We have tons of Enterprise users (they register with their corporate email address), but when we send them follow-up email, the response rate is not as high as we would like it to be. Any advice?
[random advice from the internet]<p>The proven method of talking to individuals in enterprise is a 'meat eating' sales team walking into the lobby of the building where people work and talking to the receptionist. This is probably worth doing outside of enterprise, too.<p>It is expensive. It is time consuming. It is valuable.<p>On the other hand, I think most people hate most emails because every email is an item on their TODO list because every email must be processed and processing emails takes time. The most time efficient way to process emails is to mark them as spam and never see an email from that source again. For me, if a company sends me an automated email, that's usually what happens because if and when I want more information or to learn about updates, I can just visit the website (and odds are that the content of an autogenerated company email consists of links to the website).<p>Good luck.
Do you track the usage of the free trial to the email addresses used to activate them? Better still do you track any interactions on your forum, wiki, etc?<p>It is very easy for staff to create fake email addresses to get a free trial and kick the tyres. Unless they end up using your product they won't be interested in demo-calls, etc. Most technical staffers hate sales calls, so offers of demo-calls are more likely to be seen as pushy sales calls.<p>BTW what is your conversion rate from free-trial to paid plans?
It's difficult to give feedback without knowing what your emails look like.<p>What specifically are you trying to get them to do? Why do you want to initiate a conversation? How are you getting them to sign-up? Clearly you're doing something right in getting the sign-ups, maybe you can tweak that process to get them to expect or initiate the conversation themselves.