How to enhance your User Research recruitment email strategy with Rally

POV: "There was no streamlined process around outreach and there was no visibility into what other teams were doing. We were spending more time on basic tasks that should have taken a matter of minutes."

Does this sound familiar? 

This is how Max Vasyliev, UX Researcher at PandaDoc, described his team's outreach process for Research recruitment.

It gets worse. For outreach, the PandaDoc team was using Salesloft, an email automation tool for sales teams. Salesloft, though great for sales teams, was slow, inconvenient, and "always lacking." 

The missing piece? The right tool, specifically "a single place for Research Operations specifically designed for User Research," which is how Eugene Lazovsky, Product Researcher at PandaDoc, described Rally.

Rally’s User Research CRM can be a powerful tool to streamline and optimize your email process with its email automation, templates, and personalization capabilities. “Rally has exponentially streamlined my recruitment efforts by allowing me to leverage custom templates with automated variables, check engagement rates and participation status, and prevent wasteful communication with users,” said Krista Lipps, Senior UX Researcher at Doximity.

With Rally, you can:

Seamlessly integrate your brand

Branding helps increase trust, recognition, and engagement. A well-branded email can reassure the user that the email is coming from a trusted source. Use your org’s brand fonts, colors, and logo wherever possible. Additionally, make how and where you use colors and your org’s logo consistent. This will help foster recognition and build a strong relationship between your user and your Research function.

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• HTML email signatures for branding plain text emails.
• Upload brand logo and colors that will automatically be used in emails.
• Set up custom email domains, for example research@gitlab.com.

Branded vs. plain text emails

Diving into the world of emails, it's essential to consider the strengths and drawbacks of plain text and branded emails. Plain text emails are all about simplicity and authenticity; they work on every device and are super accessible. However, their minimalist approach might come across as less engaging and offer limited opportunities to showcase your brand. 

Branded emails, on the other hand, carry your company’s visual impression. They're visually catchy, customizable, give off a professional vibe, and boost brand recognition. But remember, they might not always be as accessible and may even feel impersonal. 

The key is to mold your approach based on your audience, resources, and goals. The golden rule? Test both styles and see what resonates with your specific users and needs.

Easily build & send email sequences

🙋What's an email sequence? An email sequence is a series of prewritten, automated emails sent to users or study participants over a period of time, typically triggered by a specific event, with the aim of gathering feedback, maintaining engagement, or guiding them through a particular process.

Your recruitment email sequence is a journey. Each email, from your initial outreach to your thank-you note, plays a unique role in driving participant engagement. Although your specific email sequence will be unique to your study, there is value in exploring example sequences.

Here is a typical 1-1 interview recruitment email flow:

• Email 1: Study Invitation — The goal is to pique interest, establish credibility, outline the benefits of participating, and prompt action — namely, filling out a screener survey, or going directly to scheduling an interview.
• Email 2: Follow-up Attempt — When initial responses are low, this email reiterates the invitation and benefits.
• Email 3a: Response to Interested Participants — Express appreciation and notify the participant that they qualified for the interview based on their screener responses.
• Email 3b: Response to Not Qualified Participants — Express appreciation and explain that they were not selected for the study.
• Email 4: Confirmation — Provide all necessary details for the research session.
• Email 5: Reminder — A friendly nudge can enhance show rates.
• Email 6: Thank-You & Incentive — Show gratitude, detail the incentive, and extend an invitation for future studies, updates, or panels.

Rally enables you to:

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• Build email templates for every type of outreach and automate sending.

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• Add personalization tokens from participant and study properties in the subject line and body.

🙋Personalization tokens are placeholders that automatically get replaced with individual-specific data, like a user's name or location, to provide a customized and personal experience.

• See email previews and send test emails.

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• Bulk send emails (up to 1000s at a time).
• Track email open, click, and response rates.

Manage participants and ensure you contact the right ones

Sending an email may seem rather insignificant, but when the people you’re communicating with are your valuable users, the stakes rise. It’s vital to know exactly who you should and shouldn’t be contacting. Sending an email to someone who has unsubscribed, has already been contacted, or has been labeled as “do not contact” could lead to a lost customer. And that’s something Research does not want to be responsible for. 

That’s where a User Research CRM shines. Rally is the source of truth for your Research and recruitment efforts and ensures that the right users are contacted at the right time. 

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• Easily view who is free to contact.
• Use a blocklist to enforce do-not-contact.

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• Create and enforce rules around contact frequency.
• Manage and sync opt-outs across customer data sources.

Revolutionize your User Research outreach with Rally

“Rally provides me with the best solution for tracking all the emails that are sent, when was the last email that user received, which users asked to opt out and through additional integrations, helps me make more balanced decisions for whom I should or should not send the email,” said Liron Blum, Product Coordinator at Gong. “No other tool gave me the possibility to see in a wide layout all my projects and all the users with whom we have a relationship.”

Rally's User Research CRM enables you to do more high-quality Research with your users. Rally's email tools make outreach a collaborative breeze and helps you further build the perfect Participant Experience. Book a demo today to learn how you can optimize your recruitment email process with Rally.