The Growth Vault

A shorthand tactic for quickly assessing the performance of your Facebook/Instagram video ads: measure "thumb stop rate." This is a measure of how often people stop scrolling through their feed to pay attention to your ad.

• A high thumb stop rate indicates that your video’s intro grabs users' attention.
• A low one (less than 10%) means you need a better hook.

The thumb stop rate isn’t a default metric in Facebook’s Ads Manager. You’ll need to create a custom metric and add it to your ad dashboard.

Here’s how:

1. Go to your Ads Reporting page.
2. Click Customize to open the Customize Pivot Table sidebar.
3. Select the Metrics tab.
4. Click the Create button.
5. Fill out the custom metric creation form using the formula: 3-Second Video Plays / Impressions.

Add this metric to the Ads Manager view you look at each day. Consider creating new hooks (or entirely new videos) for any ads with weak openings. This is the first touch point to folks watching the rest of the ad.

Time-to-value measures how long it takes for new users to experience value from your product.

You want this to be as short as possible.

• Airbnb's time-to-value is one click: search a location for rentals.
• SimilarWeb's time-to-value is one click: analyze any website or app.

Both companies' time-to-value is immediate, free, and doesn't require setting up an account.

More examples:

• Loom: The user you send a video to gets immediate value. They can watch the video without needing to sign up.
• Miro: The user you send the board to gets immediate value. They can instantly start collaborating with you without needing to sign up.
• Calendly: The user you send your calendar link to gets immediate value. They can see available times and book time with you without needing to sign up.

So, if your model allows, see if you can shorten your users' time-to-value through your product.

You can also take this a step further. Unlock value incrementally by creating two different product experiences:

• First time-to-value: New users get instant value by accomplishing the first step in their customer journey (this is the experience described in the examples above—finding a rental, analyzing their website). Give users access to a useful portion of the full product, but not the whole thing. Prompt them to create an account to get access to the rest.
• True time-to-value: Once they sign-up, present users with a second wave of value by presenting features that previously were locked. Help them continue their customer journey by picking up from where they previously left off in the first experience. For Airbnb, that means seeing the availability of rentals they discovered. For SimilarWeb, that means viewing the full report and comparing to competition.

By including two separate, valuable experiences, you'll likely turn more browsers into paying users.

If you've tried traditional influencer marketing and didn't get the ROAS you would have liked, consider this.

Here are three ways to increase influencer ROI:

1. Try whitelisting: Whitelisting involves running ads through influencer accounts. Here's the best part: Influencers are often willing to create better content for you. Why? Because you’re putting ad dollars behind influencers’ accounts—and they’re getting new followers as a result. You’re helping them promote themselves. So they're more likely to create the content for free if you agree to put a certain amount of ad dollars behind their account.
2. Repurpose content: Influencers will create content for you. It's likely you've worked out an agreement to have them post it on their account. But you can stretch it much further. With permission, use the content across your other marketing assets: website, blog posts, ads on other channels, sponsorships, etc. Influencers are usually happy for the extra exposure. And you can save thousands by avoiding product photo shoots.
3. Retarget: Influencer marketing should bring potential customers to your website, but few will convert if they only see your message once. Test a retargeting campaign: Serve ads to those in your influencers' audience who clicked through to your site. Since these people already know who you are, you can use targeted language. It's likely retargeting will drastically improve your customer acquisition cost from influencer marketing.

We wrote a playbook on influencer marketing. It walks you through exactly how we test influencer marketing as a performance channel.

For every second a page takes to load, bounce rate goes up.

Test your site on Google PageSpeed Insights. If you get a mediocre score for site speed, try this:

1. Use a heatmap like Hotjar to see which sections of a product page aren't generating as much interest. Cut them. Loading fewer items is more impactful than simply reducing element sizing.
2. A reminder to remove all plugins and custom code you don't need.
3. If you keep it, optimize it: Resize images and use the WebP image format, Google's preferred format. Kraken.io offers image compression and optimization.
4. Lazy load—only load elements as a user scrolls over them. How you lazy load depends on your CMS, but whichever tool you use, make sure you follow Google's recs so the Googlebot still sees all your content.

Simple and fast way to tighten up conversion on your homepage.

Most ecommerce companies offer deep discounts on popular items for Black Friday.

This strategy might result in a lot of sales, but it often decreases your average order value (AOV) and doesn't guarantee meaningful profit.

Instead of single-item discounts, try bundling popular products with other items and offering a smaller discount. Consider this process:

• Group products that are frequently bought together in bundles.
• Test selling these bundles months before your sale. Now would be a good time.
• Promote them to your existing audience through unpaid channels (email, social media, website banners, checkout upsells). This will keep costs down as you find your most profitable bundle.
• You'll know you've found a strong bundle when it consistently converts without a discount and holds a low return rate.
• When Black Friday arrives, offer a discount on the best-performing bundle.

Choose a discount that results in a final price that's higher than your current AOV.

Offering bundles could help you realize the lifetime value (LTV) of your customer quicker, and develop better customers than you'd get offering standard promos.

There's a powerful feature in most email service providers that very few take full advantage of: dynamic content blocks.

You can use dynamic content to show slightly different messages to your audience based on their behavior and preferences. You can dramatically improve click-through and conversion—without having to create multiple versions of the same email.

A few use cases:

• Promos: Give only first-time buyers a gift when they complete the purchase of the abandoned item in their cart.
• Net-promoter score survey: Ask your customers to fill out a survey to receive a 20% off coupon code. For those who have already submitted a survey, remind them that they have an unused coupon.
• Referral programs: Ask people who haven't referred yet to refer to unlock a reward. But ask people who've already referred to refer more people for an even better reward.
• Newsletters: It's likely some of your subscribers have read your blog posts. Pitch your product's most relevant feature based on the posts they've read.

When you find a high-converting block, you can add it to all your email flows (new subscribers, first-time purchases, and post-purchase). At every stage in the lifecycle, show people the offer most relevant to them.

Sometimes the best marketing messages come straight from the customer.

When you uncover your customers' motivations and expectations—and the language they use to express those feelings—you can take what they say and mirror it back to them in your copy.

Mining reviews is a great way to source copywriting gold. Here’s how to do it:

Go where your prospects are leaving reviews online (Amazon, Google, even Reddit).

Parse through reviews for products or services that address the same core problems that yours does.

Pay attention to descriptive language. Look for patterns. Flag anything that resonates and add the best reviews and copy snippets to a spreadsheet with these three columns:

1. Memorable phrases
2. What people want
3. What people are emotionally reacting to

Fill it up, then read through them again and you’ll notice the recurring frustrations, questions, statements, and experiences—what’s most important to your prospects.

Use these new insights to update and test:

• Headline copy on your homepage
• Product messaging
• Value propositions

Review mining lets you build a valuable swipe file to help spruce up your copy and messaging. You can take it a step further and use the insights to build better products.

Autocomplete in Google Search can help you uncover real search queries from other users that are related to your target keyword.

Most SEO focuses on ending autocomplete options—the text that populates after you enter a keyword in Google.

But there are also middle and pre autocomplete options. You can check them with a simple "+" sign.

Let's use the keyword gold chain for example. To see more autocompleted queries, type this into the search bar: "+ gold + chain +"

• When you click on the far left "+" sign, autocomplete will show you queries that include keywords before "gold chain." For example, "how to clean gold chain."
• Clicking on the middle "+" will reveal keywords between "gold chain." For example, "gold rope chain."
• Clicking on the far right "+" will uncover queries such as "gold chain with pendant."

Try this:

• Make a list of newly discovered keywords after using this process.
• Pop your keywords into a keyword research tool like Surfer or Keywords Everywhere to see the monthly search volumes of each autocompleted query. Note any queries that have over 1000 monthly searches—that kind of keyword volume might be worth trying to capture.
• Use the top keywords as the focus of future SEO-optimized blog posts.

Apple is rolling out a privacy-focused iOS14. Google Chrome is weening off cookies.

The way startups use marketing data is changing—rapidly. Startups should consider building systems to collect "zero-party data."

• Zero-party data: Explicitly consented user data (e.g. survey responses)
• First-party data: Assumed consent (e.g. on-site analytics)
• Second-party data: From a partner (e.g. Facebook audiences)
• Third-party data: Traded or bought (e.g. conference attendee list)

New privacy policies will continue to tighten. It's predicted that third-party data will no longer be very usable and second-party data will become significantly less granular.

Here's one way you can collect the data you need:

First, set up a post-purchase survey a week after your customers buy. Ask 3 questions:

1. How they found out about your product (attribution)
2. How they'd feel if they could no longer use your product (net-promoter score)
3. How likely they are to recommend on a scale of 0-10 (best customers)

This is data you can use to identify top-performing channels and ideal customers.

In exchange for their time, you could send them 3 x 20% discount vouchers (1 for them, 2 for sharing). Or swag. Or special access to future products.

Separately, identify your top 10% of existing customers by filtering them by recency, frequency (how many purchases), and lifetime value. Email this group to introduce yourself and to ask for a 15-minute phone call to provide feedback and learn:

• Where they spend their time online (websites, newsletters, communities, YouTube channels)
• What they'd Google to find your product

If you run a referral program, you inevitably have customers who are willing to give a referral but don't actually do it. That's called the referral gap.

It can be a chasm: one study found that 83% of customers were willing to give a referral, and only 29% did.

Here's how you can close the gap and turn more of your customers into an autonomous sales team:

• Use the channel that drives the most last-click revenue for your referral requests. If most of your last-click revenue comes from email, then send your referral request via email (don't try to get customers to share on Twitter). Last-click attribution signals the channel where your customers take decisive action—closing the referral gap requires turning inaction into action.
• Reduce friction by pre-writing any outreach messaging your customers will need. And avoid the sales copy. Write it as if you're prompting your best friend to check out a new product.
• Shorten the process to the bare minimum. In Gusto's program, customers share a referral link through social media or email within two clicks.
• Use heatmaps (like Hotjar) to see how customers engage with your referral program's landing page. Tweak messaging where they're getting stuck, focusing on clarity and program benefits. Give this page as much respect as your other pages.

Roughly 70% of ecommerce shoppers abandon cart. These are higher-intent shoppers who were one step away from becoming customers.

Nearly half of cart-abandoners cite additional or unexpected costs as the reason.

Try these tactics to convert more shoppers:

• Offer free shipping starting at a minimum dollar amount—or better yet, on all products. Customers expect free shipping now on most orders. A fast way to kill conversion is to add shipping fees to your checkout page.
• Shopify brands can set default free shipping (or free shipping by value, weight, products, or customers) in their admin settings.
• Bake extra fees (like shipping costs) into your product pricing. If you have to charge fees, include them on your product page, not your checkout page.
• Don't make account creation mandatory. Provide an option for guest checkout. Every step you take to reduce friction will likely increase conversion.
• Keep your checkout process simple and flexible. Offer one-click checkout (with a tool like Fast) and multiple payment options.

Let's face it. Instagram simply doesn't have the organic reach it had a few years back. The platform is generally saturated with content.

But you can increase your organic reach by focusing on building community.

To increase reach, aim to spend at least 30 minutes a day on community building:

• Follow 10 to 20 key hashtags for your industry. Regularly interact with the top posts for those hashtags. These posts are often surfaced on the Explore feed, so you have a chance to engage with new users and encourage them to follow your account.
• Reply to DMs and comments on your posts, and share user-generated content you're tagged or mentioned in (with permission).
• Glossier has a "Top 5" Story Highlight featuring five of the "best things" they were tagged in. This 1) gives those creators more exposure, 2) reinforces the popularity of the Glossier brand, and 3) tells the IG algo they're immersed in their community.
• Bonus: Stories are a viral feature. When you tag your customers in stories, some will share on their own stories—showcasing your brand to all of their followers.
• Turn on notifications for popular accounts in your space, such as creators with high engagement:follower ratios. Whenever they share new content, you'll know to jump into the conversation. You'll get in front of thousands of relevant users—for free.

Instagram builds features specifically for ecommerce brands. Lean into their core values (like community) to get more organic reach.

Deliverability is the percentage of emails that make it to inboxes (as opposed to spam folders or firewalls).

Think: You’ve done all the hard work of finding the right targets, getting their email addresses, and crafting emails to them. It’s inefficient if many of your emails don’t even make it to inboxes.

Here’s the 80/20 on improving your deliverability:

• Create a separate subdomain for sending cold emails. For example, if your usual email is jsmith@company.com, set up a separate subdomain and use jsmith@e.company.com to actually send emails from. This way, if anything goes wrong (rare), you haven’t impacted your main domain.
• You can also use a tool like Mailwarm to get positive engagements on your emails before you start sending at scale. What you’re looking for is "regular email traffic" and a responsible slope to higher volumes that won’t negatively impact your sender reputation.
• Avoid including too many images or too much HTML in your emails. One of the spam flags that you can avoid is the ratio of text to other content.
• Limit your links—especially to social networking sites. And try to avoid bit.ly and other link shorteners as they’ll get picked up by spam flags.
• This might not be news to you, but it's arguably the most important factor when it comes to deliverability: Get your targeting right. You improve deliverability by getting a high rate of replies, and low rate of unsubscribes and spam reports. So only send emails to people you truly think will benefit from your product.

Bonus: Here are some tools we've used to send cold email:

• PersistIQ—free to start.
• Streak—also free to start.
• Mixmax—integrates directly into Gmail.
• Mailshake—best for just starting out in cold outreach.
• Reply IO—has an AI email assistant to help craft messaging.
• Lemlist—similar to Mailshake, with multi-channel sequencing.

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.

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.