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May 1 - June 22, 2022
Many email newsletters accept advertisers, and if not, you can contact them directly and ask...
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“Activating” a customer means getting them to engage with your product enough that they are an active customer.
As you would expect, improving your activation rates can have a significant effect on your business. After all, if a customer never gets the value of your product, how can you expect them to pay for it, or recommend it to others?
A popular approach is to create a sequence of emails that slowly exposes your new customers to the key features in your product. Instead of throwing everything at them right away, you can email them five days after they’ve signed up and say, “Hey, did you know we have this feature?” As Colin explains:
[Y]ou create the ideal experience for your users when they sign up for your trial. You then create all of the paths they can go down when they fail to go through the ideal experience. And you have emails in place to catch them and help them get back on that [ideal] path.
Let’s take Dropbox as an example. If you create an account but never upload a file, you are not active. Maybe you signed up for the site but got busy and forgot about it. When this happens, Dropbox automatically emails you, reminding you to upload a file. With these targeted emails, Dropbox has increased the chance that you will return to the product and become an active user.
For these emails, you should determine the steps absolutely necessary to get value from your product. Then create targeted emails to make sure people complete those steps. For those who fail to complete step one, create a message that automatically emails them when they’ve dropped off. Repeat this at every step where people could quit, ...
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You can also use initial emails to get customer feedback. Colin sends each new Customer.io signup an automated, personal email thirty minutes after they sign up. Here’s the email:
He mentioned that the email receives about a 17 percent reply rate, which is fantastic as far as automated emails go.
It opens the channel of communication between Colin and his customers.
Through these replies he’s learned a great deal about what wasn’t working in the product, which h...
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Your retention emails will depend on the type of product you have. For example, if you have a social networking product, you could send a simple email to customers who haven’t signed in for two weeks. Dating services often showcase profiles or mention unread messages. More business-oriented products usually focus on reminders, reports, and information about how you’ve been using and getting value from the product.
Email marketing is also one of the best channels to surprise and delight your customers.
In the context of startups, literally “going viral” means that every user you acquire brings in at least one other user. That new user then invites at least one other user, and so on. This creates true exponential growth. Though difficult to sustain, it’s been the driving force behind the explosive growth of consumer startups like Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp.
A customer is exposed to your product or service. That customers tells a set of potential customers about your product or service. These potential customers are exposed to your product or service, and some portion become customers themselves.
This type of virality comes with the advantage of “network effects,” where the value of the network increases as more people get on it. That is, the more people who are on Skype, the more valuable it becomes.
Other products grow by encouraging collaboration.
The second variable is the conversion percentage. If your product is being shared but not generating new customers, you won’t go viral.
Shortening your viral cycle time drastically increases the rate at which you go viral, and is one of the first things you should focus on improving if using this channel. To shorten it, create urgency or incentivize customers to move through your viral loops. Additionally, make every step in your funnel as simple as possible to increase the number of people who complete it.
To pursue this traction channel effectively, you need to measure your viral coefficient and viral cycle time from the start.
We suggest running as many A/B tests as you can. Best practice suggests focusing for weeks at a time on one major area (say your signup conversion rate), trying everything you can think of to improve that metric, and then moving on to another
For this reason, some companies allow people to use portions of their product without signing up.
This allows potential customers to test-drive the product without making any sort of commitment.
Products that aren’t inherently viral trying to add a bunch of viral features
Providing something of true value for free, with no strings attached. Making that offering extremely relevant to your core business. Demonstrating that value as quickly as possible.
Create a stand-alone, low-friction site to engage potential customers. Make sure it naturally leads to your main offering. The case for spending engineering resources on marketing becomes much stronger when you think about these marketing tools as long-term assets that bring in new leads indefinitely after only a small amount of up-front investment. Look internally for site and tool ideas. Perhaps you have already started creating something for yourself that could also be used by potential customers? Another approach is to turn a popular blog post into a microsite. Make them as simple as
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Just as you evaluate potential partnerships in terms of your core metrics, they will be doing the same.
You should also seek out forward-thinking partners. Often that means finding an advocate inside a large company or working with a company that has done deals with startups in the past.
Unfortunately, not every partnership will end up working. Thus, it makes sense to b...
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Create an exhaustive list of all of your possible [partners]. Don’t ever list Condé Nast without listing every single other publisher you can think of. Make a very simple spreadsheet: Company, Partner Type (Publisher, Carrier, Reseller, etc.), Contact Person/Email, Size, Relevance, Ease of Use, and then a subjective priority score. That list should be exhaustive. There’s no reason why any company shouldn’t have fifty potential business development partners in their pipeline, maybe one hundred, and be actively working the phones, inboxes, and pounding the pavement to get the deals you need to
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Once you have a list of potential partners, send it to your investors, friends, and advisers for warm introductions.
Chris Fralic suggests putting potential partners into buckets based on attributes. For example, you might categorize based on revenue numbers, distribution reach, or inventory capabilities. Then, at the end of this process, choose ten to twenty p...
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Once you have a few partners you’re targeting, the real action starts.
What do you have that they [big companies] need? You’re more focused than they are. You have an idea and you’re solving a problem. You’ve developed content or technology and you have a focus. That is very difficult to do at a big corporation.
Pivot point, offer networking events and workshops relevant to employee well being and up skill
The most important thing is to find out who is in charge of the metric you’ve targeted.
Once she is identified, you want to try to get a warm introduction to that person.
With engineering time so valuable, do as much as you can to make it easy for potential partners to work with you.
“how the deal was done” memo documenting how long it took to get to milestones, key contacts, sticking points, what interested the prospect enough to become a partner, and other factors that influenced the completion of the deal.
Twilio, a tool that makes it easy to add phone calls and text messaging to apps, attracts its customers by sponsoring hackathons, conferences, and meetups, large and small.
In phase I, offline events give you the opportunity to engage directly with potential customers about their problems.
You can also use offline events to build relationships with power users, as both Yelp and Evite have done successfully.
To get traction through offline events, Enservio went all out to organize the Claims Innovation Summit.
They held it at the Ritz-Carlton in beautiful Dove Mountain, Arizona, for multiple days. They made sure the event didn’t feel like a sales pitch for their services. Instead, they pulled in prominent figures from major consulting firms, respected individuals in the insurance industry, and founders of hot startups to come speak. They then used this group of speakers to attract the industry executives who were their prospective customers. Not only could the executives learn from the speakers, but they could network and vacation at the same time.
Some people said it was too expensive. I think for some people that was an issue, but I think it comes down to being able to prove value. Since it was unproven, they just didn’t know if they were going to spend that $500, plus airfare and hotel, and it would just be a crappy or mediocre conference. Once the first year proved itself, suddenly people were saying we need to raise the price—people have no issue with the price now.
Rob also made a few key points about creating a great event. Keeping attendee quality as high as possible is crucial so that those who attend the conference will learn a great deal both from the speakers and from other audience members.
People need to think about doing things that don’t scale. Early on when you’re trying to get those first one thousand customers, you have to do things that don’t scale. You have to take more risks.
You have to get the attention of event organizers to land speaking engagements. Event organizers need to fill time at their events. If you have a good idea for a talk and see an event that aligns with an area of your expertise, simply pitch your talk to the event organizers. If your ideas are solid, they will want you. This process becomes even easier as you become a recognized expert.
Without a story, the audience will lose interest. We suggest telling a story about why you’re doing what you’re doing, and specifically present insights only you can give through your unique position as a startup founder. Make it exciting!
community evangelists—passionate customers who tell others about how awesome a product is.
People want to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves.
