Your "above the fold" (ATF) section is the part of your site that's immediately visible before scrolling. It's your first impression. And it's your asset that determines whether people stick around and see what you have to offer, or bounce.

We wrote a playbook on creating a high-converting ATF section. You'll walk away understanding exactly what you can do to level up your landing page. Scroll to the bottom of this newsletter to start reading.

We wrote a thread highlighting how top startup's adjusted their landing pages due to COVID.

Here's an example from Airbnb:

Airbnb's business was upended in April. But by June, rural bookings were growing.

Key site changes during that time:

• Action prompt: "Book unique places" —> "Go Near [places]"
• This handles the objection of "It's not safe to be where everyone else is."

See the full thread on Twitter here.

We wrote a thread explaining email marketing. Here are a few of the actionable insights that you can apply to your email strategy:

Why email?

1. Email is where the most dollars remain uncaptured.
2. Email is an owned channel. Instead of relying on social media algorithms to surface your content, you're directly in subscribers’ inboxes.

Email is high ROI and you have direct access to your audience.

How to grow your list:

You don't need a huge list. You want a growing list of people who are in the mindset to actually trust you and buy from you.

• Create a lead gen asset that excites people—quickly. E.g. really high-quality content.
• Use popups: Love 'em or hate 'em, they work. Just make sure they provide value to your audience.
• Quality of subs > volume.

Here are the two most important things to get right when crafting emails:

1. Subject line.
2. Body copy.

The 80/20 on each:

Subject line:

If people don't open, nothing else matters. Make your subject line:

• Self-evident: You don't want people guessing why you’re bugging them.
• Segmented: Have a subject that's hyper-relevant to each sub-audience.
• Concise: 50 characters or less—or it'll be cut off for mobile users and they might not open it.

Body copy:

The goal of body copy is to drive people to your CTA:

• Fulfill the expectation you set in your subject line.
• Promise more value that is only delivered through your CTA.
• Be aggressively concise—don’t waste subscribers’ time.

Use flows—automated emails triggered by subscriber actions.

Two critical flows:

1. Nurture: Subs are more likely to take action when they first sign up. Move quick.
2. Post-purchase: Over 50% of customers who make 2 purchases make a 3rd. Optimize for that 2nd purchase.

Choose the right software for your business type:

• SaaS, apps, service businesses: Customer IO, Iterable.
• Ecom startups: Klaviyo, Drip.
• Creators: ConvertKit.

See the full thread on Twitter here.

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 convert at a higher rate, or pay more for it.

Two examples of customization:

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

SaaS: Slack lets users customize their setup with bots and integrations. Customization in SaaS also improves rentention—switching costs rise as users integrate other tools.

A 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.

Check out the other 8 copy improvements on Twitter here. And if you haven't already, give us a follow @GrowthTactics for threads like this every week.

Check out the rest of the fixes on Twitter here. And if you haven't already, give us a follow @GrowthTactics for threads like this every week.

Why you should consider testing cold email as a growth channel

No one likes getting cold emails.

But when it’s done correctly, it works. Some businesses single-handedly grow through cold email.

Take a look at this email (we wrote it as an example):

This is cold email perfection:

• Clearly indicate why you’re reaching out and how you’ll add value—and be specific: “Customer IO will increase revenue by ~12%.”
• Proactively handle key objections.
• Add a personal touch up front, which acts as the hook for the rest of the note.
• End with one clear CTA. And since it’s the first email, ask for interest instead of time in your CTA. “Do you think we’re a fit?” works better than “Let’s book a call” at first.
• Include “persona-matching”—the presumed sender of the email isn’t a salesperson. It’s the employee who most closely matches the role of the intended recipient. This builds trust and can lead to better cold email ROI.

We’ll teach you how to send effective cold email campaigns like these.

What makes email so great?

• Targeting: Emails let you target exactly the people you want, and when done right, they’re so personalized that people can’t help but respond. You can’t get that with ads. Why? Ads cast a wider net, meaning you’ll always end up hitting people who will never buy from you. A 2% CTR would be impressive with ads. For email? You can see CTRs as high as 50% on strong campaigns.
• Access: Most decision makers still manage their own email inboxes. This is a massive opportunity. So long as you have the correct email address, your message lands in front of decision makers as they’re actively making business decisions.
• Low capital investment: All you need is an email account, and potentially software to help you automate your process. So it makes sense to start with this channel if it has potential for you. That way you’re not burning cash before you’re generating revenue from clients.

Who should use cold outreach

Most early-stage startups should test cold outreach, but it’s most profitable for B2B companies.

Why?

Cold outreach isn’t “free”—that’s a common misconception. Due to the labor involved in outreach and sales, CACs can be relatively high. In many cases, only high margin products can support cold outreach as a growth channel.

B2B companies typically have a higher margin than consumer companies.

Think of it like this:

Say you run an online shoe company where you sell $100 pairs of shoes that cost you $25 to make. Cold outreach might not be worth your time: You’ll likely spend hours sending emails, setting up calls, and managing the funnel. Labor hours would exceed your $75 margin.

But for a B2B SaaS business selling $1,000/month contracts? 5 labor hours to close a deal might result in thousands of dollars of profit.

That doesn’t mean you should rule out cold outreach if you’re not at a B2B company with high margins.

You can still make cold outreach work. Here’s a framework for identifying companies that cold outreach could work for:

• High margin products that can afford the labor of emailing and closing.
• Products that are expensive and that people aren’t actively searching for (if people are searching for your product, search ads and content might be more effective).
• Most early-stage startups that need a low capital investment way to sell and generate revenue so that they can afford to test other channels—like running ads or hiring a content writer.

Specific examples of companies that should test cold outreach:

• Agencies who charge $2000+/month per client and collect their first payment after the first month.
• Most B2B SaaS companies.
• Companies selling expensive physical goods (like equipment or medical devices).
• Edtech companies that sell high-margin digital products.

If you’re deciding whether or not you should test cold outreach, here’s an actionable framework. Test cold outreach if you meet one or both of the following criteria:

1. Your profit margins are greater than $500 per closed deal AND your payback period is less than 2 months.
2. You’re at an early-stage startup that sells products over $100 and you can afford to sell at low margins to get off the ground—do things that don’t scale until you can afford to test channels that scale.

Creating a cold email strategy

Here’s what a cold outreach pipeline could look like:

• Generate a prospect list.
• Invite the qualified prospects (via email) to an online product demo, sales call, or webinar.
• Address their objections and entice them to purchase.
• Negotiate and close their contract.

We’ll show you how to test cold outreach as a growth channel. That means standardizing your approach and running tests to see if you can acquire customers profitably through cold outreach.

To get the rest of our cold email module, you can buy the Growth Program here. Here's what else you'll be able to do with the program:

• Design your growth strategy: Your dedicated growth advisor will help you focus on what matters, so you can ignore what doesn't.
• Build your funnel: Redesign your landing pages, marketing emails, onboarding flow, and referral programs to significantly increase conversion.
• Launch and scale acquisition channels: Go deep on the inner-workings of every major customer acquisition channel—ads, content, referrals, and everything else. See our examples of what good work looks like.

If you're not ready to buy, you can get a free course of the sample here.

Try marshmallow testing your referral program. 

The marshmallow test: Give a kid a small reward now or two small rewards later. See which they choose.

The team at IntelyCare—a two-sided marketplace that matches nursing professionals with open shifts at nursing homes—tried their own version of the marshmallow test.

They tested two referral program offerings:

• An extra $1/hour next shift when a referral starts an application (small reward now)
• $100 when a referral completes their first shift (larger reward later)

So what happened?

The $100 offer increased referrals by 65% compared to the control group.

Not bad. But not even close to the winner.

The $1/hour offer increased referrals by 81%. And the CAC was less than half that of the $100 group: $110 compared to $257.

The rate at which referred people started working with IntelyCare was about the same for both groups. 

Takeaway: It’s not the size of the reward but the speed it arrives that really motivates people.

Of course, that might not be the case at your business. Maybe your customers prefer waiting for a bigger reward. But if your referral program has a longer reward cycle, try testing a variation with a quicker, smaller payout. You might be surprised by the results—both referral rates and CAC.

Good-Better-Best (GBB) pricing can help you gain more customers, more revenue—or both.

It's the concept of utilizing product features in your offers to target different customers.

For example:

• Gas stations sell regular (Good), plus (Better), and super (Best)
• American Express offers green, gold, platinum, and black cards
• Cable TV providers market basic, extended, and premium packages

Most companies start with the Best option (obvious potential revenue growth) when they should really begin by figuring out their fence attributes.

A "fence" attribute acts as a barrier to prevent customers from crossing over to a cheaper option.

HBO Max, for example, uses a 2-tiered variation of GBB. Their fence is ads:

Even though the ad-supported plan (Good offering) is five dollars cheaper, ads are such as strong barrier that 90% of subscribers choose the Ad-Free plan (Best offering).

To implement good offers, you need effective fences. Here are a few ways to identify yours and brainstorm pricing:

• Identify features with wide and deep appeal
• Use no more than four attributes to differ between Good-Better and Better-Best
• Maintain a consistent progression of benefits from Good to Better to Best
• Good pricing shouldn’t be more than 25% below Better
• Best pricing shouldn't exceed Better by more than 50%

For context, many companies expect:

• 10 - 20% of revenue from Good
• 25 - 50% from Better
• 30 - 60% from Best

Note: The actual numbers will depend on the number of attributes, degree of differentiation, and the price spread.

Here’s a clever retention strategy from the DTC olive oil brand, Graza.

Include a QR code on your product label for restocking:

The QR code takes users to Graza’s product pages where they can checkout in a few clicks.

What makes this strategy so effective?

When we’re running low on olive oil (or any everyday item we rely on), we usually add it to our shopping list. In that moment, we have high purchase intent. We may even be extra motivated to buy because we want to avoid the pain of running out or trekking to the store.

The QR code capitalizes on this intent by making it ridiculously easy to restock.

This tactic works for consumables—sunscreen, detergent, toothpaste, makeup, shaving cream, beverages, and so on.

Adding a QR code on your package can help improve retention so long as your customer has their phone within reach.

Before Apple’s update, you could focus your ad efforts on targeted, bottom-funnel creative. Low-hanging fruit.

But these days, that doesn’t fly—ads should focus on educating. 

Given the update, marketers can’t pinpoint the funnel stage where prospects might see specific creative. To work around this, your creative needs to educate and sell—each piece should answer:

• What is the problem that you're solving?
• What is the brand and product?
• Why do I need this and how will the product improve my life?
• How can I trust you to be the best option?
• How do I get it right now?

This is why UGC does so well for customer acquisition—a satisfied customer naturally addresses all those questions above, and the content itself is social proof.

These ads efficiently build brand equity on the back of the performance media dollars.

Cadence does a fantastic job with this through their ad creative (also on a scrappy budget).

The best ads don't feel like ads at all, so make your ads come off friendly, helpful, aspirational, or educational.

For SaaS startups, surveys are critical.

They’re how you find out what customers actually want, instead of building products, growth strategies, and business models on assumptions and beliefs.

But in practice, we’ve found that running surveys are a lot like meditation—everyone talks about it, but few actually do it.

Those that do run surveys often make these repeat errors:

1. They don’t ask questions that get to the heart of customer decision making and product-market fit.
2. They don’t segment the results. They lump everyone together, for less-revealing findings.

Here’s how you can fix both.

Questions to ask

Use this survey template from PMF Survey to get started, recreating it in whatever survey platform you prefer, like Typeform.

Here are some possible questions—alter them based on what you’re trying to learn about your customers.

• How did you discover [X product/company]?
• How would you feel if you could no longer use X?
• What would you use as an alternative if X weren’t available?
• What’s the primary benefit you’ve experienced from X?
• Have you recommended X to anyone?
• What type of person do you think would benefit from X?
• How could we improve X to better meet customer needs?

Segments to break out

• Most active and loyal users
• Infrequent users
• People who signed up for your service or a trial but never used it

If you split out those three segments, you’re more likely to gain insights into why customers are active in your product. And why they churn.

Here’s a shortcut for refining your product copy: 

Find out how influencers are promoting your competitors’ products. Then take the best aspects of their language and use it in your copy.

Influencers are experts when it comes to driving engagement and action from their audiences. And people who follow your competitors’ brand ambassadors are likely in your target audience as well.

By studying how these ambassadors talk about products—and how their followers respond—you can find out what resonates.

To find sponsored ads for your competitors, use Google. This way, you can look up public posts tagged with both #ad and the name of your competitor. You can also look up specific keywords from post captions. Some example search strings:

• site:instagram.com #gymshark #ad
• site:instagram.com @walgreens #ad
• site:instagram.com #neutrogena #ad hydro boost

Example: Look at this sponsored post from a beauty influencer. It’s a goldmine of copy ideas for skincare brands.

A quick way to rank higher in Google: Turn unlinked brand mentions into backlinks.

If you have an online presence, there are likely mentions of your company that don’t currently link back to your site. Consider searching for these and convincing the owner of the content to link to you.

Having more backlinks (especially from high-authority domains) sends a positive signal to Google that could increase your rank.

Here’s how to do it:

First, find unlinked brand mentions.

If you have Ahrefs, use its Content Explorer tool. Search for your brand name and exclude your domain. Example: For HelloFresh, that search would look like: “HelloFresh” -site:hellofresh.com

If you don’t have Ahrefs, you can look on Google using these search operators:

• intext:[keyword] Use this to specify your brand name. The “intext:” portion tells Google to find pages with content including this specific keyword.
• -[domain.com] Use this to avoid getting results from a specific site. That could be your own site and social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and so on.

For HelloFresh, that’d look like: intext:HelloFresh -hellofresh.com -facebook.com -pinterest.com -twitter.com

Make sure you look for variations of your brand name. Check misspellings like “Hello Fresh” with a space.

Once you have a list, reach out to the content owners. Keep it short and sweet. Prove that you’ve read the article and make a case for why they should link to you.

Voilà—low-hanging fruit backlinks.

Small changes to the way you convey your prices can have an outsized impact on conversion.

One of our favorite pricing tactics? Anchoring—setting expectations so that your price becomes more attractive.

Here are a few ways to use price anchoring:

• When listing items, include the higher-priced items first. Think about a wine list. Seeing higher-priced items near the top of the list creates a price anchor and makes the other items on the list feel less expensive.
• Use specific numbers to encourage people to spend more. This works for quantity as well as pricing. Snickers grew sales by changing its quantity anchor from "them" to "18."

• Break down your prices into smaller units. £4.57 per day feels more attractive than £1,668 per year.

Check out more sharp pricing psychology tactics here.  

P.S. Katelyn Bourgoin is running a buyer's psychology session live at our Growth Summit. She'll dig into pricing psychology and leave you with actionable tactics to test. If you haven't already, register here (takes less than one minute, totally free).

Direct mail is wildly overlooked as a channel—its average response rate is 9%.

Compare that to 0.4% for organic social and 0.6% for paid search.

One of direct mail’s most effective uses today? Automated retargeting.

Here’s a simple way to test it:

• Identify site visitors who abandon cart and create two segments.
• Keep one group as the control. Send them your standard abandoned cart email flow.
• For the second group, skip the abandoned cart email and instead, send a beautiful postcard in the mail with a unique QR promo code (say, 10% off first purchase). You can set this up to send within 12-24 hours of the cart abandonment.
• Test the conversion difference between groups.

Direct mail engages people who might not otherwise respond to digital retargeting. One study concluded that marketers see a 300-400% lift in conversion rates when targeting cart abandoners through direct mail.

You can use a tool like Inkit, Lob, or Rejoiner to automate this whole process.

Affiliate publishers aren’t robots.

Just like your customers, partners, and colleagues, they’re humans. Meaning: They’re driven by connections and emotions.

If you build relationships with them, you could see a sizable bump in your affiliate sales.

Try this. It’s a proven tactic that 99% of marketers (an unscientific estimate) don’t do.

• Get a publisher list on Rakuten or Impact.
• Use your list to scrape contacts on LinkedIn.
• Connect with the contacts you find. Send each a personalized intro note.
• Gather their contact info (emails).
• Shoot them a note every once in a while—especially around times when you want to accelerate sales, like the holidays. Keep it simple and friendly (“hey, wishing you good luck this Q4”) to keep your brand top of mind.

That’s one tactic. But think about other ways you can develop relationships with affiliate publishers. For instance, you could offer them free items or coupons. In a previous role, one of our Bell Curve growth strategists sent his affiliate partner wine coupons. Sales skyrocketed.

Most companies work with affiliates through platforms that programmatically make your ads appear on affiliates’ websites. But the people behind the platforms are the ones who click the buttons that can make those ads show up more than anyone else’s. Strengthen connections with them, and you could grow your sales.

You can quickly validate TikTok ads with zero ad spend.

Organic learnings happen fast. You'll know in 48 hours whether a post is a flop or poised to go full-throttle. Once you have a winner, pulse it with Spark ads to amplify results.

Here’s the framework:

1. Define your ideal follower. Who and where are they? What content do they desire?

2. Create and publish content. Make your content searchable so that when people search for keywords in your niche, they find your videos. Make it great so people share.

• Source content ideas—Use Answer The Public to determine what people are searching for. Add a few keywords specific to your niche and pick 5-10 questions to inspire your content.
• Start content flywheel—Bake engagement triggers into the content by encouraging viewers to ask questions in the comments. Answer those questions in future content to build momentum.

3. Evaluate performance. After you publish content, track KPIs over 24-48 hours to gauge potential:

• % Watch Time
• Likes to Views Ratio
• Saves or Shares

4. Run your best content as Spark ads. When you post organic content on TikTok, the algorithm determines who you reach. With ads, targeting lets you control who sees your content. The point of this step isn’t to rely on ads, but amplify proven content to accelerate growth.

• Select the campaign objective, "Community Interaction"
• Run A/B test. A: Interest-Based. B: Hashtag
• Spend $75 - $150/day
• Let the ad run for 7-10 days, then turn it off

The additional bump in views and engagement should help TikTok’s algorithm amplify your content, getting it in front of the right people.

Concise, simple landing pages generally convert better.

For instance, it’s best to eliminate any unnecessary copy, creative, and CTAs.

But less isn’t always more. Take a look at this experiment.

A law firm created two variations of a landing page:

• One with the firm’s phone number (with a “call” primary CTA) followed by a lead generation form
• One with only the firm’s phone number—no form

The form got very few submissions. But the variation with the form generated 53.2% more calls than the variation without it.

The reasoning behind this: Forms act as a visual prompt for action.

Though both variations used the same primary “call” CTA, the inclusion of the form made obvious to leads—even people skimming the page—that the next step is to get in contact.

Based on these results, it’s worth testing how conversions are affected by the presence of a form. For example, if you have a landing page with only an email address or phone number, consider adding a form.

Free trials are often touted as one of the best ways to get more SaaS leads. But if your trial users aren’t turning into paying customers, your acquisition model is broken.

To convert more users, try one (or more) of these strategies:

• Personalize onboarding. Send a welcome email when users sign up. Ask what they need help with. Or offer a one-on-one demo to show the full potential of your software—Funnel CRM shared that doing so increased conversions from 5% to 9%.
• Trigger support emails based on user activity. Adobe offers a 7-day trial for all its Creative Cloud apps. If users spend more time on a particular app, they’re automatically enrolled in a sequence focused on that app’s features.
• Offer a short feedback session halfway through the free trial. Resolve issues that users encounter. Communication platform Nextiva uses a 15-minute feedback session to uncover issues and offer support. The short time frame makes the ask feel like a small commitment—and gives Nextiva the chance to schedule another call at the end of the trial.
• Limit the features available during a free trial. Your product’s best feature should be easy to find and use during the trial. But to add intrigue, make secondary features visible but not accessible. This will entice users to upgrade to a paid account.
• Offer a discount at the end of the trial. Some users may not be fully convinced to sign up once their trial ends. In this case, you could try offering a generous discount off the first few months of your paid tier. Payment platform Dunnly offers as much as 60% off for 3-6 months after its free trial ends. It’s seen more fully paid conversions this way than by simply extending free trials—the discount weeds out leads who are reluctant to pay anything. And if users are continuously experiencing value in the discount months, they’re less likely to churn once they start paying full price.