Can you sell a product when no one is interested in it?

Can anyone be interested in a product if no one knows about it?

The answer to both questions is “No.”

Lead generation is always a hot topic among marketers. Since referral marketing is one of the best ways to capture leads for your business ( I explain why further down), in this article, we take a step back and take a look at lead generation from a beginner’s standpoint.

Don’t be mistaken. The contents of this blog post are not for beginners only.

Whether you’re a rookie or an experienced marketer, there are things to learn or refresh. I tried to include all of them. I may turn this article into a resource page dedicated to lead generation, so I’d like you to take the time to read it and let me know in the comments on what more you’d like me to include.

Enjoy!

What’s a lead and lead types.

The first thing we need to define is what the word “lead” refers to.

A lead is a person (or company) that expresses interest in buying a product/service from you.

A lead expresses their interest through sharing their contact info by signing up for one of your offers, or product trial. Their contact information could be an email address and name, or even more details (such as the company name, company size, etc.)

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of acquiring the contact information of people that are interested in your products or services. It’s a marketing strategy for turning strangers to potential customers, and push them further down your marketing funnel.

Prelaunch campaigns are a great example of lead generation. If you’re planning to run a prelaunch campaign for your product, you should read the following articles:

• Prelaunch campaigns: How to do it right.
• A product prelaunch is much more than getting early adopters.
• Yac’s prelaunch campaign could change the way we work remotely — Case Study.

Depending on which step of your marketing funnel you acquired it, there are four types of leads:

• Marketing Qualified Leads, a.k.a. MQLs
• Sales Qualified Leads, a.k.a. SQLs
• Product Qualified Leads, a.k.a. PQLs
• Service Qualified Leads

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

In general, MQLs are leads that interacted with your marketing material -whether they downloaded a pdf, subscribed to your newsletter list, or filled out a form to receive an offer/quote.

These types of leads sit on the top of your marketing funnel, and- most of the time, they are not ready to go through your sales process.

Your goal should be to nurture MQLs and turn them into SQLs.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

SQLs are leads that took an action that indicates a direct interest in buying one of your products or services.

An SQL could be someone that booked a sales call with your sales team or someone who contacted your customer support to ask details about your product.

You should keep in mind that you’re the one who decided on the factors that differentiate the MQLs from the SQLs for your business.

e.g., On our template pages, we have two Calls-to-action:

1. “Try for free”
2. “Book a Demo”

When a visitor fills the form for booking a demo, they become an SQL for us. If they sign up for our trial, they become a PQL (Product Qualified Lead)

Product Qualified Leads (PQL)

This type of lead only exists if you offer a trial for your product or a freemium version of it with an option to upgrade to a paid plan.

The fact that someone decided to try your product, or use its free version, doesn’t make them a PQL. Again, you should define what specific action indicates the interest of such leads to become a paying customer.

For example, it could be an email that prompts people on trial to book a demo.

A PQL should be someone that belongs to the bottom of your marketing funnel; thus, they are very likely to buy from you. Make sure to define your indications accurately.

Service Qualified Leads

When I started my career in marketing, I worked for an agency as a consultant. I knew nothing about marketing, but I was good at making people believe that I knew about what I was talking to them about.

One of the first things I learned was from my friend- and now CEO of Viral Loops, Savvas Zortikis. He told me:

“You sell, they buy. When they become happy, you upsell.”

So, a Service Qualified Lead is an existing customer that expressed interest in buying an extended version of your services to reach their goals.

These people are happy customers, that not only reached a goal by using your product/service, but also believe that their business can evolve even further by using an extended version of your services.

Important Note:

More often than not, you’ll have to remind your customers about how successful the partnership between you has been.

For example, Viral Loops has a customer success team monitoring well-performing campaigns and contacting them. We also have a process of contacting people that run successful campaigns with Viral Loops to write a case study about them (which also creates a pipeline of content pieces that could potentially bring us more leads).

Why is lead generation important?

There are two types of people in this world:

1. Those that (even once) imagined how nice it would be to find a briefcase full of money.
2. Liars.

I don’t say that money is everything, but money is fuel, especially for business.

Whether you run a business for world peace or just driven by greed, you need the fuel. There’s no business without customers, and there are no customers without leads.

So, lead generation is essential first and foremost for making a business viable. But there’s also another hidden opportunity.

A lead may become a happy customer, and satisfied customers tend to become ambassadors. That means that a lead could generate another lead for you without lifting a finger for it.

The art for capturing leads.

Before getting started with generating leads, you must understand the “journey” of a stranger to becoming a lead.

The lead generation process.

1. Discovery.
2. Visit.
3. Sign up for an offer.
4. Lead generated.

It all starts with the stranger discovering you. The discovery could be through any of your online assets.

e.g., A blog post, a video, a social media post, an ad, etc.

In the second step of the journey, the stranger visits your landing page. Then, they sign up for an offer/trial/demo/download.

After the signup, you’ve successfully managed to turn a stranger to a potential customer.

The version of the journey I presented is just a plain version, and the reality is more complicated.

Just because someone finds you online, and you have a special offer, doesn’t mean that they will turn into a lead.

There are a couple of things that could go wrong:

• You target the wrong people.
• You use the wrong distribution channels.
• Your offer doesn’t provide a solution.
• Your landing page is ugly or confusing.

These are a few things you should consider before you even start spending time and resources in generating leads.

Now, let’s take a look at some channels that allows you to be discovered.

Channels for lead generation:

• Content Marketing.
• Social Media.
• Paid advertising.
• Email Marketing.
• Referral Marketing.
• Product Trials.

Content Marketing.

I bet you’re tired of hearing about how “content is king.” I know that I’m tired of it, but it’s true.

From the 1st week of Viral Loops to this day, our content is the #1 source of leads (Both MQLs & SQLs).

We try to create content that’s SEO-friendly, so most of the people discover us from organic search. Then we capture the contact info either by a form in the sidebar (look to the right of the text you’re reading right now)- turning visitors to MQLs, or with the ” Book a Demo” button on the menu bar at the upper right corner of our blog.

Social Media.

I think that almost all businesses are on social media, but only a handful of them do it right.

I know for sure that Viral Loops doesn’t do it properly, but it’s’s OK (for now!).

Using social media for lead generation is a much slower process, but it has vast potential.

In contrast with traditional content marketing (which aims to address a problem directly), social media is more focused on brand development. From the moment that most of the content on social media doesn’t directly solve a problem, the advantage is that it can make people resonate with your brand or even create a “need” for it.

Gary Vaynerchuck took social media by storm. By producing and distributing motivational content, he managed to create a cult following that had the “need” of even more life advice.

Hence, Gary sold hundreds of thousands of books.

Paid Advertising.

Titus Maccius Plautus, a poet and philosopher who lived from 254 BC to 184 BC, is probably the one that coined the phrase “You must spend money to make money.”

I used to disagree. But I changed my mind.

Why?

Just look at your organic engagement on Instagram. That’s why.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible to capture leads organically, but having a budget for advertising will speed up the process and allow you to test audiences, copies, landing pages, and offers.

If I put my money in only one type of ad, I would go with Instagram Story Ads.

With 61% of Instagram users using Stories to see what their friends are doing, it’s an excellent opportunity for you to be discovered.

Since Instagram is a highly visual medium, you should pay attention to the creative direction, or design, of your story ads. And again, be careful with your targeting. You don’t want to spend money on people that don’t care enough to become leads.

If you’re interested in using Instagram Story ads, make sure to read Wordstream’s guide.

Email Marketing.

Good-ol” email. Never fails to impress me.

In the last few years, engagement might be a bit down, but the leads coming from email marketing are always super hot.

For me, email is still the best way to nurture an MQL and turn it into an SQL. We include a ” Book a Demo” call-to-action in every email that we send. Some of us even have the call-to-action in our email signatures.

And it converts like crazy.

Referral Marketing.

Some times I wonder what’s left for me to say about referral marketing.

As I wrote a few paragraphs above, “A lead may become a happy customer, and happy customers tend to become ambassadors.”

Referral Marketing gives an extra incentive to happy customers to bring new leads by sharing about you with their network.

It works great for both prelaunch and post-launch companies, with companies like Robinhood, and Airbnb proving it.

Want to learn more about referral marketing? Read our in-depth guide.

Product Trials.

One thing is for sure; people who sign up for a product trial or a freemium version are closer to becoming a paying customer than a newsletter subscriber.

A trial version can give you an advantage against your competition since it allows people to test if your product is really for them.

It also allows you to showcase your company’s culture and your willingness to offer a solution.

Tools for Lead Generation.

Of course, if you want to go full-on with your lead generation efforts, you’ll need the right set of tools.

Below, I’m listing the tools that I’ve used throughout the years. Let me know in the comments if I should include anything else :)

For Content Marketing:

• WordPress.
• Hubspot.
• Ahrefs.
• Grammarly.
• Google Docs.

For Social Media Marketing.

• Adobe Photoshop.
• Adobe Lightroom.
• Adobe Premiere.
• Buffer.
• Hootsuite.

For Paid Advertising.

• Google Ads Editor.
• WordStream Advisor.
• Google Keyword Planner.
• Google Trends.

For Email Marketing.

• Mailchimp.
• Active Campaign.

For Referral Marketing.

• Viral Loops.

Before you go.

WOW! That was a long post.

The subject is crucial, as lead generation is one of the cornerstones of marketing. So, the goal is to renew it continually.

I hope that you learned something 🙂

Keep being awesome.

Originally published at Viral Loops

Lead Generation: The only guide you need **UPDATED MONTHLY** was originally published in Inside Viral Loops on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yac’s prelaunch campaign could change the way we work remotely — Case Study

I always find that the most challenging thing about a new venture is to find the courage to start working on it.

There’s crippling anxiety that comes with a new idea.

That’s why I’m always happy seeing our customers running successful prelaunch campaigns. It’s also a massive payoff for Viral Loops, as we made one of our primary goals to help companies to launch their products with an impact.

This is reflected in our content as well. If you’re interested in prelaunch campaign’s you should check the following resources:

• Prelaunch campaigns: How to do it right.
• A product prelaunch is much more than getting early adopters.
• How to run a prelaunch for your crowdfunding campaign.
• How to set up a prelaunch campaign on a WordPress site.
• How to set up and leverage ads for your Shopify prelaunch campaign.

I had our customer success team search for compelling prelaunch campaigns running with Viral Loops, so I could reach out and potentially write a case study about them.

A familiar name came up; Hunter McKinley. For those that don’t remember, we interviewed Hunter in the past and talked about Messenger bot giveaways, milestones, and design.

Well, Hunter has a new venture called “Yac,” and their prelaunch campaign is the subject of this case study. Keep reading, because further down, we have all the details that made this prelaunch campaign a success.

A few words about Yac and their prelaunch campaign.

So what is Yac all about?

In short, Yac is a voice messaging tool for remote teams. I think the tagline on their website perfectly captures the product’s capabilities:

“Cut down on meetings with speed-controlled voice messages, searchable transcriptions & screen share.”

Yac’s team leveraged the power of tools like Twitter and Viral loops to create “buzz” within the remote work community.

Their success started with Twitter; specifically, a tweet that caught the attention of our “would be” investor that helped us fund our first VC raise. From there, they leveraged Viral Loops to help continue the growth of our audience with the viral effect of referral marketing.

Their growth has led them to be featured in Tech Crunch and become well renown by some of the top names in the remote work community.

Yac was looking to create buzz around their app before they launched at SXSW.

Every user that came into their funnel had the opportunity to become multiple users, as the product relies on the network effect, meaning each user would need to get their team on board for Yac to be successful at their company.

The prelaunch campaign was built on the waitlist campaign concept (similar to Robinhood) to encourage new signups to get their team on board and familiar with Yac to get access earlier.

This tactic ensured that the top spots were awarded to excited, qualified teams.

Let’s take a look at the campaign’s flow.

The campaign’s flow.

You can’t have a prelaunch campaign without a landing page. Yac built a page that was simple and straight to the point.

The page’s header is the value proposition of the product; it communicates that with Yac, you can save time from Slack conversations and Zoom meetings.

Right underneath, the subhead acts as a brief description explaining that Yac is a product that enables asynchronous collaboration for remote teams via voice messaging.

And of course, the call-to-action was clear as day: “Request Access.”

Every product has to inspire trust; that’s why below the fold, we see that Yac used testimonials to reinforce social proof.

Looking back at it, Yac’s prelaunch page is a textbook landing page example. According to Unbounce, high-converting landing pages:

• Have a strong, contextual hero shot and supporting imagery.
• Present a single and focused call to action.
• Clearly state your value proposition with a compelling header and subhead.
• Outline the features and benefits (with emphasis on the latter).
• Include testimonials and other forms of social proof.

Yac’s landing page covered 5 out of 5.

Participation.

The participation flow of Yac’s prelaunch campaign was very simple:

1. Users came from one of the promotion sources (or a referral).
2. Users signed up for early access.
3. Users referred their friends.

After signing up, the users were prompted to share their unique link with their network. The sharing options available were:

• Facebook.
• Twitter.
• Reddit.
• Email.

Yac’s team extensively used our Viral Loops- Zapier integration to automate the entire process.

New leads were sent into Mailchimp, avoiding the need to export and import later. After a new lead was added to Mailchimp a custom-designed welcome email was sent that pulled in the unique referral code from Viral Loops and presented it as a shareable link in the email body.

The leads also got into an email sequence as a lead in Intercom for nurturing emails.

The unique thing about moving a lead from Viral Loops to Mailchimp and then to Intercom is that now that the lead is in all 3 systems. Yac’s team was able to fully track them through all stages of the funnel.

When a lead had been in Intercom for a certain amount of days, an Airtable row was created on their behalf which added them to one of the early access batches. Once that batch was full, a Gmail Zap would send them a welcome email with a unique link for their company using a bit.ly zap that inserted the company names the team collected from the Viral Loops form.

After that the invitation was sent, Intercom would “watch” to see that lead move to a user so that the team could track the conversion rate from invites. The entire process was automated and thanks to our Zapier integration not a line of code needed to be written.

Promotion.

As it’s natural, every piece of marketing that led to Yac’s campaign page, forced users to go through the referral flow.

A smart example was their post on Hacker News, which gained some traction in the comment section, and included a link back to Yac’s page. The post was non-promotional, but it attracted the right “eyeballs” since it was about remote work.

Most of the content used to promote the landing page was from Twitter.

Do keep in mind that Yac shared all pieces of content across other social platforms with tools like Hootsuite and even put a few dollars behind main content pieces like blog posts and video content on Facebook ads (at very minimal costs).

In other cases, they would use “winning” Twitter content as ads on Facebook as well.

Twitter is a great place for starting a conversation, receiving feedback, and conducting light and quick research. Yac used Twitter as a platform to test what type of content worked. In addition to this, they signed up for a service that would promote our twitter posts to boost impressions.

The results.

So, did Yac’s prelaunch campaign work? In Hunter’s own words: “Yes, we generated a “buzz” that folks still ask us about to this day.”

Let’s see some important metrics:

• Total number of participant: 3546 teams
• Number of successful referrals: 41
• Participant’s share rate: 9.31%
• K-factor: 1.16%
• Campaign’s conversion rate: 35%

Some might argue that 3546 participants are not a huge number for a prelaunch campaign. I think that it’s a matter of goal setting.

Although the signups seem low, the overall campaign was a massive success because we brought in quality over quantity for team leads that brought tons more teammates.

Remember that in Yac’s case, we talking about ‘teams’ rather than simple ‘participants’

If you’re running a prelaunch campaign for a physical product, I agree that 3546 participants don’t sound like a significant enough number.

But in Yac’s case, they needed initial batches of people to use the product and provide feedback. I wrote an extensive guide about getting user feedback from early adopters.

When you’re running a prelaunch campaign for a product like Yac, you need two things:

• Participants that fit your target audience.
• A number of participants that you can handle.

So, I think that Yac nailed it.

Before you go.

Launching a new product is always challenging, but a prelaunch campaign is still a great way to get closer to your goal and launch with a meaningful impact.

Yac managed to gather an initial set of users to try and create a relationship with the product.

If you want to build a prelaunch campaign similar to Yac, you can use our Startup Prelaunch Template.

Maybe one of our upcoming case studies will be about your product.

Originally published at Viral Loops

Yac’s prelaunch campaign could change the way we work remotely — Case Study was originally published in Inside Viral Loops on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Referral marketing works excellent for lead generation;, especially during the prelaunch period.

One can use referral marketing to campaigns to also generate more subscribers for their newsletter. That’s precisely what companies like The Hustle, Morning Brew, and The Skimm did.

But is that it?

Is referral marketing just a mechanism placed on the top of the funnel to lure people into trying a new product?

If you take a look at the classic AARRR framework, you’ll understand that referrals are meant to be made by retained, happy users.

Most of the time, businesses use referral marketing to reduce their acquisition costs, and that’s it. They do it in a “campaign way.” That means that they build a referral campaign, they run it for a specific amount of time, and then they stop.

On the other hand, you have companies like Dropbox and Uber that leveraged referrals as an integral part of their growth engine.

In this article, we’re going to see why & how to build an ongoing referral program for your web app.

Why you need a referral program for your web app.

Once, I was asked to name three reasons why a web app needs an ongoing referral program. That’s an easy answer:

1. People are more likely to use a product if a friend or colleague refers it.
2. Referrals decrease both the overall customer acquisition cost and cost per lead- if you’re running ads.
3. You can reward happy users with expanded product experience, for referring their friends.

Do you need more proof?

I’ve made a list of all the numbers that prove the importance of referral marketing a few months ago.

But what does “You can reward happy users with expanded product experience, for referring their friends.” mean?

To answer, I’ll present two examples:

1. Dropbox.
2. Uber.

Dropbox.

In case you were living under a rock for the past decade, Dropbox managed to take the world by storm, achieving “unicorn level” growth over the company’s first years.

Dropbox used referral marketing to boost signups by 3900%.

The program’s rewarding system was crucial to its success. Instead of bribing users with money, or whatever other gifts, Dropbox incentivized users to refer their friends in exchange for more storage space.

Uber.

Another unicorn company that you’ve probably heard of. While some might argue about whether Uber is a successful company or not, it’s undeniable that it became a cultural phenomenon.

Uber integrated not one, but two different referral programs inside their product. The best part is that the programs had a 12X ROI.

In a similar fashion with Dropbox, Uber decided to incentivize referrals with travel credit for their app. Users of the app have immediate access to their referral link for the main menu, and they can send it to their friends- which they also receive travel credit for accepting the invitation.

Now let’s take a look at how you can approach building a referral program for your web app.

How to create a referral program for your web app.

Before you start building the referral program for your web app, you first have to plan and design it.

If you don’t know where to start, I have a short cheat sheet for you:

1. Use internal currency as a reward for successful referrals.
2. Make the referral program a part of your onboarding process.
3. Give users a clear view of the benefits of your referring their friends.
4. Make sharing easy.
5. Place your referral program somewhere that’s immediately visible to users.

Internal currency as a referral reward.

When we took a look at the examples of Dropbox and Uber, it was evident that the two companies used some sort of internal currency for rewarding successful referrals.

Dropbox gave free storage space and Uber credit for rides.

The use of internal currency is an excellent way to “push” users to use your product even more.

An excellent example is Netflix, which gave a free month for every successful referral.

Making the referral program a part of the user onboarding process.

We live in an age where we want things to be fast.

Let’s say that someone signs up for your web app. Should you wait for another time to ask them to join your referral program?

The answer is, “No.”

The optimal thing to do is for people to become part of your referral program the moment they sign up for your product.

If the rewards you’re offering in exchange for referrals are essential for the use of the product, then you should highlight the importance of the program to your users right away.

Sharing shouldn’t take more than 30 seconds.

Again, trying to save your users’ time is essential.

The easier the process the sharing is, the more your users are going to share their referral links with their friends/colleagues.

⚡Pro tip:

Almost everyone uses text apps, like Facebook Messenger. Make sure to include so of these apps as a sharing option.

Your program should be visible and accessible.

This is rather obvious but often overlooked. Your users must be able to have immediate access to their unique referral link (in case they want to share it again), and also to the number of successful referrals, or the rewards they’ve attained.

Recently, Active Campaign started their referral program, and users have access to it from the main menu of the app.

How to create a referral program for your web app with Viral Loops.

Most of the cases described in the above sections are companies that built their referral programs in-house. But what if you don’t have the resources to do it on your own?

What if you want to use a software solution like Viral Loops for your web app’s referral program? Can you do it?

AFFIRMATIVE.

The first thing you have to do is to create your Viral Loops account.

The challenge here is to include your users to your referral program the moment they signup for your product.

All of our templates come with their form widgets, but there are two that you can use to connect them with your custom sign up forms.

1. The Refer a Friend template.
2. The Milestone referral template.

You can connect your custom form with your Viral Loops campaign either by adding a Javascript to your form or by using an API call.

Bear in mind that even if you skip using our Form Widget to capture participation for your campaign, you will still need to add it somewhere else on your website as it’s the only widget through which participants can get their unique link and invite others (just like in Active Campaign’s example)

To do that, you need to add the campaign snippet and Form Widget on any page you want to redirect them to.

If you want to learn how to integrate Viral Loops with your custom forms, I recommend to read our documentation:

• “Refer a Friend” + your custom form.
• “The Milestone Referral” + your custom form.

Before you go.

Referral programs could be an essential part of your web app’s growth.

Companies like Dropbox, Uber, and Netflix showed that referral marketing is not just a lead generation tactic, but can also as a catalyst for user retention.

If you’re planning to create a referral program for your product, make sure to make it a part of your onboarding process and use the internal currency to reward successful referrals.

Design your program, and we’ll provide you with the tools to build it.

Originally published at Viral Loops

Why & how to build a referral program for your web app. was originally published in Inside Viral Loops on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

More than a year ago, we released our Messenger Bot Giveaways, and The Milestone Referral for Messenger, templates.

We worked a lot to bring these templates in life and combine referral marketing with Messenger marketing; our users were excited about it.

As a platform, Messenger offers huge Open Rates & Click-through Rates, and using it, soon became essential for many businesses that looked for cost-effective ways to fill the top of their funnel.

But things started to change.

Facebook began to announcing new policies considering Messenger every now and then, in the name of- in their own words, of User Experience and compelling business outcomes.

The most significant changes in Messenger Policies to date took place on March 4, 2020. We wrote a guide about the changes in Messenger and how to deal with them.

Overall, three major changes took place on March 4, 2020:

1. The “24+1” messaging window became a “24-hour” messaging window.
2. Subscription Messaging is for News Pages only.
3. The number of Message Tags downsized from 17 to 4.

For some people, using Messenger as a marketing channel after the recent update feels like kicking a dead horse. I kindly disagree.

You see, the opportunities that Messenger offers are still the same- high open & click-through rates. There have been some changes in the rules of the game, but Messenger marketing platforms adapted.

This article is proof that you can still use Messenger to drive new, hot leads in your funnel.

Here’s a 5 step plan Messenger Marketing plan, you can start using today.

Solving the main problem with Messenger’s new policies.

Out of all the new Messenger policies, the one that’s the most troublesome is the “24-hour” messaging window.

Two years ago, there was no such thing as a “messaging window.” People would subscribe to your Facebook Page’s Messenger bot, and you could reach out to them daily, weekly, monthly, or every six months. You could send a broadcast literally at any given time.

Of course, that came to a halt.

Now you have 24 hours to send a promotional message to your Messenger subscribers since their first interaction. In case you send a promotional message (within 24 hours), and the receiver engages with it, then you open the “24-hour” messaging window again.

But despite Messenger’s high open rates, it’s natural that a significant portion of your subscribers won’t interact with your message. That means that these people can’t be reached again. Or can’t they?

The goal here is simple; you have to be able to re-open the “24-hour” messaging window whenever it’s needed.

Disclaimer:

We’re using Manychat, as it has all the essential features we need to make this plan work, and also, we’ve built our Messenger Bot Giveaways, and The Milestone Referral for Messenger, templates based on the product.

To make this, you need to build a campaign with specific objectives. You have to think about what you have to offer to get people to subscribe and continue to engage.

The best way to do so is with a referral marketing campaign. You can dangle the carrot; people will subscribe and then refer more people to win the prize.

So, here’s the plan:

1. Run a prelaunch campaign.
2. Make a touchpoint with a sponsored message.
3. Launch your referral marketing campaign.
4. Send them a text to make them re-engage.
5. Use email to bring them full circle.

Let’s see the plan in detail.

1.Set up a simple prelaunch campaign to get people’s attention.

The first step of the plan is mostly for those of you that don’t already have a Messenger audience, but who doesn’t need more leads?

Also, this could be a great chance to open the “24-hour” window for your existing Messenger subscriber list.

Although it’s different to run a prelaunch campaign via Messenger, then in the traditional form, we have two articles that will wrap your head around the concept:

1. Prelaunch campaigns: How to do it right.
2. A product prelaunch is much more than getting early adopters.

The best way to run a prelaunch campaign via Facebook Messenger is by utilizing Manychat’s “Facebook Comments” Growth tool.

Here’s how this growth tool works:

1. Create a Facebook post announcing the prelaunch, and ask people to comment by answering a simple question.
2. Link the Facebook post with the “Facebook Comments” growth tool.
3. Whoever comments on the post, gets inside your Manychat sequence where they are asked to become Messenger subscribers.

In action, it looks like this:

You can connect the growth tool with a regular Facebook post, or you can connect it with a sponsored one. I think that you should do it for both.

If you want to learn how to set up your Facebook & Instagram ads, the proper way, we have a guide for you.

2. Utilize sponsored messages.

Since you ran your prelaunch campaign, you probably have an initial set of subscribers for promoting your main campaign.

The chances are that most of these Messenger subscribers joined your prelaunch many days before the main campaign launches, and the “24-hour” messaging window is closed for them.

Is there a way for you to contact them?

The title of this section is the answer to that question. Sponsored messages work outside the messaging window, and it’s a very affordable option; around ten cents of a dollar for each opened message.

A sponsored message looks exactly like a normal message:

You can use a sponsored message to inform your Messenger subscribers on the day that your main campaign launches.

3.Yes, referral campaigns all the way.

This step is the core of your campaign.

Although this is the 3rd step of your Messenger marketing plan, the referral campaign should be the first thing you should plan and build.

First, you have to decide what type of referral marketing campaign you want to build inside Messenger.

There are two options:

1. A giveaway.
2. A multiple reward, Milestone referral campaign.

For this article, we’re going with the second option as the multiple rewards offer an opportunity for more touchpoints with the participants.

Here’s how it looks on Messenger:

To keep the “24-hour” messaging window open for as long as possible, we added in our template, three extra messages (“Ask for email,” “Consent message,” and “No Consent message”) to ask participants for their email address and get their consent to send them an email notification whenever reaching a milestone.

You can also add an input for the telephone number to use later on for sending SMS to your campaign’s participants (see the next step).

4. Text them like you’re friends.

As I wrote earlier, the main problem with Messenger’s policies is the messaging window. We need to find ways to re-open it.

48% of consumers prefer SMS for receiving brand updates. This is almost double from email or notifications.

Manychat offers the option to send SMS to your subscribers. You can use that functionality to bring them back inside your campaign’s flow, and thus open the “24-hour” messaging window again.

What’s even better is that you can include photos and gifs inside your SMS campaigns, which can boost the engagement even more.

⚡Pro tip:

When you ask for people’s telephone number or email address, be honest about why you’re asking. Tell them that the reason you want them to give you their information is to notify them when they reach the goal of your campaign.

5. Be old-fashioned, send an email.

Email marketing is often overlooked, but it’s never going to make your life difficult (comparing to Facebook).

No matter what new marketing channel/trend emerges, email addresses remain an owned marketing asset. That’s why it’s so important to get people’s emails with every given opportunity.

By using Manychat’s input fields, you can get the email addresses of your campaign’s participants– if you ask nicely.

From there, you can use Manychat to send email updates (Manychat charges $0,003 per email send), or “send” the addresses to your preferred email marketing platform and send the email updates.

The goal here, once again, is to bring people back to your campaign’s Messenger flow and open the messaging window.

⚡Pro tip:

When you ask for people’s email address, or telephone number, be honest about why you’re asking. Tell them that the reason you want them to give you their information is to notify them when they reach the goal of your campaign.

Before you go.

Facebook made Messenger marketing a tad more difficult, but the high engagement rates of the platform make it a marketing channel that’s still worthy of pursuing.

The only real obstacle is the “24-hour” messaging window, but you can overcome it by leveraging referral marketing, email marketing, and SMS, and you can do it all from one place.

To make Messenger work for your business, you have to build an “ecosystem” of messaging techniques that will bring people back again and again.

I want to know what you think. Is Messenger worth it, as a marketing channel?

Originally published at Viral Loops

A 5 step Messenger Marketing plan. was originally published in Inside Viral Loops on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few years back, I was in a call with Dan Walchonok; he’s been working with Hubspot as the Director of Product Analytics, and he’s the Product guy at Reforge, so he knows what he’s talking about.

He told me: “If you have a good retention rate, nothing else matters.”

Many of our customers own/run eCommerce stores. They use Viral Loops, mainly to acquire new customers or to generate buzz for a new product in their store.

Yes, referral marketing is an affordable way to fill the top of your funnel with hot leads, but is acquisition what an eCommerce store needs to grow?

In the early days of every eCommerce store, there’s an obsession with customer acquisition- which is normal. But many times, this obsession carries on even in later stages.

But did you know that it costs 16 times more to build a long-term relationship with a new customer, compared to keeping existing?

Everyone focuses on new customers and forgets that around 40% of the revenue comes from 8% of the total traffic. This 8% is returning customers.

Throughout this article, we’re going through how to calculate and boost your eCommerce store’s customer retention.

What Customer Retention is, and how to calculate it.

The term “Customer Retention” refers to the ability of a business to retain its customers.

Customer retention is influenced by the number of new customers, and the number of existing customers that churn or don’t come back for another purchase.

Given a specific period, you can measure your eCommerce store’s retention by calculating the Customer Retention Rate.

Customer Retention Rate equation.

Let’s say that you want to calculate your store’s retention rate for 30 days.

Customer Retention Rate= ((# of customers at the end of the 30 days — # of new customers during the 30 days) / # of customers at the beginning of the 30 days) * 100

Let’s see an example:

If you start June with 50 customers, and by the end of the month you gain 40 new customers, and five customers churn. According to these metrics, you have:

• # of customers at the end of the 30 days = 50 + 40–5 = 85
• # of new customers during the 30 days = 40
• # of customers at the beginning of the 30 days = 50

So your Customer Retention Rate for June is:

((85–40) / 50) * 100 = 90%

Calculating your Customer Retention Rate is only the first step. Having churned customers is part of the game, but you have to identify if you have a problem with retaining your customers.

Do you know what the most common answer to all marketing-related questions I receive is?

“It depends on the industry you’re in.”

That’s partially the answer to what a good retention rate is. You can’t expect to achieve the same retention rate as a retail store if you’re selling cars.

Let’s look at some examples of the average retention rate across different industries.

• Retail: 63%
• Banking: 75%
• Telecom: 78%
• IT Services: 81%
• Insurance: 83%

As I’ve already mentioned, calculating your eCommerce store’s Customer Retention Rate is only the first step of the process.

If your customer retention rate is low, you should investigate the reasons that your customer’s churn, and start improving your pain points.

How to boost your eCommerce store’s retention rate.

The investigation for patterns behind the reasons your customers churn will provide you insight for your store’s UX & UI, mobile-friendliness, your targeting, messaging, and pricing.

Although these are essential things, this article is about the marketing initiatives that you can take to increase your customer retention rate.

One of the most overlooked ways to increase customer retention rate is customer support.

How long does it take you to answer to your store’s customers/visitors?

Did you know that more than half of consumers expect a response from customer service within an hour, even on weekends?

Ensuring you provide answers within a short time, adds up to the customer’s experience. Also, if you get creative with the way you handle support tickets, you might even go viral, like Rackspace.

Here’s the story:

During a marathon troubleshooting session, a support engineer of Rackspace heard the customer was hungry, so she ordered them a pizza!

That’s a great example to follow.

Learning more about your customers.

For all the marketing initiatives we’re going to talk about further down the article, you need some degree of detail about your customers. The goal is to provide personalized experiences, and to do so; you have to add multiple data collection points.

For this article, we’re going to keep it simple. If you want to learn more about data collection and personalized experiences, BigCommerce has an excellent guide.

The data points you’ll need to collect:

• Name.
• Email address.
• Location.
• Purchase history.
• Abandoned items in cart.

The easiest way to get access to these data points is by getting people to sign up to your store to complete their order.

Sometimes the process of signing up is tedious for users. It might turn them off. One thing you can try is to allow them to check out as guests and then ask them to create an account in the order confirmation email.

After collecting all the necessary data, you can:

• Send personalized newsletters based on purchase history.
• Make repeated purchases easier.
• Remind your users of the abandoned items in their carts.
• Send birthday/anniversary offers.

Personalized newsletters.

We think it’s pretty straightforward, so instead of telling you what to do, we’ll just tell you what not to!

Please, don’t send every new product or deal to everyone. Trust us; women are not interested in men’s pajamas (unless it’s father’s day, which then is a good idea).

This kind of campaign should be as targeted as possible. You can create newsletters that include items based on your customer’s past purchases.

Make repeated purchases easy.

There’s a list of items that people buy on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

Coffee, sanitary products, etc.

Let’s say your store sells liquids for vaping fellas. You can send them an email based on their previous purchase, around the time they will need to repurchase their juices.

Based on the same criteria, you can send a campaign including a special offer considering their most preferred product with an addition of other relevant products.

The goal here is to make a repeating purchase feel as fast as possible. Think what a game-changer was the “1-click purchase” that Amazon introduced in 1997 (wow).

Most email marketing platforms offer the ability to repurchase campaigns, and it’s easier than it sounds.

Saving abandoned cart items.

No matter the reason for people to not complete a purchase, cart abandonment campaigns have been proven to be very effective as shoppers are close to the conversion, and all it takes is just some gentle nudge to push them to checkout.

A great Cart Abandonment campaign consists of 3 things:

1. Context — you have to inform people what they’ve left in their cart.
2. Copy — ”you forgot to buy your ITEM” doesn’t work. You have to make both your subject and email body appealing.
3. Visuals — although a plain-text email might do the job, adding a suitable photograph can act as an emotional trigger.

Reinforcing customer loyalty with Referral Marketing.

As I wrote in the opening paragraph of the article, referral marketing is an affordable way to fill the top of your funnel with hot leads.

A fact that’s often overlooked is that an eCommerce store can use a referral marketing program to generate more sales while giving an extra incentive for customers to purchase again.

If you’ve seen our list with the best 100 referral marketing examples, you know that most of the eCommerce stores in that list use a double-sided reward system.

The idea is simple.

When a customer completes a purchase, you can incentivize them to invite their friends to purchase from your store with a discount. When their friends make a purchase, your original customer also receives a discount for their next order.

If you want to build a referral marketing program with double-sided rewards for your eCommerce store, you can use our Altruistic referral template.

Before you go.

The best way to ensure that your eCommerce store grows is to make people buy from you again.

If you’re not doing it already, calculate your current customer retention rate. The metric will provide insight as to why people don’t buy from you again, and a place to start optimizing your store.

If your business suffers from a low retention rate, it’s possible to fix it, starting with minor adjustments and then with more sophisticated experiments.

Originally published at Viral Loops

Boost your eCommerce store’s customer retention was originally published in Inside Viral Loops on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The first question that emerges when discussing any possible solution to a problem is ‘why?’

Why virality and word of mouth?

I would say because it’s a marketing channel based entirely on your product and it doesn’t rely specifically on any other channel.

Then I would provide extra support to my argument by saying that word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20% to 50% of all purchasing decisions and also it’s 10x more effective than traditional advertising, as people are really sick and tired of being pushed to buy things.

Paid advertising is almost dead.

Relying on ‘rented’ space to acquire loyal customers, is a risky practice.

Plus, by increasing virality, you decrease your CPA as more people get to use your product by keeping your marketing budget at the same level.

I bet that you hear a lot about the power of word of mouth. But what is it really?

Word of what?

Word of mouth is a phenomenon where people love something so much, they just cannot stop boasting about it, until everyone gets to try it.

And if anybody has something bad to say about it, then these passionate fans are able to go full berserk in order to protect it.

It sounds stupid, but it happens.

Let’s see 4 simple things- at least in theory, you can do to generate word of mouth for your product:

1. Have a great product, meaning that your product should solve a problem even for a small niche and actually work the way it’s supposed to.
2. Keep your customer support in high priority. Humans love being treated well!
3. Build communities! The big bang of the internet happened not because of products but because it offered the ability to people to finally belong somewhere. Building a community is vital, and if you ask me, it’s better to start building one for your niche even before having a product to sell.
4. Love your customers. Help them in any way that you are able to! If you have a saas product, you can write a case study about them, or just support them by buying something they sell.

Actually, about customer support, I have a funny story.

During a marathon troubleshooting session, a support engineer of Rackspace heard the customer was hungry, so she ordered them a pizza! How can the customer resist to not talk about this?

Another funny case is Shazam. Its users didn’t even have to talk about it!

When scanning for a song using the app, they would hold their phone near to a speaker. That, of course, raised the obvious question around them:

‘Dude what are you doing?’

The power to create curiosity is more powerful than words as curiosity is integrated into our DNA.

Some great Word of Mouth examples.

TOMS

TOMS is a very interesting brand. The brand’s story is a killer.

A guy who lost in the final of The Amazing Race, saw first hand the need for shoes of kids in Argentina, and decided to make and sell shoes, donating one pair for each pair sold.

I don’t know if Blake Mycoskie is actually that angel of a person, but I know for sure that the majority of people would want to be that kind-hearted.

That feeling- of doing a good thing, gave TOMS incredible leverage and allow the brand to expand in other industries as well (like sunglasses and coffee).

“We’re in business to improve lives” in the title of the TOMS website.

Apart from the “buy one, donate one” approach, the brand found other ways to reinforce word of mouth for their activities.

“One Day Without Shoes” is a great example; the challenge was to spend a day in public without shoes, to empathize with the children that don’t have a pair to wear.

Today, TOMS donated 45 million pairs of shoes to charity and allowed its customers to help another person.

Coca Cola

Coca Cola is the 5th biggest brand in the entire world. The company’s marketing campaigns are so legendary that some people still believe that the brand is responsible for the image of Santa Claus- which is not true.

But if I had to choose one of the company’s campaigns as a great example of word of mouth marketing, that would be “#ShareaCoke”.

This global campaign was based on the idea that if a consumer saw their names or their friends’ names on a Coca-Cola can or bottle, they would be more likely to purchase it.

The campaign became a sensation, with people using the hashtag on their social media account. It was so big that after a point they were using coke bottles to photograph their pets.

Even though the campaign is over, it seems like there was a demand for personalized bottles, so Coca Cola now offers the option to print your own custom Coca Cola bottle, and buy it.

Netflix

The streaming giant/film production company knows to do 3 things:

1. Great advertisement.
2. Embrace pop-culture.
3. Give users what they want.

Just about a week ago, a Twitter user posted this:

Of course, this advertisement went viral. But it’s not the first time that Netflix uses a real situation, or trend to make people talk about it.

I guess you’ve heard about “Netflix & chill”. The term appeared for the first time around 2010 but eventually got a spot in the Urban Dictionary. More people started using it regularly. Even parents got into the game- with a few hilarious results.

But Netflix’s success couldn’t rely on clever ads and slang language. The product itself makes people talk about it. I swear, every week I have another friend telling me about a new show they found on Netflix.

That’s because Netflix is well aware of what kind of shows/movies/series my friends enjoy. Since the very beginning, the service started tagging their content thoroughly, which gave them an immense amount of data for their user watching habits.

Satisfied customers are bound to talk to their friends about your product.

CrossFit

I have a friend that is the athletic kind of person. He does yoga, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training, swimming, surfing. He also does CrossFit training 1 per week.

He asked me why I don’t go CrossFit training with him.

“Isn’t it a bit intense?”, I asked.

“Yeah, you’re probably going to vomit in the first session”, he replied.

I don’t want that kind of exercise in my life at the moment. But still, what makes a person to be willing to endure that much intensity?

Let’s take a step back.

I always thought that CrossFit was a type of training, but as I later learned it started as a company. And the company crossed its way to being a lifestyle. It looks like people not only can endure the intensity, but they also can’t shut up about it.

Here’s one of the reasons:

This is a CrossFit board. You’ll find one in every CrossFit gym, and its role is to keep track of each member’s performance, inspire them to become better, and create a healthy competition among members.

The first time I heard about CrossFit, was when someone told me that they are very sore, but it was worth it because they broke their pull up record during their CrossFit training.

Virality Vs. Word of mouth

So, what’s the difference between virality and word of mouth?

Virality is a phenomenon where people spread the word about an offering, in the context of using it, rather than loving it, which is what happens with word of mouth.

In other words, virality has always to do with some sort of reward. Love, on the other hand, is unconditional.

I have 2 examples for you:

Kickstarter leverages user campaign for virality, as when a campaign creator spreads the word about his project, he helps Kickstarter reach higher user adoption.

The same mindset applies to product hunt. When a hunter submits a product, both the hunter and maker spread the word about it, bringing in more people in the platform.

Now, we know that both virality and network effects lead to growth but they are not the same by any means.

Eventbrite, for example, uses virality but not network effect, as in order for the organizer to get more registrants for their event, they have to spread the word in other platforms and external networks.

On the other hand, a platform like LinkedIn is designed to use network effects as you have to be a LinkedIn member in order to connect with other people through it.

As you can understand, virality is a business design problem and not just a marketing strategy. You have to make it part of your business model in order for it to work.

Now, there are 2 types of virality which I will explain and I’ll also give you some examples to get inspired by how you can get them to work for you.

First, we have Pull Product Virality (PPV), product virality where existing users require people in their network to join to gain value out of a feature.

You can see that type of virality on an app like Splitwise where you need friends on the product to input money owing and money lent. Or, with Whatsapp where you should have your friends and family in to communicate.

Snapchat also works the same way because need friends in Snapchat to see snaps and be seen.

Then, we have Distribution Product Virality (DPV), product virality where existing users spread awareness of a product to their network.

Instagram’s cross-posting was a game-changer for them; You can share your photos on Facebook and Twitter and even non-users will get in.

The same thing happened in Facebook’s early days.

If a tagged friend wasn’t on Facebook, she would receive an email prompting her to create an account.

How to measure Virality

The way that someone can measure virality is through the calculation of viral coefficient or the k-factor.

The k-factor is the total number of registrations per unique inviting user.

So, if 1 in 5 of your users will successfully recruit a new user in their first month, your viral factor is 1/5 = 0.2, and our initial 5,000 users will recruit another 5,000 * 0.2 = 1,000 users in month #1.

I will get you out of the trouble to look for industry benchmarks on that by saying that for a consumer internet product, a sustainable viral factor of 0.15 to 0.25 is good, 0.4 is great, and around 0.7 is outstanding.

But here’s the problem:

When our viral factor is less than 1, we acquire users at a decreasing rate until we grow no more.

That isn’t an outcome that anybody wants, so is there something we’re missing?

Yes! We are missing all of the other channels with which you can acquire users like the Press, direct traffic, inbound marketing, paid advertising, SEM, SEO etc.

You see it’s truly rare to attain a viral factor of more than 1.

As I told you, you can measure virality by using the k-factor, but this is just an indicator of how your referral marketing works.

In order to see how virality affects your overall growth, you have to take into consideration your amplification factor.

The number of users acquired through non-viral channels by our amplification factor will reveal the real growth of your user base.

You can calculate the amplification factor by dividing 1 by the result of subtracting of your viral factor from 1.

In case I messed you up, you can see the equation in the image above.

Apart from your main marketing funnel, you can have multiple sub funnel, and your viral loop is no exception.

You should treat your viral loop as a funnel with several stages that can be optimized, so as to maximize your viral factor.

Here’s a basic anatomy of a viral funnel:

1. The top of the funnel is the step where the user becomes aware that she can invite someone.
2. Then the second step is where the users submit the invite form.
3. The third step includes them sending the actual invitation.
4. Then the fourth step is where the invitee gets the invitation
5. The fifth and last step is when the invitee accepts the invitation and registers.

TL;DR

• Paid advertising is rented space.
• Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20% to 50% of all purchasing decisions.
• People love to talk about their achievements, make sure your product makes them feel good about themselves.
• Deep knowledge of what an audience enjoys, will help you serve your customers better. Customer satisfaction is still the #1 reason behind word of mouth.
• Virality and Word of Mouth are not the same things.
• In order to see how virality affects your overall growth, you have to take into consideration your amplification factor.

Originally published at Viral Loops

Word of Mouth Marketing: The future is now was originally published in Inside Viral Loops on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I feel like I’m of the lucky ones.

My job is about writing for a company that sells a product online. I can do that from home. Even in an economic crash instance, I could find something to do online to make ends meet.

During the quarantine period, I haven’t stopped working. I continued getting my salary, paying my bills, and taking care of myself.

Yet, some people are not that lucky.

I’ll stop you right here.

This article has nothing sentimental about it. It’s about only one thing: Making a Brick-and-Mortar business thrive in a post-Coronavirus world.

We’ll take a look at where brick-and-mortar business owners should start and how to take a physical store online.

We’ve published another article, last month, about the 4 Things all businesses should do amid the Coronavirus. I think you should also check it out.

Let’s get into it.

The impact of COVID-19

I think that apart from the travel industry, retail was hit the hardest by the pandemic.

People started buying only for their daily needs. We all remember the toilet paper hoarders.

Let’s see a monthly retail sales comparison of the impact of Coronavirus in the United States.

Find more statistics at Statista

The Atlantic wrote:

“Department stores and clothing stores are facing an extinction-level event after having experienced years of decline.”

The more sales dropped, the more businesses started laying people off, which results in more empty pockets, which leads to even fewer sales, which also results in more empty pockets. It’s the snake that eats its own tail.

But are things that terrible?

The situation is dark, but there are things that we can do. This pandemic didn’t drop brick-and-mortar sales; this is just a symptom. The truth is that the consumers changed the way they shop.

It surely is a misstep for your business, but you can also change the way you sell your inventory.

The 1st thing you can do today.

The truth is that when I was researching for this article, I stumbled upon the term “Dark store.”

Of course, I was intrigued.

Then I got disappointed because I knew what the term refers to, but I didn’t realize there was a name for it.

So, a Dark store is a retail outlet or distribution center that caters exclusively for online shopping.

Although the model was popular with grocery stores, due to the events of the COVID-19 outbreak, other businesses starting adopting it, as well.

Brick-and-mortar retail stores are being converted to fulfillment centers, adopting a “ship-from-store” program.

Bed&Bath closed all its stores at the beginning of the crisis, but after seeing an 85% increase in online orders, the reopened 25% of the stores as fulfillment centers.

So what should you do? Open a dark store?

The 1st thing you should do is two things:

1. Convert your regular store into a dark store.
2. Start selling online.

I know it sounds like a lot of work, and it is. But it’s something that might save the business- and create possibilities for the future.

I don’t know anything about the process of turning a retail store to a dark store. The legal requirements may vary from state to state or from country to country. It’s wise to ask someone to help you with that, a lawyer probably.

In the meantime, you should be preparing to start selling online.

Taking a brick-and-mortar business online.

This is short of a technical part.

You can either try to do it yourself or hire someone for the job. The latter is going to cost you, but you’ll save a lot of time.

Overall, here’s how you can take your brick-and-mortar store online in 5 steps:

1. Buy a domain.
2. Run a prelaunch campaign.
3. Build your eCommerce store.
4. Launch!
5. Sell.

Buy a domain.

This step is rather obvious. Your online store needs a domain name. You can buy one by using a service like GoDaddy or Hostinger.

All you have to do is to find a reliable domain registrar, search for a preferred domain name, buy it, and register it.

I’m not going to into the exact details on how to perform those steps. For that, you can check Hostringer’s “How to Buy a Domain Name — A Simple Guide.” It’s the best resource I could find on buying a domain.

Running a prelaunch campaign.

If you’re a reader of our blog, you know that I’ve written numerous articles about the importance of prelaunch campaigns, and how to set them up.

The first thing you have to do is to build a “coming soon page.”

The example in the image above is also a great idea. It’s the subscription model.

If you have items in your inventory that you know people buy in a recurring way, you can bundle those items and make them part of your prelaunch campaign.

Nevertheless, if you need inspiration for your prelaunch landing page, I have 40 coming soon page examples. The article also included a short guide on how to build your own coming soon page.

The gist of the short guide; if you want to build a coming soon page, you need three tools:

1. A landing page builder or a CMS.
2. An Email Marketing platform.
3. A Referral Marketing software.

The landing page’s role is to describe what’s coming up from your store and capture emails.

That’s it.

You can provide incentives to people to get them to subscribe or refer their friends. That’s where Viral Loops might come in hand.

To make Viral Loops easy to use, we created templates that will help you build the ideal campaign based on the way you want to reward people.

• Template for giving early access, inspired by Robinhood.
• Template for providing rewards, inspired by Harry’s.

Then, on the day you launch your eCommerce store, you’ll use an email marketing tool (like Mailchimp), to notify the prelaunch subscribers.

If it sounds like a lot of work to do, we can help you with that.

You can use The Viral Loops concierge service and let us and grow your prelaunch campaign.

Building and launching an online store.

The first thing you need to do before start building your online store is deciding which eCommerce platform you’re going to use.

You can always hire someone to build you a custom CMS, but custom solutions bring custom problems. And custom problems are expensive.

If I were in your shoes, I would go with Shopify.

It’s probably the most popular option for eCommerce stores, which means that there’s a vast community, and a ton of information online.

There’s also a variety of Shopify apps that will make your life easier. Shopify offers a theme collection that will help you get started with the layout of your store, faster.

Your online store’s initial launch depends heavily on the prelaunch phase that I described in the previous section of this article.

Even if a prelaunch campaign is a great push, it can’t carry the weight of your entire plan. You have to make sure that when your online store launches, it will already be as optimized as possible.

First, you have to define your buyer persona. This process will help you identify your online message and the values that your customers appreciate and enjoy.

Then on the more technical side, you have to:

• Optimize your store’s SEO.
• Start using social media.
• Produce relevant content.
• Create a list building mechanism.
• Run ads.
• Drive sales via referrals.

I’ve covered everything you need to know about driving traffic to a Shopify store, in a previous article. Make sure to give it a look.

An interesting approach would be to combine list building with referral marketing and Facebook ads.

By splitting all audiences in their dedicated adset and running personalized campaigns, you can reduce your Facebook CPL (Cost Per Lead) by a significant percentage.

When the Corona outbreak ends.

The impact of COVID-19 on the world economy is yet to be seen. Whatever happens, the crisis shaped consumer habits forever. Even if everything goes back to the way it was, making an opening to the online market, it would be inevitable for your brick-and-mortar business.

Even if your physical store opens its doors to the public, you should keep “pushing them” to buy from your online store.

e.g.

The cashier could register them to your eCommerce store and give them a discount for their next online order from you.

Before you go.

The outbreak of the Coronavirus dealt a significant amount of damage to the retail industry and kept brick-and-mortar businesses closed.

Consumer habits also changed, and online sales have gone up. It looks like the perfect time for a brick-and-mortar store to go online. This can be done in 3 steps:

1. Convert the physical store to a dark store.
2. Launch an eCommerce store.
3. Use the dark store as an order fulfillment center.

Even after the outbreak ends, you can use your physical store to sell to people online. Your eCommerce store could be a cost-effective way to grow your business and a very convenient choice for your new and existing customers.

Originally published at Viral Loops

Brick-and-Mortar after Coronavirus: Making a comeback. was originally published in Inside Viral Loops on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My first interaction with PayPal was through eBay, back in 2005 (or 2006). My first reaction was, “why should I pay via another service? I already have a debit card.”

I wasn’t willing to find out why; all I wanted was to make the purchase. So I did. Later I found out it was more secure than giving my card numbers– silly 17yo me.

Fast forward nine years in the future, and while I’m on my first marketing job, somebody mentions the “PayPal Mafia.” I was intrigued.

When I found about the people belonging to that group, I was dumbfounded.

Paypal is a monument among internet companies, as it didn’t only change the way we shop online, it also brought to the spotlight a marketing channel that many of today’s internet giants ripped off.

Referral marketing.

The people from Dropbox were never timid to talk about the direct influence that Paypal’s referral program had on their decision to build one for Dropbox.

Read how Dropbox grew 3900% with their referral program.

Since this referral program left such a footprint in the way that we do marketing in 2020, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to write a complete case study about it.

Let’s see how Paypal attained up to 10% daily growth with their referral program.

What made PayPal run a referral program?

As every company, PayPal faced the usual question: “How do we get more clients?”

We have to understand that the company started in a very different era than the one we’re living in now. People didn’t use the internet the way we use it now, and more importantly, people didn’t use their phones to make a purchase on a bus ride back home.

According to Peter Thiel, they though that PayPal had to raise money so it could raise more money so it could then figure out what to do with all that money. And they managed to get angel investment, which led to a 5.4M funding from Nokia Ventures.

As I wrote earlier, mobile wasn’t quite there yet, and the company decided to pivot to their final model, which was to send money to anyone just by using an email address.

Soon they realized that advertising was far too expensive, and potential BD deals with banks failed mostly due to bureaucracy and the inability of bankers to understand online payments.

For the people in PayPal, it was clear that the only way to grow was organically and at a viral pace; “model it just like bacteria growth in a Petri dish,” as Elon Musk later said in an interview.

The decision was to give $20 to anyone opening a PayPal account, and another $20 for referring another user to open an account. Later they dropped the reward to $10 and eventually to $5 per signup or referral.

Below you can see how PayPal showcased their proto-referral program on their homepage in 2000:

PayPal’s referral incentives landed them a crazy viral growth rate; we’re talking for a 7 to 10% daily growth rate. To be more precise, PayPal reached 100M users.

Then they decided to stop. Οpinions are divergent as to why that happened. Peter Thiel said that although user growth was exponential, so was cost structure, and there was no incoming revenue.

Elon Musk, in his interview with Sal Khan, said: “As the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer.”

I believe that both opinions are right; different sides of the same coin.

The key here is the network effect that PayPal managed to build over time. The truth is that they need more money to continue what they were doing, and their exponential growth offered them a very flattering piece in The Wallstreet Journal, evaluating the company at $500M.

The following month, PayPal secured another funding round.

The rest is history; eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5B, and the founders (and some employees) later created huge companies like Tesla, SpaceX, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Yelp.

Although this story is an excellent material for a fairy tale, bear in mind the amount of risk involved. The whole “raise money, to raise more money, to raise more money” was risky on its own, and PayPal spent a total of $60 or $70 million for signups and referrals.

Everything could easily go south, but it seems that “fortune favors the brave” fitted like a glove in this case.

How to grow exponentially with a referral program, like PayPal.

The chances are that you don’t have these Silicon Valley connections, or that your product/business is not a pioneer in an industry that doesn’t fully exist yet, or that you have $60M to spend on user acquisition.

But all that doesn’t mean that you can’t build a referral program that will help you grow at a fast rate.

Let’s see what made PayPal’s referral so successful:

1. The product was innovative and appealed to the people involved in digital tech.
2. There was a double-sided reward, and there was an incentive to sign up whether you came from a referral or not.
3. The reward (cash) was the best fit for PayPal, as the product had to do with online payments.

If you want to build a referral marketing program similar to Paypal, you can use our Altruistic referral template.

I’m not going to elaborate on why your product must be appealing to your audience since it’s 2020, and that statement is rather obvious. Your product, or service, should either address a problem or ride the wave of a trend.

Now, if you looked at our article with the 100 best referral marketing examples, you’ve already noticed that double-sided rewards are prevalent when it comes to rewarding mechanics.

It works great for any type of business- from tech companies to eCommerce stores, as it appeals to the altruistic side of our human nature.

As I wrote in the opening paragraph, PayPal’s case acted as a direct inspiration for companies like Dropbox. Many believe that the was the “reward people to refer their friends” part that sparked the idea for the people at Dropbox to use referral marketing, and that’s partially true.

PayPal showed the way (unwittingly, in my opinion), to how to choose a referral reward. I mentioned that cash, in PayPal’s case, was the best reward as money was an integral part of the company’s product.

Dropbox translated that into more storage space in exchange for referrals, Airbnb offered travel credit, and Uber gave free rides. There’s an excellent example that showcases my point.

World of Warcraft.

Blizzard entertainment took the gaming world by storm when they released their massively multiplayer online role-playing game released in 2004. Online gaming changed forever.

In-game socializing plays a massive role in how well you’ll do in the game, and since the actual game never ends, players competed for social ranking and rare items. It’s a micro-universe.

In addition to that, to play on the official servers requires buying game time, which, if you play for years, adds up to a lot of money.

World of Warcraft’s refer-a-friend program addresses these issues by offering free game time, rare items, and bonus experience points (if you’ve ever played an RPG game, you know what I’m talking about.)

My point is that your referral rewards should prompt the user to use your product, not just bribe them to get on board.

Before you go.

Paypal not only changed the way that we make online payments but also how companies do referral marketing.

Their approach was somewhat risky and unstable, but they managed to grow their user base exponentially, which landed them more funding rounds and an acquisition that spawned some of the most prominent digital companies of today.

Whether you have $70M to spend on acquiring customers, or not, you can use referral marketing to increase your growth rates at a quick pace.

Start building your referral program- similar to PayPal today!

Originally published at Viral Loops

The Paypal referral program: Getting to 100M users. was originally published in Inside Viral Loops on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After one thousand and one blog posts about referral marketing here in Viral Loops, we believe we have already established how vital referral marketing is for your user acquisition and marketing campaigns.

We want to make sure that you can use Viral Loops everywhere — using our Landing Page, a Shopify Store, and of course, any WordPress website in the world.

If you’ve been living in a cave for the past decade and a half, WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) for building websites and blogs across the Internet (36.28 % of Top 1M sites).

This doesn’t come as a surprise as WordPress is an open-source project which is super user-friendly, feature-rich, and supported by a community of hundreds of thousands of web developers.

In this full-guide, we’re going to show you how you can run a Viral Loops campaign from your WordPress website.

Why you need a prelaunch campaign.

I used to think that the sole purpose of a prelaunch campaign is to gather leads for an upcoming project. While this is partially true, there’s more into it.

Overall, a prelaunch campaign allows you to expand on three verticals:

1. Gather leads.
2. Test the market for interest in your product/service.
3. Gather feedback from early adopters.

Gathering feedback from early adopters is an often overlooked aspect of prelaunch campaigns, as most of us are obsessed with hitting quantitative goals.

If you want to get an in-depth look at how you can use your early adopters to gather valuable feedback, you should take a look at our dedicated article.

A product prelaunch is much more than getting early adopters.

Overall, the process is simple; You gather a list of early adopters, you segment this list, and then you interview people. These interviews will provide you with info that will help you in your product development process and ensure that you’ll build something that people want and understand how to use.

Things you must decide before your campaign.

Recently I was watching a video by Tim Ferris about journaling. He said that one of the things he learned over the years is that complexity fails.

There are two ways to avoid complexity:

1. You can make things extremely simple.
2. You can schedule/plan things ahead of time.

But why pick one over the other? You should aim for both.

Your prelaunch campaign should be simple enough to require as little resources as possible, and you’ll plan things so you can avoid friction and miscommunication.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed about coming up with tasks, you don’t have to worry that much. I’ve listed the basics for you:

1. Decide your main message.
2. Prepare and educate your team.
3. Set up your campaign’s goals and metrics.
4. Define a time frame for your campaign.

To decide your campaign’s main message, I propose to give a good look at what your competitors do. There may be somebody else out there that built a product similar to yours that has already done enough research about it.

I don’t say by any means to copy what other people do, but you have the opportunity to learn a bit about the language that your competitors use, and also come up with a market gap that you can fill with your product.

About the time frame of your campaign, I know when starting up, there’s a desire to launch it ASAP. I strongly advise against rushing things. You need enough time to gather an initial set of leads and gather feedback.

Robinhood, for example, run their prelaunch campaign for over a year to gather 1M users.

If you want to learn more about prelaunch campaigns, the only thing you have to do is to read our huge guide.

After planning your prelaunch campaign, it’s time to build it inside your WordPress site. Let’s see how you can do it using Viral Loops in 4 steps.

The Milestone Referral Template + WordPress= ❤

Step 1

Create your campaign in the Viral Loops app. Follow the campaign wizard steps and edit all your campaign settings up to the Installation step.

We’re going to showcase our guide using the Milestone Referral Template, but the process is precisely the same for all our referral marketing Templates.

Step 2

Click on the “I’ll do it myself” option.

In the following steps, you are going to add some code on your WordPress pages. Keep in mind that the code needs to be on the same page (URL) that you have submitted on the Info step of the campaign wizard.

Step 3

All of a sudden, lines of codes start popping everywhere.

Don’t panic! Let me tell you what this precious code does for your campaign.

• The first big part is the one that helps us connect your WordPress website with Viral Loops. It is essential for campaign tracking, and nothing else would work if this chunk is missing.
• The smaller parts are for the widgets that you’re going to embed on your page (Form Widget, Milestone Widget, Referral Count Widget).

Step 4

You can place the campaign JavaScript snippet in your theme’s code or as part of your campaign page in WordPress (both in Gutenberg and in Classic Editor). This should be placed last relatively to the other widget codes.

If you need any help with this part, please refer to our dedicated Help Center documentation.

However, your widget code should be added directly to your editor.

On Gutenberg Editor, you can add your widget as an HTML code using a dedicated HTML Block.

On Classic Editor, you would need to switch from the “Visual” to the “Text” tab of your editor and place your respective HTML widget code exactly where you need it to be.

In the case you’re using a Page Builder plugin such as Elementor or WPBakery, there are Custom HTML block options for them as well.

Originally published at Viral Loops

How to set up a prelaunch campaign on a WordPress site was originally published in Inside Viral Loops on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Have you ever met anyone being completely secretive about a new product they’re building?

Products are not black-ops programs, and in the era that a product prelaunch is an essential element of success, you need people to know as much as possible before launching.

That’s where a coming soon page comes in handy.

Whether you’re planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign, or funding a project by yourself, you want to put it out to the world as soon as possible.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the best pages we found and examine what makes a great one.

Finally, we’ll go through the tools and process that will help you build your own, and launch your new product with a buzz.

Why you need a coming soon page.

You have to understand that a page like this acts as a window from where the world can take a glimpse of what you’ll eventually offer.

But it’s not like this is the only benefit.

You need a coming soon page for four reasons:

1. You can communicate how your product works.
2. It’s an opportunity to test your brand’s message.
3. You’ll generate leads.
4. It’s a chance to receive constructive feedback, conduct user interviews, and launch a better product.

The four reasons mentioned above are interconnected with each other.

To build a better product, you need feedback. You’ll get that feedback from early adopters, whom you’ll capture with your brand messaging and the premise for your product.

Many people overlook the usage of branding voice. Don’t be like that.

Give time to think carefully about your brand’s identity as it’s something that builds communities around products. TheSkimm utilized branding to create a fanatic fan base for their newsletter.

Harry’s razors also leveraged their funny and witty branding voice before launching.

What makes a coming soon page great.

Our narcissistic nature- as humans, pushes us to believe that when something works out for others, it’s out of pure luck.

Although life is very random when looking at the big picture, it has been proven that some things are possible to plan.

In other words, you can’t expect luck to grace you. You need to be prepared, expecting to fall victim to the lack of it.

There are recipes you can follow if you want something to work, and although you can never be 100% sure of the outcome, they are an excellent place to start.

So, such a page should include three key elements:

1. Clear value proposition.
2. Branding and design.
3. Call to action.

The value proposition informs people about the problem you’re planning to fix with your product. In Robihood’s case, the value proposition was commission-free stock trading.

According to Wikipedia, a brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.

They say that people don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves.

Maybe the best example of how branding works is the iPod.

Instead of advertising the storage capabilities of the mp3 player, Apple decided to point out that by buying an iPod, you’re going to have 1,000 songs in your pocket.

Now, the call-to-action is what the name suggests; it’s an element that is supposed to tell the visitor what to do to get the benefit presented by the product.

There’s a notion that a call-to-action is supposed to be a button, but the truth is that it could be a combination of a tagline and a button.

e.g.

Tagline: “Be the first to try it when we launch.”

Button: “Join the waitlist.”

Now that we’ve seen the elements that make a coming soon page great let’s take a look at the 40 best examples we found that fulfill the criteria.

Providing extra incentives.

Although it’s not a must-do, providing extra incentives for signing up can move the needle.

This is made possible via referral marketing, which apart from the main benefit- boosting word of mouth, it allows you to reduce your CPL (cost per lead).

There are many options when it comes to referral rewards, but overall they are divided into two categories:

1. Early access.
2. Prizes.

The best 40 coming soon page examples.

1. AdTerminal

2. Allbirds

3. Apple Arcade

4. Apple TV+

5. Buffer Analyze

6. Byte

7. Deximal

8. Disney+

9. Dropbox Paper

10. Duolingo

11. Equal Parts

12. Everlane

13. Evrybo

14. Freetrade

15. Freewrite

16. GoBlog

17. Juicy

18. Launchday

19. Mindjournal

20. Mint

21. Pitch

22. Proposals

23. Quip

24. Robinhood

25. Slidescamp

26. Spoil

27. Stopwatch

28. Stuvio

29. Superhuman

30. Supply

31. TeekTak

32. Themezilla

33. Transistor

34. Typenugget

35. Viewple

36. Voyager

37. Webconf.asia

38. Webflow Interactions

39. Wistia Brandwagon

40. Workweek

The tools you need to launch your coming soon pages.

As you probably understand, such a page cannot come to life just by imagining how it looks.

You need to find the proper tool that will do the job efficiently and in a fast manner. Overall, there are four kinds of tools that you can use.

1. A landing page builder.
2. A CMS (Content Management System).
3. An Email Marketing platform.
4. A Referral Marketing software.

1. Landing page builder.

A landing page builder will allow you to create landing pages quickly, as they are more than often easy to use, and they come with a lot of pre-made templates you can use.

Apart from that, most of these platforms allow you to create multiple variations of your pages. That’s great for testing different designs, calls-to-action, and copywriting in general.

On the downside, landing page builders might seem a bit pricey if you plan to use it only to create one landing page.

Recommended platforms:

• Leadpages.
• Unbounce.
• Instapage.

2. CMS (Content Management System).

Content management systems are tools you can utilize to build anything from a simple landing page to a blog, or a fully functioning website.

There are many available themes and templates you can use, but these platforms are, most of the time, easy to use. That allows you to build your custom themes.

Although using a CMS gives you many options in functionality, they often require third-party tools and plugins to work correctly.

Another thing that’s great about content management systems is the plethora of information and tutorials to help you get started.

Recommended platforms:

• WordPress.
• Webflow.

3. Email Marketing platform.

The reason you need an email marketing platform is rather apparent.

After capturing your leads, you need to open a conversation with them to gather feedback, or just to send them updates considering your launch.

These platforms are straightforward to use and offer many capabilities in terms of segmenting users. That way, you’ll ensure that you send the right message to the right person.

More and more of these platforms started rolling out landing page building features, but most of the time are not that sophisticated.

Recommended platforms:

• Mailchimp.
• Active Campaign.
• ConvertKit.

4. Referral Marketing software.

In case you decide to provide extra incentives to people for signing up, you’ll need a referral marketing platform.

You need a way to track and assign successful referrals to specific users and reward them accordingly.

There are two ways to reward early adopters:

1. Giving early access.
2. Providing rewards.

To make Viral Loops easy to use, we created templates that will help you build the ideal campaign based on the way you want to reward people.

• Template for giving early access, inspired by Robinhood.
• Template for providing rewards, inspired by Harry’s.

Originally published at Viral Loops

40 coming soon page examples and how to build yours. was originally published in Inside Viral Loops on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.