Types of Minimum Viable Products [Series]: The Email Campaign

Let’s continue our in-depth series into the different types of minimum viable products (get caught up on the seven common MVP types here) and how today’s entrepreneurs use them to jumpstart their businesses with minimal risk and capital investment.

Email is still one of the most effective channels to reach your targeted customers. So why not incorporate it into an MVP?

What is an Email Campaign MVP?

It’s a relatively inexpensive, quick way to reach out to your target market. You can even build a service with an email list without building a full-out product.

What do you do to create it?

For example, let’s say you saw an opportunity to create a tutorial for students looking to get help with SAT test prep. Rather than immediately publishing a book or creating software, you could do the following:

• Use an email service like Mailchimp or Constant Contact to create an informative newsletter with test prep tips that would be sent out to interested subscribers.
• Test, tweak, and update the newsletter, adding different information, practice tests, and other items of value to your readers.
• Measure which options are seeing the best results with your audience.

The goal: At a certain point, you’ll know if there’s demand for the idea that you have. At this point, you can begin to build out more elaborate products like unique software or publications that build off of what you have learned and created within your email campaign.

The catch: If you don’t have anyone to email, you won’t have an email campaign, right?

With too small of a list, you cannot reasonably expect to get the responses you would need to make informed decisions. There’s no hard science here for what entails a minimum viable audience, but you should make an effort to grow this initial list as large as possible.

How do you build this audience? Leverage social media, your personal and professional networks, or paid social advertising (among other creative ways) to build out a large enough e-mail list of potential customers.

Many entrepreneurs get discouraged due to a lack of generated interest. But often, they had never put the idea in front of enough people to get an honest amount of feedback. Give it time to grow and get in front of a significant number of recipients before you make your decisions.

Pros of Using an Email Campaign MVP

• Low overhead cost, allows you to take the time to test the viability of your idea
• E-mail typically produces better results than social media, with an ROI of up to 3800% (social media is estimated to have an average ROI of 28%)
• A variety of tools available to help execute your campaign

Cons of Using an Email Campaign MVP

• Requires you to have or build a significantly large list of recipients to make informed decisions
• Potentially difficult to turn email campaign subscribers into customers of future products

Examples of Email Campaign MVPs

The following are two real-world examples of email campaign MVPs:

Product Hunt: Today, Product Hunt is a website with a product-agnostic curated list of the top tech products and startups. But before its popularity as a website, Product Hunt started out as a simple email newsletter.

As the number of subscribers grew, a thriving community of entrepreneurs, founders, and venture capitalists generated the demand for a more comprehensive website. Product Hunt was able to use their email newsletter to test the demand and build a community for a product information resource before spending the money and resources into building a full-fledged website.

AngelList: AngelList is a network for investors, entrepreneurs, and those looking to work for startups — they are all looking to build relationships around their ideas and concepts. Just like Product Hunt, this major website first began as an email list where the AngeList founders offered entrepreneurs introductions to investors.

Once they saw that interest was building, they invested more money and time into building a larger network. Today, AngeList is one of the most popular resources for startup founders as a website with more than 3.5 million users.

A Final Note on Email Campaign MVPs

If you have an existing network of potential customers, using email for your minimum viable product might be the right type for you. If you have unique information that is valuable, you can share it in an email newsletter and see what kind of demand you’ll get.

You’ll be able to gather feedback and traction while you grow your community. There is no end to what is possible with an email campaign MVP if you’re willing to think outside of the box.