Growth Newsletter #031

You don’t need to wait for a customer to leave your site to initiate a cart abandonment campaign.

Instead, use a chatbot to preemptively engage customers on the verge of leaving your site. It’s often faster and more effective than a traditional cart abandonment email campaign.

Try this:

When a customer’s cursor leaves a window, automate your bot to reengage them with a targeted message. Examples:

• “How about an exclusive offer on your cart?”
• “One of the products in your cart is low in stock. Would you like to check out now?”
• “Did you want free shipping with those items?”

If users still show exit intent after engaging with your chatbot, trigger a high priority message to your customer support team and talk with them.

Podcast downloads are highly concentrated within the top 1% of shows.

So how do you get traction for your own?

Well-known guests are the easiest solution to attracting listeners. They have fans who consume everything they create.

Good news: There are famous people who are willing to appear on just about any podcast—no matter how small—while promoting their book launches. They make it a goal to be hyper prolific.

1. Build a system around identifying famous people who do this.

• Browse Amazon's "coming soon" book list and make a list of authors.
• Search podcast guests on big shows to see if they recently launched a book.
• Use YouTube to find famous people who appear on smaller podcasts. Search "their name + podcasts" and see who shows up on tiny podcasts with small numbers of listeners.

2. Reach out to them to entice them to come onto your show:

• Highlight how their subject matter expertise overlaps your audience's interests.
• Always offer them the last cut in editing so they can appear as they'd like.

Now use their appearance to hook other huge guests: Your first big-time guest acts as social proof that your show is worthwhile.

Buying ads in newsletters is an opaque form of performance marketing: There's no algorithm to optimize, and there are rarely options for A/B testing.

But newsletter ads are a highly effective way to reach quality leads.

Know what to look for before you spend any advertising dollars on newsletter ads.

Here’s a framework for buying ads in newsletters:

• Read the newsletter for two weeks before inquiring about a sponsorship. Understand the style, audience, and interests before you throw cash at it.
• Ask newsletter owners for unique open rate and click-through rate. Tip: Have them take a screenshot of the numbers from their email service provider (like MailChimp or Customer.io). It's rare, but some newsletters overstate their metrics.
• Focus on lead gen—not only purchase. Only a small percentage of subscribers will buy straight from your ad. So optimize for email capture and track clicks so you can retarget these new leads and convert them down funnel.