Sweat, Blood and Beta!
25th June 2015, we kick-started Beta Sign-up Program, in order to get few customers involved early in product development cycle. “Beta” is Latin for “still doesn’t work” ;-), and hence with beta started a voyage from “not-working-land” to “work-like-a-charm-land”, with few fellow travelers on-board.
BTW, who are WE?
At Yogurt Labs, we are building a mobile video tech platform that enable businesses to create professional looking videos from Smartphones. Bill Gates once said “Content is King!”, well he was right. Today, businesses needs a lot of visual content. Our platform help businesses create quality video content on a regular basis.
Rome wasn’t built in one day…the beginning
We started with basic building blocks i.e. a Website, Facebook page, Twitter account and a LinkedIn page. With some good content we quickly garnered few hundred followers on all these platforms.
The next step — get landing page ready! There are two ways to do this, either build it yourself or use one of the third party services like Kickofflabs, Launch Rock, Unbounce etc.
After spending some time, we chose Kickofflabs as it has easy theme customization and Mailchimp integration. Beta page was up in matter of hours. YAY!
Part 1: Sweat
Beta page was up and tested, now moving on to difficult task: how to bring early adopters in? While social channels are a good source of traffic but they aren’t enough. According to McKinsey & Company, email is nearly 40 times better than Facebook and Twitter at acquiring leads.
LinkedIn provides a cheeky way of exporting email contact list. Everyone in the team exported their email list and after some sanitation, we had more than 5,000 genuine email addresses.
It was time to deploy our first email campaign.
Both Kickofflabs and Mailchimp support A/B testing. Two beta landing pages were designed and before the roll out of a big email campaign, 2 smaller campaigns were run to determine which landing page converts better.
Outcome: People were more engaged with the option on the right side of the image above.
All guns were set in the right direction, we rolled out first big email campaign.
Emails sent to contacts from my LinkedIn list had my name in signature. This gave a personal touch to the reader and they were more inclined to register to beta. The same practice was followed for each team member.
First email campaign saw a conversion rate of more than 40%, which was great even by the standards of Gary Vaynerchuk! We were really happy.
Insight: The largest chunk of traffic on landing page came through email. Social channels like Facebook and Twitter also gave us considerable clicks.
Part 2: Blood
LinkedIn contact list was soon exhausted. We searched for databases in verticals like Real Estate agents, Hospitality Industry, Event Managers, Executive Service Providers etc. These are the industries where effective use of video marketing is happening.
According to an Australian Real Estate Group, real estate listings that included a video received 403% more inquiries than those without.
After zeroing out on a db, a new email campaign was designed. Keeping our expectations in limit, we anticipated an open rate of 15% — 20%. The stage was set, fingers were crossed and next campaign was sent.
It failed miserably! Approaching people with a cold email and one fold Beta page was not enough.
Having a better landing page which speaks more about the product was a viable option. A design contest was hosted on 99designs.com and within two weeks, we had a much better beta page.
Though Kickofflabs allow complete customization of HTML, it require you to learn their liquid HTML language, which is kind of weird! Hence, the new landing page was hosted on our servers with A/B testing framework from Google Analytics.
Another setback: This too did not work that well. We saw very little engagement and conversion.
Part 3: Beta
Since cold email campaigns were not giving us desired results, we started looking for alternatives and came across BETA LIST!
We contacted Beta List to feature our landing page as they have an active and large community of early adopters. All we had to do was to fill a simple form and submit the page for review.
Beta List responded back within 2 days. Our landing page was ready and they made sure we were not featured on a weekend.
Just in three days of being featured on Beta List, we saw an increase of around 40% in our sign ups. These were the most qualified sign ups we got till date.
For ex. someone from “dollarshaveclub.com” signed up for the Beta. They create a good amount of video content. Their first promotional video got more than 20 million views on YouTube.
In little more than 2 weeks we got more sign ups from Beta List than what we got in last four months using cold email campaigns. Some traffic is still coming in from Beta List and sign up tracker is painted blue with its name :-)
If you are still with me then hopefully you must have got some good ideas for your Beta Program. I would be really happy to answer any question or doubt you have in mind.
P.S. Our Beta is still on and we would love to have you on our Beta List. Join us at beta.yogurtlabs.co.
