I'm a copywriter and tend to notice when people are screwing up on their email.

This time I've noticed someone who has room to grow: UBER. 

Love the service.

Love the company.

Meh on the emails.  

I pulled a big list of the emails Uber has sent me since I signed up for Uber in July 2013 when I needed a looong ride from the Seattle airport to the suburbs:

Of all these emails, the only inherently interesting emails I really get are when they send my receipt.

The receipt email is great because it's all about ME!  I even save them in a special expenses folder.

These receipt emails are inherently helpful to me:

But if you take a look at some of the other Uber email marketing attempts, they're not inherently interesting:

This email I thought was actually on the higher-end of being interesting, but it fell flat.

Problems with this email:

• Doesn't particularly teach you anything useful.
• There was a chance to tell a good emotional story, but it seemed like someone at Uber "wanted to keep the email short" and cut it off.  It lost all the emotions because it was so short.  (Guy gives ride to another guy to jump-start his car.  BFD).  If there's a great story to tell, don't worry about the length.  Keep it long if necessary to tell a good story.

"Ok Neville, how do you KNOW FOR SURE these emails could be better??  You don't know their actual stats....."

I started poking around to see if I could find some "pseudo-stats" from the emails.  Time-and-time again I found results such as this:

Checkout this "#WomenMoveUs" campaign email:

Ok, that's a noble cause.....but the message is all over the place and not correctly explained.

But more troubling was that I checked the "psedudo-stats" from a lot of emails like this, and the numbers were surprisingly low for some of them....like the view count on the YouTube video from the email:

That video is 4+ months old and barely has any views for a company on the size of Uber.

Even if this video was only sent to Uber subscribers in Seattle, this number still seems jokingly-small for how much effort must've been put into that campaign.

So how can we make Uber emails better....and actually get people to use the service more?

Let's play a simple thought-experiment:

Let's pretend you have been named Uber's VP of Email Marketing Growth, and you have to get people ACTUALLY READING the Uber emails or else Travis Kalanick will bitch-slap you.

How would we do this?

I think the key point is to make Uber's emails inherently interesting.  This means writing about topics such as:

• Showing alternate uses for Uber people may not have thought of.  This helps ME.

• Stories of people using Uber in unique and useful ways.  This helps ME think of new ways to use Uber.
• Cool features customers may not know of.  This helps ME understand the product better.
• How Uber dramatically improved someone's life.  This gets ME emotionally involved.
• A case study of how much money someone saved because they take Uber instead of owning a car.  This helps ME make decisions about my vehicle situation.

It's very tempting to "brag" about how cool your company is, but it's far more effective to show what the services can do for THEM.

Let's take a couple of examples.

In the blue boxes below I've made a sample email in the same format Uber currently sends it's emails:

[[Headline]]

[[image]]

[[Text]]

This email is meant to show the email subscriber some cool ideas for using an Uber Black (they may have never even THOUGHT of using the service for these):

This email shows some cool uses about Uber XL.  A lot of people may not even know you could carry this many people in an Uber.  This pops the idea into their brain that for their next group outing, everyone could take a single vehicle:

This email shows "unique uses" of the service.  Most people think of Uber as only "a car service kind of like a taxi."  So giving real life examples like this of "alternate uses" expands someone's view of what Uber is:

This is another "alternate use" email which people may not have even realized.  A large number of teenagers are using Uber with their parents permission, this could bolster more of that use by letting parents know some crucial info:

Before these email marketing campaigns, a person signed up to Uber may think of it just in this little circle:

.....but after getting a bunch of USEFUL emails from Uber, someone's scope of what the product will be FAR LARGER like this!

Now you don't have to be a genius to figure out that the person who is well-informed of all the cool uses of the product will use it more.  

Sincerely,

Neville Medhora

P.S. Comment below with some ways YOU think you could improve the Uber newsletter, I would love to help get them more feedback!