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GistReader
AI-enhanced RSS reader that summarizes your content.
@arondeparon
Topics
πŸ“§ Email Marketing πŸ“ˆ Marketing
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Tips on implementing email drip campaigns?

I am a complete noob when it comes to email drip campaigns, so I'm wondering if anyone here has experience with this. If so, what tools are you using? What kind of automations / triggers have you set up and how are they working out for you?

Right now, I occasionally send out a manual email marketing campaign that mostly contains feature updates or requests for feedback, but I'm interested in creating an automated email flow that starts once users sign up.

A lot of users that sign up for β˜’ simply seem to "forget" about it after signing up, so I hope that by creating an automated funnel that occasionally reminds them (and could act as an onboarding guide), my retention goes up.

Would love to hear how others are solving this.

Aron Rotteveel
@arondeparon

πŸ‘‹ Join WIP to participate

Cat Stickler
PRO
@cat

Hey, Aron, I've run people's email marketing, including strategy and automation, since 2017, and it's one of my favorite things to create with people.

It looks like what you're looking for is a welcome sequence, which is really simple to set up. (Especially in Convert Kit where it's not only pretty intuitive to set it up and manage, but also integrate to other applications without always needing Zapier.)

I can help you create one and help create a longer drip sequence after, but I need to know more about your brand, audience, strategy, and offer first to make sure I'm not just giving you general, boring advice. (That stuff doesn't really work anyway.)

PS I'm happy to do a whiteboard strategy session with you to map this out live if you'd like.

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Thanks Cat! I'm not at a point right now where I'm able to hire people to do this for me, so at this time I'm mostly interested in hearing what tools people use, what has worked for them and what hasn't.

I never played with ConvertKit before so will definitely give it a try πŸ‘

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Cat Stickler
PRO
@cat

It was an offer to just help out a fellow WIPer for free.

Call it a session to keep my strategic blade sharp. :)

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Ah, that's awesome Cat :) I did not realise that.

I'll add some more context for you (and others, in the spirit of transparency) here:

Gistreader still feels a bit like a "happy accident" to be honest. I just wanted to build a tool for myself and shipped it because some friends told me to πŸ˜… I did not give much thought to brand, audience and strategy so I'm figuring out things as I go along.

Ideally, my goal for Gistreader is to save users time by making it easy to read online content. I do this by:

  • Providing a reading view that shows you only the article, not the rest of the website
  • Providing both RSS and "read later" (single pages) support
  • Generating AI summaries that extract the essence of the article
  • Generating personalised podcasts based on (manually) selected articles. Although this sounds cool to most people, this feature is barely used and to be fair, I don't even use it myself. Main reason for that is that it's a manual process, which removes the fun and "magic" from the experience. Just sharing that here, because I don't want to put too much focus on this feature right now.

I have done some minor marketing efforts, mainly by sharing my work in progress on Twitter. This definitely connected me to a lot of cool people (πŸ‘‹) and a reasonably steady flow of users. I get 1-3 signups per day on average right now. I also created some posts on Reddit, but they never gained any traction.

  • 445 users right now
  • ... of which 5 are paying 😬
  • Users are onboarded on a 14 day free trial that allows them to use every feature
  • 3 days before their trial ends, I send out an automated mail that reminds them of this fact
  • If trial ends, they are put on a free plan with low usage limits and no AI features whatsoever
  • 2 days after trial ends, I send out an automated email that asks them for feedback on what I could have done better.

The main issue right now is that the active user base is just super small and it's hard to get a good grasp of what I can do to retain them. I don't think adding an email funnel will drastically turn things around, but I'm definitely interested to see if it has a measurable impact.

I have been asking users for feedback but 9 out of 10 times I am getting no response, which makes it a bit hard to determine what I should change. I've got dozens of features that I want and that I will probably eventually build, but it's hard to get a grasp on what my potential audience wants.

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Yifan Goh
@imgyf

I'm using ConvertKit for my email drip. Highly recommended.

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