Marketing Hack – Build Email Lists

An email list is probably the strongest marketing tool a business can have in its marketing repertoire. From the first day itself, a startup must focus on building an email list. Email lists can be created using Gamification. Users can be offered freebies and incentives to induce users to share their email ids.

Email lists are a good marketing tool owing to the following reasons.

One to One – The communication between the business and the customer is personal and one to one.

Higher Engagement & Conversion – Emails can be sent on a regular basis to inform users about latest updates and happenings. This leads to increased engagement with the customer, which eventually results in a higher conversion rate as well.

Marketing Skills for a Startup

A product cannot create value until marketed well. Marketing forms the backbone of value creation in a startup. New age marketers, also called Growth Hackers now, need to keep evolving over time, in order to propel the startup.

The role of the marketer has changed from someone merely analyzing different advertisement options to one who takes care of much more. From working closely in product development, to putting it into the market, analysing the result and going back to the drawing board is what a new age marketer is expected to do. Growth has become a marketer’s major focus and responsibility and working independently is not value additive in this competitive environment.

Ways to Market Your Startup

Marketing your startup is generally your focus when the initial product is ready. Nowadays, there a innumerable tools which assist you in this. To simplify it, I feel all these tools can be classified broadly into 3 categories.

You push your message: This is when you push your advertisement to users from your target market. The benefits of this are that you build visibility to customers who do not know about you and that you extend your existing customer base by bringing in new potential customers. The downside is that this strategy has a high bounce rate, i.e. customers looking at your ad and not taking any action on it.

Some popular tools for this include Social Media, Emailers etc.

Customers get pulled to you: This is when a customer is looking for a product/service which you are offering and by putting your ad in the right place, the customer is pulled to your portal/business. The customers in this case would be more interested in your offering as they are anyways looking for it. This tends to be generally more expensive than when you push your message to customers, and rightly so.

Some popular tools include SEO, SEM etc.

You get referred: This is when a third party refers you to a potential customer. This third party generally tends to have a previous connection/relationship with the customer and hence has more influence on the customer. The bounce rates tends to be lower here. Trusting the third party and higher costs are the downsides in this strategy.

Some popular tools include Affiliate Marketing, Ad Placements etc.

Early stage startups must try out different strategies based on their offering. Based on the KPI you are most interested in, calculate the relative costs for all of the strategies and accordingly allocate budgets for them.