“The tacos and the whiskey are in the back. We’ll do shots later.” This comes to no surprise for me, as Noah Kagan introduces himself. He comes across exactly as he does in his popular AppSumo emails: funny, down-to-earth with a blend of confidence, and convincing.
You’d find his background fascinating. Noah was the 30th employee at Facebook, and an early marketer at Mint who helped grow its user base during its critical nascent days. Now he runs the popular AppSumo software deals newsletter which has built to over 750,000 subscribers.
We’re a small group, with representation from BarkBox to People Magazine, invited by Noah to learn more about his new SumoMe website growth tools, and to learn about his growth insights through his diverse experiences. I’m here in particular to get ideas on how to promote our new TrackBat product, which offers rich analytics on whether people engage or understand your documents.
Noah’s lessons do not disappoint.
1. Optimize your top pages
What people don’t tell you when they say everything is 20/20 in hindsight, is that they also feel pretty dumb. That’s how I felt when Noah explained one of the fastest ways to acquire email addresses is to look at the pages that generate most of your traffic, and optimize those pages to capture email addresses.
When you go to his homepage at okdork.com, you won’t see blog posts like most blog home pages. You’ll see a smiling picture of Noah and a clear call to action to give your email address. Though unconventional, this is indeed the most visited page on his blog, and adding this increased his email conversion rate significantly around 10-15%. You’ll also find the personal photo and clear call-to-action on Andrew Chen’s blog, a thought leader in online marketing.
Another not-so-obvious page is your about us page. This is commonly one of the most frequented page on websites, and should be taken advantage of to capture emails.
2. Rock the bonus content
SumoMe offers a free product called HeatMaps, which allows you to see how far someone reads through your webpage. From analyzing his data, Noah shared with us that most people read only 30-50% of an article, and very few people reach the end of the page. Moreover, very rarely do people look at the content or calls to actions that sit on the right rail of a webpage. For those knowledgeable of the digital ad space, this is akin to banner blindness.
Why then do so many blogs have a call to action at the bottom of their posts and in the right rail. Even marketing vanguards like Hubspot follow this pattern.
To address this, Noah creates bonus content related to his blog posts, like a checklist or excel template. He then strategically places a call to action to this content in the top ⅓ of his blog post. You’ll also notice on his blog that he has no right rail to capture email address. Noah explains that people want you to tell them what they should do, and he wants his readers to focus on his relevant bonus content.
This strategy has increased his email conversions by over 12%!
3. Create email-based courses and recycle content
Noah launched Summer of Marketing earlier in June as series of emails that teach the basics of marketing. The beauty of this strategy is that that along with some original content, he re-used many of his blog posts and packaged them as part of the weekly emails you’d get when you sign up for this course. He acquired over 5,000 contacts with this strategy.
Through our EasyBib product, we too have had similar success with this strategy. Among the three email based courses we’ve launched we’ve collected 5,520 educator leads.
It works because a course promises that you will come away with tangible skills, and because it’s a digestible amount of information to read over time. What makes Summer of Marketing particularly successful is the fact that it was launched as a separate product and URL. Doing so creates brand value that you may not necessarily get if it were another content initiative among many on your blog.
4. If you don’t ask, you won’t get
To start his presentation, Noah first asked everyone in the audience who was or who wasn’t familiar with his AppSumo business. For those unfamiliar, Noah responded almost instinctually “to go to appsumo.com, and now enter your email address to get our great deals.” Just like that, he had grown his email list by about 10 people.
Clever tactics like this are what Noah thrives on, but ultimately he was trying to drive a deeper point.
Most people build a product and magically expect people to come. In reality, you have to educate and ask people to use your product. Best of all, there are opportunities all around us. Everyone in the room could represent a potential user.
This idea, he went on, extends to your content marketing efforts. Just building content is not enough. One touch with someone does not guarantee they will come back to your site. You have to be smart, create very useful information, and ask for their email address in the right way to improve your chances of building a relationship with that viewer. Otherwise, you’re investment building your content can go in vein.
I laughed nodding my head when Noah concluded that getting someone’s email is like inviting them to your
5. Have one core goal, and reverse engineer it.
You most likely can relate. It’s all too easy to have numerous goals that you juggle and end up not hitting any of them. Noah keeps it simple by having one core goal that ties into everything he does. This year, it was to build his email list of his personal blog, OkDork.com, to 50,000 contacts.
Next is figuring out how to hit that goal.
Tyler, part of Noah’s team, spontaneously interjects at this point showing a complicated spreadsheet spanning numerous tabs on how he had planned to hit this goal. He explained that Noah balked when saw this. Instead, they created one simple spreadsheet with 20 rows that outlined the different channels where they could acquire contacts, from guest posts, to Facebook ads, to online email courses. Each channel had a forecasted reach and a conversion rate, all totaling to 50,000 contacts. As the proverb goes, keep it simple stupid.
Noah dived deeper. He would evaluate each channel on by one, and based on results, he would double down or move on. Traction Book, by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, covers this topic well. They talk about the idea of a critical path, which is the process of finding the right channels to hit your goal fastest.
Just do it.
When I asked a question about why Noah pursued a particular strategy, he answered honestly, “I’m a do-er. I do and learn.”
That resonated. Entrepreneurship is all about doing, and learning from those experiences so you can do it even better.
