🗞 What's New: Craft email campaigns that drive results

A well-crafted email marketing campaign can hit an ROI of up to 4400%:

• Build an email list the right way, focus on deliverability, and test emails before sending. Make sure to keep your message and CTA above the fold.
• May is Mental Health Awareness Month, which is a great time to highlight these mental health resources specifically tailored for founders.
• $3.8K MRR after a major pivot. OpenAI's new products nearly killed Snow Lee's startup, but changing direction brought new opportunities.

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by Thomas Griffin

Thoughtfully planning your email marketing campaign can lead to an ROI of up to 4400%. But the average open rate of a standard email marketing campaign is less than 2%.

Beat the odds with these tips, and design email campaigns that drive awesome results!

Create an email list the right way

Many businesses purchase contacts to grow their email lists, but there are a few problems with that. The first is relevance. The contacts purchased may not represent the audience segment you want to target. You also may end up violating GDPR guidelines.

You can quickly grow your email list by engaging visitors on your website, offering them something in exchange for sharing the required information with you.

Offer digital assets like e-books, webinars, videos, guides, or white papers in exchange for visitors' contact information.

Declutter your email list

Your list may require a clean up from time to time. People may not opt out of receiving emails from you, but that doesn't mean they're actually opening your emails.

It's wise to remove inactive recipients from your list. Sending emails to recipients who are not engaged can affect your campaign's performance by impacting its open rate.

It may give you misleading insights, which affects the campaign optimization process later down the road.

Keep the scrolling to a bare minimum

It's best to keep your message and CTA above the fold, since not everyone will read the entire email. Lengthy emails can be a turnoff, and can negatively affect your campaign's performance.

However, the implications of this may vary from one scenario to another. Experiment to figure out what works best for you.

Use attention-grabbing subject lines

Your recipients probably receive countless emails from brands across the board. Your subject lines can make your emails stand out.

Around 47% of people open emails based on their subject lines, so be thoughtful in creating them.

Send personalized messages

You can't just create an email template, send it to your entire list, and expect things to work. Your recipients are highly unlikely to be engaged by emails that seem like they were composed by a bot.

However, it doesn't mean that you should disregard email automation altogether. There's nothing wrong with using email templates, as long as you personalize your messages.

Focus on deliverability

The first obstacle you face when sending emails is surviving the spam filters. Spam filters assess your emails across a variety of quality standards, and label them as junk if they need to be better.

Several factors come into play here, including brand reputation, email copy, email frequency representing the sender, personalization, and more.

Test your emails before sending

To improve your campaign's performance, test your emails before sending them out. To do this, send it out to your family, friends, and team, and ask them for their feedback.

Ask them about their first impression when they saw your email in the inbox. Assess how long it took them to determine the CTA, and whether they were interested in the copy. This can help you avoid sending out a dud!

Discuss this story.

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by Marc Andre

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and at Founder Reports, we’re taking this opportunity to cover important topics that impact many founders.

*Keep in mind that this is not medical advice. If you are struggling, please reach out to a professional.

The results

Last month, we conducted a global survey of founders to learn more about the most common issues. Here are some of the key findings:

• 87.7% of founders struggle with at least one mental health issue.

• 50.2% of respondents said they struggle with anxiety, which was the number one issue, according to our survey.

• More founders said they were concerned about mental health than physical health.

• Female founders were more likely to struggle with imposter syndrome (41.2%) than males (27.8%).

• Male founders were more likely to face burnout (36.1%) than females (30.9%).

• Male founders were also more likely to have poor work-life balance (29.1%) than females (22.1%).

• 70.6% of female founders said they have a support system in place to communicate openly with others about mental health struggles, compared to 52.5% of males.

Check out the full mental health survey results at Founder Reports.

The resources

Only 18.5% of survey respondents said they were aware of mental health resources specifically tailored for founders. We want to change that! We’ve worked with industry experts to create free resources to help founders with issues like anxiety, burnout, work-life balance, perfectionism, and mindset.

The resources below are in-depth guides that offer practical, realistic advice from expert therapists and coaches:

• How busy founders can create a healthy work-life balance.

• How to prevent and overcome burnout.

• Just do nothing: How founders can handle anxiety.

• A roadmap to entrepreneurial growth mindset.

• How founders can overcome perfectionism.

• The self-care blueprint for founders.

In the entrepreneurial community, mental health issues are often overshadowed or pushed to the side. Be sure to prioritize your mental health!

And, if there are other mental health topics that are important to you, leave a comment and let us know. This is an ongoing project, and we'll be adding more mental health content later. We'd love to know which topics matter to you!

Discuss this story.

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🤔 Indie hackers selling to indie hackers. Posted by Vlad Calin.

💵 Sold four products in the past year. Posted by Rushab Jain.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

by Snow Lee

Our team got accepted by Techstars Oakland 2024 this year, and we're currently at $3.8K MRR!

The background

Last October, OpenAI held an event called OpenAI DevDay, which caused serious problems for thousands of startups, including ours. Our original product was an AI assistant for technical support. However, because OpenAI introduced new products that made it easier for people to build their own custom AI, we realized we would have to compete with our customers' engineering teams, instead of other service providers.

We had to choose between adding more features to our product, or changing directions completely. Although we had some interest from potential customers, it was taking them a very long time to make decisions. Big companies would deliberate for months, just to ultimately say no. So, at the end of November, we decided to test out a new idea.

Creating AI is different from actually using it. While services like GPT and custom GPTs are amazing, it's challenging for people to change their workflow from familiar tools to something new. Also, writing code to integrate new services takes a lot of time. So, we decided to help users take better advantage of their own GPTs, instead of building AI for them.

From that, PlugBear was born. It's no-code software that integrates custom AI into daily work tools, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, HubSpot, and more.

Our first users

We built the basic service in a week, and launched it on Product Hunt. We asked friends and family members to upvote our product, and shared posts about it on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit.

Thanks to that, we hit the number five developer tool on Product Hunt that week.

Techstars

Our Product Hunt launch helped us quickly grow to $3.8K MRR. The coolest part about all of this was finding new opportunities at the most painful time for our company.

We are now participating in Techstars, one of the top accelerators in the world. We are learning a lot from Techstars, our mentors, and our customers, and developing a plan to continue on this path of growth!

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by Tweetmaster Flex

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Thomas Griffin, Darko, Marc Andre, and Snow Lee for contributing posts. —Channing