This guide outlines information about customer programs and other customer communications sent by CS Ops and other CS teams, including webinars, monthly newsletters, and email.
Please use the Slack channel #cs_ops_and_programs for questions.
Our email programs go to many different customers, including paid and free, self-managed and SaaS, AMER and APAC. We strive to create a consistent look and feel that is similar to other communications from GitLab, but remains unique to our team and its goals.
We use the Handbook Style Guide as our base. This covers things like punctuation, capitalization, and branding. For example, whether we use contractions or not, and how to capitalize brand names.
We also use the Pajamas Design System to guide our own brand principles and tone.
Additionally we use guidance from the Documentation Style Guide to avoid non-inclusive language, and avoid regional phrases or words that may be confusing to a wider audience.
Our emails are generally friendly but not casual. This typically means we don't use overly familiar language, but we do try to keep a warm and supportive tone. We are sending primarily to post-sales customers, and do not use persuasive language heavily. Instead, we opt for a more educational and helpful tone.
A good rule to consider is whether the email is coming from a specific person or from a team. For example, if the email is sent by "Joe GitLab, CSM," and is meant to be personal, we would most likely use "I" or "my" throughout the email. If the email is sent from the Customer Success Team, "we" and "our" would be the better option.
Gainsight has some HTML support, but is mainly a plain-text email application. Due to this limitation, our emails are set up as templates within Gainsight to create consistency and ease of use.
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Gainsight uses many of the same fields found in Salesforce, but not all can be mapped in a 1:1 way. We use a basic set of standard fields for most emails, but can also add fields as needed.
By default, we do not send to restricted accounts.
See more about the basic standard fields and practices used in our email programs.
We used tokens in Gainsight as placeholders for Gainsight and/or Salesforce data. You may see them in a Google Document as {TokenName}
We can send email to the following regions:
Email programs can be set to send to any region at a locally relative time.
