When I launched WellPath and was starting out as a first-time entrepreneur seeking to get initial traction without the capital to pour into expensive channels like Facebook, I was faced with the harsh realization many aspiring entrepreneurs face: “I built this awesome product, now what?”
With few exceptions, the reality is that if you build it, they will not come. Great product does not automatically beget audience. This reality is even more pronounced at the beginning of a business when getting an initial foothold can be a daunting challenge.
From the early days, we were big believers in Mary Meeker’s 3C’s — specifically that you should leverage content to foster community and ultimately drive commerce. We were all-in on building great content through a newsletter, but how were we going to build an audience of readers?
Surveying the landscape around us, we realized that there were many other brands with similar target audiences, similar demographics and a similar readership as ours but, importantly, with non-competitive products. What this meant is that we could barter our promotional efforts and eyeballs with these brands without fearing that we might be exposing our customers to the competition. This meant working with well-known brands like Reebok, Well & Good, Fabletics, Men’s Health and myriad more.
Marketing tactics that in the past might have been derided as low quality were significantly improved by our team becoming increasingly data-driven about the audiences we chose to work with and how that conformed to our own target audience. This ultimately enabled us to acquire tens of thousands (and later on, even hundreds of thousands) of newsletter subscribers a month while maintaining strong open and click-through rates. In shaping our own growth strategy, we’ve found a number of elements to be of important utility, the most crucial of which I break down below.
1. Incentive sharing through rewards, recognition and gamification
We all respond to different types of psychological motivators. Some people seek economic value, some people like the pure sense of achievement and others value public recognition.
When it comes to tapping into those different motivators to encourage readers to become evangelists, nobody has figured out the process better than theSkimm. TheSkimm creates status (you’re a “Skimmbassador” upon sharing with 10 people), rewards systems (you can get a combination of money and prizes for sharing), recognition (the “Skimmbassadors” are recognized in the newsletter on their birthdays) and gamification (a graphic serves as a fun and easy way to track your success and progress). Every one of these tactics…
