We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.
This is how you’re going stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice you can’t get elsewhere.
Our community consists of 600 startup founders paired with VP’s of growth from later-stage companies. We have 300 YC founders plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo, and Ritual.
You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curve’s marketing webinars, Slack group, or marketing training program. See past growth reports here, here, here and here.
Without further ado, onto the advice.
Improving engagement for drip emails
Based on insights from Matt Sornson of Clearbit. Lightly edited with permission.
Personalizing your marketing emails increases conversion. But doing so at scale takes a lot of effort. Here’s how to get around that:
- Run lead generation ads to your blog posts and to other long-form content on your site. Then tag users based on the posts they’ve read. Plus, prompt them to fill out useful quizzes. Store their quiz answers.
- Push their engagement data into an automated emailing platform like Customer.io. And enrich their contact details with Clearbit to discover their job title and the industry they work in.
- Now you can send automated yet personalized drip emails based on a person’s role, company, and interests. This results in higher conversion rates. Show recipients you know who they are and what they care about, and you’ll seem a whole lot less like spam.
Improving cold email response rates
Based on insights from Neal O’Grady of Demand Curve.
If a cold email recipient has heard of you before they receive your email, their chance of converting increases. So, here’s a simple technique:
- Upload your prospects’ emails to an ad network.
- Run ads to those people for 2 weeks before sending your outbound email.
- These ads can essentially be content marketing for the purpose of building brand credibility.
- Once you reach out, prospects are more likely to have been exposed to your brand and to take you more seriously. You’ll sometimes hear, “Oh right. I’ve heard of you.”
How much does page speed actually matter for SEO?
Based on insights from Bernard Huang of Clearscope. Lightly edited with permission.
It doesn’t matter much. Slow loading speed is simply a negative signal. Meaning, if your site is really slow, you’ll be penalized in the rankings. But whether your site is fast or superfast is an over-optimization Google isn’t indexing on. Spend that optimization time writing better content instead.
Marketing tools suggested by the community
- User research: Simon Lind recommends using Lookback to run remote user product interviews. This is helpful when you’re validating new features.
- Cold email: Mica Gomes recommends Good Sales Emails for sourcing outbound email copy ideas.
- Competitor email research: Jeremy Cai recommends Milled.com for seeing inside the emails of your competitors.
- Content writing: Julian Shapiro recommends Clearscope for writing blog posts that successfully rank for target keywords.