Welcome to a new issue of Zero to Marketing.

Every month I pick a new startup and write a short case study explaining exactly how I’d grow it.

Let's dive in.
Buttondown is a tool to send emails.

What kind of emails? If you’re a new visitor landing on their site you wouldn’t understand it at first glance.

The hero section is way too vague. I only get that it’s an email tool but nothing more. Unless I had some prior context like someone strongly recommending it I would probably bounce.
The copy doesn’t tell me anything about who the product is for and why I should even consider it compared to the most popular alternatives
But it’s not a positioning problem.

If you do a quick search online you’ll see that the founder is always very clear about the fact that this is a tool that makes it easy and simple to send newsletters.

It’s a messaging problem.

Their hero section is not communicating that well to their ideal customer profile.
It looks like a lot of people are in fact confused and that’s a wasted opportunity because they already have some interest in the brand and might have become customers
On the contrary the rest of the landing page is very good.

It’s different from what I usually see because it’s mostly text.

But it’s good copy and it has a very strong differentiated angle against traditional email platforms - it makes you cheer for Buttondown.

The problem is that a lot of people won’t invest time in scrolling if they aren’t engaged from the start.

They don’t want to waste time only to find out that it’s not a product they should be interested in.
Instead of looking like a copy/paste from a million similar email platforms the copy-first approach makes Buttondown’s landing page stand out in a good way
I randomly found a killer asset that was buried somewhere in their changelog. An ungated demo of the product that lets everyone try it without having to leave their email.

That should be front and center on the landing page for new visitors to play with.

If they can use it for a while it’s going to build a lot of trust that Buttondown is the right product for them. I’d add a link to it directly in the hero section near the main CTA.
With their demo you can write an imaginary email, change all the settings and even customize how your site would look just like you would with a paid account
Before doing anything marketing-wise we should stop for a moment to reflect on who really is Buttondown’s main competitor.

Substack and other similar newsletter platforms? Sure. But that’s only a fraction of the potential market.

The biggest part of the pie is the vast majority of people who use only social media, have a decent audience but despite that still don’t have a newsletter.

So a good part of the marketing strategy should be aimed at educating all these people about the benefits of building an email list.
A lot of times your real competitor is not who you expect it to be
But it makes sense to start with people already looking for a solution to their problem so search is definitely one of the best channels for that.

I was surprised to see that when someone creates a newsletter it’s hosted on their marketing site rather than a subdomain.

I’m not sure hosting user-generated content on your main domain is a good idea from a search perspective.

On one hand you might benefit from all the incoming links this content receives but on the other hand it might completely dilute your topical authority.
Not to mention that it also attracts parasites looking to rank by leveraging your domain authority
People with intent might be searching for different categories of keywords like for example “alternative to” queries.

They are trying to address that but they’re making a few mistakes in the process.

The biggest one is that although they’re creating a lot of pages around this they’re optimizing all of them as “Buttondown vs [competitor].”

The pages are well-written and do a good job of balancing their point of view with objective facts yet they will never rank.

That’s because people looking for a Beehiiv alternative aren’t familiar with Buttondown’s brand so they’re not searching “Beehiiv vs Buttondown”.
Beehiiv is a newsletter tool that’s in direct competition with Buttondown but if I search for "Beehiiv alternative" I don’t see Buttondown mentioned anywhere on the first or even second page
I’ve seen from my own experience that most people starting a newsletter give up quickly. But the few who manage to build a habit and stay can have really high LTV so along with acquisition Buttondown needs to do everything they can to maximize retention.

One idea might be a gamification campaign. If you write your newsletter for one year you get the first year free. They could create a streak dashboard to keep people motivated to reach that goal. They might even build a support group to foster a community for those starting out.

Once people establish a routine of writing a newsletter for over a year it’s hard to imagine they would give up or switch to a different email service provider. For Buttondown that would mean unlocking really healthy customer lifetime values.
A study showed that only 10% of people who start a newsletter make it past 10 issues
While search might take care of some of the bottom of the funnel traffic that number is capped by limited monthly volume.

So it’s vital to also have a strong top of the funnel game.

What Buttondown needs to do is push much harder on the growth loop pedal. A product like this is lucky enough to have the opportunity to leverage that.

Imagine this. You follow someone you like and trust. You subscribe to their newsletter. When you receive an issue you see they’re using Buttondown. The fact that someone you admire is using it not only introduces you to a new tool but also carries a lot of social proof. If they’re using it it must be good. Some of their subscribers might start using it too gradually exposing more and more people to the same growth loop.

So the number one goal for Buttondown should be growing that number as much as possible.

Not with just anyone but with authors whose audiences match their ideal customer profile.

The most efficient way to scale this is to manually find those authors and offer them some kind of partnership deal like letting them use the product for free.
Their pricing is already wisely structured so that users can remove branding from emails but only if they are on higher-tier plans
Like we said before most people aren’t aware of the benefits of having a newsletter versus relying solely on social media.

So Buttondown needs to not only create content to educate them but also ensure they have the right distribution to reach them.

That’s why one idea to start with could be analyzing which of their existing customers have an audience and creating a content series where they interview them.

They could cover topics like why they decided to start a newsletter, why they chose Buttondown, how they’re growing their email list, etc.
There’s a good chance that once the interview goes live people will repost it on their channels amplifying this branded content to all their followers
That's it for today.

See you next month with a new case study.

Andrea
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