We launched SmartrMail in March 2016 on the Shopify app store, and have grown it to over 3000 installs. Stores use us to send better automated emails, using machine learning. Sending more relevant emails to customers gets more sales (makes sense, right?), and so far we’ve helped our users’ stores generate over $21,000,000 in sales directly through emails.

So how did we grow our app? We set an aggressive growth target and tried a number of different marketing channels. Below I’ll outline 5 strategies that have worked for us in growing SmartrMail.

But first, here are strategies we tried that failed. Sometimes spectacularly.

5 Failed Strategies

Most of what we tried hadn’t worked. That’s fine. We define a “good growth strategy” as one that returns a positive return on investment. How do we define positive ROI? We’ll go into that below, but for now these are the things that didn’t give us positive ROI:

1.General E-Commerce Email Search Term PPC Ads

Bidding on terms like “ecommerce email marketing” hadn’t worked for us. We were competing against large, well established competitors who were happy to overspend, and the traffic we were bringing in was too general, so we often didn’t have an solution for them anyway.

2. Facebook Ads to a “Cold Audience”

Conversion focused ads served to a cold audience that had never visited our site before, didn’t work. Even targeting people “interested in shopify” hadn’t worked, probably because a big cross section of these folks weren’t actually interested in email marketing.

3. Paid Ads on LinkedIn and Twitter

We didn’t experience much in the way of audience or ROI.

4. Sponsored Blog Reviews

We tried a couple of paid reviews on e-commerce blogs. Surprisingly it drove very little traffic, and not a great ROI. This may have been more to do with which blogs we were on than this as a strategy. We learned to be sure to ask every blog that reaches out what results they’ve generated in the past, and if they don’t know it’s likely they haven’t been a successful channel for other apps before.

5. Content Driven Email Marketing (uh oh)

Ironically, sending long form content emails to our audience hadn’t been working. Kinda sucks since we work in email! But this came back to understanding our audience better — they’re time poor entrepreneurs building their own stores. They may not have had a burning a passion for the nitty gritty of email optimization as we did. It also could’ve been that our content sucked. Either way, we worked on improving both.

We’ll continue to revisit these channels, and just because we can’t get them to work does not mean they won’t work for everyone. Now, onto the good stuff.

Note: Basics of Calculating SaaS ROI

There’s a lot written about SaaS metrics, but for brevity’s sake are here are some example numbers. Assume our:

- Ave revenue per store is $100 per month

- Monthly Churn is 5% = 18 months ave customer retention

- Then the Average customer LTV is $1800

So with one new store on SmartrMail having an average lifetime value to us of $1800, we could comfortably pay up to 1/3 of that to acquire a new customer. So if we could spend less than $600 to bring someone to us and convert into a paying customer, we’re in positive ROI territory. 👍🏻📈

Winning Strategies: Our Top 5 Growth Channels

1. Content. Looooong Form Content.

Long form content about e-commerce has been effective. Very effective. We started writing content because of the silly brand name we chose, SmartrMail. When we launched, we had the ultimate face-slap from Google search — it was auto-correcting search for “smartrmail” to a different spelling. This does not instill confidence in a prospective customer when they’re actively searching for you. Uh oh.

So we needed to fix this issue, and the fix was interesting, shareable content. It fixed our embarrassing SEO issue quickly. And we found our content started to actually bring in traffic and installs too.

We don’t just write blog posts for the sake of it. We aim to write the most interesting post there is on a certain specific topic, and have a chosen a set of 3–4 categories to write about. While we’ve grown our organic traffic 3000% over the last year, not every post will make an equal contribution. No matter how much effort you put in you’ll find the power law still applies. 80% of your traffic will be driven by 20% of your posts. So while quality matters, so does quantity!

Our current content action plan is:

  • Research a topic relevant to our audience, write a 2000 word post on it
  • Support our best content with paid social boosts on Facebook. We boost for engagement, not clicks (people seem to like posts that look popular)
  • Occasionally reach out to other app makers about cross posting on their blogs

Tools:

2. Remarketing 🔄

Content started bringing in organic traffic, so we set up retargeting Facebook Ads (using Facebook Custom Audiences) and Google Display Network. We retarget with different campaigns based on what type of article or feature page a visitor has read. The ROI on this has been great, but it is constrained by how many organic visits we can drive.

One key, is to constantly optimize and kill your losing ads to keep your acquisition costs low. You’ll also need a refresh your ads and creative every 2–3 months. For inspiration and competitor research go to Moat. Then, write up a short but descriptive brief, then use Upwork to get ads done both quickly and inexpensively.

Tools:

3. Affiliates, They Don’t Have to Be Dodgy

Affiliates were definitely not on our roadmap. My initial thoughts of affiliates were scammy ads on dodgy sites. But turns out that a network of high quality partners referring stores is a fantastic source of new customers. The key is to keep improving the product so great partners will want their customers to use your app, as well as providing good support. To manage this we set-up a partner network of app devs and agencies.

Our action plan:

  • Creating a generous partner program
  • Reaching out to Shopify-specific, high end web developers and marketing agencies
  • Looking through Shopify Expert lists
  • Setting up demos for agencies

Tools:

4. Automated Onboarding 🤖

Looking at our data, more than 60% of stores who installed SmartrMail neversent an email. This was bleak. So we decided we had to fix this, and set up an automated onboarding sequence to get to two key outcomes. 1) Get new installs to try sending 2) To get a new store that has sent an email to book a set-up demo.

As a result, we set up an onboarding flows for new users to guide them towards their email goal. We didn’t reinvent the wheel on this, but simply reworked the strategy already successfully tested by Baremetrics.

Our action plan:

  • Using email and in-app notifications
  • Focusing on each stage of the user journey
  • Triggering email/in-app messages based on user behaviour

Tools:

  • Triggered emails and messages through Intercom
  • Booking demos through Calendly
  • Stopping activation emails once a user has booked a call, with Zapier

5. Demos & Support — Helping People Is Cool

Our data showed that when a store did a 15 min demo with us on how to help optimize their email sending, they converted to a paying store 95% of the time. We book calls in Calendly and use Zapier to automate ending the sequence. There’s a lot of great blog posts on how to run good product demos, but our golden rule is try for 80/20 time for listening vs talking.

Tools:

Lastly, great support is a feature.

When you’re a small app, you may not have the brand cache of an established competitor, but you can be flexible enough to offer much better support as a feature. Listening to your users might even uncover your next big feature!