Going Viral In The Inbox 🚀

Hi there 👋,
 

We are a wee bit late this month because we were in Thailand celebrating our 1 million ARR milestone and meeting the team IRL for the first time. Here’s what it looked like 👇

The holiday withdrawal is real, folks! 🏖️
 

However, before we went on this much-needed break, we had been buried in many projects, including a referral campaign.
 

Our goal was to create virality for our email masterclass, and we figured that nothing could motivate people to share it with their friends than getting prizes in return.
 

To make this campaign a success, we distributed it across all channels only to realize that the email is the OG.👑

So, in this edition of The Mailmodo Bulletin, we’ll discuss how emails helped us get 500+ referrals within 3 weeks! 
 

But before that, let’s help you sign up for the masterclass that we’ve been talking about🕵️

Now, let's begin!🍴

How we used emails for our viral referral campaign via Mailmodo

1. We used emails to keep users engaged in the viral loop

Once we were sure we wanted a referral campaign, we realized that we'd also need a viral loop (quite literally), and we came up with this plan - 

• To get the masterclass for free, the participant must be in the top 50 rank holders of the waitlist.
• To move up the ranks, the participant needs to refer more people.

Everything is fun and games here until you remember how easy it is for people to forget about a campaign after referring one person and the viral loop falls flat.
 

This is where emails came in.💯
 

We decided to start a weekly email sequence and remind the participants about their rank and how they can move up by referring more of their friends. 

Below is a snapshot of one of those reminder campaigns 👇
 

These reminder emails had more than 40% and 20% open as well as click rates. They allowed us to be more personalized and exclusive. Had we not used the emails to nurture these leads, our referrals campaign would’ve been a dud.

Our top tips for using emails to keep referrers engaged

• Send emails to remind referrers of the ongoing competition
• Create an email nurture flow to introduce referrers to your other resources related to the topic of your campaign. 
• Send emails focusing on incentives and special offers to motivate referrers, etc. . 

2. Leverage interactivity to shorten the journey

Most referral emails nudge the recipients to go to a link and then refer somebody, but we decided to go the interactive way. We knew that AMP could make almost anything happen inside an email, so we went ahead and did exactly that.
 

Instead of automating the reminder emails via viral loops, we created a “Refer a friend” AMP widget on the Mailmodo editor and enabled users to refer a friend without leaving their inbox. The result spoke for itself. This is how the block works 👇

Right after someone referred a friend with this block, their friend would automatically get an email informing them of the referral. This entire process helped us in reducing one step from the entire user journey and helped us get better response.

Our takeaway

If your users can complete an action in 2 steps, why make them take another? Find different ways to use AMP emails in your strategy. Read this guide to learn more about its use cases. 

3. Convert high-intent users at the right time 

After the success of the referral campaign to get people on the waitlist, we launched another referral campaign once the course was launched. According to this, you can buy the course for $49 or get it for free by referring your friends.
 

However, the free access kicks in only if the referred friend signs up for the course. After a week, we realized that this condition was leading to attrition of high-intent users who spent some time sharing their information and entering one more email ID. 
 

So, we used Zapier and triggered an email to send them free access 24 hours later after they refer a friend whether this referred friend signs up or not (tongue twister much? 😁). 

This way, our referral count keeps increasing, and our high-intent users also enroll without any dependencies. 

Uptill now, we've sent more than 60 such emails with an open rate of more than 30%. 
 
Our recommendation

Send emails to people when they exhibit interest in your product. Don't let your proposition get lost in digital chatter. 
 
.We've spoken more about setting up referral campaign and its result in this article. We suggest you give it a read! 

🚀 Mailmodo Shoutouts 🚀

1. Build the right connection in the startup world with Hello Meets

Right connections and community are essential to help startups find the direction and avenues. Hello Meets bring all such stakeholders on one place and facilitate conversations. 

 2. Capture leads with creative pop-ups using Wisepops

What if you could build contextual pop-ups as and when you deem fit without depending upon developers? Wisepops help you achieve this with its no-fuss, drag-and-drop editor.

3. Learn a new skill with Emeritus

If you've been looking for a right place to learn new skills, you must check out Emeritus. With its collaboration with 50+ top-tier universities across the globe, it has some of the best courses available online. 
 

4. Analyze leads effectively with ContactOut

LinkedIn is the best sourcing and reach-out platform to exist currently and ContactOut helps you streamline your LinkedIn leads and automate your messaging in a jiffy. 
 

5. Nailing persuasive copywriting with Daniel Doan

Daniel is known for conversion copywriting and his undying love for bananas (not necessarily in that order 😁). We checked out his copywriting bible recently and we vouch for it! Go and check it out. 

With this, we come to the conclusion of this edition! See you next month with more email talk, interesting anecdotes, and fun recommendations! Ta-daaa! 👋

Mailmodo Technologies Inc.

355 Bryant Street, Unit 403, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA