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The Growth Newsletter #160

Growth Loops > Growth Hacks. Gmail’s new rules. Personalize pitches.

We've generated 480 growth tactics for this newsletter now by continuously researching and interviewing founders and marketers.

But we'd love to hear from all the smart people who read this. If you have any ideas for actionable tactics we should cover, submit them here. We'll credit you for the idea :)

And we'll appreciate you <3

Topics for the day : Growth Loops > Growth Hacks. Gmail’s new rules. Personalize pitches.

Let's dive in 🧮

– Neal

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1. Growth Loops, not Growth Hacks

Insight from Reforge. 

Which would you choose:

1. Initiative A:  Gives you 500 new users this week but nothing afterward.
2. Initiative B: Gives you 20 new users in week one, 22 in week 2, etc (growing 10% WoW) for every week going forward.

Initiative B will take 14 weeks to reach 500 new users.

But after 1 year, you’ll have 28,208 new users and grow by ~2600 per week. By the end of year 2, you have 4,035,039 new users (assuming a constant 10% growth rate).

This is the general principle behind compounding Growth Loops:

In short, the output of a marketing initiative feeds back into the input. Examples:

Another classic example is ads:

1. You spend money to run ads
2. You profitably acquire new customers
3. You use said profit to acquire more customers. If you need help running ads, we’ve built an ad agency specifically designed for startups.

In short, your primary marketing efforts should not be one-off tactics. Instead, they should be initiatives that can compound. Here are examples that do not compound:

• Launching on Product Hunt: You get an influx of users. You… can’t launch on Product Hunt again.
• Timed-limited Promos: You get a big influx of customers and revenue. You can’t just run another promo.
• Press coverage: You get featured in Forbes. You get a big spike in traffic. It disappears a couple of days later. You can’t be featured all the time.

The things that don’t scale can be great ways to launch or get initial users and attention. But what truly scales a company are compounding growth loops.

2. Get ready for Gmail's email authentication

Insight from us and Googz

~50% of emails are spam. And 75% of emails are opened via Gmail.

Google and Yahoo are rolling out stricter requirements from email senders to combat the never-ending wave of spam.

Here's the 80/20 of what you need to know:

#1. It was originally targeted for Febuary 2024, but it has been delayed to June 2024.

#2. If you send > 5,000 emails to Gmail users in a day, you need to meet these 3 criteria:

• Add SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication to your DNS records for your mail server. This is technical, check out this article for help.
• Have one-click unsubscribe buttons and process them within 2 business days.
  
• Maintain a spam rate of 0.1% or less . A "spam" happens when a user marks a message as spam. If you send an email to 5,000 people, 6 people marking it as spam is enough to upset Google. For reference, we get 1 to 3 out of ~90,000.

#3. Email deliverability is serious . Every sub that doesn't get your emails is a lost potential customer and revenue.

The average open rate for business emails is ~20%. Our newsletter hovers around 45-50% for 90,000+ subscribers because we take it very seriously.

Read "Give single opt-in a chance" from a previous newsletter for a breakdown of everything we do to keep our open rates high (beyond the technical stuff above).

3. Personalize your emails, pitch, and content

Insight from DC.

Nothing turns people off more than pitching something completely irrelevant to them.

To avoid that, you must be selective about who, what, and when you pitch. Bad examples:

• The instant pop-up modal on all pages pushing them to book a demo.
• A 5 email sequence to everyone on your list promoting an expensive product.

Here's one way to do it better: Infer by past behavior. If they've:

• Visited relevant product pages.
• Clicked on relevant links in your emails.
• Read relevant content.
• Or came from a specific website.

You can infer things about them and what they might be interested in. 

For example, when we promote new cohorts of Un-ignorable (cohort coming mid-April), we focus on people who have joined the waitlist, visited the landing page, clicked an email related to Un-ignorable, or read our LinkedIn Organic Playbook.

Not everyone wants to build a personal audience, and that's okay. We don’t need to keep bugging people who aren’t interested.

But here's a better way:  Ask people directly.

A few weeks ago, I added a question before News & Links asking people whether they're a founder, freelancer, or have a full-time role. This then links to a survey page where we ask more questions. Their answers are automatically saved in our email tool.

(We hide the section if you've already answered the question.)

People are also given this survey right after subscribing, both on the thank you page and in the welcome email.

Several thousand people have filled it out already. Now, we can customize our drip emails, promo emails, and page content to what they actually care about.

Takeaway: Gather data from users and personalize their experience. We use RightMessage.

Quick question: You are a...?

Your response will help us personalize the content you receive from us :)

News and links

News you can use:

• Both Google and Meta had bugs that caused advertisers to overspend. Google is issuing refunds. Meta apologized so it's unclear 😅

• OpenAI is oddly now working on a web search product to truly go after Google. Although tbh Google is so ingrained in our habits, I doubt it'll stick.

• Apple is facing a $539M fine from Spotify's anti-trust complaint.
• Facial recognition may be coming to airports near you.
• The EU probing into TikTok over child safety and advertising transparency.

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See you next week!

Neal O'Grady

Justin Setzer