Outbound, Ads, SEO: 3 Recent Experiments
What generated $250k of valuation vs what generated $0...
FYI: This newsletter is sponsored by Smartlead. We’re customers of theirs, for cold email infrastructure. Check them out.
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Several months ago, we acquired a product called ViewExport.
And, it’s doing well! Every month, we make almost as much in MRR from it as we paid initially (once) to acquire it.
Now, we have two main marketing challenges:
A. Keep doing more SEO, because that’s how this product has always won, and
B. Try to figure out another channel apart from SEO, to increase lead gen
A has been easy. B has been challenging.
Here’s how each channel is going:
Outbound: ⚠️ No Customers But Several Partner Opps
We’re early on in our outbound journey, and have sent around ~1500 cold emails. And that’s just to one customer segment (a test to the HR leaders at mid-sized professional services firms). So we have a long way to go:
In terms of our email infrastructure, we’re pleased with the setup we have and recommend both of these tools to other founders:
1. Smartlead for sending emails
2. Ocean.io for contact and account data + list building
When it comes to LinkedIn inbound, we’re doing better. In the last week, we’ve booked 3 partnership calls with people in the eDiscovery space, which is super valuable to us for getting feedback, building relationships, and finding other avenues for demand gen. Over half of the people who’ve accepted my connection request, have wanted to talk to us. That’s cool!
The only problem? Most eDiscovery services provider firm owners don’t have any sort of active LinkedIn presence, so very few of these folks even use social media at all. (We plan to follow up by email with the ones who didn’t respond via LinkedIn, don’t worry.)
Our next outbound campaign is going out today, to Employment Law Firms. We hypothesize that they’ll have the most direct use case for our tool, given the way they interact with their clients (and with opposing counsel during litigation discovery). Fingers crossed!
Ads: ⚠️ Nothing Yet
Not a huge test but thus far we’re in for ~$1300+ on ViewExport ads over the last few months. This has resulted in 887 clicks and an average of $1.47 CPC.
But… how much revenue? Well…
So far, we don’t think we’ve generated even a single lead 🙃
(To be fair, it’s actually debatable whether one or two leads denied marketing cookie consent but did come from an ad, so it’s possible we had ROI’d here, possible we haven’t, but we’re pretty certain it’s been a bust.)
Ogilvy’s famous quip about 50% of his advertising being a waste, is proving true for us. We don’t know ‘which half is wasted’ or if the whole thing is.
This hasn’t stopped us: the dollar amount is small enough, and the payoff from just one customer is large enough, that if we got one customer tomorrow, this could be our worst-performing channel and yet still a positive ROI.
SEO: ✅ Winner… Invest more!
Despite getting far fewer clicks from Organic Search than we got from advertising, 98%+ of our leads and revenue to date for the ViewExport product have been from SEO. That’s pretty hard to ignore.
As a result, we’ve spent 50% more money (and 500% more time!) on improving SEO than we have on advertising or outbound combined.
If you haven’t plugged in your site to Google Search Console, you gotta do that right now. For that matter, plug in Bing Webmaster tools too! They’re both free:
Verdict? Expand SEO, Continue Testing Ads/Outbound, Find Referral Partners
We (Mac and Alex) both believe that — when it comes to marketing — everything always works. And calling it quits after limited testing does not mean you have exhausted the potential of a channel.
To share wisdom from a friend of ours, on this topic:
“Marketing effects accumulate over time; stopping prematurely prevents the observation of those effects. It's like going to the gym twice and concluding exercise doesn’t work.”
While SEO has been our winner thus far, we know that:
The referral-generation engine is within reach if we continue to develop relationships in the industry - we just have to find the right initial ‘nodes of connection’, people who are excited about our product and willing and able to connect us to new customers on a regular basis
Advertising and outbound always work! It’s just a matter of figuring out how to execute it for one company or another, and then deciding if and how the motion is profitable or not (the jury is still out on this, for ViewExport. We’re figuring it out.)
We can’t rest on our laurels with SEO: in fact, we should be investing more in this channel than the other ones, since it’s already working. We should be expanding here, not maintaining.
Conversion rate optimization, specifically with our offer and our packaging, have become an enormous focus for us recently. We’re getting too much traffic to have such a small amount of net new customers coming in each month. To fix this, we first need to have more conversations with our ICP!
Overall, we are LOVING this game.
Over and out.
-Alex and Mac
P.S. Oh, and here’s the money… 😍
Appendix: The Specific SEO Keyword Rankings and Queries That Brought Us $5k MRR Last Quarter
Next, here are the exact phrases and keywords that have driven over $5k MRR of growth for ViewExport in the last few months. By the way, even within this group, the majority of the customers have come from just the top 1 single keyword alone (!!!):
