This Won't Scale: 41 Plays From The Drift Marketing Team To Help Your Business Cut Through The Noise, Grow Faster Than The Competition & Thrill Your Customers

by Dave Gerhardt

And while you’re at it, you can also kiss your no-reply email addresses, self serving Twitter monologues and pre-recorded webinar presentations goodbye. Because from now on, your only job as a marketer is to drive conversations.

back then we couldn’t pick just one thing we wanted our new subscribers to do.

In email marketing, you need to be very clear about what you want.

the best thing about live webinars is that they’re… well, live. And so we try to make them as conversational as possible with a few simple tricks: First, the best webinars we’ve had so far haven’t been scripted. There are no slides and no formal agenda. Just two people talking to each other about a topic that they both know well.

Successful SaaS brands like Slack and MailChimp had never made people jump through hoops in exchange for value.

Right then and there we realized that we needed to take marketing back to its roots and kill all our lengthy lead forms for good.

By now you’ve probably noticed that we’re not fans of proper grammar, punctuation or big words.

That’s why everything we write should feel like an email from a friend. It’s not necessarily witty or well versed.

Most people can spend several days writing a 10X blog post. They’ll read through it over and over, rewrite some parts and rephrase sentences. And when they’re done with all of that, they take thirty seconds to write the headline. That’s not us. We obsess over headlines at Drift.

Especially in a space as crowded as sales and marketing where there’s already so much noise we need our headlines to stop people in their tracks and make them go, “Damn, I want to read that.”

We write 10-15 variations of every headline and then kick them around with the team until we finally find one that we really like. So if you’re reading this book to find quick wins or practical tips, here’s one: You’ve got to spend time on the headline. It’s the only way to get people’s attention online.

And while she’s quick to confess that the email is automated, she also writes, “I’m a real person that would love to hear why you subscribed to our blog?” That’s been an absolute game changer because we are creating a real connection with people. These emails help us generate tons of feedback and allow us to start conversations.

Product launches are a huge deal here at Drift. In fact, the entire company is organized around shipping a new product to our customers every single month. Not just a bug fix or a new feature, but a completely new product. Internally we call these product launches Marketable Moments.

Obsess Over Getting The Whole Team On Message

Over-Communicate Everything

Every company has loyal fans. They love the product, the brand or the people. But most companies haven’t learned how to leverage these fanboys and fangirls for a product launch. And if you ask us, that’s a huge mistake.

Much like internal marketing, it’s critical to brief the insiders early on, go into some depth with the information and most of all, get everyone really excited about the new product. A month before each Marketable Moment, we tell our Insider Network about what we’re about to launch. We give them beta access, we use their quotes on our landing pages and we ask them to publish blog posts about our new products on the day of the launch.

we don’t obsess over scale. We obsess over experience.