Growth HackHow Groove increased Email opt-in by 400%

Groove make customer support software. You might have seen their support widget on the bottom right of some websites you have visited.

They also have an incredible blog, where they share a lot of stories about their growth. I will be writing about a few of their growth hacks on here, and am incredibly grateful for them sharing.

Groove use their blog to increase their email signups, like a lot of SaaS companies.

I am not sure who said it, but there is a popular phrase going around that “you should average $1 per month for each email subscriber”. It doesn’t matter how accurate that is, the point is that email subscribers are valuable (if you can market to them well).

Like a lot of SaaS companies Groove were offering readers lead magnets, like ebooks, in exchange for their email address. The lead magnets weren’t specific to the post. So it meant that they could be a bit hit or miss.

The reader might be really interested in reading the blog post on customer support email templates. So a lead magnet offering a customer support hiring checklist might not be too enticing. The reader might not even be in charge of customer support hiring at their company.

Instead of offering their standard lead magnets, Groove decided to offer content upgrades from within the blog post.

For example, if they were blogging about email templates they would include images of the emails in the post, but not the text. Users could read the emails, but they could not copy-paste them.

To get the copyable versions, readers needed to submit their email address.

This got Groove a 400% increase in the number of email opt-ins (that’s 4x).

It worked well because they were matching the offer (copyable email templates) to the audience (people reading about email templates). It’s kind of like the content upgrades had better product-market fit for those readers than Groove’s general lead magnets.

I think this is a little bit like how Medium and Starterstory encourage users to sign up. They provide the first part of an article and then ask for an email to view the rest. They are offering “the rest of the article” to users who “are really interested in reading the article”. (I know, this approach can be really frustrating for readers).