Teach yourself growth marketing: How to boot up an email marketing campaign

Without customers, there can be no business. So how can you drive new customers to your startup or keep existing ones engaged? The answer is simple: Growth marketing.

As a growth marketer who has honed this craft for the past decade, I’ve been exposed to countless courses, and I can confidently attest that doing the work is the best way to learn the skills to excel in this profession.

I am not saying you need to immediately join a Series A startup or land a growth marketing role at a large corporation. Instead, I have broken down how you can teach yourself growth marketing in five easy steps:

Setting up a landing page.
Launching a paid acquisition channel.
Booting up an email marketing campaign.
A/B test growth experimentation.
Deciding which metrics matter most for your startup.

In this third part of my five-part series, we’ll examine how to set up email marketing to push consumers through your funnel and drive conversions. For the entirety of this series, we will assume we are working on a direct-to-consumer (DTC) athletic supplement brand.

Your growth funnel

Even if you have the most premium product and amazing product-market fit, if you aren’t leveraging email marketing, you’re leaving huge leaks in the bucket. You can think of email marketing as a way to plug the holes that consumers are leaking out of at various stages of your funnel.

The funnel for our athletic supplement would look simple in comparison to something like getting someone to sign up to drive for Uber. I’ll show what both these funnels look like below.

Athletic supplement funnel: Ad view > website view > add to cart > email entered > checkout process (adding payment and shipping information) > purchase.

Uber driver funnel: Ad view > website view > email entered > basic identity questions (i.e., date of birth) > sensitive identity questions (i.e., driver’s license, SSN) > KYC background check consent > download mobile app > complete first drive.

As the complexity of the funnel increases, so does the potential for leaks, as do the opportunities for email marketing to plug them up.

For our athletic supplement, I would start with three automated email campaigns:

Consumers who enter their email but don’t purchase.
Consumers who add payment/shipping info but don’t purchase.
Consumers who purchase but haven’t repurchased in 30 days.

Teach yourself growth marketing: How to boot up an email marketing campaign by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch