use when sending those emails. It will not only save you time but also save you the hassle of crafting them.

Application on the Waitlist

The last follow up email template you should have to manage the application process messages efficiently will come in handy when it’s time to let an applicant know they are on the waiting list:

Move-in Communication

There’s nothing like a welcoming email with all the information new tenants should have for their move-in to kick-start a good relationship. A well-crafted email can make them feel valued and reduce the questions a new tenant could ask. Here's an email template to help you create a professional and informative welcome email for your new tenants:

Maintenance Requests

Most emails overflowing your inbox as a property manager are often maintenance requests. Replying to those messages quickly and letting the resident know you're taking care of their request is the key to satisfying them.

With the following templates, you can send a response quickly while maintaining a personal touch.

Receiving a Maintenance Request

When receiving a tenant request, you should acknowledge it right away so your unit occupant knows that you’ll take care of it:

Issue Is Resolved Follow-Up

Then, once the issue has been resolved, sending a quick follow-up will show that you care about your client's satisfaction:

You should always maintain consistent messaging and set proper expectations by sending the initial response swiftly and following up once resolved.

Rent Payment Reminder Emails

If a resident is late paying rent, you must send a firmer reminder. Here are some tips:

• Keep the tone positive and casual - this is just a friendly nudge.
• Avoid sounding accusatory. Assume they just forgot or lost track of time.
• Give them the benefit of the doubt if it's their first reminder.
• Remind them of the exact late fees that apply as defined in the lease.
• Specify when late fees will start accruing if the balance remains unpaid.
• Provide the next steps if it remains unpaid by the late fee date. Example: notice to pay or quit.
• Offer to discuss payment plans or assistance programs if applicable.
• Include account balance, where to pay, and who to contact with questions.

Here’s a template that can be useful:

Renewals

Sending timely renewal notices is crucial for retaining residents and avoiding vacancies. You should start the renewal process at least 90 days before the lease expires, depending on your local laws. Your email should highlight any changes and provide deadlines for giving notice to vacate.

Here’s a template:

Move-Out Communication

When a resident decides to move out of one of the properties you’re managing, you’ll need to communicate all information necessary for the process. This process can feel daunting, especially if you manage many properties, but it can be automated quite easily using an email template.

Before exploring the template, let’s go over some good tips to make sure your message as effective as possible:

• Send an email reminding residents of the move-out inspection process 30 days before the move-out. Highlight that inspections assess damages beyond normal wear and tear.
• Include details on date/time of inspection and if residents need to be present. Offer to reschedule if the proposed time doesn't work.
• Attach your move-out cleaning checklist so residents can prepare the unit properly. Also, include some information about any charges for extensive cleaning or repairs.
• Thank residents for being tenants and let them know you are processing the return of their security deposit. Note your policy timeline for returning the deposit.

With all these tips in mind, you’ll be able to make this template yours and ensure the residents know what to expect when moving out.

Best Practices for Effective Property Management Emails

Being a good property manager isn’t just about caring for brick and mortar — it’s also about nurturing good relationships. Whether you’re a manager or a landlord, following email best practices can help you save time and avoid misunderstandings.

Here are some good tips to keep in mind when emailing your occupants:

   
• Personalize your communications: When sending an email to one of your residents, using their name in the greeting, rather than a generic "Hello" can go a long way.
   
• Use clear & descriptive subject lines: Subject lines should quickly communicate key info so residents know if they need to open the email. Avoid vague subject lines like "Lease Question" that could apply to anyone.
   
• Optimize for mobile: With more people reading email on phones, you should make sure that your messages render well on mobile devices. Using a single-column layout with buttons, choosing larger fonts, and breaking content into short paragraphs can all help your recipients have a better experience when consuming your messages.
   
• Keep it professional: Even if you’re using friendly greetings, your emails should stay polite and have a business-like tone. That being said, it's time to forget everything you've learned in school about writing like Shakespeare. You should be clear and concise. Plus, proofread to check for errors; there's nothing worse for your image than sloppy messages full of mistakes.

By mastering property management email communication, you can provide five-star service to your residents, operate efficiently, and support your team of property managers.

Every day, approximately 350 billion emails are sent and received. Of these, more than 45% end up in spam. This leads to significant losses for businesses, as marketing emails don't reach their subscribers, transactional emails fail to inform users, and colleagues struggle to communicate effectively.

Email deliverability is somewhat of a black box, much like SEO. The rules are constantly changing and are not clearly disclosed by major Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others.

Sometimes these rules are disclosed, as seen recently with the announcement from Google and Yahoo about the enforcement of new security protocols starting in February, but they are often kept unclear.

The good news is, despite the uncertainty, you can greatly improve your email deliverability. If you are worried your messages are getting lost in an email black hole, keep on reading as we’ll delve deeper to understand the main reasons why emails end up in spam, and how to prevent this.

Table of Contents

• What is Email Deliverability?
• Why Do Emails End Up in Spam?
• Best Ways to Prevent Emails From Going to Spamsome text
  • List Management
  • Cleaning Your Lists
  • Content
  • Infrastructure Configuration
  • Monitoring
• Wrapping Up

What is Email Deliverability?

Before we dive into why your emails end up going into spam, let’s first explore a subtle yet so important distinction:

It’s not because your emails show as delivered in the tools you are using (also known as bounce/delivery rate) that they are actually reaching your recipient’s inbox.

Email deliverability is the odds that your email makes it to your customer's inbox and not in their spam.

Why Do Emails End Up in Spam?

There are several reasons why your emails might end up trigger the spam filters. It can be a long story, but it can be simplified into four pillars:

1. List Management: Sending emails to unsubscribed addresses is a major red flag. Your list should be built organically with permission-based opt-ins. Plus, if you’re still sending emails to old and inactive accounts that end up bouncing, it can negatively impact your reputation.
2. Content & Engagement: Using excessive exclamation points, ALL CAPS, misleading subject lines, or irrelevant keywords can trigger spam filters and route your email to no man's land.
3. DNS Configuration: Not implementing email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is another redflag for ESPs. These act like digital IDs by verifying your legitimacy and preventing impersonation by spammers.
4. Monitoring & Optimization: Not regularly keeping track your email deliverability metrics like spam rates, open rates, and click-through rates is another no go. This data can help you identifying areas where you could improve, like content adjustments, list cleaning, or technical optimizations.

By avoiding these red flags, your emails will be able to land in the inbox of your recipients more easily.

Best Ways to Prevent Emails From Going to Spam

List Management

Opt-in

The method you use to collect emails and build your subscriber list has a significant impact. If you employ a deceptive approach to obtain emails and then send these users unsolicited messages, it's likely that these recipients will be displeased with your unexpected emails. The more dissatisfied they are, the more likely they are to mark you as spam.

Ensure you use an opt-in form that clearly communicates to users that they will receive content from you by agreeing and checking a box or a similar mechanism. Be clear, don’t try to be sneaky.

Unsubscribe

Make it easy for people to unsubscribe. Don’t try to hide the link grey on white at the bottom of your email template. People who are unable to unsubscribe are actually people who will flag your email as spam and damage your reputation.

To encourage organizations to have the best practices on this, Google and Yahoo just made it mandatory to have an Unsubscribe button directly in the header of your email. Here’s how it looks:

Cleaning Your Lists

Deprecated Emails

You can use third-party tools to remove emails that have been deactivated or accounts that have been banned. Those create hard bounces and hard bounces are bad for your reputation.

We personally like Neverbounce.

Sunset Policy

If a certain group of subscribers has not opened a single email in the last six months, you might want to send them an email asking if they're still interested. Ultimately, emails that are not interacted with are likely to be flagged as spam.

This is not beneficial for your sender's reputation, and it's a poor final point of contact with your brand for the user. We recommend being kind and warm about it. Let them sail into the sunset if that's their wish!

Content

It's no secret that the type of content you send to your recipient is one of the most important aspects of a successful email campaign. People's time is extremely valuable, so ensure that when you ask for their time to read your content, your content is of top quality and feels genuine.

Here are the most important questions to ask yourself before hitting send:

• Relevant and exciting content?
• Is it well-written and to the point?
• Is it well-designed and fun to look at?
• Is it made for my audience?
• Does it use any words that could trigger a spam filter?
• Would I like to receive this email if I were the reader?

Infrastructure Configuration

Authenticating and securing your emails is a crucial step in ensuring your emails reach the inbox. It's often overlooked by many companies, yet it's one of the easiest ways to improve deliverability.

There's a complex relationship between security and compliance. ESPs aim to reduce spam, scams, and phishing attempts. To support this, they favor domains that have well-configured security and authentication protocols on their domain's DNS.

Although this part can be quite tricky to understand and configure, it's incredibly valuable. It can make the difference between a +39% open rate and a +34% purchase likelihood. Isn't that amazing?

So, What Are Those Authentication and Security Protocols?

Understanding DNS

DNS is like the address book of the internet. Computers use DNS to look up domain names to find the corresponding IP addresses needed to connect to websites, servers, and other internet resources.

That’s also where email service providers like Google, Apple, and Microsoft are instructed on how your emails are secured and authenticated:

• Who is authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain (SPF)?
• What is the signature they should look for to ensure the content is authentic (DKIM)?
• Is your domain protected by a policy? (DMARC)
• Is your sender’s identity verified? (BIMI)

Let's dive into each one of these one by one.

Authorized Senders List - (SPF Record)

SPF Records are like a guest list for sending emails. An SPF record is a line of text that specifies which domains or IP addresses are permitted to send emails on behalf of your domain. It resides in your DNS manager, under TXT records.

Here’s an example of an SPF record:

v=spf1 ip4:192.0.2.0/24 ip6:2001:db8::/32 include:_spf.example.com ~all

If an email from your domain is sent to a recipient server without your domain's permission, it could potentially decrease the email's deliverability.

A quick tip: To analyze whether your DNS is configured properly and if your email has a high likelihood of reaching the inbox, you can use Palisade’s free Email Deliverability Score tool. This tool audits your DNS configuration and provides suggestions for improvement.

Digital Signature - (DKIM Records)

DKIM records add a digital signature to your emails that proves they are authentic when they get to the recipient server. It's like the signature on the back of your credit card.

Each third-party service you are using with your domain typically needs its own DKIM key and record.

Here’s an example of an DKIM record:

v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAgAS4QZzH+/iM5ilpxexFK7uVnX5OasDMW61p7IvUjM+488QnpLqDTlsvGdJtG/oHgwRpXcNSxKKhtX3R4zg0MoSdLJYTEMiirr8UdeuGng/ZKM2XtLa+qGve6kp3H5NBx2uYHVj+E0WANeRT3bK5sMVRTYSAywN/m9ugX5T5PkbvJ2HRTmrX00ov4/VoVFSbfHZzaA/FDX/hyFnWEiOb1JihArP2+cMs+CYgIi7u8t+p0FqR/37kuEh5PLxOct/fnhqjn35XPn8C1s2fAC5J2WZjmmC5QM2qYV90isu03jeCI7Vap9ocKj5P+qJAlooYNujICd84ZmcHeA2UJqj22QIDAQAB

Defended Domain - (DMARC)

Protects your domain from people who try to send fake emails (phishing, spam) on your behalf.

The DMARC policy is central to your email deliverability and security. It tells the recipient servers what to do if the emails they receive from you are not authenticated properly in your SPF or DKIM (often referred to as alignment).

Here’s an example of a DMARC record:

v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@palisade.email; ruf=mailto:dmarc@palisade.email; fo=1;

Recently Google and Yahoo have started enforcing DMARC policies for all email senders.

Brand Display and Verified Checkmark - (BIMI)

BIMI is the new hot kid on the block. It was just adopted by Google, Apple, Yahoo, and most major ESPs (looking at you Outlook) this past May 2023.

It is now required to verify your identity via email, display your logo in the inbox, and get a verified checkmark in the inbox. You can see it being slowly rolled out by major companies like LinkedIn and Google:

Here’s an example of a DMARC record:

v=BIMI1;l=https://images.palisade.email/brand/bimi-logo.svg;a=https://images.palisade.emai/brand/certificate.pem

Monitoring

Monitoring your sender reputation is a significant component of ensuring your email deliverability remains high. Your sender reputation is much like a person's reputation. It takes time to build and is easy to damage.

Unfortunately, there is no "one tool to rule them all" for monitoring. However, there are tools available that can provide some insight into the status of your deliverability.

Domain Reputation, IP Reputation and Spam Rates

One of the best tools out there, even if it only monitors your reputation from Google's perspective, is Google Postmasters.

It allows you to get key data points on your sender reputation from three key angles:

• Domain Reputation: How your domain is viewed by Google holistically. All emails coming from all apps combine into one reputation.
• IP Reputation: How the third-party app's IP reputation influences your sender's reputation.
• Spam Rate: The number of users reporting your emails as spam.

Wrapping Up

Email deliverability is not set and forget, it’s a constant piece of work but oh so worth it.

Many companies spend a significant amount of time A/B testing their funnels and producing content. However, they often overlook the crucial step of ensuring their emails reach their customers' inboxes. If your users aren't seeing your content, what's the point of investing so much in creating it?

We understand, it's not easy. List management best practices are always changing. Content engagement follows the latest trends and designs. DNS compliance is constantly evolving. Reputation Monitoring is sensitive.

After reading this article, we hope that you've gained a better understanding of the basics of email deliverability (and the difference between your emails being delivered), and that you will place more importance on it.

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When I took over the customer service team at my last company, it was during a period of transition.

We’d just gone through an acquisition which, although welcome, meant we needed to reassess our resources, our tools, and our team’s strategy for the foreseeable future. I was also stepping from a senior role into a management role, and while neither management nor the team were new to me, the situation was changing quickly.

This presented a challenge: quickly leading the team through setting new expectations and requirements, while still delivering the same excellent customer service experience for our customers.

It also gave us an opportunity to move from good to great — by understanding where we were, where we wanted to go, and how we might get there.

Maybe you’ve also just taken over a new team, or you’re also going through an acquisition or reorganization. Or maybe you’re just looking to level up your support team.

Regardless of why you’re here, this article will help you understand what SMART goals are in the context of customer service and how to define SMART customer service goals for your team. It includes some examples of great customer service goals, and it will show you how to measure the success of your goals so your team can continue to grow and adjust your customer service strategy as needed.

Table of Contents

• Why Setting Customer Service Goals is Important
  • It makes good business sense
  • It makes for happier, more loyal customers
  • It makes for happier, more engaged customer support teams
• SMART Goals in Customer Service
• Setting SMART Customer Service Goals
  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound
• 3 Examples of Customer Service Department Goals
  • Improve customer self-service
  • Implement a quality assurance program
  • Improve customer satisfaction
• 2 Examples of Customer Service Manager Goals
  • Improve customer service team engagement and satisfaction
  • Become the voice of your customer
• 2 Examples of Customer Service Representative Goals
  • Improve customer service skills
  • Owning the customer experience
• Customer service goals level up your team

Why Setting Customer Service Goals is Important

Being on a ship with no destination is unpleasant and nerve-wracking for everyone aboard.

Setting solid customer service goals for your team provides a common purpose and keeps everyone moving in the same direction. It improves your odds of reaching your destination: consistent excellent customer service.

And beyond the psychological benefits of having clear goals, there are plenty of more tangible benefits too.

It makes good business sense

Clear customer service goals ensure that your team’s efforts align with the broader objectives of the company, so it’s clear how your team is contributing to business growth.

It also means both you and the company can make more informed decisions about budget and resource allocation, using the real data and trends you glean from measuring your progress against your goals.

It makes for happier, more loyal customers

Goals focused on customer satisfaction directly contribute to improving the overall customer experience. Satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal, to make repeat purchases, and to recommend your business to others.

Consistently meeting and exceeding your customer service goals also builds your company’s reputation for reliability and trustworthiness, which is essential for long-term brand success.

It makes for happier, more engaged customer support teams

Setting specific goals and measuring how each member works toward these objectives allows customer service teams and managers to identify strengths and weaknesses. It also allows individual team members to understand and direct their own professional development.

Well-defined goals also provide teams with a clear sense of direction and purpose. Team members who understand how their work contributes to larger goals are happier and more committed to the company’s success.

SMART Goals in Customer Service

You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before. It’s a handy mnemonic tool that reminds everyone that effective goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

But why do the goals you set for your customer service team (or that they set for themselves) need to be SMART?

The point of setting goals is to be as clear as possible about expectations:

• How you expect your team to work independently and with each other
• How you expect to create satisfied customers
• How you expect to contribute to your company’s success

There shouldn’t be ambiguity in customer service goals. That’s because while a well-defined goal tells your team members what success looks like, it also acts as a catalyst or guide to help you get there.

This may be from a customer standpoint (satisfaction, response time, self-service, etc.), from an individual perspective (performance or professional development), or from a company perspective (cost per customer, retention rate, expansion rate, etc.).

Setting SMART Customer Service Goals

First, keep in mind that you usually can’t jump right into creating a goal. There’s always an assessment period first.

You need to spend some time figuring out what the current state of your customer service team is.

Some questions you can ask to guide your assessment:

• What is our budget? Are we over or under-budget?
• What is our team capacity?
• What is our incoming ticket / chat / phone volume?
• Does our team capacity match our ticket volume?
• What are our most important customer service metrics (like first response time (FRT), average handle time (AHT), and customer satisfaction (CSAT))? What is the current baseline for each of those metrics?
• What are our most important customer success metrics (like Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer churn and retention rates, and customer lifetime value (CLV))? What is the current baseline for those metrics?
• What tools do we have? How much do they cost? Are they necessary?
• What tools don’t we have that we need?
• What internal and public-facing product resources do we have? What do we need?
• Are there any existing company goals that are relevant to the customer support team? If so, what is the team’s current progress / contributions toward those goals?

Your assessment will be highly dependent on your team and company, but these questions should give you an idea of the things you should consider as you work to define your goals.

Once you’ve done the foundational work to understand what your team needs to improve on, you can begin using that information to define your goals.

Let’s break it down in the context of a real customer service SMART goal.

Specific

Any goal you set should be clear and well-defined. For example, “answer customers faster” is a nice aim, but what are the channels where you want to answer customers faster? What does “faster” mean?

A more specific goal for reducing customer wait times would be to set a target first response time for a specific channel, such as: “Send a first response to customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”

Depending on your needs, you could get even more specific: “Send a response to customers inquiring about their order status in 60 seconds or less.”

Measurable

Any customer service goal should be measurable, so you can understand whether you’ve achieved the goal (or not) and adjust your strategy appropriately.

Taking our example from above, a measurable target chat response time goal could be: “80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds.”

Achievable

This is the point at which your initial assessment becomes really important.

“80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds” may sound like an achievable goal. It might be doable if you have a simple product or many agents trained and available to handle chats.

But what if you have only two chat agents and are receiving hundreds of chats each day?

Of course, you still want to strive to improve their first response times, but you’ll have to set reasonable expectations to give your agents a fair shot at success.

An attainable goal in this context might instead involve increasing the initial chat response time or decreasing the percentage of customers you’re targeting, like this:

• 80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 120 seconds
• 60% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds

Your context will determine what makes the most sense for your team. Just remember to aim for a goal that’s stretching, yet realistic.

Relevant

This is another area in which your foundational assessment is key.

First, are your proposed customer service goals aligned with your customer service values and company’s objectives? If not, they won’t be effective or successful, no matter how well they fit the SMART parameters.

Secondly, are your goals relevant to your team? For instance, a manager with a high chat volume might adapt our example to involve implementing a chatbot in order to hit their desired initial chat response time goal.

But a manager with a low ticket volume probably can’t justify the time and expense of implementing a chatbot because the benefits will never outweigh the costs for their team.

Time-bound

This parameter is closely tied to being measurable. You won’t be able to determine whether you’ve succeeded unless you know when the goal needs to be achieved.

To make our example time-bound, we could edit it to read: “By the end of Q2 2024, we’ll be responding to 80% of customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”

3 Examples of Customer Service Department Goals

Improve customer self-service

Customer service goals aren’t just about how your agents interact with your customers. Surveys have shown again and again that customers want the option to solve their own problems.

A goal for developing effective self-service could be:

“By [DATE] we’ll have launched a knowledge base with articles answering our 10 most frequently asked questions about [PRODUCT], resulting in at least a 10% reduction in tickets about those issues.”

Many knowledge base tools will have built-in ticket deflection tracking features, such as giving you the number of views for an article and the number of tickets created after the article was viewed.

You can also measure the success of this goal by tracking ticket volume for a specific category or tag over time.

Implement a quality assurance program

Implementing a quality assurance program is a great way to improve overall customer satisfaction, response and resolution times, and brand recognition. It’s also a more objective way to measure and track agent performance and to kick-off conversations about professional development with your team.

It might look like this:

“In January 2024, develop a draft QA scorecard based on ticket reviews from the previous 3 months, so that we can begin calibration sessions with the team in February 2024.”

In this case, measuring success is relatively simple: is the draft scorecard available by February 2024 when calibration conversations must begin?

Improve customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is crucial to your support team’s success, but also the overall success of the company. To build a customer-first organization, improving or maintaining your customer satisfaction score should be one of your main goals.

A sample goal for CSAT could be:

“Each month next quarter, maintain an overall CSAT across text channels (chat and email) of 85% or better.”

You can gather CSAT ratings using built-in tools on your customer communication platforms, or through a dedicated CSAT tool to send customer surveys. Most tools will calculate your CSAT score or percentage automatically.

2 Examples of Customer Service Manager Goals

Improve customer service team engagement and satisfaction

As we’ve already covered, customer service agents are most engaged when they understand what their role is and can see how their contributions matter (both to their entire team and the company).

A goal for improving your customer service team’s overall engagement could be:

“Have a monthly one-on-one with each agent on my team and arrange at least one team social event a quarter, with the aim of reducing employee turnover by 10 percent by the end of the year.”

As you can see, this goal includes multiple conditions for success, and the team turnover rate is a metric that can be directly measured.

Become the voice of your customer

As a customer service manager, you get an especially broad view of how customers use and feel about your product. You also have the ability to take that customer feedback and put it in the hands of those who need it: your product team, your engineering team, your marketing team, and so on.

This can be as simple as implementing a public customer feature request tool where your customers can share their feedback and vote on what they want to see, or as complicated as setting up an internal, cross-functional customer feedback process.

The goal for becoming the voice of your customer could be:

“Have a bi-weekly Voice of the Customer meeting with the product development team, leading to at least one product bug fix and one new customer-requested feature release every quarter.”

You could measure this goal in a number of ways, depending on your strategy. If you have implemented a dedicated customer feedback tool, you can track customer usage against the rate of product releases and bug fixes. You could also track ticket volume in a specific category as well as any impact on CSAT ratings.

2 Examples of Customer Service Representative Goals

Improve customer service skills

Everyone has their specialties and their weaknesses, and your customer service agents are no different. Quality assurance programs are a great way to identify areas for improvement, but you may also uncover opportunities during performance and career development conversations.

Your customer service reps can improve by seeking training in special topics, professional development courses, and peer support. Working with each team member to set and achieve goals for improvement fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

A good example of goal for your agent could be:

“Get training on my weakest skills as identified by our QA reviews during the next month so that my average handle time goes down to [TARGET] by the end of the quarter.”

They can measure the success of this goal through attendance and completion of training, as well as by looking for improved QA scores and handle times.

Owning the customer experience

The more customer service agents take ownership of their customers’ experience, the happier both they and the customer will be.

Owning the customer’s experience will mean something different for every team. It may look like being the customer’s one point of contact for an issue, or it may mean acting as the customer’s guide as they move through the escalation process.

It may look like answering every CSAT rating, good and bad, to thank the customer for their thoughts and solicit more feedback. Or it may mean reviewing their own customer interactions, identifying missed opportunities for exceeding customer expectations or anticipating customer needs, and devising strategies for doing so in the future.

A goal for owning the customer experience could be:

“I’ll reduce my ticket escalation rate by X percent in Q2 by being the primary agent on tickets about Y topic.”

Measuring your growth at owning the customer experience will depend a lot on what specifically that means for your company. For the example above, you’d measure the achievement by looking at the percentage of tickets you’re still escalating on the specific topic.

Customer service goals level up your team

As you’re building out goals for yourself or your customer service team, remember to take a step back occasionally and look at the big picture.

Are these goals aligned with your company and your team’s vision? Are they clear or confusing? Are they too inter-dependent, so that if you fail at one, you fail at them all?

There’s nothing magical about setting SMART goals. They’re a fantastic tool for customer service teams, but the real key is in making goal-setting a discipline and a habit you’re regularly engaging in. Setting goals is not a one-time task — it’s an ongoing process of adaptation and growth.

The landscape of customer service is always changing, and your goals will need to evolve with it.

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