Demand Curve - The Growth Newsletter #079

The Growth Newsletter #079

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Welcome to the 1,738 new marketers and founders who joined last week!

This week we're covering direct mail automation, price anchoring, and backlinks.

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1. Retarget users with direct mail automation

Insight from Rejoiner and Demand Curve.

Direct mail is wildly overlooked as a channel—its average response rate is 9%.

Compare that to 0.4% for organic social and 0.6% for paid search.

One of direct mail’s most effective uses today? Automated retargeting.

Here’s a simple way to test it:

• Identify site visitors who abandon cart and create two segments.
• Keep one group as the control. Send them your standard abandoned cart email flow.
• For the second group, skip the abandoned cart email and instead, send a beautiful postcard in the mail with a unique QR promo code (say, 10% off first purchase). You can set this up to send within 12-24 hours of the cart abandonment.
• Test the conversion difference between groups.

Direct mail engages people who might not otherwise respond to digital retargeting. One study concluded that marketers see a 300-400% lift in conversion rates when targeting cart abandoners through direct mail.

You can use a tool like Inkit, Lob, or Rejoiner to automate this whole process.

2. Use price anchoring to increase conversion

Insight from Katelyn Bourgoin and Phil Agnew.

Small changes to the way you convey your prices can have an outsized impact on conversion.

One of our favorite pricing tactics? Anchoring—setting expectations so that your price becomes more attractive.

Here are a few ways to use price anchoring:

• When listing items, include the higher-priced items first. Think about a wine list. Seeing higher-priced items near the top of the list creates a price anchor and makes the other items on the list feel less expensive.
• Use specific numbers to encourage people to spend more. This works for quantity as well as pricing. Snickers grew sales by changing its quantity anchor from "them" to "18."

• Break down your prices into smaller units. £4.57 per day feels more attractive than £1,668 per year.

Check out more sharp pricing psychology tactics here. 

P.S. Katelyn Bourgoin is running a buyer's psychology session live at our Growth Summit. She'll dig into pricing psychology and leave you with actionable tactics to test. If you haven't already, register here (takes less than one minute, totally free).

3. Turn unlinked mentions into backlinks 

Insight from Ahrefs.

A quick way to rank higher in Google: Turn unlinked brand mentions into backlinks.

If you have an online presence, there are likely mentions of your company that don’t currently link back to your site. Consider searching for these and convincing the owner of the content to link to you.

Having more backlinks (especially from high-authority domains) sends a positive signal to Google that could increase your rank.

Here’s how to do it:

First, find unlinked brand mentions.

If you have Ahrefs, use its Content Explorer tool. Search for your brand name and exclude your domain. Example: For HelloFresh, that search would look like: “HelloFresh” -site:hellofresh.com

If you don’t have Ahrefs, you can look on Google using these search operators:

• intext:[keyword] Use this to specify your brand name. The “intext:” portion tells Google to find pages with content including this specific keyword.
• -[domain.com] Use this to avoid getting results from a specific site. That could be your own site and social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and so on.

For HelloFresh, that’d look like: intext:HelloFresh -hellofresh.com -facebook.com -pinterest.com -twitter.com

Make sure you look for variations of your brand name. Check misspellings like “Hello Fresh” with a space.

Once you have a list, reach out to the content owners. Keep it short and sweet. Prove that you’ve read the article and make a case for why they should link to you.

Voilà—low-hanging fruit backlinks.

News and links

News you can use:

• Don’t sleep on Etsy. Considering its Q2 revenue growth (nearly 6 million new buyers), the marketplace may be worth testing—assuming your product fits the platform.

• The trend toward short-form content continues. YouTube’s trying to make that easier by providing an option to convert creators’ longer videos into Shorts. Any Short created using this feature will link back to the original long-form video, making it a great way to drive new traffic to your main content. (If you’re completely new to Shorts, a YouTube product manager answers Shorts FAQs here.)

• Apple’s testing two new ad placements in the App Store: on the Today tab and app product pages. If results look good, we recommend app developers try them out ahead of their competitors. 

In case you missed it:

We recently spoke with SparkToro’s VP of Marketing, Amanda Natividad. After taking our audience-building course last year, Amanda grew her Twitter following from 1k to 60k in a year. Check it out here.

A cool growth event in San Francisco:

Our friends at Lob.com are hosting an event we recommend checking out on human connection in marketing. It's an intimate in-person event for enterprise marketers on August 9th in San Francisco. You'll hear perspectives from world-class marketing leaders on how to develop deep relationships with your customers through messaging, creative, and the appropriate channel. Use this link to register and gain access. Food and drinks will be served throughout the event.

Top new marketing jobs

If you're looking for a top growth role, check out the opportunities below from our job board.

Something fun

From @lizclimo

Want more growth tactics?

We're giving away our entire back catalog of tactics to folks who refer two friends to this newsletter. Here's your referral link to share: https://sparklp.co/385a143f. You can track your referrals here. We'll automatically email you the password-protected tactics page once you've referred two people.

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Who's Demand Curve? We’re who marketers and founders rely on to solve real marketing problems. We skip trends and fluffy stories and only share high-quality, vetted, and actionable growth content from the top 1% of marketers.

How we can help you grow:

• Read our free playbooks, blog articles, and teardowns—we break down the strategies and tactics that fast-growing startups use to grow.
• Enroll in the Growth Program, our professional course that will help you get traction and scale revenue.
• Hire our agency, Bell Curve, and we'll grow your startup for you.

• Engage with our audience by sponsoring Demand Curve.

See you next week.

— Nick, Grace, Joyce, Dennis, and the DC team.

Nick Costelloe

Grace Parazzoli

Joyce Chou

Dennis Buckley