HEY GO-GETTERS! MIKE FROM FULL CIRCLE AGENCY BRINGS YOUR WEEKLY MARKETING BOOST! 🚀

Exciting news! We've turbocharged our Full Circle Agency Newsletter. On a state-of-the-art platform, expect bigger, bolder innovations and some exclusive referral perks. Massive thanks to our ever-growing community—you rock!

BIG MOVES AHEAD!

Hold onto your hats, folks! We’ve given The Marketer’s Playbook a sizzling upgrade, now on a zippy new platform. What's in store? More innovation, brilliant referral goodies, and a whole lot of fun.

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Let's co-create the best reading experience EVER. Dive into our subscriber survey—it's our secret sauce to delivering the content you crave. Get started here!

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.

1. Growth Loops, not Growth Hacks

Insight from Reforge.

Which would you choose:

Initiative A: Gives you 500 new users this week but nothing afterward.

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:

You spend money to run ads

You profitably acquire new customers

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).

THIS WEEK'S MARKETING BLAZERS :

One of the standout themes is the ongoing exploration of AI's role in marketing. According to the American Marketing Association, AI remains a promising yet underutilized tool in marketing strategies. Their latest Marketers Confidence Survey Index highlights that AI has considerable potential to revolutionize the industry, but its broad application is still on a long journey. Furthermore, a study in the Journal of Marketing revealed insights into how digital ads perform across AI recommendation versus user subscription channels, shedding light on the complexity and varied effectiveness of digital advertising in today's AI-driven landscape​​.

The Drum echoed similar sentiments, emphasizing the need for marketers to reckon with the real impacts of technological advancements. This includes understanding the nuances of marketing strategies in the digital age, where tradition meets modernity, and the balance between investing in emerging trends versus ensuring ROI. The publication highlighted several case studies, including the marketing strategies of Heineken and Britvic, which illustrate the diverse approaches brands are taking to navigate these challenges​​.

In addition, Digital Agency Network shared insights into the latest digital marketing tools and trends. Their coverage includes the launch of new platforms like the 20i Agency Hub, designed to streamline workflows for agencies managing clients and projects. This reflects a broader trend towards leveraging technology to enhance efficiency and creativity in marketing efforts. Moreover, the report on cybersecurity incidents underscores the importance of robust digital defenses in protecting marketing assets and customer data in an increasingly online world​​.

One of the most exciting developments comes from Iconosquare, which announced a new AI-driven Content Inspiration Tool. This tool, powered by Open AI's Chat GPT 4, aims to address creative blocks for social media marketers by providing fresh, AI-generated content ideas. This innovation is a testament to the growing reliance on AI to fuel creativity and efficiency in content creation​​.

Cheers to soaring marketing heights! 🚀🚀

Keep crushing it,

Mike