How to use snip.ly+curated.co to create retargeted campaigns for your audience

Most offices buy coffee on three-year contracts, which means cold emailing and cold calling has limited upsides if you’re a coffee company scouting out potential new clients. By definition, 35/36 of the people you get in touch with won’t be looking to (or able to) change coffee suppliers in any given month.

So one of our biggest challenges at Honest Coffees is to insert ourselves into both the mind-set and purchase intervention point when office managers are buying coffee. A clever combination of Snip.ly and Curated.co helps us get in front of our target market every week in a non-spammy way while still reinforcing our coffee’s super deliciousness. So when office managers (our typical customer persona) are looking for a new coffee supplier, they’ll naturally think of us. It’s a long game but hopefully on that will pay off.

How to create long-term relationships with curated.co while reinforcing your branding with snip.ly

The tools you’ll need

• Snip.ly
• A subscription to curated.co ($25/mo to start)
• Access to lots of great content that’s interesting and relevant to your target customers

What we’ve done

Using curated.co, we’ve built a hand-curated newsletter full of content that’s interesting and relevant to our specific target customer personas: office managers and PAs. It’s called Honest Office and comes out once a week. We’ve found Thursdays around 10am is a good time.

Each newsletter contains six articles and a comic strip. We’ve layered snip.ly on top of each of those articles, so our branding message is reinforced with every click.

The newsletter itself isn’t really branded, and it’s not spammy at all

But each time a reader clicks on a link, she sees our messaging at the bottom of the article.

We use mostly evergreen content, which means we can pull down 60 articles at a time, convert them into snip.ly’s, and load up curated.co for weeks to come. Once the newsletters are loaded up, you just set the publish dates and can forget about it if you’d like. We did around ten issues worth — from finding articles to converting them to priming the publishing system in around four hours.

How’s it worked out so far?

We just published issue number seven and have seen consistently good email open and click rates. We’ve had the best luck with clickbait articles, (7 things you should never do at work, etc), but you’ll need to experiment with your readers to see what works best for you.

Those numbers are pretty consistent, and we average around 1.2 clicks per subscriber per month at the minute. A newsletter with 2,000 subscribers would cost you $39/mo, which means each retargeting ad (which is basically what snip.ly is), costs you $0.016 each.

Plus: when people do click through to the articles, we’ve got our message in front of them for a long time:

Not bad for a few hours work!