"Leveraging free & paid channels to fuel growth" by Stefano Pochet

Stefano Pochet

Leveraging free and paid channels to fuel growth

Head of Growth at MasteredGrowth Hacker at BlikBook, Visual.ly and Fanpage.itFreebar.com

Stefano Pochet

Growing Visual.ly B2B customare base with cold emailing

Leveraging free channels to fuel Growth

Visual.ly offered marketing content production to businessesGreat product, experiencing 50% month over month organic growth

Visual.ly, B2B infographic marketplace

Responsible for growing the number of quality leads to Visual.ly marketplaceWe were searching for more companies that wanted to produce marketing content using Visual.lyNot managing marketing budget

Growth Team at Visual.ly

Main source of leads were the infographic showcase website and the blog- improved the lead acquisition funnel,

enhanced email marketing campaigns, data analysis, lead assignment prioritization

- Created a new channel: cold email prospecting

Strategies developed

What is cold email prospecting?

Sending marketing emails to people who had no prior contact with you

Does cold emailing really work?

Yes, if done right

At Visual.ly a successful cold email strategy:● Has brought 30 new qualified leads daily● With minimum negative side effects to

Visual.ly brand

1. Writing an effective email template

● Make it look like a manually written email● Send it from a senior member of the company● Be short and direct● Communicate your brand reputation (mention your clients, link case

studies)● A/B test the subject line

2. Capture recipient attention

● The key is to use data to generate a very personal email for the recipient. Try to use data about his location or about the company he works in.○ At Visually we were sending emails only when we had good

detailed data about the recipient● In case you don’t have personal data:

○ Scrape data or use third party services (eg Fliptop and Fullcontact) to get user personal information from an email address

Your minimum goal should be a 4% reply rate

An email template example

Minimizing negative effects to the brand

● Make it look like a manually written email● Be direct but not aggressive● Do not send too many emails (ensure a minimum 4% reply rate)● Track negative replies and if needed manually reply to some emails● Never re-email the same person● Scale it slowly● Limit the number of daily emails sent to each organization● Exclude specific companies/emails

Scaling it● Use a reliable email platform. Use Intercom● Build an efficient process to handle replies and qualify leads

○ Some customers will require up to 5 replies to be ready for a phone call

● Keep track of open rate/reply rate/conversion rate/negative feedback for each email segment

● Send the email at the right timing. Monday and mornings perform better

● Automate it○ Connect your CRM/website to remove existing leads

Some tips

● Recursively parse Fliptop and Fullcontact!

● To automate reply handling you can use Google prediction API

● A quality lead algorithm can help in qualifying leads

Getting emails (1)

Inbound

● Users signed up to your website/blog/app○ +30% email with data adding login via Facebook

● Reparse your existing user base through Fliptop and Fullcontact

Getting emails (2)

Work on the UI. Some examples:

● In forms, store the user email input before it is actually submitted● Use widgets at key sections:

○ OnExit popups. Anticipate the user’s intent to leave the site and show an appealing call to action

Getting emails: working on UI

Getting emails (3)

Outbound

● Third party services (eg Leadspace)● There are websites where you can scrape emails

○ At BlikBook our target market were University Teachers, so over 90% of our target market had data publicly available online

Is cold emailing legal?

It’s borderline. It depends on where you get the email addresses and the content of the email.

If the email will look like a personal manually written email negative feedback will be minimum

When you want to scale very fast ...

Leveraging Facebook Ads to grow Mastered revenue in 3 months from 0 to £ 250k monthly

Leveraging paid channels to fuel Growth

Online fashion courses for professionals

Exclusive teachersHigh price tag (£ 1000)4 months acquisition, target 1000 bookings

Mastered

Growth Team at Mastered

Responsible for the growth through any channel, including digital marketingHigh Marketing budget (up to £ 100k monthly) Ambitious target: grow from 0 to 250k revenue in 3 months

*by the way, we are hiring growth hackers!

- Instagram, Email marketing, Pinterest, Affiliates, Partnerships, Facebook groups, Scraping ...

The best way to grow the revenue that fast is:- Paid media

Strategies developed

Facebook ads

A wonderful growth hacker toy

With the right marketing and scientific skills it’s possible to scale marketing efforts: - very quickly - keeping an high ROI - with not much management

Growing with Facebook ads

Facebok ads is a marketplaceTo guarantee high delivery the key is to have a funnel in place so that you can show your ad at a high enough CPM- At Mastered the funnel structure has been

very important to make Facebook ads profitable

Develop a Facebook ads strategy

1. Develop a strategy that works for a given target audience.a. Small audience is okb. Doesn’t have to be very profitable

2. Scaling ita. Sometimes while scaling the efforts the ROI gets

better

Leverage what is great about Facebook ads:a. Targeting criteria

i. At the beginning don’t worry about narrowing the audience

b. The social factori. Excitement funnel sales

Let advertising be a fuel for a strong social strategy.

Developing the first strategy

Developing the first strategy

Your ad is not the post: is the post, the comments, the likes and the shares- At the beginning use organic posts and promote them to

your fan base before starting ads to new users- Keep an eye to the comments- Leave the ads on for a few days, with a minimum of

conversions (˜5 daily) to let the algorithm learn

Scaling it

Organize a number of adsets, each one with enough number of users that can deliver some conversions daily- In Mastered case 2% click rate 2%

conversion rate: we needed at least 100.000 in each adsets to let the algorithm optimise delivery

Scaling it, segmentation

Avoid too big audiences through segmentation- At Mastered if size of the audience is over

500k we tend to segment it. We then simply stop the one not performing good

Don’t target the same users in two adsets

Scaling it, new adsets targeting

Scale internationally if it’s an option for the business (US can be organized like it is 10 countries)Create all possible available lookalike allover the world- It can make sense to buy users with

negative ROI to build lookalike

Advanced tips for scaling it

Using a third party editor (I suggest Smart.ly):- Automatically create all worldwide possible

lookalike (hundreds of adsets in one click)- Automate adsets targeting exclusion- Use algorithms to manage budget and

bidding of hundreds of adsets automatically

Thank you

We are hiring growth hackers at Mastered! - https://www.mastered.com/jobs - or email me at [email protected]

Let’s keep in touch

Stefano Pochet

@stefanopochetangel.co/stefanopochet

uk.linkedin.com/in/stefanopochet