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3 new $100M ARR club members and a call for the next generation of growth-stage startups
Time flies.
It was nearly a year ago that The Exchange started keeping tabs on startups that managed to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR. Our goal was to determine which unicorns were more than paper horses so we could keep tabs on upcoming IPO targets.
We found that Bill.com, Asana, WalkMe and Druva were impressively large and growing nicely. Since then two of the four companies from that post have gone public.
GitLab, Egnyte, Braze and O’Reilly Media joined the club before 2019 was even closed, with two of those companies taking part in the recent Disrupt conference, talking about how they managed their historical growth.
In early 2020 we added Sisense, Siteminder, Monday.com and Lemonade to the club, wrote about ExtraHop’s path to $100 million ARR, Cloudinary’s epic growth sans external capital, Siteminder’s own records and BounceX reaching $100 million ARR while it rebranded to Wunderkind.
As the year rolled along, MetroMile, Tricentis, Kaltura and Diligent joined the club. As did Recorded Future, ON24 and ActiveCampaign. There were even more names: Movable Ink, Noom, Riskified, Seismic, ThoughtSpot, along with Snow Software, A Cloud Guru, Zeta Global and Upgrade.
Today we have three more names to add to the group: UserTesting, Udemy’s business arm and Expensify. But, more than merely adding those companies to the mix — more after the jump — I wanted to shake up our radar a bit as we head into 2021.
Yes, The Exchange will keep tabs on startups and other private companies that reach $100 million in ARR, or annual run rate, as the case may be. But next year we also want to find the startups around $50 million ARR that are growing like hell. We want to go a year or two earlier in growth histories to better watch how startups scale into nine-figure revenues, instead of hearing about it after the fact.
So, if you are a startup that is expanding aggressively and will reach the $50 million revenue mark inside the next quarter or two, please say hello. I suspect a good cut of the global unicorn market could fit this bill, and therefore might provide a window into which highly valued startups are growing into their valuations.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
It’s going to be fun. Now, let’s quickly chat about the latest members of the $100 million ARR club.
UserTesting, Expensify and Udemy’s business arm
You’ve heard of each of our $100 million ARR companies this morning, so there’s less need for prelude and introduction. Here’s the group:
Expensify
Expensify is an expense-tracking company well-known around the technology world, so it’s no real surprise that it has reached the $100 million ARR threshold, a feat it announced yesterday.
But the company did us one better than merely dropping a single data point and racing back into the shadows. Instead, Expensify also disclosed that it has “maintained profitability for years [and] recorded its highest monthly revenue ever in October.”
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Online learning marketplace Udemy is raising up to $100M at a $3.32B valuation
Online education has been one of the hotspots in the tech world this year, as people turn to e-learning tools to fill in the gaps variously arising from closed schools, closed offices, social distancing and more time on our hands at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And that is giving a big bump to education startups, which are raising money to capitalise on the growth opportunity.
In one of the latest developments, Udemy — which provides a marketplace currently numbering some 130,000 video-based courses across 65 languages, ranging from learning Python or how to photograph better, through to mastering mindfulness and business analytics — is raising up to $100 million in a Series F round of funding that would value the company at up to $3.32 billion.
The company has filed paperwork for the fundraise in Delaware, first discovered by Justin Byers and the team at Prime Unicorn Index. It’s not clear if the round has closed, and whether the full amount was raised (or indeed, more).
Contacted for a response, Udemy didn’t deny the report but also declined to say anything for the moment. “We have a company policy where we don’t comment on speculations,” a spokesperson said to me via email. “We don’t have a comment at this time but I’ll reach out if anything changes.”
The fundraise would be a strong move for Udemy, which only closed its Series E earlier this year — a $50 million round that catapulted the company to a $2 billion+ post-money valuation.
But that was in February, before the novel coronavirus really took hold of the world. Since then, startups focused on education have been seeing a surge of business starting in the spring of this year, and as a result, also a surge of attention from investors who see a good moment to back rising stars.
Just looking at some of the most recent deals, last week, Udacity announced a $75 million debt round and said it was finally profitable. In October, Kahoot announced a $215 million round from SoftBank. And in September, Outschool raised $45 million (and is now profitable); Homer raised $50 million (from an impressive group of strategic backers); Unacademy raised $150 million and the juggernaut that is Byju’s picked up $500 million from Silver Lake.
And these are just some of the bigger deals; there have been many smaller fundraises, new edtech startup launches and other signs of momentum alongside this. (And Prime Unicorn, incidentally, also noted that Duolingo is also raising money, up to $35 million at a valuation of $2.21 billion if all shares are issued. We’re still digging on that lead.)
When Udemy last raised money, earlier this year, the president of the business division told me it had clocked up 50 million students that purchase courses in an à la carte format, while enterprise customers — which include Adidas, General Mills, Toyota, Wipro, Pinterest and Lyft in a list of some 5,000 in all — use a subscription model.
It looks like its business users have grown and now number over 7,000, according to figures on its site, with total course enrollments now totalling 400 million to date. That could point to the opportunity that Udemy is now exploring with more capital.
But to be clear, the filing does not detail who is in this latest round, nor what the purpose of the fundraising is.
As we wrote at the time of the round in February, that fundraise came from a single, strategic investor, the Japanese educational publisher Benesse Holdings, which partners with Udemy in Japan. Benesse’s bigger business includes developing educational content for children and courses for adults, both online and in-person, and for other educational brands that it owns, such as Berlitz, and Udemy helps Benesse develop content for those various efforts.
Other investors in the company include Stripes, Naspers (now Prosus), Learn Capital, Insight Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, among others.
Prime Unicorn Index notes that the terms surrounding this latest Series F include a “pari passu liquidation preference with all other preferred, and conventional convertible, meaning they will not participate with common stock if there are remaining proceeds.” It also noted that Udemy’s most recent price per share is $24.13, an up round from the Series E, which priced shares at $15.57.
We’ll update this post as we learn more.
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Udemy and altMBA co-founders return to edtech with a new, stealthy business
In 2009, Udemy co-founder Gagan Biyani tried to convince people to learn online through live classes. But what he discovered instead was that everyone wanted an online repository of content that allowed them to learn at their own pace, whenever and wherever. So, he canned his idea and Udemy created what is now called a massive open online course provider, or MOOC.
In the years since, Biyani was let go from Udemy, started a 200-person food company, shut that down, took a sabbatical, and is now returning to the seedling he left behind in 2009: live, online courses.
Today, Biyani tells TechCrunch that he is teaming up with Wes Kao, the co-founder of AltMBA, an online cohort-based leadership program, to start an edtech company that combines both of their experiences into one focus: live, cohort-based learning. The duo grew up as friends in the same hometown, but only recently reconnected over education once Biyani returned from sabbatical. Kao’s experience building an online course from scratch, with an over 95% completion rate, was validation that the format worked. And soon enough, they incorporated a company together.
The company will focus on cohort-based learning, mixing live and asynchronous components. As it’s still in early stealth, the founders said it doesn’t have a name yet. Instead of a company site, they have a Notion landing page. Update: The company filed paperwork with the SEC indicating that the funding has been raised under an Austin-based corporation named “Didactic.”
Despite those missing details, what Biyani did say is that the startup’s main focus is creating a community where anyone can start their own course. Kao says that creating a course requires over a dozen people behind the scenes — teacher assistants, community moderators and the process is essentially “an entire production.” With the startup, she wants to democratize that operation.
“I see it as a way to help more traders and experts be able to share their knowledge,” she said. “And take away the question marks on how to build community.”
The company from the start will focus on the back-end production of helping teachers, but eventually create a marketplace to allow students to see a directory of classes.
“It should be as easy as building a Substack,” Biyani said, referring to the popular newsletter service. Similar to Substack, the company will only make money if the instructor, or creator, does. It takes a chunk of each student’s subscription cost as revenue.
The company is entering a crowded space. Yesterday, CampusWire announced that it has pivoted to start offering build-your-own courses to experienced professors. MasterClass allows celebrities to teach classes, Teachable allows anyone to create their own course, and the list continues.
But Biyani views their biggest competitor as teachers who have already built courses without a third-party service. The company is planning to bring those creators onto their platform by offering ways to manage their customer base.
Ultimately, the market will only be won over by the startup that has the best strategy, product, and teacher pool. Based on their stealthy vision, the duo has raised $4.3 million in a round led by First Round Capital. Other investors include Naval Ravikant, Sahil Lavingia, Li Jin, Arlan Hamilton and co-founders from Lambda School, Outschool, Superhuman, and Udemy.
It’s a stacked term-sheet for a company in the early stages, suggesting that that edtech’s boom is still very much upon us. Lavingia says that he committed right away even though he didn’t use the product.
“Gagan’s name was enough for me,” he said. “I think I followed him on Twitter a year or two ago and i’d back anything he does just based on what he shares.”
Backstage Capital’s Hamilton said that Kao has been within the Backstage mentor network for a while, and added that “there’s a perfect storm for Wes and Gagan to execute within.”
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Seed funding tips and tricks from Uncork Capital founder Jeff Clavier
Angel funding, seed investing and generally focusing on earlier stage investing is a huge business in the world of startups these days — it helps investors get in early to the most promising companies, and (because of the smaller size of the checks) allows for even the less prolific to spread their bets.
There was a time when it was immensely difficult for a founder to get a first check, not least because there were fewer people writing them. However, Jeff Clavier was an exception to that rule.
As the founder of Uncork Capital (formerly known as SoftTech VC), he has been in the business of angel and seed investing for 16 years, popularizing the opportunity and highlighting the need for more support at this stage — well before it was cool. You could say he was early to early stage.
Clavier said that at the end of 2019, it was estimated that there were more than 1,000 firms focusing on seed investing in the market, but by the end of this year, there will be about 2,000. “Don’t ask me whether it makes any sense because when I started 16 years ago, I didn’t think would be a big deal,” he said. “But certainly that creates a bit of a conundrum for founders to try and understand.”
As of now, Clavier has made nearly 230 investments and counting.
TechCrunch Early Stage, our virtual conference highlighting that stage of startup life, was the perfect venue to hear from him on all things seed investing and building startups today. Below are some highlights, a link to the video and a pitch deck he put together for the chat. Questions were edited for space and clarity.
Not all VCs are created equal (so know who you are pitching)
First thing to understand is that not all VCs are created equal. There are a bunch of different firms, tons of them out there, and you as a founder need to understand what are the specifics of your pitch opportunity, how to match with the right firm, and to figure out what stage of “early” you happen to be.
Startups can be super early, or mid-stage, which is typically what we refer to as pre-seed. Then there’s the seed stage, where you have developed a product, with a demo. And there is post-seed, where you have product but are not quite ready to raise a Series A. So who are the firms that can actually be the right fit for me at those different stages? The qualification part of the targeting is really important. Especially in a COVID environment when you can’t spend the same kind of time with each other.
It’s useful for founders to try and understand investors better, maybe asking a couple of questions like, “When is the last time you made a brand new investment at seed stage?” And “How has your investment process changed as a result of COVID?”
For investors, you want to understand how you’re going to evolve your process to cope with the fact that you don’t spend time with those founders face-to-face. Some firms are still struggling with that.
At Uncork, we’re now past the point of portfolio triage that we had in the first few weeks of of the pandemic. What was surprising to me was the speed and velocity at which some deals actually.
Find an investment lead
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Entri raises $3.1M to build a vernacular language ‘Udemy for India’
Scores of online learning startups have emerged in India in recent years to serve school-age students. More than 250 million students are enrolled across schools in urban and rural parts of the country.
Whether one is in kindergarten, or preparing to join a college to pursue an undergraduate course, there are several startups offering a plethora of courses at affordable price points to help these students get there.
Byju’s, Unacademy and Vedantu among other local startups today help tens of millions of students each year gain access to high-profile and established teachers and a repository of study material that many might not have been able to find in an offline setting.
These startups — and legacy educational institutions — are helping students chase some of the most aspirational jobs: careers in engineering and medicine.
Most of these students, however, will either end up not getting their dream job — or based on their skills and India’s growing unemployment figures, a job altogether.
There are about 400 million people in India, or roughly a third of the country’s population, who are confronting a fundamental challenge: Not able to speak English, and lacking other skills that could prove crucial when applying for a job.
Entri, a startup based in the Southern city of Kochi, is attempting to address this market. The three-year-old startup offers upskilling courses to help people excel at exams that would land them a job with state and federal governments. And it teaches them these courses in the language with which they are most comfortable.
Students who dropped out before high school to those who have already attained graduate-level degrees account for the vast majority of users of Entri .
The startup began its courses in Malayalam, a language spoken by about 50 million people in India and especially popular in South India, explained Mohammed Hisamuddin, co-founder and chief executive of Entri. It has since added its courses in several other languages, including Hindi, Telugu, Kannada and Tamil.
Over the years, Entri has also expanded its course catalog to help people pursuing other kinds of jobs, including those in the blue-collar category, replicating a model similar to that of San Francisco-headquartered Udemy .
The team at Kochi-based startup Entri. (Photo provided by Entri)
“We soon realized that only about 1.5 to 2% of the people who appear in these exams are able to make the shortlist,” he said. “These exams are very competitive, so many start to explore jobs in the private sector, sometimes even when they already have some low-profile job.”
The startup now offers more than 150 courses, including several languages, accounting and those that teach popular computer applications such as Microsoft Office. These pre-recorded video courses and quizzes run for 30 to 60 days.
“Starting with the 100 million people who apply for government jobs each year, Entri is expanding the universe of employable candidates by skilling people in their own language — as it should be,” said Arjun Malhotra, a partner at venture firm Good Capital . “It’s ridiculous that economic opportunities are bottlenecked because of the medium of learning. Skills bringing employability shouldn’t require people to be proficient in English.”
Hisamuddin said Entri has amassed more than 3 million users on its platform, up from 1.5 million early this year. About 90,000 of these users are paying subscribers. “We are adding close to 10,000 paying subscribers each month now,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch early this week.
Entri offers a portion of its courses in certain languages at no charge, but complete access requires a subscription. Paid subscriptions start as low as 300 Indian rupees a year ($4) and go as high as 10,000 Indian rupees ($133), said Hisamuddin. The most popular subscription tier costs 1,500 Indian rupees ($20).
The startup said this week that it had closed a $3.1 million Pre-Series A financing round, led by Good Capital. Hari TN, head of human resources at online grocery startup BigBasket, and HyperTrack founder Kashyap Deorah also participated in the round.
It plans to deploy the fresh capital into introducing 50 additional courses to its platform and reach more users. Hisamuddin said Entri’s revenues have surged 150% in the last three months and its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has reached $2 million. He aims to scale Entri’s ARR to $5 million by this year.
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Edtech startups flirt with unicorn-style growth
When Quizlet became a unicorn earlier this year, CEO Matthew Glotzbach said he’d prefer to distance the company from the common nomenclature for a startup valued at or above $1 billion.
“The way Quizlet has gotten to this point is by building and growing a very responsible business,” he said. “It’s the result of the hard work of the team for a decade. We’re much more like a camel.”
It’s clear, though, that the tides might be changing. In edtech, the rich are getting richer. Last week, Mountain View-based Coursera announced it had raised a $130 million Series F round a day after The Information broke a story about Udemy reportedly raising new financing at a $3 billion valuation.
For anyone who has been following my edtech coverage in recent few months, this momentum is hardly surprising. Earlier in the pandemic, MasterClass raised $100 million, Quizlet became a unicorn and Byju’s became India’s second-most-valuable startup.
While edtech’s boom is predictable, the industry is known — to the chagrin of founders and to the benefit of long-time investors — for being conservative. Today we’ll look to understand how a boost in late-stage funding may impact the market on a broader scale.
High-flying camels
Ian Chiu, an investor at Owl Ventures, tells TechCrunch that the rise of big rounds brings a “watershed moment” to the $6 trillion education market. Owl Ventures was founded in 2014 and is one of the biggest edtech-focused firms out there, but Chiu says the recent strong capital flow shows that the sector is finally emerging as a sector other investors are noticing.
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Give us your seed round and we will send back double
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week was full of news of all sorts, but as we recorded, both Danny and Natasha “not Tash” Mascarenhas were still locked out of their Twitter accounts after a proletariat revolution on the social platform saw the ruling Blue Checkmark Class forced into silence. That’s not really what happened, but it sounds better than what actually went down at Big Social.
Anyway, Twitter accounts or not, the three of us gathered to parse through a wave of news:
- The new TechCrunch List that Danny spent a very long time compiling has arrived! It’s live! You can find it here. It is good.
- And, if you want to know which VCs were even more fêted by founders, head here. (If you are irked that you did not make either list, please email Danny, not the show!)
- Moving on, Google is putting billions into Reliance Jio after every other company in the world did the same. Google is buying a bit less of the Indian telecom than the search giant, but between the two of them it’s been more than $10 billion in dealmaking. Perhaps Reliance Jio is done raising money? At last?
- Udemy is hunting up more capital at a higher valuation, reports say, providing Natasha with the perfect moment to let us know what is going with edtech.
- Turning to funding rounds, I was hyped about the Macro round that TechCrunch covered this week, Danny wanted to chat about The Browser Company’s similarly sized $5 million round and Natasha talked us through LiteBoxer’s combined $6 million in new capital.
- Closing, we talked about IPOs for a hot second. The IPO window is open, and now that nCino and GoHealth have gone public, we want to know who is next.
It was a lovely time and there is a bit of show news. Namely that Equity is coming back to YouTube either this week or the next. So if you want to see us talk, soon you will be able to! Again!
Oh, and follow the show on Twitter. If you can, that is.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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GO1, an enterprise learning platform, picks up $40M from Microsoft, Salesforce and more
With a large proportion of knowledge workers doing now doing their jobs from home, the need for tools to help them feel connected to their profession can be as important as tools to, more practically, keep them connected. Today, a company that helps do precisely that is announcing a growth round of funding after seeing engagement on its platform triple in the last month.
GO1.com, an online learning platform focused specifically on professional training courses (both those to enhance a worker’s skills as well as those needed for company compliance training), is today announcing that it has raised $40 million in funding, a Series C that it plans to use to continue expanding its business. The startup was founded in Brisbane, Australia and now has operations also based out of San Francisco — it was part of a Y Combinator cohort back in 2015 — and more specifically, it wants to continue growth in North America, and to continue expanding its partner network.
GO1 not disclosing its valuation but we are asking. It’s worth pointing out that not only has it seen engagement triple in the last month as companies turn to online learning to keep users connected to their professional lives even as they work among children and house pets, noisy neighbours, dirty laundry, sourdough starters, and the rest (and that’s before you count the harrowing health news we are hit with on a regular basis). But even beyond that, longer term GO1 has shown some strong signs that speak of its traction.
It counts the likes of the University of Oxford, Suzuki, Asahi and Thrifty among its 3,000+ customers, with more than 1.5 million users overall able to access over 170,000 courses and other resources provided by some 100 vetted content partners. Overall usage has grown five-fold over the last 12 months. (GO1 works both with in-house learning management systems or provides its own.)
“GO1’s growth over the last couple of months has been unprecedented and the use of online tools for training is now undergoing a structural shift,” said Andrew Barnes, CEO of GO1, in a statement. “It is gratifying to fill an important void right now as workers embrace online solutions. We are inspired about the future that we are building as we expand our platform with new mediums that reach millions of people every day with the content they need.”
The funding is coming from a very strong list of backers: it’s being co-led by Madrona Venture Group and SEEK — the online recruitment and course directory company that has backed a number of edtech startups, including FutureLearn and Coursera — with participation also from Microsoft’s venture arm M12; new backer Salesforce Ventures, the investing arm of the CRM giant; and another previous backer, Our Innovation Fund.
Microsoft is a strategic backer: GO1 integrated with Teams, so now users can access GO1 content directly via Microsoft’s enterprise-facing video and messaging platform.
“GO1 has been critical for business continuity as organizations navigate the remote realities of COVID-19,” said Nagraj Kashyap, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Global Head of M12, in a statement. “The GO1 integration with Microsoft Teams offers a seamless learning experience at a time when 75 million people are using the application daily. We’re proud to invest in a solution helping keep employees learning and businesses growing through this time.”
Similarly, Salesforce is also coming in as a strategic, integrating this into its own online personal development products and initiatives.
“We are excited about partnering with GO1 as it looks to scale its online content hub globally. While the majority of corporate learning is done in person today, we believe the new digital imperative will see an acceleration in the shift to online learning tools. We believe GO1 fits well into the Trailhead ecosystem and our vision of creating the life-long learner journey,” said Rob Keith, Head of Australia, Salesforce Ventures, in a statement.
Working remotely has raised a whole new set of challenges for organizations, especially those whose employees typically have never before worked for days, weeks and months outside of the office.
Some of these have been challenges of a more basic IT nature: getting secure access to systems on the right kinds of machines and making sure people can communicate in the ways that they need to to get work done.
But others are more nuanced and long-term but actually just as important, such as making sure people remain in a healthy state of mind about work. Education is one way of getting them on the right track: professional development is not only useful for the person to do her or his job better, but it’s a way to motivate people, to focus their minds, and take a rest from their routines, but in a way that still remains relevant to work.
GO1 is absolutely not the only company pursuing this opportunity. Others include Udemy and Coursera, which have both come to enterprise after initially focusing more on traditional education plays. And LinkedIn Learning (which used to be known as Lynda, before LinkedIn acquired it and shifted the branding) was a trailblazer in this space.
For these, enterprise training sits in a different strategic place to GO1, which started out with compliance training and onboarding of employees before gravitating into a much wider set of topics that range from photography and design, through to Java, accounting, and even yoga and mindfulness training and everything in between.
It’s perhaps the directional approach, alongside its success, that have set GO1 apart from the competition and that has attracted the investment, which seems to have come ahead even of the current boost in usage.
“We met GO1 many months before COVID-19 was on the tip of everyone’s tongue and were impressed then with the growth of the platform and the ability of the team to expand their corporate training offering significantly in North America and Europe,” commented S. Somasegar, managing director, Madrona Venture Group, in a statement. “The global pandemic has only increased the need to both provide training and retraining – and also to do it remotely. GO1 is an important link in the chain of recovery.” As part of the funding Somasegar will join the GO1 board of directors.
Notably, GO1 is currently making all COVID-19 related learning resources available for free “to help teams continue to perform and feel supported during this time of disruption and change,” the company said.
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4 edtech CEOs peer into the industry’s future
When Zach Sims first started pitching his coding startup, Codecademy, he framed it to investors as a corporate tutoring company. That was intentional, despite the fact that edtech is a $5 trillion business.
“It was much easier for investors to understand instead of an education company,” he said, noting that the industry has long been defined by tight budgets and slow sales cycles.
But, as millions adopt remote learning overnight, edtech’s reputation is changing — and investors are scrambling accordingly. The revitalization means that a new wave of edtech startups is upon us. We asked four entrepreneurs who have been working in this space to share what they think the next billion-dollar business will look like. While we’ve covered the investor side of edtech quite a bit, it was refreshing to hear from founders and executives who are on the ground making decisions:
- Matthew Glotzbach, CEO, Quizlet
- Jessie Woolley-Wilson, CEO and president, DreamBox Learning
- Darren Shimkus, general manager, Udemy for Business
- Zach Sims, co-founder and CEO, Codecademy
How to sell: Classroom and outside the box
According to Matthew Glotzbach, CEO of Quizlet, “any edtech solution tailored toward schools and classrooms may find a significant headwind,” such as games or VR/AR headsets that need to be used within classroom settings. “Not because physical spaces are going away, but in this limited time, limited budget environment, teachers and administrators are going to spend their money on solutions that are more tailored toward distance.”
Startups should plan to be useful in both a pre-coronavirus and post-coronavirus world, likely hybridizing tech solutions that are useful for day-to-day classroom operations as well as remote learning.
How to reach scale: B2C or B2B?
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How to get people to open your emails
Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional. He also writes at Julian.com.
More posts by this contributor
We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.
This is how you’re going stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice you can’t get elsewhere.
Our community consists of 600 startup founders paired with VP’s of growth from later-stage companies. We have 300 YC founders plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo, and Ritual .
You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curve’s marketing webinars, Slack group, or marketing training program. See past growth reports here and here.
Without further ado, onto the advice.
How can you send email campaigns that get opened by 100% of your mailing list?
Based on insights from Nick Selman, Fletcher Richman of Halp, and Wes Wagner.
- First, a few obvious pieces of advice for avoiding low open rates:
- Avoid spam filters by avoiding keywords commonly used in spam emails.
- Consider using email subjects (1) that are clearly descriptive and (2) look like they were written by a friend. Then A/B your top choices.
- Include the recipient’s name in your email body. This signals to spam filters that you do in fact know the recipient.
- Now, for the real advice: Let’s say 60% of your audience opens your mailing, how can you get the remaining 40% to open and read it too?
- First, wait 2 weeks to give everyone a chance to open the initial email.
- Next, export a list of those who haven’t opened. Mailchimp lets you do this.
- Important note: The reason many recipients don’t open your email is because it was sent to Spam, it was buried in Promotions, or it was insta-deleted because it looked like spam (but wasn’t). The goal here is to resuscitate these people. You have two options for doing so:
- (1) Duplicate the initial email then selectively re-send it to non-openers. This time, use a new subject (try a new hook) and downgrade the email to plain text: remove images and link tracking. De-enriching the email in this way can help bypass spam filters and the Promotions tab.
- (2) Alternatively, export your list of non-openers to a third-party email tool like Mailshake (or Mixmax).
- First, connect Mailshake to a new Gmail account on your company domain.
- Next, configure Mailshake to automatically dole out small batches of emails on a daily schedule. Let it churn through non-openers slowly so that Gmail doesn’t flag your account as a spammer.
- Emails sent through Mailshake are more likely to get opened than emails sent through Mailchimp. Why? Mailshake sends emails through your Gmail account, and Gmail-to-Gmail emails have a greater chance of bypassing Spam and Promotions folders, particularly if the sender doesn’t have a history of its emails being marked as spam.
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