A Great Marketing Email

Andy

The other day a marketing email hit my inbox that really caught my attention. It was from Kelly Starett, the founder of Mobility WOD, a website for athletes that helps them prevent injury and feel great.

I’ve been a fan of Kelly’s since he first started posting YouTube videos back in 2009 (back then it was “The Mobility Project”). He’s my go-to guy whenever I have any injuries while training. 

Anyways, last week he sent out an email that I loved. It had all the makings of solid content: an eye catching headline, an element of scarcity, a gift for the recipient, a risk free offer and relevant, interesting, and funny content.  Here are a few of the elements that I found appealing.

A Surprising Headline: ‘I Shut Down Mobility WOD’

I was surprised when I saw this headline since Mobility WOD is a very well-known, successful brand. At first, I thought, “well maybe he wants to just focus on other projects?”.

When I started reading the email, I realized that he isn’t “shutting down” Mobility WOD, but rather rebranding to a new name, The Ready State. A catchy headline with some shock value led me to open the email.

A Unique Opportunity: ‘Keep reading to see how you can get a free mobility ball and join an intimate, members-only video chat with me.’

The goal of the email was to get me to sign up fora membership to the new site. As part of this effort, Starett offered the first 200 signups a free mobility ball and access to a members only video chat.  

This created a sense of scarcity. Rather than thinking, “I’ll get to that later,” I decided to sign up for an account and try the new site. Unfortunately, I was too late to get the ball, bummer. 

The Big Offer: ‘So sign up for a 100% free, 14-day trial of Virtual Mobility Coach now’.

They’re using the free trial as a hook, and it works. I signed up for a trial – tbd on if I’ll becoming a paying customer. But the key was getting me to pay attention in the first place and I think this email did a great job.

Closing with Humor: Make sure you check out our EPIC behind-the-scenes launch video.

Kelly is an entertaining, funny guy. It’s a key ingredient to his success. He makes mobility fun. He closed out the email to this video that definitely captures his quirky style. 

Launching a Segment Integration (Beta): Sync all of your tracking and advertising data in one place

Will
Segment

We (thanks to Segment) just made tracking ad conversion rates and efficacy much easier!

If you’ve heard of Segment, you know that they’re able to ingress all of your data (think all the Google Tag Manager and Facebook Pixel integrations you manually drop in) and aggregate them in one place.

After you’ve got data flowing into Segment, you can turn on and off different integrations.

The good news is that Bottle has been working on a Segment integration! This is a twofold integration.

First, there is the frontend integration (think replacements for Google and Facebook ad trackers) that will allow you to replace a bunch of integrations with one.

Second, Bottle is going a level deeper and sending actions that occur on the backend to Segment. Things like new orders, new filled cart, new purchase, new message, etc., are all synced to Segment.

This way, you’re able to send data about your customers to a host of different resources.

This feature is in private beta. If you’d like early access, let us know and we can help you get set up!

Bottle is the best way for meal prep businesses to sell to their customers week after week. Combining a simple text-based CRM with powerful subscription, e-commerce, and marketing tools, Bottle helps you grow your revenue, retain customers, and keep your cool.

Paul Graham on advertising

Will

Hypothesis: Before the internet, you could build businesses on advertising in a way that you can’t now, because now the platforms evolve to eat your margins.

@paulg https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1160237998463520768

Facebook, Instagram, and Google are the gatekeepers of your audience today. On one hand, it’s amazing how you can target specific audiences and advertise to them.

However, your target audience is also being targeted by Casper and BlueApron and Away. Your audience is sifting through content being posted by dozens of different influencers, they’re subconsciously filtering out sponsored posts, they’re getting follow-up emails from Delta and Priceline, they’re getting Apple News alerts popping up on their phones, not to mention the miles and miles of Instagram and Twitter and Facebook feeds they’re scrolling through every hour.

The slice of attention you’re competing for is getting narrower and narrower. With more scarcity comes higher prices. This is why Instagram is evolving in a way that makes it more expensive to acquire and retain customers than ever before.

Building an audience and developing relationships directly with customers helps. We at Bottle want to help you nurture and grow relationships outside of the walled Facebook and Instagram gardens. Otherwise, they’ll keep eating away at your margins.

Bottle is the best way for meal prep businesses to sell to their customers week after week. Combining a simple text-based CRM with powerful subscription, e-commerce, and marketing tools, Bottle helps you grow your revenue, retain customers, and keep your cool.

Rule Tutorial: Charging a one-time delivery fee after signup

Will

Let’s imagine that you give customers a cooler when they first sign up, so you want to charge them a one-time $10 fee after they pay for their first order. (Other scenarios might be you charge them one-time fee to join your service, or any other time you might want to charge customers an additional amount after they place their very first order).

We have a new tutorial in our help docs showing you how to create this rule: “IF a customer pays you for the first time, THEN charge them a one-time $10 delivery fee.”

Bottle is the best way for meal prep businesses to sell to their customers week after week. Combining a simple text-based CRM with powerful subscription, e-commerce, and marketing tools, Bottle helps you grow your revenue, retain customers, and keep your cool.

Cutting out the middleman: a business model revolution

Will
Photo by Fancycrave.com on Pexels.com

When Lean Cuisine launched in 1981, my parents got all their food at Bruno’s Grocery, a five-minute Volkswagen Bug ride from their condo.

Bruno’s had three frozen aisles. At the end of one of those aisles were all the ready-to-eat meals available for young Allen and Stella: Stouffer’s, Lean Cuisine, Healthy Choice, and a couple others.

My parents might have seen the “Try Lean Cuisine: Good tasting entrees at less than 300 calories” marketing campaign on the local news. But unless Bruno’s carried the meals, my parents would have had no way of buying them.

Because shelf space was scarce, Lean Cuisine needed to sell Bruno’s on the idea of carrying healthy ready-to-eat meals.

You know who wields the most economic power by noticing whose names are attached to the newest buildings in town. In Birmingham, it was the Bruno Family. Across the country, local grocery chain moguls were supporting parks and hospitals and theaters. Competition was minimal and groceries were recession-proof.

Over the next few decades, Bruno’s faced increasingly more competitors as Walmart and others grew into behemoths – doubling and tripling shelf space supply in Birmingham. But the new shelf space supply never outpaced the shelf space demand. Hence why Maxwell House and Jell-O and and Kool-Aid and Honey Bunches of Oats all got rolled up into one conglomerate; it took banding together to fight back against the pricing power of shelf space scarcity.

And then the Internet came along. The doubling and tripling of shelf space supply got multiplied by several magnitudes. Nowadays, shelf space is an endless scroll of pixels on an iPhone.

Shelf space scarcity is dead. Distribution is a commodity. Attention is the new scarce resource.

Before Amazon, Lean Cuisine’s customers were grocery store executives. Sure, they ran Super Bowl ads; but what really mattered was that the product was on the shelf when my parents went to Bruno’s.

After Amazon, my parents had an explosion of choice. Lean Cuisine needed to convince my mom to choose their meals over the hundreds of other options proliferating everywhere.

Nowadays, it’s Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin who’re building the hospitals. Companies pay the Facebook Tax in order to convince you to buy their product over the other 1,000 options popping up on Instagram. Companies pay the Google Tax to appear at the top of search results. Your attention – not Bruno’s shelf space – is now the product.

And it’s not enough to buy a customer’s attention once. Brands have to sell their products to the same customers again and again in order to make money. To keep the customer’s attention, they’re up against competing products, email inbox saturation, Instagram ads, web ads, cat memes, Trump tweets, news and everything in between screaming for mental headspace.

What’s the new business model innovation? How do brands maintain a relationship with their customers in this hectic environment? How do they repeatedly sell to their customers over and over again?

Two ways. First, by having a real relationship with their customers. Second, by getting them onto recurring plans.

We at Bottle want to help brands text with their customers, and keep the customers ordering every week.

Bottle is the best way for meal prep businesses to sell to their customers week after week. Combining a simple text-based CRM with powerful subscription, e-commerce, and marketing tools, Bottle helps you grow your revenue, retain customers, and keep your cool.

Redesign Updates: Bigger logo at the top, customer page improvements, more coming soon!

Will

We keep making incremental improvements to the checkout redesign pages. These include:

  • Expanding the width of your logo at the top of the page (so wider logos appear bigger!)
  • Dietary options now spill onto a second line on the customer’s profile if there’s a lot of them
  • An improved “Referral Code” box on the customer page

Some other updates coming in the next week:

  • A refreshed “Customer Account” plan and open order navigation area at the top of the screen
  • Better past-order management

Please keep sending your feedback our way. We want to make these checkout pages as beautiful for your brand and your customers as possible.

Bottle is the best way for meal prep businesses to sell to their customers week after week. Combining a simple text-based CRM with powerful subscription, e-commerce, and marketing tools, Bottle helps you grow your revenue, retain customers, and keep your cool.

Redesign Updates: Max two columns, locked product width, images as squares, and more!

Will

We hope you had a fantastic Fourth of July week last week! We’ve listened to your feedback and an initial wave of redesign improvements is now live. These include:

  • Locking the number of columns at two columns
  • Not allowing full-width products on desktop
  • Bolder section headers
  • Dietary options for each product always visible
  • A preview of the product description before expanding to show more
  • Mouse-over brand colors on each dietary option
  • A more clear “checkout” box for payment options on the confirmation screen
  • All product images are now square – always – on both mobile and desktop

Some other updates coming in the next week:

  • A refreshed “Customer Account” page with better messaging on open orders, past orders, and referral codes
  • A wider-width brand logo for customers who want a larger logo in the top header
  • And more!

Please keep sending your feedback our way. We want to make these checkout pages as beautiful for your brand and your customers as possible.

Bottle is the best way for meal prep businesses to sell to their customers week after week. Combining a simple text-based CRM with powerful subscription, e-commerce, and marketing tools, Bottle helps you grow your revenue, retain customers, and keep your cool.