I don't think anyone (including the authors) would disagree that this is a very basic introduction to marketing for developers.
A point that's very separate from whether or not it has value.
There are still way too many developers who are making awesome products and then failing to get traction because they neglect the marketing basics. Something like this article that plainly lays out the basics is very helpful for setting a baseline.
It works if you can hit upon the sequence of events to get some viral attention. Hitting HN at the right time of day, or getting some other attention among your target users. That can be a matter of chance but usually requires at least some effort on your part.
Just creating a product and a website with no marketing whatsoever is unlikely to get the attention of anyone.
This has and hasn't worked for me in the past. The difference being that the successful project was something that people actually wanted. So much of the success hinges on finding the right product for the right niche. If you get that it will grow organically regardless of your marketing. Then the marketing is just a way to accelerate the growth.
> Email might not be the most attractive means of communication, but newsletters are direct and exclusive to customers, a good starting point. “You should have an email newsletter if you have nothing else... This is the one opportunity you have to make something just for them that no one else consumes.”
I'd love to see some broad evidence that email newsletters are effective. I've experienced no strong correlation myself between the frequency of sending newsletters and sales.
The strongest argument I've heard for email newsletters is, "it can't hurt, so you should do it just in case it helps." But that ignores opportunity cost.
Can anyone (preferably who doesn't work for a email campaign company) give any strong evidence in favour of regularly sending out email newsletters?
You should not send anything ever if you dont have a properly engineered marketing plan and funnel in place. Why? Waste of time.
Newsletters, like all forms of media, work when the message works. Meaning that if the message is shit, then the vehicle is shit too. You have to establish a direct 1:1 communication with your target market, learn about what problems they would pay money or give attention to, and then produce quality content around them. The problem stems when people publish content for the sake of hitting the publish button. It feels like you are doing marketing well, but not really. One piece of content a year can have a bigger impact than one thousand pieces. Doesnt even need to be long form. A well crafted and curated message may take one paragraph or ten to drive a point. Maybe even a sentence.
What you should do is define your goals as to what you want to achieve. Then talk to the people in the market. Friend them on social media. Figure out what makes them tick. Finally, having learned about them and their wants, craft a message that they cant ignore. Repeat until you hate yourself and then ten years after. Will this work? I dont know if it will work for you. It has worked for me and I have made it work for others. But that doesnt guarantee it works for you because you might not be able to execute. Oh yeah, you might just suck at marketing. :)
In my experience it's the difference between "Oh a random bloke on the internet has a $product" and "Oh Swizec who's often helpful and interesting has a $product"
That's a big difference imho.
But I've noticed that somewhere between going from 1000 subscribers to 7000+ things have changed. It's time to look into segmentation and personalization properly. Especially for product launches.
Primarily, email is your channel. Not beholden to the whims of another entity like Facebook or Udacity or Google or even HN and Reddit and Youtube. Took me a long time to learn that lesson.
And yes, this is what we got because RSS got killed. Email newsletters and facebook pages.
It's most definitely true but all of those email newsletter services and "marketing gurus" never tell you the real truth.
It's not as simple as just "build a list and print money".
It's more like, provide top tier content for free for years and years while you test everything that's super specific to your content.
Then, you take what you have and transform that into an intelligent autoresponder (drip campaign) that has a purpose of having a user take action (maybe buy one of your products).
Email marketing is ridiculously cheap in terms of retention compared to most other forms of marketing. You 'own' the list, unlike with Facebook and Twitter. You can push to the list, unlike Google.
I can't talk for startups, but I have worked with very big enterprises on email marketing and all their analysis said email was the most cost-effective over the customer lifecycle.
Makes sense -- when people subscribe to your email list, they have directly indicated at least some level of interest in your product. That's more than any bio/demo based ad campaign can guarantee.
Potentially, someone might have expressed interest by following or liking you. The problem is that the only way of reaching those people is by paying Facebook. The cost increases as your list grows.
When you send an email newsletter, even if your customers don't read it or respond, you're getting your brand name and offer in front of them. The costs barely change as your list grows from 100 to 10 million. That's the real advantage of email compared to just about every other form of marketing.
Compare the costs and sales of pushing an ad to 10 million people who liked you versus 10 million people who bought from you or subscribed to your newsletter. The latter will nearly always give much better value for money.
If you're using Mailchimp to handle a list of 10 million users you're definitely doing it wrong. You need a tool that charges by number of emails sent instead of size of list.
These days I'd suggest buying an in-house email tool and use an SMTP server (SendGrid, Mandrill, SES, Mailgun). Pricing will obviously be more expensive but it increases much more slowly than with Facebook. To send 10 million emails on SendGrid would cost around $5K. Depending on the terms, that kind of budget would cover somewhere between 50 and 50000 users with Facebook or AdWords.
Ha! Yeah, well we're not quite at the 10 million mark, and not sure who would pay that amount.
We actually use Sendgrid for transactional emails and should probably revisit for marketing. They didn't have the list manangement features when last we looked and there's a little integration dev that'll need to be done, but you've prompted me to take another look at it. May be worthwhile now. Thanks.
But, even with those guys going from 100 emails to only 4 million (highest quoted on the site), the price goes up a couple of orders of magnitude from $9.95 to over $1600. That's hardly "barely growing costs" and for a bootstrapped startup, the difference may be prohibitive. Hopefully, you've got some revenue or funding by the time you hit that subscriber base. But, don't want to gloss over the fact that you will pay significantly more as your list grows substantially, even if it's less than with other channels.
OK I guess I phrased it badly. At a list size of 10 million, email will probably cost around $10K per month to service. With SEM you'll be lucky if it costs less than $250K per month.
So for every SEM placement, you can send 25 newsletters. So you need SEM to convert 25x better than email to get value from it. That might be possible, depending on the quality of your list, but my experience is that all companies eventually use email marketing because it's so much cheaper with big lists.
I would question how you even got a list size of 10 million, or what you're hoping to get from direct marketing, if $10K per month is prohibitive.
> I've experienced no strong correlation myself between the frequency of sending newsletters and sales.
So, it turns out that the effectiveness of email newsletters, just like that of landing pages, is highly variable.
I would suggest doing quite a bit of A/B testing on the effect of subject lines, content, format, frequency, day-of-week, time-of-day, etc. (Not to mention the extra variables that customization and personalization[0] can throw into the mix) on email open rates and clickthroughs (as well as on the rest of your funnel) in order to get really good results.
[0] The distinction, AIUI, is that Customization would be "for monthly newsletters that go out 60-89 days after the user signs up, add this opening paragraph", whereas Personalization would be "add some recommended product links to the footer based on the individual recipient's product reviews and ratings."
Getting someone on a mailing list at least provides the benefit of requiring them to think about you more and see your name more often. I know I have personally bought things from vendors more because their newsletter (which I almost never actually read) would come and keep them in the forefront of my mind.
On a few occasions, these newsletters actually have informed me of useful discounts, sales, or new products and caused me to buy right away, but mostly they just increase brand presence/mindshare. Even though it's not directly measurable, that's not a benefit to be discarded, IMO.
The problem with marketing as a developer is that there is a fine line between helpfully increasing awareness of your product/service and being an asshole about it with modals which interrupt blog post reading and "growth hacking" of unsolicited email/Tweet blasts/etc.
Silicon Valley has been encouraging the latter because it works, to my frustration. One of the reasons people ask for upvotes on Product Hunt is that everyone else is doing it and there are no visible consequences for doing so. (and I've recently found out that people do the same for HN votes on occasion because they assume it's a part of the culture)
For newsletter signups specifically, I have a "zero fucks given" KPI: However I configure the "Signup for our Newsletter" CTA, I make sure to watch for signups like "fuckoff@fuckyou.com" - As soon as I see one I know the CTA is annoying people and I come up with a better way.
Dont do things because others do it as well. Create your own hypotheses and test them. Then adjust as necessary. But dont be an asshole. You might (might!) make less money but peace of mind and respect are worth so much more than a couple of bucks.
"If spamming the user with popups and emails makes them click and buy more, adding more of it is making the site more user friendly."
That's a generous interpretation of "user friendly." If a user genuinely wanted those things, then yes it's truly an improvement. If users didn't want them but got the impression pop-ups and emails were required then it's more debatable. Put another way, paying for things is not user friendly, but without doing so there would be less worthy of buying.
Let's assume we're talking about short and clear email messages. Nothing shady at all, not using misleading popup to trick the user into clicking adsense ads.
If people buy more stuff when they receive 10 mails per months, is the user to blame?
Additional information: Users really open the emails and don't mark them as spam at all.
About that: you know what I've been waiting to see in one of these articles for about two years? Any reference to rates of "bounce with visible modal" and "email unsubscribes on the first email."
Well. I just attended a private presentation from a popular e-commerce company. They said they were sending 15 emails per months to a customer in average.
That's a lot, but they've tested it and they got more revenues for every email, until that much.
The emails include: Sale confirmation, payment confirmation, recommendation to buy something again, please come back to rate this, discounts, etc... (it's not all spam).
Agreed - and feeds a little into the 'Launch and the world will be beating a path to your door' mindset. Just as important as having a blog is being able to mine trending topics and having a proper process in place around content production.
Yes in the sense of there being industry trends you should keep up with and talk about. One thing with b2b sites is that you don't really need viral content, because you likely have a very specific idea of who your customers are.
Depending on the field, lots of b2b topics aren't super competitive SEO wise, which makes it possible to really dominate a particular topic in search results. Long tail keywords [1] are particularly helpful from my experience.
From experience there's a huge amount of 'watching what others are doing' going on in B2B. No one wants to get caught out as having missed the next big thing.
Vendors also try to make sure that they have a 'story' around major trends, and analysts like to see this too.
Although you're dealing with volumes orders of magnitude lower than its usually possible to identify 5/6 topics that are top of mind for CIOs at a given time.
This is perfect timing for me - I've just finished building my side project (http://www.artpip.com/) and feel like I've made something people would want to use, but was unsure about how best to get the word out. Thank you!
I am going to recommend people who are building stuff specifically for desktops to call out that fact.
Here is the tagline for this project:
"BEAUTIFUL ART FOR YOUR DESKTOP"
So whether it loads in 6 seconds on mobile or 600 seconds is completely irrelevant to you the creator (of course within reason try to speed up the mobile experience).
Here is a stat that no one actually finds unusual after thinking about it for a second - if what you have created is primarily for people who produce (rather than just consume) - writing, editing images, coding etc - a large portion of your audience will actually use your stuff on a large screen with a good internet connection. Before you go on to, say, AMP your site, first ask "Do I really need to?"
I question the people peddling the mobile-first world - that world is quite far away for hardcore producers, and the odds are not terribly low that these prolific producers are going to be people with plenty of discretionary money to spend.
Failed to install on Windows, wish you have a Linux version.
2017-01-01 13:27:22> Program: Starting Squirrel Updater: --install .
2017-01-01 13:27:23> Program: Starting install, writing to C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\SquirrelTemp
2017-01-01 13:27:26> Program: About to install to: C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\artpip
2017-01-01 13:27:28> CheckForUpdateImpl: Couldn't write out staging user ID, this user probably shouldn't get beta anything: System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException:
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I experienced a really slow loading time on mobile 4GLTE. The top image loaded and 6 seconds later the text loaded. People dont wait. They dont care enough for your site to load. You should reduce loading time and make sure text loads before pictures. When you do this send me an email and Ill give you more feedback if you want.
Before you go off shoving fistfuls of money at display ad retargeting platforms, I'd highly suggest running placebo tests first. The platforms will tell you how you're converting people into paying customers at a $2 rate, but with retargeting, you've previously acquired their attention in some form -- that's how you're able to retarget them in the first place. The problem is that, particularly with display ads and Facebook feed ads, you tend to cookie bomb your audience and you're not getting a fair assessment of how many people actually stayed engaged with you because your ads in some part.
In nearly all my experience, the actual value of retargeting is never what the platforms tell you it is in their ridiculously misleading CPA reporting.
Has anyone here gathered a bunch of resources similar to this, especially around early-days bootstrap Marketing for SaaS?
We created our product as a group with engineering backgrounds and now trying to switch some to full on Marketing mode and trying to grab anything I can get my hands on.
You should checkout http://saasemailmarketing.net/ - It's nicely hyper focused on SAAS+Email which I found nice as there's so much out there that's consumer focused and frustratingly hard to apply my own projects.
This is a good 1000 foot overview but they leave off some specifics that could burn you bad.
Blog content: they say writing anything is better than nothing and there's some truth to this, but compelling content is far more important. One thing that can happen (seen it) is you hire some content monkeys to make you "content". The result is bland and reads like stale Cheerios. Google will knock your site ranking badly if users don't like to read your articles.
When I started writing content for this client my first article got more organic traffic than their whole site with hundreds of pages of "content". This continued with each article I wrote until 99+% of organic traffic to the site came from around 10 articles I wrote.
Biggest thing with content is it needs to be good quality. Long form articles with pictures work the best. The other extremely important point is to tailor the subjects to your readers.
If you sell can openers write content about cans and cooking with canned stuff. Write about ways to open cans when your opener breaks. Write about what to look for in good can openers. Write about how canned food is made. Become the one and only website about anything can related. Google questions your readers are likely to type and get links to your site on the top search results for those questions. Even if you have to pay some site owners it will boost your rank tremendously.
Make sure a human visiting your site would think it was well made and google will to. Use cdn's to make it load fast. The latest and greatest TLS certs. Fully verified email addresses linked to you domain with all the bells and whistles. Make your site seem legit enough that users would feel okay using their credit cards there.
Email: make sure the emails you send are things your customers want to get. Know the demographic of your customers and tailor your message carefully. It goes far beyond subject line content, if you annoy your customers your emails will get binned as "promotions" and nobody will see them.
"The Web App Development Guide for Marketers"
1) Get a database because they are the where all your data will be saved. "You should have a db if you have nothing else."
- MySQL book link
- Relational databases video
- more intro-to-databases links
2) "Fancy having a frontend?" A frontend is needed because your users will want to use your awesome app
- HTML link
- CSS link
3) Do's and Don'ts
- Have forms and buttons
- Don't make the forms too long. Here's some research to show long forms lead to lesser people submitting them.
... and so on and so forth.