MixRank is a platform that allows you to spy on your competitor’s ad campaigns. It was founded in 2011 by Ilya Lichtenstein and is backed by Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Mark Cuban, and other angel investors.  They did a couple of interviews with Startup Frontier on getting customers before building their product and doing paid advertising effectively. While most startups have a difficult time trying to get their first customers, MixRank knew how to grow an audience before building a product.  And, they grew their revenue 44% per week when their product became ready.

Image by Orissa Jenkins

1. Segmenting their audience

By segmenting their audience, MixRank was able to drill down to get a very well-defined group. This helped narrow the scope of the problem they were trying to solve.

2. Paying for market research

Right away, MixRank started spending $2,000 per month on Google Adwords. They viewed it not as a risk, but as a way to learn what people wanted. In addition, it helped them determine their costs for customer acquisition.

3. Creating content their audience will respond to

Having narrowed their focus, MixRank was able to select content that would engage their target audience. Whether it was trying to break news, reach out to bloggers, or post on a social bookmarking site, they would include a sign up invitation for lead generation.

4. Offering free services

Spending $2k/mo (of money that was tough to come by) and offering free services doesn’t sound like a great business plan. However, these were the strategies MixRank used to gain valuable insight on the market. Specifically, they built marketing campaigns and did free consulting for people willing to talk to them so they could figure out exactly what their problems were. In addition, they now had a list of people that ‘owed them a favor’ and who were more likely to be responsive to requests later on. All it cost them was time, which was something they had a lot more of than money!

5. Being patient

MixRank didn’t dismiss campaigns that didn’t yield immediate results. Particularly for Saas products, potential customers need time to play with it before deciding to buy. They use, as a rule of thumb, to get at least 30 conversions before determining what the conversion rate for the campaign is.

6. Running Facebook ads

Remember the $2k/mo on Google Adwords? It’s difficult to keep going at that pace, especially for B2B/Saas businesses. There’s typically not thousands of keywords to bid on and competing against big enterprise software companies that are spending millions tend to be fruitless. With Facebook ads, it is easier to drill down to the target audience and the competition was/is generally local small businesses making it less competitive (at the time).

7. Sponsoring a blog

MixRank did sponsored reviews with bloggers for sales leads, offering $2 or $3 for every sign up. Of course, there was transparency and full disclosure, but the risk was low for both parties. The risk for MixRank was whether the sign up would lead to revenue. For bloggers, they didn’t need to bet on, for example, making more money with this ad versus another, because this piece of content was a post not a banner ad.  As a bonus, sponsored reviews show up near the top in search engines, compelling bloggers to do a sponsored post.

8. Sponsoring email newsletters

Newsletters provided MixRank with a burst of traffic really quickly. It was also high quality traffic for lead generation, as newsletter subscribers are an audience that is willing to give up their email address for the right content or product.

Try out some of these steps to improve your lead generation and reach your target audience to help grow your revenue.

1) Use Photoshop

image credit: HongKiat.com

This article takes you step-by-step on how to create an HTML email template by using Photoshop. If you are naturally a designer or work with a graphic designer, this is a great tutorial on how to build your own email template yourself.

2) Use Word

image credit: workawesome

If you’re not familiar with Photoshop, Microsoft Word can be a simple option for creating an email newsletter template. This tutorial also takes you step by step on how to create a newsletter.  However, Microsoft Word will export messy HTML, so note that it will be hairy to edit your HTML once you export it.  That said, your email service provider should be able to handle the exported code.  Some, such as MailChimp, will take this a step further and will clean up the messy code.

3) Code from Scratch

image credit: OwlHillMedia.com

If you know HTML and CSS and want to build your own email newsletter template, the best option is to write your own code from scratch.  This presentation covers everything you must know about coding email templates.  tl;dr?  Use tables.  Use inline CSS.  And, test your templates on multiple browsers.

If you haven’t found a template that you love or absolutely need full control over the design and brand of your company, check out these easy tutorials to build an email newsletter template to your needs.

1) Set expectations

Not every ebook is going to be right for everybody. So, it’s important to state upfront who your ebook is for to set proper expectations.

Note: if you’re a beginner they point you to a different book that might be more appropriate. They don’t want you to start reading this book only to become confused and disengage.

2) Use clickable buttons

HubSpot’s ultimate call to action is for you to buy their product. So, they make it easy for you to do so by including key buttons within their ebooks.

You don’t want your readers to have to go to your site, scramble to figure out how to buy, and ultimately become distracted and leave in the process. Make buying easy.

3) Be personable

Immediately, I’m introduced to the ebook’s author who has a bio and a face.

This makes me feel like I’m building a relationship with the author rather than a corporate machine. If I like her work, I can decide to follow her later.

4) Include a table of contents

Before I invest time into reading this book, I want to know right away what I’m going to learn. An upfront table of contents is helpful if an ebook is fairly long.

I can even skip to just the sections I find interesting.

5) Make the ebook readable.

Ebooks that show lots of pictures make the copy more readable. It also helps explain concepts that may otherwise take too many words to write.

Using different fonts, font sizes, and colors will also help break up the copy and increase reader engagement.

6) Highlight important tips

Even after making your ebook more readable, your readers still may miss a lot of information if they are just skimming your ebook. Pulling out important tips can help you convey essentially the tl;dr parts of your book.

7) Close with a call-to-action

Lastly, you’ll want to remind your readers about your product.

Your potential customers downloaded your ebook to solve a problem. So, tie your product back to that problem, explaining how it can help further.

image credit — all screenshots are from How to Create Epic Facebook Ads

The Rise

Native ads are all the rage these days, seamlessly blending engaging content into the property’s environment. But to really understand why, we need to take a look at the history of online advertising.  In the 90s, when the dot com boom was starting to take off, I was just entering high school in the Silicon Valley and I had the opportunity to briefly help (if you can call it that) at a banner ad company.  They were rocking it, seeing very high click-through-rates (CTR) and charging just pennies per click.  Back then, everyone and their mother was clicking, so even at just pennies, this company was rolling in the dough.  They later sold for hundreds of millions of dollars before the dot com bust in the early 2000s.

But they weren’t the only ones raking it in.  Just about every banner ad company was doing the same.  Banner ads were seeing anywhere between 50-90% CTR!  It was an insane time!  As a result, the effective CPMs were also very high. For example, let’s say you ran a website with a 70% CTR on one banner ad and only made $0.05 per click. For every 1000 visitors, you were still making 1000 * 70% * $0.05 = $35 eCPMs!

The Fall

Fast forward to today.  The CTR on banner ads has plummeted to about 0.1%.  So your eCPM is now 5 cents instead of $35! Advertisers are getting way fewer clicks and publishers are hardly making any money at all.  Why?  Consumers have banner-blindness.   Banner ads are now standardized, so they look the same on every single site.  It makes it easy to ignore ads even if they are relevant and well-targeted.

The Resurrection

We see banner-blindness in our own network since we offer both banner and text ads.  The latter looks native to the look and feel of a given newsletter, while the former is a traditional banner ad format.  In our controlled studies, time and again, the text ads will always win doing 2-10x greater CTR than banner ads.  Think about it — an order of magnitude difference in CTR is an order of magnitude difference in revenue.  In other words, instead of making $10 with banner ads, you could be making $100.  At first, this difference astounded me, but now it seems obvious.  Native ads have high CTRs for a couple of reasons:

1) They look like they fit the content.  Since users are actively reading the content, they are more likely to read the ad.  

2) The look-and-feel required to be a native ad will differ from property to property, so users are not able to learn to ignore ads.

The Epiphany

Advertisers get more engagement with native ads compared to banner ads on an eCPM basis. If you are a publisher and can choose your ad format, it’s a no-brainer to run native ads.  Since they are more effective, advertisers should also be willing to pay more for these on an eCPM basis.  Everyday, we hear about online newspaper companies struggling, because banner ads are just not paying them enough to make their business model work.  By adopting native ads, media companies should be able to increase their revenue by an order of magnitude, and advertisers will pay for this, because it works better than banner ads.

Get ready for a new world. There’s a new way to get customers now, and everyone — marketers, agencies, ad exchanges and networks — will need to be prepared for this big change.  Have questions or thoughts about what this new world will look like?  Type them below.

Image credit: Flickr user LexnGer

What is Karma Sending?

Karma Sending is the equivalent of working smarter, not harder. It means sending more targeted emails to the right people – those who are actually engaging with them. It means sending the right offers at the right time. In the end, you’ll probably send fewer emails, but they’ll perform better.

Why Karma Sending?

Higher conversion rate. If you focus your email marketing on customers or potential customers who are more likely to engage, your conversion rate will go up.

3 Companies that do Karma Sending

1) Fab.com noticed that not everyone was engaging with every email. So, they went ahead and unsubscribed people who were not opening certain emails (e.g., Sunday-Thursday emails) and sent them a notice.

image credit: The Next Web

The result? Not only did this reduce their email bill, but their percentage of engagement went up in the eyes of clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail. The people who were never going to open the email anyway didn’t get bothered, and Fab’s emails got more attention.

2) Like Fab, LinkedIn made a similar move. Just as good karma can bring you luck down the line, so can good Karma Sending.

LinkedIn groups send periodic digest emails, so if someone belongs to tons of groups, they are constantly getting LinkedIn emails. So LinkedIn cut back. If people were not engaging with the digests of certain groups, LinkedIn automatically unsubscribed them. In the future, users will think more kindly of LinkedIn and pay more attention when they actually do send emails.

3) Online store OpenSky takes the cake for its expert Karma Sending.  They went so far as to say they would deactivate my account if I did not re-engage.

It’s a clever move: if I haven’t engaged with their platform for a full year, why bother emailing me? But if I do decide to re-engage, they’ve effectively reminded me to do so without sounding naggy.

Mass emailing is dead

Mass emailing doesn’t engage all your recipients, and the dead weight actually hurts you.  It increases your chance of hitting spam filters in Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo.  It costs you money to send to people who have not opened a single one of your emails in years.  And, your users don’t appreciate being inundated with a barrage of useless emails.

This decade is all about Karma Sending. Are you Karma Sending? Why or why not?

Hi folks,

I’m having annoying deliverability issues with Gmail over the last few weeks (perhaps 15% of folks at Gmail who used to get every issue are no longer seeing them).  …

Thanks for reaching out to us.  I can definitely understand your

concerns about the recent drop in opens, however in all likelihood its

probably just related to this specific time of year.

Similar to retail, the amount of emails being sent across the internet

around holidays is typically much higher than average, especially

around the end of a year due to many holidays falling very close to

one another.

Yesterday, I held a webinar on “How the best advertisers do lead generation.”   We talked about:

• Driving traffic: best practices in creating ads
• Building compelling landing pages
• Packaging content into ebooks, pdfs, whitepapers
• Cultivating your audience

And, we teamed up with our friends at Tout, who talked about doing lead generation through cold-emailing.  If you couldn’t make it, we’ve recorded it and published it below.

Image credit: epSos.de

By Elizabeth

Working in the email world, you learn about some seriously shady practices and what goes on behind the scenes.  I was initially reluctant to talk about this publicly, but the other day, an acquaintance approached me for some advice.

Me: Oh what’s up?
K: I bought an email list, and I want to know the best way to send these people emails.
Me: As in, you bought actual email addresses?
K: Yeah. 38,000 emails of professionals. From a site similar to Salesforce’s data.com.
Me: Oh…I see…
K: Yeah, I paid $18,000 for the list. How should I send marketing emails to them?

I felt bad for him. He’s starting a company and is strapped for cash like everyone else. And, he blew $18,000. If he had talked with me earlier, I would’ve talked him out of buying that list, because I’m vehemently opposed to buying actual email addresses. I might’ve tried to sell him on the idea of using LaunchBit or working with publishers directly to buy sponsorships in lists. But buying actual email addresses is not only shady, but it’s a real headache if done incorrectly.

How to send a mass email to a purchased list

For the record, I DO NOT endorse buying email addresses.  But since he already opened Pandora’s box, I decided to tell him about how he can send to his list:

• Never send mass emails from your Gmail account (or any other email client).  Gmail will shut you down, and it will be a pain in the behind to get your account back to normal
• Actual spammers run their own email servers and are constantly switching their IP addresses.  This is the more effective way to go, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s probably easier to use 3rd party email service providers.
• If you use multiple 3rd party email service providers, divide your list of emails across different ones.
• And, when you open all these accounts, use a prepaid credit card, so that way you are not as easily traced back to these lists.  You still may never be able to send from these email service providers again, so be aware of that.
• And create new contact information and email addresses just for the purpose of opening these accounts
• Don’t include your company’s link in these emails.  Any links that are in emails where people hit the spam button — regardless of whether the emails are coming from your domain or not — will be associated w/ that spam.   Buy a whole new domain just for the purpose of cultivating whatever leads you get.
• Be CAN-SPAM compliant.  This includes adding an unsubscribe link in your emails.

To summarize, I basically told him to hide his identity, create lots of new accounts to remove himself from the picture, and send his email recipients to a completely different corporate website.  By the end of our conversation, it basically sounded like I was trying to help him cover up a crime!

The private sector regulates the email industry

But, buying email addresses is not illegal.  Cold-emailing is not illegal.  What regulates this industry is the private sector, not governments.  Reputable email service providers don’t want to be associated with your spammy behavior, so they will dump you as a customer.  Gmail will shut you down if you are abusing their email client.  They don’t want to be part of your business. But this is all perfectly legal.

These third parties will FIND OUT that your list is not clean, because behavior of bought lists look different from lists where readers have opted-in.  These email addresses typically bounce a LOT more.  People will typically hit the spam button more.

Do the economics make sense?

Here are the numbers I’ve predicted for my acquaintance’s purchase:

• ~30% or more email addresses will typically bounce on a bought list
• ~20% open rate on email addresses that don’t bounce
• ~50% click-through-rate on opens on a really really good dedicated email
• ~10% sign-up conversion to learn more on a well-crafted landing page

Give or take: 38k subscribers * 70% non-bounces * 20% open rate * 50% click-through-rate * 10% sign-up rate = 266 sign ups

And, these are free sign ups.  My acquaintance’s services start at say $1000, so he needs at least 18 of those 266 people to buy, which is a 6% paying conversion to break even.   This ignores the cost of sending the emails and his time.  That’s going to be a  tough sell.  With most freemium services, a 3% upsell from free to paid is considered very good.

To most marketers, buying a list of email addresses of your target audience seems so simple and so obvious on the surface.  But, you will have to go through a lot of headache just to send your emails (if you don’t run your own email servers).  And, the economics are not as lucrative as you would expect with an audience that has not been cultivated by you.

Don’t buy email addresses.  It’s not worth it.

There are a lot of marketing blogs out there that are just awful. They aren’t insightful. They don’t teach you something new. They’re boring.

Here are our favorite marketing blogs that we’ve found to be extremely helpful and tactical.

1) Unbounce

The team over at Unbounce writes tactical posts on how to improve your marketing. Best practices for building landing pages. How to optimize your email marketing.

2) PostRocket

If you want to learn how to optimize your social media marketing, the PostRocket team goes into great depth around studies they’ve done on Facebook and Twitter. When should you post on Facebook? What should you post? And how?

3) MixRank

Do you run Google AdWords campaigns? MixRank dives into how you should be structuring your campaigns and bids. How to choose keywords.

4) KISSmetrics

Lastly, the team over at KISSmetrics rocks it with their general marketing tips. They will often bring in guest bloggers w/ different areas of marketing expertise to do deep dives on topics.

What awesome marketing blogs do you follow?