Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

by Ryan Holiday

The term for it is “onboarding.” How you get someone’s attention or get them to sign up, that’s what marketing is about—but how do you manage their initial experiences and groom them to be a great customer or client or fan? That’s onboarding. I’ll give you an example: A site I run called DailyStoic.com has built a six-figure email list of people who are interested in Stoic philosophy and who get a daily email meditation to inspire them at the start of the day.* But if you sign up on Tuesday, you don’t just get whatever email was randomly scheduled for that day. I mean, what are the chances that is the perfect first email for you to see? Instead, the first seven emails you get are scripted to be the perfect experience—based on the data we have about what people have liked in the past—to explain to you the important lessons of this philosophy you’re interested in. The subject lines and every word of the copy inside them have been tweaked dozens of times (again based on data) to help build the habit we’d like to see you stick with. And then after the seven emails, there are other scripted notes that go out at predetermined intervals that we know convert well.