Snov.io is a great tool for sending outbound cold prospecting emails, but I like to use it for more than that. The fundamental way it works is you spend a “credit” to get access to a contact’s email address & other info.
Once you’ve spent that credit, though, there’s a lot more you can do than just email them.
Finding Your Audience
Start by building a few lookalike audiences for advertising purposes. I don’t like direct ads as a way to drive revenue in a short-term through product sales unless your in Ecommerce, but platform traffic is great for driving people to your content.
Of course, you don’t just want content views. You need to make sure that your content is doing its job of getting people to sign up for your newsletter / otherwise give you their direct contact info. Otherwise your content isn’t helping you make money.
So we need to build an audience at scale to read your content. Good news, then: you can search and pull 25,000 email addresses for just $150 a month at Snov.io. Let’s assume you do that. You can target people like:
140 different hospitals and healthcare companies founded in 2007 with between 51 – 200 employees, or similar results for equally precise audiences. Let’s say we wanted to grab all of the CEOs of those companies. It’s as easy as visiting the profiles we’ve acquired, searching for the right info, and then:
There you go. Export the list and you’re ready to build an audience with ’em. Many accounts have personal emails as well as professional ones, which means we can target them with ads. Remember that we only need a few hundred valid accounts to make a good lookalike audience.
The other way to do this is demographically: look for people who seem like they work at the kind of job we want, or who have interests aligned with what our product provides.
The goal here is pretty simple: you want to set up a few different ad campaigns which will drive traffic to the blog posts that are most likely to get each given sub-audience interested in what you have to offer. If you want to be really clever, set up the ads in a sequence so that if someone visits your site, they will see ads to a related piece of content next.
All told, you should be running ads to with a total reach of at least a half a million relatively well-targeted recipients. You should run these ads on a one-week sprint and iteration cycle across either Facebook, Twitter, or both. Don’t split these tests too many ways or you’ll go crazy.
Setting Goals
Let’s assume you’ve got a small performance marketing budget to spend on new user discovery, readership, and acquisition of said user. Here are some examples of a sensible budget and goals for a month of limited testing with less than four thousand in ad spend:
- Week 1 – ~$500 ad spend
- 1,500 content visits
- <$0.30 CPC
- 50 blog signups
- Week 2 – ~$850 ad spend
- 2,500 content visits
- <$0.35 CPC
- 80 blog signups
- Week 3 – ~$1,000 ad spend
- 3,000 content visits
- <$0.33 CPC
- 120 blog signups
- Week 4 – ~$1,200 ad spend
- 3,500 content visits
- <$0.33 CPC
- 140 blog signups
Each week, ads launch on Sunday; there’s a mid-week check on overall performance every Wednesday. Each week should see a test of either audience, ad creative, or destination content depending on:
- Low click / low conversion – iterate on audience / iterate on offer
- high click / low conversion – iterate on destination content
- low click / high conversion – iterate on ad creative
Another Handy Snov.io Growth Hack:
- Use Ahrefs/Moz.com to export all of your competitor’s backlinks
- Scrape the authors names from all of the content in your list of backlinks & generated a .csv with competitors backlinks and author names. Run this through snov.io’s emails from domains and names tool.
- This creates a list of thousands of people who have written about your competitors. Use this list to create a Facebook or Twitter custom audience.
- Run ads with your content to EVERY SINGLE PERSON who has ever created content about your competitors.
