Top Growth Tactics

A low open rate doesn’t necessarily mean people are ignoring your emails.

It’s possible your emails are left unopened because a visitor:

• Misspells their email address
• Uses a fake email
• Used an old corporate email
• Doesn’t align with your target audience
• Is a bot

These broken emails can be a net drag on your email deliverability.

This is one of the many reasons it's a wise idea to use a double opt-in confirmation for subscribers: Ask users to confirm their interest when subscribing.

The result: fewer emails going to spam and greater engagement from your recipients.

We want you to delete contacts from your email list.

Two reasons to remove inactive contacts from your list:

1. Since email platforms charge per contact, inactive contacts on your email list cost you upwards of 50% of your email bill.
2. The higher your open rate, the more Google delivers your emails to inboxes as opposed to the Spam folder. You can increase your open rate by removing contacts who don't open your email. Pretty simple. That's the second benefit of removing inactive contacts: Those who remain see your emails even more.

So here's what you do:

• Once per quarter, duplicate your email list and search for contacts who've been inactive for over three months.
• Before you remove them, try a win-back email campaign that explains they'll be removed if they do not resume opening and engaging with emails.
• Once you have a cleaned list, test a new campaign for higher open rate and CTR.
  

Open rates for SMS marketing are misleading—it's best to avoid using them as your defining metric.

Some reports suggest that SMS has a 99% open rate. But the majority of those opens might be users:

• Opening to delete your message
• Opening by accident
• Or opening because they have no idea who the message is from

Instead, consider measuring success of your SMS campaigns based on:

1. Click-through rate (CTR). People who click the link are likely interested in your message. A high CTR signals an effective campaign.
2. Use of SMS-specific discount code. Create a discount code for your SMS campaigns and measure how many people use it. The higher the percentage of SMS recipients who use your code, the more successful your campaign.

Triggered emails typically convert better than broadcast emails. (It's reported that they drive 624% more conversions than broadcasts.)

Triggered emails are pre-written campaigns that trigger based on someone's engagement with your site or app.

4 trigger-based campaigns are more profitable than the rest. Here's how to get them right:

1. Welcome nurture: Welcome emails often get 4x more opens and 5x more clicks than your other promo emails.

• Include your brand's name in the From field (ex. Julian at Demand Curve)
• Remind them what benefits they can expect

2. Abandoned cart: This will likely be the most profitable email you'll ever send. Adding to cart shows massive buying intent.

• Over 70% of ecommerce carts are abandoned
• Create copy that answers: "Why buy now?"

3. New customer post-purchase: You've got your customer's undivided attention—get them excited.

• Tell them next steps and set expectations
• Validate they made the right decision
• Cross-sell accessories or complimentary products

4. Customer re-engagement: Each subsequent purchase increases your customer's lifetime value. And it's cheaper to re-engage existing customers than it is to acquire new ones.

• Share useful and relevant lifestyle content
• Mix-in special offers and seasonal sales

The subject line of your email is one of the most important elements.

If it's weak, your email won't get opened and the rest of the email is irrelevant to your subscriber.

There are three reasons people decide to open an email:

1. Self-interest: Offer them something that's going to help them.

• Example from Spotify: "Playlists made just for you"—save them time and effort.

2. Emotional interest: Spark positive emotion.

• Example from Typeform: "You're invited to the premiere"—make them feel special.

3. Relational interest: Get them to like you, trust you, and want to hear what you have to say.

• Example from Allbirds: "Leave a lighter footprint"—they like the brand and mission.

Consider leaning into one of these elements for each of your subject lines. As a result, you'll likely increase your email marketing performance.

When analyzing email marketing performance, avoid judging the quality of an email by its open rate.

Open rate is a measure of PAST performance, plus time of day, plus email subject. Here’s what we mean by past performance: If your emails have been consistently good, people will be more likely to open future ones.

But on an email-by-email basis, consider this:

• It’s often more helpful to measure click-through rate (CTR): How many people who open your email click through and take an action you suggest?
• Along with CTR, look at click-to-open rate (CTOR), which measures the percentage of people who click after opening.

CTOR excludes people for whom the subject wasn’t appealing, which is a better indicator of how appealing your copy, design, and CTAs were.

In ecom, when a new customer purchases your product, there's a time gap between them clicking "buy now" and the product arriving at their door.

Instead of going radio silent, you can use that time to get customers excited about the product they purchased.

Create a post-purchase email flow that educates your new customer about your brand, what they can expect when it arrives, and what kind of transformation they'll experience from using it.

You can include:

• Examples of how to use your product.
• User-generated content showing off real customers.
• An invite to join your community.

By building anticipation towards unboxing, your customers will likely put more value on the item they purchased—and you're more likely to turn first-time buyers into lifelong customers who will buy from you again and again.

Many marketers believe that emails that land in the Gmail Promotions Tab won’t get read.

In reality, your messages aren’t getting buried:

• The Promotions Tab was designed for desktop, so mobile users won’t have email separated into tabs. They’ll likely see your email in their main inbox.
• Even if your email lands in Promotions, the numbers aren't bad:

• 50% of readers check their Promotions Tab daily.
• These readers tend to click through more often because they’re in the mindset for promotional emails.

Instead of trying to artificially avoid promotions, focus on getting people to engage with your emails:

• Prompt replies: Propose questions to get people to reply. Two-way communication sends positive signals to Google, fast-tracking you to readers’ primary inboxes.
• Personalize and segment your campaigns: They’ll get more engagement, which shows Gmail that your content belongs in their inbox.

Blasting out sale announcements feels straightforward and promotional. As a test, try teasing sales in advance so customers can’t wait to check their inbox:

• Blur out sale items. Chubbies does this for their Black Friday items, using playful copy and a CTA of ‘setting an alarm for tomorrow’ to see what surprise items are on sale.
• For physical products, try using a daily deal sequence leading up to a big sale.

          • Most companies can’t run daily deals forever. But before a launch or big sale, it fosters intrigue and gets subscribers into the habit of clicking.

          • Example: Poo-Pourri offers six different deals over 12 days before Christmas and promotes them in their emails.

In doing so, they create a curiosity gap, where the subscriber feels compelled to check back each day to see the next deal.

Note: This works well before big events like Black Friday/Cyber Monday. But better yet, you can create your own holiday like BarkBox does for “National Dog Day.”

When used sparingly, a little mystery and intrigue go a long way to drive clicks and sales.

While they're often thought of as intrusive, popups convert 3% of site visitors, on average.

And strategic, high-performing popups can reach ~10% conversion.

To make higher-converting, less intrusive popups, try the 60% Rule:

• Open your website's analytics and see what the average time spent is on a specific page you'd like to use a popup on.
• Set your popup to appear after 60% of the average time spent on your specific page. So if the average time spent on a page is 50 seconds, set your popup to appear 30 seconds after visitors land on that page.

At that point, readers have shown interest in your content but are nearing the end of their session. Prompting them with a relevant and valuable incentive in exchange for their email will feel like a fair exchange.

Bonus: When designing your popups, ensure the copy, call-to-action, and incentive are directly relevant to the page the visitor is currently on. You can rephrase the headers that appear on the page as a hook in the popup.

Negative reviews can actually improve checkout conversion.

For context, reviews are a big deal:

• 93% of consumers claim product reviews impact purchase decisions
• The social proof of having 50+ product reviews increases conversion. Shoppers trust peers more than they trust brands.

Negative yet constructive reviews can outperform your best positive review for generating sales. When a partially negative review weighs your cons versus your pros, and concludes that the product was worth purchasing anyway, that sounds authentic and honest.

Here's what you can do:

• Make sure your post-purchase email flow contains a request for reviews. The more reviews you have, the better.
• Don't bury slightly negative reviews. If someone leaves a 4-star review and offers a fair (and insignificant) critique, showcase it towards the top of your product page. Be human.

Most ecommerce stores use one main navigation item, like ‘Products’ or ‘Shop’, as a dropdown for all of their product categories.

This can damage conversion. 

When a customer arrives on your site, they’re immediately scanning for products. If it's not easy for them to find what they’re looking for, they’ll bounce.

Try this: Feature your product categories in your header menu. If you have dozens of categories, group them together to reduce friction. Once a customer feels that they are headed in the right direction (they’ve clicked a relevant category), they’ll feel better about continuing their search.

Worth testing: If you have one, clear, best-selling product, consider linking it directly in your header menu. It's likely that people visiting your site are coming specifically for your best-seller. They might have seen it in an ad or heard about it through word of mouth. Seeing it in your header menu is confirmation that it's worth clicking on.

Marketers generally create standalone landing pages for product FAQs.

Instead, try weaving FAQs into your product pages.

This prevents visitors from having to leave your product pages to answer their questions, increasing your odds of converting them. 

Try these four tactics:

1. Make answers collapsible to avoid cluttering your pages.
2. Order and categorize questions logically. Step into your customer's perspective and ask yourself, "What questions would pop into my head right now?" Then answer them in order.
3. Feature real customer questions and answers. They're relatable.
4. Include links to relevant blog posts, videos, and other resources in answers. If customer's need more convincing before purchase, they'll click through.

A friendly PSA. Great product pages do two things:

1. Reassure and convert customers who were learning towards buying
2. Win over and convert those who were on the fence

Most product pages look the same for a reason. There’s a formula. Here’s how some of the top brands structure them (for desktop and mobile): 

Product images:

• Desktop: Left side of the page. People scan from left to right.
• Mobile: Front and center. People scan and then scroll down.
• Reasoning: You want them to see your product before your price.

Product name, details, add to cart:

• Desktop: Right side of the page.
• Mobile: Just under the image.
• Reasoning: Remove lengthy product descriptions above the fold. Keep it minimal—the goal here is conversion.

Full product description and reviews:

• Desktop and mobile: Just below the fold.
• Reasoning: If people are interested in your product, they will scroll. When they do, you want to hit them with copy that will convert. Reviews and testimonials are critical in this section—they add weight to the claims you’re making on the product page.

Love 'em or hate 'em, popups can dramatically increase conversion—when used correctly.

If you show people the exact same popup each time they visit your site, you're missing out on opportunities to either 1) push leads closer to a purchase or 2) increase LTV.

Try this: use dynamic popups to meet visitors at their current stage in the buyer's journey.

Most marketing messaging tools offer the ability to target individuals with different popups. So split your audience into three segments and show a popup that resonates with each:

1. First time traffic - people who haven't subscribed yet.

Provide a discount, giveaway, or exclusive piece of content gated by an email capture.

2. Returning subscribers - people who have subscribed but not yet purchased.

Include a subscriber-only discount to encourage purchase. Tip: include a countdown timer on the popup to create urgency.

3. Customers - anyone who has already made a purchase.

Feature new products and greet people with a "welcome back" message.

CRO is about optimizing high-leverage touchpoints with customers. Popups are no exception.

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.

Sales teams waste calls and emails on unqualified leads.

That’s why it’s so important to prequalify leads, only giving the best leads the option to book a sales call.

Here’s how to optimize sales resources:

Go through previous clients and determine predictors of high LTV. For an agency, ecommerce clients with more than a $10k monthly marketing budget might be your best clients.

Add a form to your sales process for clients to indicate their budget.

For those spending over $10k, let them immediately book a priority spot on your calendar. Remove all friction.

For the low priority leads, put them in an email drip sequence and don’t let them immediately book on your calendar.

Call booking rates go way up when people can book when filling out the form. We want our qualified leads to book immediately.

Good at closing sales over the phone?

Try Google call-only ads. They are text-based and link directly to a phone number instead of a website.

CPCs are similar to traditional Google ads. But instead of people bouncing from your site after they click your ad, you’re on the phone with them within 2 clicks.

Here’s how to get the most out of call-only ads:

Set your keywords for call-only ads to target high-intent searchers who are looking for quick answers and have no time to research. Combine this with normal text ads so that you can appeal to searchers who are not in a rush and prefer to self-educate.

Conversion rates go up if you include your searchers' location in the copy. For example, if you're a San Francisco based towing company, include that in your copy. Searchers are more likely to click your ad if their car breaks down in San Francisco.

This tactic is best suited for businesses with high LTVs due to the labor costs associated with closing sales over the phone.

Finding anything you want through Google search is a superpower that not many marketers take full advantage of.

Here’s a quick tip: Use Google search operators.

The syntax of your Google search can help run market analysis, prospect people on LinkedIn, find investors, retrieve fundraising news, etc.

Examples:

Search: “site:docs.google.com/spreadsheets intitle:startups 2020”

Use case: Find open Google spreadsheets that include “startups” and “2020” in the title. For example, if you offer services for startups that are hiring remotely, you can find a list with thousands of potential leads and email addresses.

Search: “site:airtable.com inurl:VC”

Use case: Find Airtable bases that contain “VC” in the URL. You can find lists of investors that may be relevant to your fundraising needs. These lists often provide you with the names (and occasionally emails) of investors, and also share relevant information about each one of them.

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.

LinkedIn has insightful firmographic data, yet most marketers rarely consider running LinkedIn conversion ads—they're often far too expensive.

But you can combine LinkedIn's B2B targeting with Facebook's conversion-focused ad platform to create a highly-targeted B2B funnel.

Here's how:

1. Create a LinkedIn ads campaign promoting an article or landing page using the “website visits” objective. Make sure your article or landing page has a quality lead gen offer and that your pixel tracks the conversion.
2. On Facebook, create a custom audience targeting the visitors who visited your article or landing page from your LinkedIn ads campaign but didn’t convert.
3. Run a FB "conversions" campaign to this audience promoting your lead gen offer.

Taking this approach, your CPC and ROAS could be much lower than you’d get if you ran the entire lead gen campaign through LinkedIn’s ad network.

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.

Most marketers see TikTok's shockingly high CPAs and give up on ads too soon.

One reason for poor ad performance on TikTok comes down to poor ad creative.

Before ruling out TikTok as an acquisition channel, test these changes to see if your CPAs improve:

1. Sound: Most advertisers don’t put much effort into their ad sound. But TikTok requires videos to have sound. Try using audio to highlight customer testimonials and feature walkthroughs of your product’s benefits.
2. Quantity: Creative fatigue happens more rapidly on TikTok than on other platforms—users consume massive amounts of content and are quick to ignore anything that feels repetitive. So build a queue of fresh videos and change your ads, at a minimum, bi-weekly.
3. Authenticity: If your content feels like an ad, you’re going to get a swift swipe up. So make sure you're creating ads that match the organic content that users come to TikTok for. Shoot on an iPhone and make grittier content that is authentic to how your actual customers will engage with your product.

It’s getting more expensive to run Facebook ads.

One way to try reducing costs is by using a different ad objective—and getting creative.

Say you own a DTC cookware brand. Consider this:

• Create a piece of content that your audience will love, like a seasonal cooking guide. Feature your relevant products within the guide.
• Then run a retargeting campaign to drive traffic to your guide. Make the ad objective “Engagement.”
• Set engagement goals of:

          • Time on page: 20 seconds.

          • Vertical scroll: 50%.

If your content is great, you might experience lower acquisition costs and a higher ROAS.

Why? When you optimize for different objectives, Facebook can distribute your impressions differently to the same audience. And maybe that re-distribution achieves a better cost structure given you’re no longer indexing on the higher cost folks who have a history of purchasing via Facebook ads.

Users who send direct messages (DMs) to your brand on Instagram are likely to be interested in your product—yet many brands don’t do enough to convert them.

Consider running ads directly to people who DM your brand:

1. In FB Business Manager, go to Accounts and click on “Instagram Accounts.” Select your Instagram business account.
2. Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience. Select “Instagram Account” and “People who sent a message to your professional account” in the past 365 days. Call it “Instagram DMs” and click on “Create Audience.”
3. Create a campaign to target this audience.

Important: For best ad performance, study the questions that continuously pop up in your DMs. What do these users want from you? Design your ads with the value props that directly solve their problems.

Most subscriber growth on YouTube comes from the algorithm promoting your videos to new audiences.

YouTube's algorithm promotes videos that get people to stay on the platform longer.

To increase the likelihood of your video being promoted to new audiences, optimize these three areas:

1. Thumbnails. Try testing your YouTube thumbnails with your audience on Instagram or Twitter. Make a poll and ask them to vote for their favorite before using it on YouTube. The more engaging they are, the higher your click-through rate (CTR). And a high CTR keeps users on-platform longer.
2. Retention rate of your videos. Videos that are more frequently watched till the end produce greater on-platform time. In the first 15 seconds of your video, explicitly say what the viewer is going to see and tease why they should stick around until the end.
3. Average view duration. You want users to watch another one of your videos in the same session. Test creating a multi-part video series that spans a specific topic.

Your LinkedIn posts can get significantly more reach with this small tweak.

The LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes "dwell time”—a measurement of the amount of time a user spends viewing a post—when assessing virality.

More dwell time leads to more impressions.

You can lean into the algorithm by creating posts that people stop and spend time on.

Here’s how:

• Avoid single images in your post. Instead, upload a multi-page PDF with key insights or brief case studies on each page. Each page should flow into or introduce the next.
• In the body of your post, tease any surprising conclusions or data. Give your audience a reason to stick around to view the entire PDF.

Remember to only include outbound links in the comments section—the algorithm might demote content with outbound links in the body. You can mention the link in the body of your post so that your audience seeks it out.

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.

Most video content is poor. Here's MrBeast's technique for creating videos that get engagement and shares:

1. Describe the video's value in the first five seconds. Don't make users guess what they'll get by watching.
2. Ask a question you don't resolve until the last five seconds. This is the hook that gets users to watch until the end of the video—and satisfies them when the question is answered.
3. Create fewer quality videos over many lesser-quality videos. The YouTube algorithm favors high-quality content. One amazing video will grow your channel more than ten good videos.
4. Integrate quick cuts. Don't give people time to ask if they're bored.

Watch the first 30 seconds of Ali Abdaal's video here to see a job well done.

If you're building an audience on Twitter, consider this:

Growth on Twitter comes from retweets. Retweets get your content in front of completely new audiences, instantly.

We ran a poll to figure out why people retweet. Here were the top 3 responses:

1. To give kudos.
2. To signal which side of a debate they're on.
3. Save and bookmark for later.

So use this to build your audience on Twitter:

• Be concise and novel. People retweet to give kudos to novel, elegantly articulated ideas.
• State contrarian findings. People retweet to signal that they're on your side of the discussion.
• If you really know your subject, tweet step-by-step threads. People retweet to save longer-form content to reference again later.

Links from mainstream news outlets carry a ton of weight:

• They have high domain authority and improve your startup's keyword ranking in Google.
• They have some of the largest audiences on the internet and provide valuable brand awareness and referral traffic.

But most startups only focus on PR for things like fundraising and product launches. That'll only get you so far. To see a real growth lift from earned media strategies, consider intentionally creating content that’s optimized for pickup by news outlets.

Here's how you can do it. Make your content:

1. Relevant: Focus on your publisher's audience first. Re-frame your briefs and think about how to make your content broadly appealing so that your stories get picked up.
2. Objective: Publishers won't link to a story that’s obviously stuffed with keywords or product links. Create content that’s objective and authoritative—not salesly.
3. Timely: Weave in current events and cultural trends. Why would a journalist be motivated to link or reference the article today? Find a hook and use it when pitching.
4. Unique: What makes your story different? Use localization, first-party data, and engaging visualizations. The best way to stand out is to provide a unique, fresh angle that a journalist couldn’t access without referencing your story.

News publications are resource-constrained and looking for unique storytelling that will appeal to their readers. Make it easy for them by being a source of great, compelling content.

Most content marketers aren't thinking enough about distribution before writing. They often create too many single point-of-view and opinion pieces—neither of which have built-in distribution benefits.

Instead, consider interviewing subject matter experts, practitioners, and internal team members. Then create content written through their lens of expertise.

It's likely you'll get a bump in distribution:

• The experts you feature in your piece will be inclined to share it for you. (This works even better if you can work with practitioners who have engaged, online audiences.)
• Ask the people you interview to link to your post from their website. Backlinks to your new post send a positive SEO signal to Google.
• Insights from experts are more likely to be referenced by others than standalone brand opinions are. After the initial distribution boost, it's likely that other writers will reference your piece in their work.

A simple technique for more search traffic:

• Find a subreddit related to your business.
• Pop the subreddit link into Ahrefs (our go-to keyword generation tool) and look for the keywords that the page ranks for.
• Take the list of keywords and use them to optimize your content.
  

Keywords that Reddit ranks for are low-competition.

Reddit has a high domain authority and frequently ranks on page one. But Reddit pages don't tend to outperform great blog posts in search results.

Now that you have a list of low-competition keywords, build superior content that actually answers the searcher’s questions.

You can eventually outrank the original Reddit thread.

Google has an acronym for content they tend to rank higher in search. It's E-A-T:

• Expertise: The content’s author is knowledgeable in their field.
• Authority: The content, site, and author are authoritative.
• Trustworthiness: The content, site, and author are reliable.

Google uses E-A-T to rate page quality, along with factors like website reputation and page purpose. According to Google, all high-quality content takes a “significant” amount of one or more of the following: time, effort, expertise, and talent/skill.

To improve your E-A-T score:

• Commission content from knowledgeable creators.
• Make sure claims are substantiated and sources reputable.
• Showcase your brand’s credentials and awards.
• Create an informative “about us” page.
• Respond to all reviews (not just the good ones).

If your content strategy is fast and furious, rethink your approach. A churned-out article won’t just hurt your brand reputation and thought leadership. It will make Google bury your content.

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.

If you're using your podcast as an acquisition tool, you face a real problem: It's notoriously hard to get conversions.

But you can use scarcity and urgency to convert listeners to your email list and nurture them down funnel. How?

Tease limited-time downloads they can only get that week.

Here's loosely how “Growth Marketing Today” does this at the beginning of their podcast:

1. Tease the episode highlights/benefits: “In this episode, you’ll learn x,y,z.” This hooks the listener.
2. Then, explain how you can save them time: “And before we begin, we’ve put all the actionable takeaways into a free PDF. Why take notes when you can just get them from me?”
3. Create Urgency: “Why get it now? Because once I publish next week’s episode, this goes back to costing $100.”
4. CTA: Grab it in the link in the show-notes or on our website.

The scarcity (you can only get the PDF this week) combined with the low maintenance ask (all you have to do is download it from our site) gets people to act quickly.

And to save time turning podcast episodes into notes, you can use a tool like Descript to quickly transcribe the audio, then edit it down to the highlights.

And what about all the listeners who listen months or years later? Offer them something else when they hit your landing page. Something related and still useful.

Marketers tend to create blog posts solely for top-of-funnel awareness, failing to take advantage of an opportunity to convert existing users.

Here are two ways to optimize your blog posts for the people further down your funnel:

• Offer a basic solution, and then pitch your product as a more effective one. Increase conversions by presenting your product as a better alternative.

• Example: Zapier could write an informational blog post showing customers how to manually manage their social media mentions. For the second half of their post, they could highlight how users could use Zapier to send social mentions to Slack, automating the entire process.

• Improve your CTAs. Over 20% of B2B blogs don't include CTAs in their posts. CTAs should offer a solution to the problem that your readers face after each article. You can drive people to:

• Related articles: Use for complex products that require multiple content touch-points.
• Newsletter sign ups: Use when you've just solved a problem for your readers and they're in a mindset to give you their email address for more content. E.g. "Sign up and we'll send you actionable growth tactics each week."

Give interested buyers a way to move further down funnel after reading your posts.

When writing for SEO, avoid chasing trophy keywords—words that have high traffic potential but drive little value for your startup.

Example: If your business sells software to accountants, a trophy keyword would be “accounting software,” which carries 28,000 monthly searches.

Though this term drives plenty of traffic, here’s the reality: High-intent, professional accountants will rarely ever search for such a generic term.

When you decide to attempt to rank for a keyword, avoid asking the most obvious question: What would drive the most traffic to my site? Instead, ask yourself:

• What terms would my target audience search for?
• What terms have the highest purchase intent?
• What terms would educate my audience and lead them to convert?

Then, act on your answers:

• Use Ahrefs to create a keyword list using the questions above.
• Measure them by competition and potential traffic.
• Then seed your target words in your page titles, headers, and content to rank quickly.

People use Google for three objectives:

1. To be inspired
2. To be educated
3. To execute

Using a standing desk as an example, we can use variations of the keyword “standing desk” to create a stream of relevant content for all buyers:

• “Minimalist standing desk home office"
• “Benefits of a standing desk”—Once a buyer has identified a product, they’re likely to start looking for practical reasons to buy. Benefit-focused content answers their biggest questions, solves their pain points, and moves them toward a purchase.
• “How to attach monitor to standing desk”—Once they’ve made a purchase, continue to educate with content about setup and product maintenance. Consumers who engage with your content and customer service are likely to buy from you again.

New content can take months to surface on search engine results pages.

But you can repurpose your old content to accelerate the ranking of your new content. Here's how:

• Figure out if you have any existing content that ranks for the keywords you're targeting. You can Google search using this format [site:yoursitename dot com keyword] to find ranked pages.
• Then redirect (for outdated pieces of content) or interlink (for pieces that are still relevant) these URLs to your new piece. This will give it an authority boost—a sign that Google uses to increase your content’s ranking.
• If you don't have any relevant content for interlinking, use an SEO tool (like Ahrefs) to determine high-authority pages on your site. Link these pages to your new content where it fits.

Your new piece of content now has an internal linking profile with authority, which will help it to rank quicker, and better, on Google.

Landing page copy is difficult to optimize. You need a sufficient level of traffic to run accurate A/B tests, but driving traffic to your landing page is costly (you're paying per click just to get people to the landing page you're testing).

Consider running ads to test and refine your landing page copy.

Since your ads will get significantly more impressions than your landing pages, you'll be able to get statistically significant results on your copy, quickly.

Try this:

• Create multiple copy variations to test in Facebook's ad manager. Instead of conversions, focus on click-through rate. The goal is to determine which copy incites the most engagement.
• Test until a clear winner emerges. Use the winning ad copy as your landing page's headline, sub-headline, and body copy.

People checking out your pricing page are likely high intent prospects.

Here's a quick copy fix to turn more of them into customers: Try reframing your pricing copy to include highly valued features for free.

• Before: "$100 per month for up to 10 hours of transcription"

          What your buyer thinks → "10 hours for $100 is $10 per hour. That's pretty pricey..."

• Optimized: "$100 per month. Your first 1000 subscribers are free!"

           What your buyer thinks → "$100 is pretty cheap for what I'm getting..."

Consider getting feedback from your users to understand what they value most about your product. Repackage your product to offer that value "for free" with the purchase of your product at full price.

While most marketers know they should be tapping influencers to sell their products, few know how to find the right influencers for the long-haul.

Here's what to look for:

1. Seek long-term relationships over one-off campaigns: Brands and products that are reinforced over time to an influencer's loyal following lead to deeper affinity. Consider working with influencers who have an interest in becoming a true representative of your brand.

2. Consider prioritizing influencers with high engagement across multiple platforms: This is a sign that their audience is engaged and excited about their content—and that they didn't just fall into meme-based fame on one channel.

3. Most startups should start with micro-influencers over macro-influencers: Influencers with smaller followings are more accessible than their celebrity counterparts. But, more importantly, relatively small followings lead to more trust. Pick creators with smaller follower counts (5,000-25,000), and tailor your message to what that audience trusts the creator to know about.

Keep in mind that influencers can outlast mediums. Ask yourself: If Instagram was to become irrelevant tomorrow, would the creators you're working with still have influence?

Influencer marketing on TikTok requires a different approach than Instagram and YouTube.

TikTok has a high variance algorithm—the impressions that a creator’s average post gets isn’t constant. If a video is good, you get boosted. It’s that simple.

Smaller influencers have more power than they do on other platforms. So it's worth taking a chance on smaller creators if they’re very talented and you believe in their ability to break out.

Here's a suggested strategy:

• Use an app like Swipehouse to find creators that fit your brand. Use data. Avoid trying to manually wing it with seemingly "on brand" influencers.
• Consider splitting your budget: Work with a few bigger creators (20%), but take bets on a large number of small creators (80%).
• Pay with gifts: For the smaller creators (less than 50k followers), you can send products in exchange for content and exposure. They’re likely running their TikTok account on the side, rather than relying on sponsorship income to pay the bills.
• Give them creative control: Give creators even more creative freedom than you would on other platforms. Due to the algorithm, they really need to hit an authentic nerve for videos to go viral.

Giving influencers coupon codes and special links to share helps account for some conversion.

But they won’t tell the whole story—people often hear about your product from an influencer, but think about it later and come back to your site in a way that’s not tracked to that particular influencer.

The workaround? Combine analytics data with an attribution survey.

• Add a post-purchase attribution survey and ask customers where they heard about you first. (There are tools like Enquire for Shopify that get 80%+ completion rates for post-purchase surveys.)
• List influencers as the option.
• Even better if you break it down by channel (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.)

While your link data may show a low ROAS, you’ll likely find that your influencers are actually bringing in a high ROAS once the survey data is accounted for—justifying influencer marketing as a profitable channel for your brand.

It's not just your customers who can refer—your best influencers can refer other influencers to your brand.

Once you find a great long-term influencer partner and you’re ready to scale up, it’s worth incentivizing your partner to activate other great influencers.

Here’s how to do it:

• Create a referral system for your long-term influencer to sign up other influencers.
• Give them a percentage of sales generated by the influencers they refer and activate.

They’ll be motivated to sign up other great influencers because they’re paid based on the performance of those influencers.

Now your long-term influencer partner isn’t just your advertiser—they’re incentivized to help you scale influencer marketing as an acquisition channel.

If you run a subscription business, here's a tactic that can increase your LTV and ROAS (return on ad spend):

Offer discounts for groups.

Think of group discounts like Spotify family plans—users get a discount (say, 10% off) for joining your subscription together.

There are two key benefits:

1. Acquisition: Users are incentivized to bring in friends, since the initial users benefit from the discount. So the group discount becomes an acquisition mechanism.
2. Retention: Individuals within discount groups tend to cancel less frequently, since doing so would make their friends pay more. As a result, retention increases.

Bonus: If your store is built on Shopify, you can use an app like Skio to test this.

Cross-selling campaigns tend to increase average order value (AOV) more than standalone sales promotions do.

For example, most marketers offer free shipping once a cart reaches a purchase minimum. That’s table stakes. But you can increase your AOV by promoting another ongoing campaign in combination with your free shipping offer.

Three campaigns for you to try:

1. Get free shipping when you buy any of these two products.
2. Get 3 for the price of 2 on all flash sale items.
3. Buy one, get one free—plus free shipping on orders $50+

Add personalized recommendations and highlight complementary products when possible.

Example: Someone interested in a new game console would likely be willing to add a game to their cart in order to redeem free shipping. So make sure your checkout flow asks them if they want to add a game instead of an unrelated product.

People love receiving free rewards from brands.

But don't wait for birthdays—that's when customers receive gifts from lots of other brands.

Try this instead:

• Reach out with a freebie at a random time of the year: Not for a birthday or a holiday. Simply a surprise for being a loyal customer. People will remember your thoughtful, random gift—more than they would if you sent them an email that got buried in their inbox next to 50 other brands' gifts.
• Relate your gift to your core value prop. E.g. Chewy—the pet eCom store—randomly sends customers pet portraits. People want more of what they pay you for. This will lead to more affinity.

The most famous referral success stories are outliers.

The well-known referral programs that grew brands like Airbnb and Dropbox are highly unlikely to work for your startup.

In fact, instead of trying to "build a successful referral program," you should be focused on finding your company's viral loop.

Examples:

• If you run an ecom pet store, your viral loop might be getting dog owners to post pictures of their dogs on Instagram (with you tagged).
• If you're in EdTech, your viral loop might be a bustling community where eager students get free course credits when they invite their classmates.
• If you're a SaaS founder, your viral loop might be a freemium tier where your customers include your badge in their footer.

There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. You have to dig into what your product offers and align that with an incentive that increases your exposure.

Common startup mistake: Asking customers to refer their product at the end of the sales process, before they've even tried the product.

That’s like asking someone if they’d recommend a movie as they’re waiting in line to go watch it.

It's ineffective and will lead to a low adoption rate and annoyed customers.

Instead, look for moments when rapport is high between you and your customer:

1. Right after your customer gives you a high Net Promoter Score on a follow-up survey.
2. When your customer renews for another billing cycle.
3. When your customer actively engages with your marketing efforts (replies to an email newsletter, sends a social media DM, or comments on a post).

It’s in these trigger moments when your business is top of mind for your customer. Use that to your advantage by engaging them in your referral program.

To get referrals to work, you need your incentives to check three boxes:

1. Your customer acquisition cost (CAC) must be less than the lifetime value of that customer (LTV). This is obvious.
2. The referrer's incentive needs to be desirable enough that your customers take action.
3. The referral's incentive needs to be desirable enough that they convert.

Different business models call for different incentives. Here's what we've seen work best:

• For B2B: Tailored personal rewards work better than discounts. A gift card to a local restaurant works better than 20% off your product since B2B customers are employees—they're more motivated by personal incentives.
• For Ecommerce: Discounts or cash offers work because there is a direct benefit to the customer. But your cash incentive needs to be significantly large enough to drive action. $5 off typically doesn't cut it.
• For SaaS: Offer greater access to your core product—that's what users come to you for. So give them more of it. E.g. Dropbox offers referrers more storage. 

Common startup challenge: Your product solves a problem that people don't know they have yet.

For example, no one knew they needed an Uber–they thought they needed a taxi.

When planning your go-to-market strategy, choose a marketing channel that:

• Allows you to get in front of a lot of your target customers, quickly
• Allows you to get in front of your target customer, inexpensively

There are seven ways people learn about new products:

1. Word-of-mouth: through friends, family, and colleagues
2. While browsing online, organically: SEO article, social media recommendation
3. While browsing online and seeing a promotion: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube ad
4. Offline, organically: seeing a product on the shelf, someone using it
5. Offline and seeing a promotion: billboard, posters, samples
6. While at home, seeing a promotion: direct mail
7. Someone reaching out to you: direct sales

Go through all seven ways people learn about new products and list all the channels that are possible. For each channel, ask: How quickly and cheaply can I reach my target customers? How many are there?

This exercise will clarify which marketing channels will be most effective for your go-to-market strategy.

Most marketers skip a key step in the growth process while running A/B tests.

Everyone looks at quantitative data. That's easy. Your analytics platform will show you which A/B variant had a better conversion rate.

But few dig in to figure out why a given variant won.

Two approaches to determining the why:

1. Use heatmaps: Tools like Hotjar will help you figure out why certain variants won. Were users distracted by a suboptimal CTA in one variant? Maybe users bounced before scrolling past the top half of your landing page?
2. Survey customers who were impacted by the test. You can use tools like SurveyMonkey to set up automated survey emails that trigger post-purchase. Ask questions that help you determine what aspect of your test variable got them to purchase.

Figuring out why each variant wins will inform your next tests: It's what keeps your growth flywheel spinning.

Most SaaS apps lose 95% of new users within 90 days. A majority of these users drop off before they finish onboarding.

When customers fully onboard, they're more likely to stick around and pay for your product. One way to encourage them to complete onboarding? Give them a quick win.

Example: After logging in to Quora for the first time, a new user sees a checklist called “Set Up Your Account.” The first step, “Visit your feed,” is already checked. The user has accomplished something just by signing up.

People are more motivated to keep going if they think they’ve already accomplished something. Early in the onboarding process, keep motivation high with quick wins and reminders of what the ultimate big win will be.

• Keep the “job-to-be-done”—what users will get out of the onboarding process—front of mind. Airbnb’s host signup page shows you what your monthly earnings could be if you complete the steps to rent out your home.
• In your welcome email, don’t waste precious space on a “thanks for signing up.” Remind them of how your product will benefit them once they’re fully onboarded.

Tip from behavioral psychology: people place a higher value on things that they have a hand in creating. If you allow people to customize your product, they'll either 1) convert at a higher rate, or 2) pay more for it.

Two examples of customization in practice:

Ecommerce: Converse allows shoppers to choose the color, shape, and star placement of their famous All-Stars.

SaaS: Slack lets users customize their setup with bots and integrations. Customization in SaaS doubles as a retention driver — switching costs rise as users integrate other tools.

Here's the lesser-known benefit: customization generates valuable data. Take Converse. If people self-select one particular color or style more than the rest, Converse can use that data to create a core product line.

Failed payments can be a quiet cause of unnecessary churn.

Even very successful startups like Segment have said that non-payment can account for up to 50% of total churn in a given week.

If you sell subscriptions, use this process to reduce churn. (This can be automated.)

• When a card fails, retry the card-on-file again before emailing your customer. Over 20% of payments are resolved by retrying the card before sending emails.
• When you do need to reach customers, email them a mobile-friendly link without a password so they can easily give you their new card details.
• If customers don't engage with your email, send an SMS.

Your customer acquisition efforts aren't optimized without a heavy focus on retention. Limit failed payments to fix a leaky bucket. 

Cold email works better when your targets already know who you are.

So unless your startup is a household name, you might consider pre-targeting: Run ads to a specific list of email addresses before reaching out to them. 

Pre-targeting can boost open rates and response rates because it makes your company feel more known—especially in industries with large, older companies (like government, manufacturing, supply chain, and real estate).

How to run a pre-targeting test:

• Pull a list of at least 1000 emails. Call this group A.
• Then pull another list of 1000 emails. Group B.
• Run ads on LinkedIn and Facebook and directly upload the group A list (you’ll want to use “Direct Audiences”). Then email group A.
• Email Group B without running ads.

See which group responds and converts better.

Final tip: When optimizing your pre-targeting campaigns, consider choosing the Awareness objective on your ad platform. You just need your prospects to see your ads—not click. It’s cheaper because fewer advertisers bid on awareness ads.

More people read emails on mobile as opposed to desktop.

If you're not truly creating mobile-first emails, your campaigns aren't fully optimized. 

The good news is that it's easy for email clients & ISPs to automatically adapt mobile-first designs to desktop whereas the opposite is not true. So if you optimize for mobile, your design looks sharp regardless of the device.

Here's how you create great mobile-first emails:

1. Write short subject lines to prevent them from getting cut off on mobile.

2. Keep the design clean to make it easy for readers to engage the content:

• Narrower design with plenty of negative space.
• Bigger, legible fonts.
• Larger, easy-to-click CTAs.

3. Use small files only. Many mobile devices are running weak processors. Prevent people from bouncing due to slow load times by compressing your image files.

4. Send a test and read it on your own phone before scheduling.

There's often a disconnect—marketers use desktop platforms to create and send emails. It's easy to overlook mobile when you're working from a computer.

Some social proof is better than none.

According to a major ecommerce study, a seller with negative reviews and poor photos is more likely to outperform a seller that has zero information.

Chew on that for a second.

Zero information leads to distrust, while negative information facilitates a neutral level of trust.

This finding illustrates the importance of “uncertainty reduction.” That is, people require information to feel more trust about something.

That’s not to say you should actively seek out bad reviews. Rather, understand that having no reputation or photos whatsoever may preclude sales.

Most call to action (CTA) buttons aren't compelling enough. Here's how you can improve yours:

Successful startups describe WHAT you get by signing up:

1. Download the ebook —> Read the book for free
2. Get started —> Create your meal plan
3. Sign up now —> Watch now (Start your 30-day trial)

Always remind people what's in it for them: Simple yet thoughtful changes to your CTAs could increase clicks and conversions.

Decision fatigue might be hurting your conversion.

If people have to make too many decisions when they get to your landing page, they'll tire and bounce.

So what can you do to avoid it?

Decrease the amount of decisions per page that people have to make.

• Only include the most critical links in your nav bar: Don’t distract people from the action you want them to take.
• Limit the types of CTAs you use. You can take this a step further by using Unbounce or Optimize to show a dynamic CTA: a single CTA that is most likely to get a click given the particular person.
• Use plenty of negative space to prevent people from having to choose between focusing on creative or copy.

Remove all unnecessary decisions so people quickly get what they're looking for from your site. They'll be more likely to buy from you.

New subscribers come into your email list in a variety of ways:

• Some sign up for your newsletter.
• Others sign up after reading your content.
• Customers opt-in at checkout.

Yet many startups send each new subscriber the same welcome series even though we know what drove the sign up in the first place.

 Increase your email performance by segmenting your flows:

• When new subscribers sign up for your newsletter, include a sample of the newsletter in your welcome flow—get new subscribers acquainted with your newsletter while it's fresh in their minds. They'll be more likely to notice and open it when you send your next issue.
• When people sign up through your blog content, tailor your welcome flow to send them more relevant blog posts. Get specific: If they signed up while reading a keto blog post, send them more keto content.
• When customers opt-in after a purchase, create a flow that shows them how to use your product. Optimize for a second purchase: 53% of customers who’ve made two purchases make a third purchase.

Most marketers set up a welcome email automation that greets new customers immediately after signup.

But people reflexively discard them: more spam.

Welcome emails are a critical opportunity to move leads down your funnel.

Here's how you get people to open and read your welcome emails:

• Delay your welcome email by 15 to 45 minutes. The time delay removes the subscriber's mental connection between their signup and your email. This bypasses the reflex to ignore.
• Set the email sender name to someone within your company, rather than your business name. An email from Julian Shapiro is more likely to get opened and read than an email from Demand Curve. It's more human.
• Write a unique subject line. Don't simply write "Thanks for joining!" Instead, write something that will people want to click. Allbirds writes "Welcome to the Flock." Grammarly includes "You + Grammarly = Ready for Action."

You should optimize every part of your funnel, and welcome emails are no exception.

Here's a friendly reminder: Slight tweaks to your email subject line can lead to significant swings in open rate.

To get the highest ROI out of your email campaigns, try this:

• Create multiple subject lines and A/B test them on ~10% of your list. Then set up your email software to send the iteration that receives the highest open rate to the rest of your list. We've found that small iterations on your initial subject line work best because they require less time to write.
• Pique curiosity. Subject lines are like cliffhangers. Provide an inkling of the content within without revealing too much: Intrigue readers to open to satisfy their curiosity. Just make sure your subject line does relate to your content—otherwise you'll lose trust.

Reminder: Past email quality has the greatest impact on your open rate. Quality content leads to high open rates on future emails. Subject lines are just the icing on the cake.