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.

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.

One way to poach future customers from competitors:

• Create landing pages that compare you against them.
• Address customers' biggest objections.
• Show your product in action.

Then, when people search for you versus your competitors, you'll show up on the Google results page.

See the full resolution image on Twitter here.

There's a lot of conflicting advice about how to launch on Product Hunt. So we interviewed top product hunters and makers, synthesized our learnings into a playbook.

Turns out, there's a framework for optimizing growth through your Product Hunt launch.

We've included the first portion of the playbook at the bottom of this newsletter. Scroll to the bottom of the newsletter to dive in.