40–60% of SaaS trial users sign up, open the product once, and never come back. Your onboarding emails are the one channel that follows them outside your product — and for most companies, they're doing almost nothing.
When we launched Trellis — a project management platform built for fast-moving product teams — our onboarding was a single "Welcome to Trellis!" email with a link to a help center. Trial-to-paid conversion: 4.1%. Industry average, and entirely mediocre.
We replaced that with a 5-email behavioral sequence over 14 days. Every email has one job, one CTA, and is triggered by what users actually do — not a calendar. Six months later, trial-to-paid conversion hit 11.3%. Here's the entire sequence, copy included, so you can adapt it.
vs. standard campaigns
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Before You Read: The Rules We Followed
Every email in this sequence obeys four constraints. Break any one of them and performance collapses:
1. One email = one objective = one CTA. The moment you add a second ask, click-through drops by half. If an email tries to teach a feature AND ask for feedback, it does neither well.
2. Behavioral triggers over time-based drips. "Send on Day 3" is a guess. "Send when user creates a project but hasn't invited a teammate" is a system. Behavioral emails convert 2–4x higher than calendar-based ones.
3. Write like a human, not a marketing department. Every email comes from "Sarah, Head of Product" — a real person with a real reply-to address. Plain text formatting. No hero banners. No six-color HTML template. When users reply (and they do), Sarah's team answers within 2 hours.
4. Earn the next open. Each email must deliver standalone value. If users learn something useful even without clicking, they'll open the next one. That compounding trust is what makes Email 5 convert.
Trellis is a project management platform for product teams — think roadmaps, sprint boards, and cross-team timelines in one workspace. The "aha moment" is when a user creates their first project and invites a teammate. Teams that reach this point within 7 days retain at 4.2x the rate of solo users.
The Sequence
Hey {{first_name}},
Welcome to Trellis. I'm Sarah — I lead product here, and I'll be your guide for the next two weeks.
I'll keep this short. Most project tools ask you to configure settings for 20 minutes before you see anything useful. We're going to skip that.
Your workspace is already set up. You have one thing to do right now: create your first project. It takes about 90 seconds. Pick a real project your team is working on — not a test. You'll get more value that way.
Create Your First Project →That's it. No setup wizard. No 14-step tutorial. Just one board, ready to use.
I'll check in tomorrow with a shortcut that saves our teams about 3 hours a week. But first — get that first project going.
Head of Product, Trellis
P.S. Hit reply if you get stuck. I read every message — real inbox, not a black hole.
Hey {{first_name}},
Nice — your first project is live. Now here's the pattern we see over and over:
Users who try Trellis alone think it's "a nice Trello alternative." Users who invite one teammate in the first week say it changed how they run projects. The difference isn't the product — it's that collaboration features only click when there's someone to collaborate with.
Here's the shortcut I mentioned: shared task assignments with real-time status. When your teammate updates a task, your board updates instantly. No more "hey, where are we on this?" messages in Slack. That's where the 3 hours/week comes from.
But it only works if there's a teammate on the board.
Invite a Teammate (30 seconds) →You can invite by email — they'll see your existing project and be ready to go. No separate onboarding needed.
Hey {{first_name}},
Quick story. The team at Lattice (42 people, product org) moved to Trellis last quarter. Within a month, their sprint cycle time dropped from 3 weeks to 11 days.
The biggest driver wasn't the board — it was Timeline View. It shows dependencies across projects on a single screen, so PMs catch bottlenecks before they cascade. Most new users don't discover it until week three. You can try it right now.
Switch to Timeline View →Open any project → click "Timeline" in the top nav → drag tasks to set dependencies. Takes about 2 minutes to set up, and you'll immediately see which tasks are blocking others.
P.S. If your team is smaller than 10, Timeline is especially powerful because it shows you where one person is a bottleneck across multiple projects. Worth a look.
Hey {{first_name}},
You've been using Trellis for a week now and your board is taking shape. Here's a quick way to make it feel like the center of your workflow instead of another tab to check.
Connect one integration. Our most-used connections:
→ Slack: Get task updates in the channel where your team already lives. No more "did you see my comment in Trellis?"
→ GitHub: Link PRs to tasks automatically. When a PR merges, the task moves to Done.
→ Figma: Embed design files directly in task cards. Feedback stays in context.
Pick the one your team uses most. Setup is two clicks — no API keys, no IT ticket.
Browse Integrations →P.S. Teams with at least one integration active are 67% more likely to be using Trellis 90 days later. It's the stickiest move you can make this week.
Hey {{first_name}},
Quick numbers from your trial so far:
→ {{task_count}} tasks created across {{project_count}} projects
→ {{teammate_count}} teammates active on your workspace
→ {{comment_count}} comments — conversations that would've been Slack threads
Your trial ends in 3 days. Here's what happens:
If you upgrade → everything stays exactly as it is. Your projects, boards, timeline views, integrations — all intact. Plans start at $9/user/month (billed annually), and you only pay for active seats.
If you don't → your workspace goes read-only. Nothing is deleted for 30 days, so you can always come back. But your team loses access to boards and real-time updates.
See Plans & Upgrade →No pressure, genuinely. If Trellis isn't the right fit, I'd rather you find the tool that is. But if your team is getting value — and {{task_count}} tasks suggests they are — locking it in takes 60 seconds.
P.S. Reply "extend" and I'll add 7 days to your trial. No questions asked. Some teams just need a bit more time, and that's completely fine.
Sequence at a Glance
| Trigger | Objective | CTA | KPI Target | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 Welcome | Signup (instant) | First project created | Create Your First Project | 60% open · 35% click · 50% create within 1h |
| #2 Team Invite | 24h after first project | Invite teammate | Invite a Teammate | 45% open · 22% click · 30% invite within 48h |
| #3 Feature + Proof | Day 5 (if ≥2 logins) | Timeline View discovery | Switch to Timeline View | 38% open · 18% click · 25% try Timeline |
| #4 Integration | Day 8 (if ≥1 teammate) | Connect Slack/GitHub/Figma | Browse Integrations | 35% open · 15% click · 20% connect |
| #5 Conversion | Day 11 (3 days before trial end) | Upgrade to paid | See Plans & Upgrade | 50% open · 20% click · 11% trial-to-paid |
What Makes This Sequence Work (and What to Adapt)
The activation metric drives everything. For Trellis, it's "create a project + invite a teammate within 7 days." Emails 1 and 2 exist solely to hit that milestone. Your activation metric will be different — find it before writing a single subject line.
Suppression rules matter as much as triggers. Half the value of this sequence is what it doesn't send. A user who already invited teammates never sees Email 2. A user who already connected Slack never sees Email 4. Sending people emails about actions they've already taken is the fastest way to train them to ignore you.
Plain text outperforms HTML templates. We A/B tested styled HTML emails against plain-text-style emails (minimal formatting, no hero images). Plain text won on both open rate (+8%) and click-through (+12%). It reads like a message from a person, not a marketing blast.
The P.S. is the second-most-read line. Eye-tracking studies consistently show readers jump from the subject line to the opening sentence to the P.S. We use the P.S. for social proof, urgency, or a secondary hook that doesn't clutter the main CTA.
Replace Trellis's milestones with your own: (1) What's the single action that predicts 90-day retention? Build Emails 1–2 around it. (2) What advanced feature creates "depth" — a reason to stay beyond basic use? That's Email 3. (3) What creates switching costs? (Integrations, imported data, team adoption.) That's Email 4. (4) What personalized data proves the product is working? That's Email 5.
Build Sequences That Actually Convert
Trellis gives product teams the boards, timelines, and automations to ship faster — and onboarding that makes it stick from day one.
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