Overview

This document covers who we’ll be emailing, how we’re getting their emails, and what our initial tests will look like. We can scale up if we see success.

Audiences

People who have indicated interest in premium dog products. Specifically, there are two main audiences we’ll be starting with:

• High-end dog owners in the Dog Food Lovers Slack group.
• Participants in dog-food related conversations in the Doggie Moms Google group.

Email Harvesting

Dog Food Lovers

We’ve written a scraper to programmatically go through their Slack channel and pull the emails for the owners from each profile. Here is an initial list. First tab.

Demand Curve Note: above would be a link to a spreadsheet with the list of emails; we've removed it from this example doc.

Doggie Moms

We’ve joined the Google group and exported the list of participants from the “Members” section of the admin panel.

Initial Test

Start by sending LinkedIn InMail. You’re going to send 10 inMails, total, to start.

You’ll have to purchase a Premium subscription to do this. You only get a fixed number of InMails per month, but it looks like you can purchase more if you run out.

At the same time, try cold-emailing people directly. You’re going to send 10 emails, total, to start.

When you send cold emails, you may want to comply with CAN-SPAM rules, which govern cold emailing in the United States.

Complying with CAN-SPAM tends to hurt conversion, since it makes cold emails follow a similar format and people will instinctively screen them out. But we leave that choice up to you.

Consult a lawyer if you want definite legal advice (we can’t offer it), but they would recommend following these guidelines at a minimum:

• Don’t use false or misleading header information
• Don’t use deceptive subject lines
• Tell recipients where you’re located with a physical address (this information can go in your email signature)
• Tell recipients how to opt-out of receiving future email from you.
• This doesn’t have to be a link. It can be a line in the email asking them to reply to you directly if they don’t want any more emails from you.
• Honor opt-out requests promptly.

You can read more here or read the original text if you really want some bedtime material.

Don’t reach out to more than 20 Dog Food Lovers to start, since folks are going to catch on quickly and if they talk to each other, we’ll start to look like spam.

Stagger out the emails, sending only 1 or 2 per day.

We need our outreach to be natural. Since we know that pet owners tell other pet owners about Fictitious Dog Chow, you can “land and expand” without actually sending many emails. You’ll ask for owners to refer other owners, in person, at the end of their trial if it goes well.

We’ll rely on further emails as a crutch, not as a centerpiece of our outreach strategy.

However, it’s safer to email owners who are broadly dog owners, or in a more publicly available Slack channel. We’ve scraped a list of these owners: the 1000 most recent participants in the Doggie Moms Slack channel. They’re in the second tab of the sheet.

Make sure you haven’t already reached out to these people when you email them (the Dog Food Lovers are in the same list).

Aim for people who were active in the last month. We’re planning to segment this list further in the future to find past dog food purchasers and pet owners who are closer to buying gourmet. If you send out too many similar emails from Gmail per day, it will start marking you as spam and blacklist your domain (usually once you’re in the hundreds). So you need to be careful about not sending too many.

Email response rates over 10% are considered good. The best we’ve ever seen is ~50%, with targeting even better than what we have here.

Content

It’s going to come off as creepy if you say that you know owners are in the Dog Food Lovers group. You’ll need to write a subject line enticing enough to make them click, but have a convincing enough excuse for why you’re reaching out to get them to respond.

You’ll mention Dog Food Lovers as an aside in the email, but not make it the focus.

Stick to the templates we’ve written pretty closely if you can. We’ve spent hours perfecting these.

For the variables that you’re plugging in:

• Find any public information indicating that they're a Dog Food Lover.
• This is ideal and the most straightforward.
• For example, there are a few owners who already list that they have a dog in their Twitter profile. You’ll want to check those.
• Install the Clearbit Connect. Plug in their email. See what shows up.
• Look through their LinkedIn.
• Google them. Reference Tweets/Blog Posts/Social Media that indicated they’re interested in premium dog food.
• Reference their city and talk about how gourmet dog food has gotten rave reviews there.
• Research anything else you can about them to give you a compelling excuse to reach out.
• In general, you’ll want to do three things to write high-converting emails:
• Make them feel like the email is personalized to them in the context they read it. By context, we mean Gmail, a mail app, or LinkedIn.
• Immediately entice them with a solution to their problem.
• Close with a clear next step.

You need to hook owners with the subject line and first blurb they read.

Emails read very differently in Dropbox Paper than they do in Gmail or LinkedIn, so send yourself a sample email in Gmail before sending out to see what the emails will actually look like.