BirdSend
Affordable Email Marketing Tool for Indie Creators
Added another tool to BirdSend's affiliate arsenal.
Now affiliates can promote BirdSend simply by sharing [The Ultimate Email Marketing Guide for Creators] to their audience or on social media or anywhere they like.
Because it's a deep, comprehensive guide that's free and no opt-in required, it's not salesy at all.
Even if folks don't use BirdSend, they'll still get value out of the guide.
Usually when we release new features for our email marketing tool, the purpose is to provide more value to customers and increase our bottom line.
Not this one though. This one actually decreases our income 😅
It's the clean your email list feature. Since we charge by the number of unique contacts, when users use this 3-click feature to clean their list, we get less money.
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Big salute! There is really remarkable.
Are you highlighting this on your landing page to inform everyone that you are building a user-first product?
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That's a very good idea! Thanks!
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Let me know once it is up on your site please! I like to create this as a case study for my site GrowthHunt.co
Cheers!
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IMO if it makes the product much better for the users, then it becomes valuable to them. I whole-heartedly liked the decision that you took. User first product is what leads to growth✌️.
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Thanks for sharing and for your support!
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This is one of the most requested features from our users.
And we're pretty excited to release this!
Previously when a contact unsubscribes, our user unsubscribe him/her from their entire account completely.
This poses a problem.
Contact (let's say John) who wants to unsubscribe from topic A but still wants to subscribe to topic B -- has to unsubscribe entirely from their account… thereby resulting in them losing him as a contact forever. Imagine this happening to thousands of their contacts.
The problem above can be somewhat solved by using Automation Rules that goes like this…
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Trigger:
If John clicks the link -- "click here if you do not want to hear about topic A again"
Action:
Tag John with "no more topic A"
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Next time when our user sends emails about topic A, they exclude those who are tagged with "no more topic A".
However, not everyone is going to follow instructions. There will always be people who click the footer unsubscribe link -- which, as explained above, is going to unsubscribe these people from the user account completely.
This is not ideal, as our user would be losing subscribers who want to hear from them regarding other topics/interests.
With this new "unsubscribe from tag" feature that we've just released… when contacts click the footer unsubscribe link, our user can ask them to choose which specific topics they want to unsubscribe from (and which ones to remain subscribed to).
Previously for Automation Rules related to email opens and link clicks, we only support "positive" behavior -- i.e. if contact has opened emails or clicked links.
With this new update, we now support "negative" behavior as well -- i.e. if contact has NOT opened or has NOT clicked links.
So, for example, you can have an automation like this:
If contact/subscriber has not opened email in 5 days, add them to the "reengage" sequence and tag "reengage".
Or if contact has not clicked a link in 3 days, tag them with "uninterested".
I hope this new update is useful for our users!
We've released more native integrations with shopping carts / membership and learning management systems.
This time the integration is with aMember.
When someone buys from an aMember checkout, our users will be able to add the customer to their BirdSend account.
We support the following Triggers:
- product purchased
- product refunded
- subscription canceled
For Actions, we support many. The most common types of actions that our users use are:
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tagging the person (e.g. Product X customer, Product Y customer)
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subscribing them to sequence(s) (e.g. subscribe to customer sequence for Product X, or Product Y)
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recording a conversion (sale) inside BirdSend, including the monetary value
We've improved our Form Display options to make it more robust.
We already have a robust "Show if" section. Now we've added a "Don't show if" section too.
This way our users can laser target which specific opt-in forms show up (and don't show up) on which specific pages.
Which of course is going to make their opt-in forms more relevant to visitors.
We've released direct native integration with ThriveCart.
When someone buys from your ThriveCart checkout, you'll be able to add them to your BirdSend account.
We support the following Triggers:
- product purchased
- product refunded
- subscription canceled
For Actions, we support many. The most common types of actions that our users use are:
- tagging the person (e.g. Product X customer, Product Y customer)
- subscribing them to sequence(s) (e.g. subscribe to customer sequence for Product X, or Product Y)
- recording a conversion (sale) inside BirdSend, including the monetary value
We've improved how in-content opt-in forms are loaded on our users' WordPress sites.
Previously if they have a lot (hundreds) of different in-content forms in their account, it takes a long time to load these forms on their WordPress sites.
This has been improved and the forms now load fast on their sites.
In terms of marketing and sales, we totally focused on direct sales -- which we learned from Nathan Barry of ConvertKit.
His story inspired us to focus solely on this method. More specifically we used direct email outreach, and when people responded to our email, we offer to do a live demo call.
Fast forward to December 2019... for this month our revenue is $3,898.
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Congrats on the milestone! Also thanks for sharing your tips and lessons from Nathan Barry. I have read some stories on how they built ConvertKit, it's truly amazing hustle against big incumbents like MailChimp, Unbounce and other big bulk email players.
What are your next steps moving forward or other things you plan to test on?
Cheers, Darren
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At this time, we're still doing cold email outreach.
We also have new customers coming in via word of mouth. An important thing I underestimated was how crucial a good product and good customer service is when you want people to refer you (without using their affiliate link).
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Awesome progress and appreciate you sharing your insights! Some questions:
- what tool do you use for direct email sales? there is just so many... its confusing
- where do you find their emails? linkedin? is there a marketplace one can buy a list? i just got burned by findemails.com and bought a list and it won't download!
- can you share your campaign flow? like you send the first email, then you wait how many days for a followup? etc.
Thank you!
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1/ We used to use Lemlist until last month when we switched to Mailshake. Lemlist is a bit unstable and their customer service is poor -- if you're curious why we switched.
2/ We manually searched sites that are relevant to the niche we're going after. No marketplace. No scraping of email addresses. Just old fashioned Google searching and using tools like similar sites, similar web, and feedspot to find related sites/blogs.
My suggestion is not to buy email addresses as they're typically very poor in quality.
3/ Initially we had a 4 part email series, each with a 5 days interval. Now we only have a 2-part email series with a 10 day interval. When a lead replies, the series would stop and I'd manually take over and answer their reply.
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Hi wellymulia. This is awesome. Is there any change you are willing to share the style and tone of your email as templates. Wanna really learn how to do cold emails effectively.
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As previously shared in one of my replies to the comments, I use a bit of humor + a simple "Is there anything frustrating with the current email marketing tool you're using?"
For the humor part, I'm not sure if I can share the exact template since I bought Jon Buchan's templates and swipe from there. You can do a google search for his name if you're interested in the templates.
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Hey thanks for sharing!
I'd love to know more about your process:
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Did you have any previous experience with cold outreach/ direct sales?
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Where did you learn the process?
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How did you find your leads? What kind of copywriting did you use in your email?
Cheers,
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Thanks Kevin!
1/ No, this is my first time doing cold direct sales. I was initially focused on marketing, but I learned from Nathan that when we don't have any budget for paid ads, and our brand is not known yet, it's better to focus on direct sales rather than marketing like content marketing, podcast, etc.
2/ As stated in the post, I learned from Nathan Barry of ConvertKit. You can see how he lays out his process in this article:
https://nathanbarry.com/sales/3/ Basically I did what Nathan did -- going after leads on a niche by niche basis. Copywriting-wise, same like what he did too. Asking questions like "what is your frustration with brand X?"
Later on, I'd add a bit of humor too in the emails and I find that people are more receptive and forgiving when you include humor. Also, make sure to always put the lead front and center in the email, instead of always about you.
Most cold email pitches intro like this:
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Hi JohnMy name is Welly. I work with brand X and we create bla bla bla and we're the number 1 bla bla bla
--This is all about you and not about the lead. People are not interested in how good or cool your product is in a cold email. So always put them first before you mention anything about your product.
Make sure you earn the right to pitch your product. And the way to do that is to make the intro engaging enough for the lead to continue reading the next line of your email.
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Hey congrats on reaching a new milestone and thanks for sharing your insight. Can you give an example of your own mail. How you pitched to consumers and how you added humor?
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Good stuff there, but it's March, curious why this is something you're posting about ~2 months later. How has sales been since then, are you still doing direct sales or have things shifted?
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Just realized it's dated EOY, but showing up as being posted today... IH gotcha... still interested in hearing how the last 2 months have been
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Yeah I'm newt to IH. I created a product a few days here on IH and was updating the product timeline. Had no idea it would show up as today.
Jan revenue was almost 4.9k. Feb revenue was down to 3.6k. There are still fluctuations here and there.
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Hmm, why such a non-trivial downward fluctuation?
I am also running a SaaS. In my experience, month-to-month downward fluctuations rarely exceed 1%.
Also, you posted an update half a year ago about switching to direct sales. Has that been a good move?
Any way, all the best!
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I guess it's because we quite a number of people signing up for the yearly plans, which contributed to a larger income for one month and then not paying again till next year. Another factor is churn, which is something that we need to improve upon.
Switching to direct sales is definitely a good move. I'd attribute 90%+ of sales came because of direct sales.
Another interesting thing to note is that even though someone might see our cold emails and they don't join, they might refer someone later on who joins.
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Where did you learn the legal aspect of this business? I know there are many rules on email spamming, and I'm not sure where cold email outreach could fall into email spam.
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I searched through Google and several good results came up regarding this topic.
Here's a good one that you can read about:
https://prospect.io/blog/cold-email-illegal/
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Thanks for sharing! Do you have any unique insight that is different from Nathan Barry's method? What has worked for you and what hasn't?
Also, how much revenue has direct sales driven? Is it all of the $3,898?
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I basically copied his approach.
Then I added in a bit more personalization.
So I'd say I came across your site [insert yourdomain.com]. As a [insert niche] expert, is there anything frustrating with the email tool you're using?
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Nice, very nice.
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Thanks!
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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Thanks Alex!
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2.5 months after the free plan was introduced, we closed it down.
There are 2 reasons:
1/ We've managed to increase our sending volume to a level that we're content with.
2/ NONE of the free users were not upgrading to the paid version --most likely because the free plan was too generous -- it had everything the paid plan had, the only difference was in the number of contacts/subscribers allowed. Even the free plan can store up to 5k contacts, which was a lot!
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