Ask HN: How to set up a landing page to collect email from a niche group? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to set up a landing page to collect email from a niche group?

14 pointssubrat_rout15 comments

I would like to start an Appsumo like web portal which will provide ridiculously cheap deals on instruments and lab kits to a bunch of people in a particular niche group. Say for the people who are in universities and Govt. organizations doing physics and astronomy. However, I have no technical background(coding) for launching a good landing page which can collect email address from a niche group. Also I have little business experience on how to collect enough numbers of email addresses to start with.

So here are my questions.

Q1. How should I set up a landing page to collect required information.Should I go with any landing page template off the shelf to test the idea or hire a freelance developer to do it?

Q2. 1. How do I go out and collect large number of email addresses from a particular niche group?

Thanks

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So, from your point of view, you have a problem (lack of business) and something that would help you out (people giving you their email address). Let's reframe this: your audience has a problem (fill this in for me), and you have something which would help them out (fill this in for me), which as a consequence results in you getting their email address and permission to contact them.

You're presumably the expert on this subject, so just take this as an example: let's say your target audience spends a lot of time grant-writing. Aha! You, being the expert on their needs, might also know a lot about grant-writing, maybe specific with grant-writing-for-physical-goods-purchases. Why don't you collect your expertise about that subject in, say, a 15-page report?

Then, instead of "Please give me your email address because that would help me a lot", you'd say "Do you have a problem grant-writing? Of course you do. I'll send you a free copy of my 15-page report on grant writing, including these 3 tips which will save you time/stress and make it more likely that your grant is successful. Where should I send your report? [email address] [Get My Free Report]"

You make it clear on this page that, in addition to the report, you'll be sending them other stuff that they'll find valuable, and if they don't, they can stop receiving it at any time.

Other stuff:

1) AppSumo will tell you that, for your first 1000 customers, your issue is less "How do I collect a large number of email addresses?" and more "How do I bang down the door of 1,000 people in this niche to have meaningful conversations with them?" You can literally justify putting your email signup on an iPad and going door-to-door or conference-to-conference getting signups at this point, just to have a better understanding of where your target customer is at.

2) In specific response to Q1, at this stage, any landing page template off the shelf is better than what you have now, and paying a developer is a poor use of your limited resources. You can hook together e.g. Unbounce or e.g. any landing page template on ThemeForest.net to e.g. Mailchimp in under 15 minutes, even with no special development skill.

3) In direct response to your Q2, this question is "How do I do marketing?", and that is outside the scope of an HN comment. Don't worry about that right now. Get the incentive written, get the landing page up, and get things to the point where you can take someone out to coffee and browbeat them into signing up on the spot. If you cannot convince someone to sign up for your mailing list while you're looking them in the eye you will never convince 10,000 people to sign up for your mailing list just from looking at your landing page.

Hi patio11, Thanks for the comment. Really makes sense. Collecting email is not the only hard part. Once you have sufficient number of people who want a specific product, the next hard part is to do the deal with the companies to push them to sell you the same product at a lower price. I believe if I have sufficient number of customers I can do the negotiation with the company to bring down the price to a certain level. But that is now in assumption phase.

If the core source of risk to the business is not "Can I get 1,000 buyers of X" but rather "Can I get a discounted supply of X if I buy 1,000 of it at a time", that should be investigated with a phone call prior to building an audience.

That is a great pointer which needs to be taken care of first. Though getting 1000 buyers for product X is as equally important as getting a discounted supply, inquiring the supplier(or it's competitor) will save a bunch of time and give an idea whether the business idea is good to start with or not.

patio11 just:

    a)made you lots of money
    b) saved you lots of money and time

His response was just spot on. You should follow his advice. Really.

I'm assuming you want to MVP this sucker, get it up and test it as quick as possible. I'll also approach this from a "tools you need" to build it as I'll assume you've thought through the marketing aspect.

If that's the case, there is no reason you need to hire a developer to build this. If you want to MVP this and just test something, you can throw up a landing page with Premise 2.0 software from copyblogger. I've written a tutorial on this here - http://socialmouths.com/blog/2012/04/17/premise-2-0/ . It's almost offensively simple to do and you should be able to have a decent opt-in page up and running in 20 minutes.

If you're looking to collect emails, I would integrate it with MailChimp (Aweber is better, but MailChimp is free for your first 2000 contacts).

As for marketing, we'd have to know more about what you're interested in selling eventually to these customers as your incentives for getting them to sign up will vary based on wherever their interest should be targeted.

Hope that helps.

Thanks Joel for your suggestion. I was debating between unbounce.com and using mediatemple (I have a plan with them). But after reading about premise 2.0, I think it is worth to look for. Can you please describe the difference between unbounce and premise 2.0?

You can register yourdomain.com, and register an account with tinyletter and redirect it to http://tinyletter.com/yourdomain - then tell people to go to yourdomain.com

At least with Tiny Letter you're ready to go to send emails once the emails are collected.

Or you can create a basic page using Google Sites and embed the tinyletter code on it to collect the email addresses. I've done something similar here: http://goo.gl/OyAXK (you can also embed a twitter widget on the page too as I've done to publish updates to the page from twitter)

- just find organizations, and specifically people in those organizations who can push out your message. Also go to online forums and post there. In your postings, have your webpage as your signature. Try yahoo and google groups.

Q1: You should find developer to do the landing page and many different versions of it for testing which gives most traffic and email addresses. After a while just keep those that actually work with your marketing campaign.

Q2: Simple google hack gives you easily email addresses from forums and other websites where this niche group shares their email address publicly. Query something like this "@gmail.com site:mmorpg.com" the email address domain works so that it will search for email addresses from that email provider and the site keyword specifies the website where you want to find the email addresses.

Anyway with a landing page you should use google adwords for advertising campaign instead of trying to spam users to get their email address which you already have.

A) Use something off the shelf. Simple and cheap is best when starting out so that you can focus on finding business.

B) Explain exactly why the customer should fill in the email. I don't like bribing the customer with some other unrelated thing, like a white paper because people who want the whitepaper just want the white paper. They might not be your actual customers. Instead I would honestly say (example) "Do you want awesome deals on physics and astronomy instruments? Well we're going to find deals for you and send an email every month."

C - Niche products need niche sales strategy. Find out where your customers spend time and figure out how you can get in to meet people. Explain what you can do for them and ask for an email on the spot.

You are right. The landing page should be clear and has a clean call to action describing only one goal. That is, how the customers/users will be benefited by providing their contact information such as email and which products or kits do they want at a ridiculous price.

You should look at http://launchrock.com/

Thanks Jabo, Looks like a great launching platform for landing page. Will have to dig deeper to find out more about it.

Unbounce.com

Yes, I am debating between Unbounce and hosting plan with a landing page option where I will have more control.

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