Growth Newsletter #026

When connecting with people on LinkedIn (for B2B outreach), test not including a message with your outreach request.

We’ve found that no message appears ambiguous and, as a result, less like a sales pitch. People accept the request more often.

In contrast, a templated message definitely looks like outreach automation, and it triggers people’s reflex to ignore you.

Lookalikes are one of the most reliable ways to scale paid social ads.

But lookalikes haven’t changed much over the last couple of years. Many startups run basic lookalike campaigns and settle for a suboptimal ROAS.

Try these tactics to get more out of your lookalikes:

1. Setup exclusions: You’re probably driving traffic to a lookalike of your best users or customers. But have you tried creating a lookalike of your worst ones, and using that as an exclusion audience? In our experience, this won’t help with your CPA, but it could have a significant impact on your retention and LTV.

2. Use UTM’s to seed cross-channel: Search traffic is often more qualified than social—after all, if people are searching for your product, they’re actively in the market for it. Instead of seeding a lookalike with everyone who has visited your site, try testing a seed with visitors where “URL Contains ‘utm_source=google’”. You’ll be targeting people most similar to those who came to your site with high purchase intent.

3. Try partners' websites: A couple of months back, we wrote about how you can retarget someone else’s website traffic using pixel tracking marketplaces (like Repixel’s). But consider this: once you have access to another site's pixel, create a lookalike off of it. Expand your reach with your partner’s audiences—and not just your own.

Keys to a great landing page:

• Put your key value prop front and center.
• Handle the most obvious objection upfront.
• Use negative space to direct people’s eyes to your header.

When you create a compelling, frictionless landing page, more people click and convert.

See the full resolution image on Twitter here.