As a great appreciator of finely crafted email newsletters, it hurts that I have to caution so strongly against their use. But the (very few) marketers who actually are sending high-end newsletters know more than anyone that newsletters, as a general rule, don’t convert well.
If successful marketers thought newsletters were just a cheap and easy way to re-engage users, they wouldn’t spend so much time making them great. They know the bias they are overcoming (being perceived as a marketing channel), and they develop an identity partially based on the value they provide in the newsletter, such as Hiten Shah in his SaaS Weekly.
So, instead of talking about the incredible amount of effort necessary to make a newsletter great, today we’re going to take another tack. We’ll look at the lifecycle of a user and find opportunities to enhance their experience using email.
For the sake of organization, we’re going to use Dave McClure’s “Pirate Metrics” model as a frame to guide us through the customer lifecycle and talk about how to get the most out of the emails you’re probably already sending.
Pirate Metrics works very well here because (a) it gives us discrete, measurable points to take stock, and (b) it can be explained in about 5 minutes. Here’s the gist:
