💌: FB outage, skeletons, & cold email

What's up y'all! I don't know if it's just me, but this week felt like the longest week ever.

This week, I stopped dragging my feet and finally took the plunge into NFTs and the wild world of web3. I wanted to get involved earlier this year, but we were building a house and buying furniture seemed like a better idea than buying .jpgs 🤣

Outside of artist work, what I’ve found interesting from a marketing perspective is how companies with collectible go about their marketing. They really are at the forefront of community building (almost 100% on Discord), and are also masters of getting their audience to make memes and market for them.

I might start adding in a bit of those types of stories into the newsletter. Let’s get into this week’s news first though!

Social & The Creator Economy

SEO & Content & Analytics

Email Marketing

  • Ok, so… Home Depot has a crazy 12 ft (3.66 m) tall Skeleton decoration that is really popular for Halloween decorations. People even resell these things. This year they sold out via a single email back in July! This proves two things: 1) email is still great for e-commerce marketing, and 2) you can sell literally anything and humans will buy it.
  • We’ve featured Amanda Natividad’s content before, and this week she published another super useful piece: the ultimate guide to effective cold outreach. She has an 80% response rate for cold outreach, which is insane. Most reps I know pray for 3%. The secret is doing a bunch of research on the people you’re emailing upfront so that you can craft relatable emails.
  • Staying on the topic of email outreach. This story of a 17-year-old’s email outreach was super inspiring. There are some good tips in the article for how to write your next outreach email. Same secret here: do your research and cater to the recipient’s ego. After all, you are trying to get a human to respond.
  • If you’re not optimizing your emails for conversions, what are you even doing? Says the man that only has his conversions at the bottom of this newsletterHere are 10 tips to drive conversions in 2021.

Branding & Advertising

  • Arby’s, not to be outdone by other food brands-turned-merch-peddlers, created meat-scented joggers. Arby’s Smoked Sweats, anyone? I’m interested, but not quite enough to click a buy button.
  • Advertising on LinkedIn can be tricky. It’s more costly than other ad platforms, but it’s a great place to for B2B marketers to get their message across to buyers. Here are 10 examples of great LinkedIn ads.
  • Firefox is adding advertising to its browser. They’ll show up in your searches as “suggestions from parters” aka paid placements. This is a weird move for a company so focused on privacy, so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out and how successful it becomes.

Fun

Woo! You made it to the end! Thank you so much for reading along this week. If you’re enjoying the newsletter, you can help me grow it by:

Thank you again for being here, and see you all next week!

Forge