Think of an Elephpant -
– liamhammett.com - submitted by Liam Hammett
Find out how we can champion PHP as a community and help bring it to the attention of more developers
Read more [liamhammett.com]
How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read
Michael Lynch, a software blogger, provides examples of his own successful posts and suggests strategies for promoting articles on platforms like Hacker News and Reddit.
Read more [refactoringenglish.com]
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Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
This article shares specific, actionable advice for early-stage startups building dev tools in particular.
Read more [posthog.com]
Creating an onboarding email drip campaign using Mailcoach original
One way to teach your audience the features you offer is by creating a drip campaign about all the features your platform offers. Better knowledge of all features hopefully leads to better conversion rates.
Read more [mailcoach.app]
The making of the WWSD videos original
We published a fun series of videos as a promo for our Black Friday sales. These videos are inspired by the more recent apple announcement videos. Let's take a look behind the scenes to see how they were made! The WWSD videos We used WWSD to name our week of Black Friday discounts. It stands for…
Selling digital products using Laravel part 8: Mailing updates and news using Mailcoach original
We'd like to stay in touch with the people interested in our products by sending them emails when we got some news on an upcoming product, or when we are running a promo for existing products. To handle subscriptions and send out emails, we use our home-grown Laravel package Mailcoach. Let's take a look at how we use Mailcoach ourselves.
How are users finding our SaaS?
After more than 2 years of building Oh Dear, I still struggle with the most fundamental question: how are users finding our application and where should we focus our marketing efforts to maximize that?
Read more [ma.ttias.be]
Don't design your emails
You can spend a lot of time to make emails look pretty, but it might be better to just don't style them at all. Greg Kogan did some A/B testing an concluded that sending plain emails results in more opens, clicks, replies, ...
Why are the plain emails crushing the performance of designed emails?
- They're less likely to be caught in spam filters. Having less HTML and fewer non-text elements such as images lowers the likelihood of triggering spam filters. You can use a free spam checker to validate this by testing plain and designed emails.
- They're less likely to go into the "Promotions" tab in Gmail (used by ~16% of all email users), for the same reasons above. From my testing, the plain emails typically end up in the Updates tab and some times even in the primary tab. Of course, the text in the email also affects this.
- They don't look like advertisements. The second the recipient interprets your email as an ad, promotion, or sales pitch—and it does take just a second—its chances of being read or acted upon plummet towards zero. A plain email leads people to start reading it before jumping to conclusions.
- They feel more personal. It's no handwritten note, but it's much more personal than an over-designed email with the recipient's first name crammed somewhere inside.
Open source marketing tips
As software developers we tend to look at things from our own perspective. Assuming everyone else will see it the same way. I’ve spent all this time developing but I didn’t take those extra few minutes to really polish the marketing text. This is the big mistake. I know you are thinking it’s open source, do I really need marketing? Without a doubt yes you do!http://ericlbarnes.com/open-source-marketing-tips/
