8 counterintuitive marketing strategies that actually work:

Add friction to boost sales.

Boxed cake mixes used to require only water.

But when Duncan Hines' cake mix required fresh eggs, sales soared. People liked the extra work.

Other examples:

Longer sign-up form → improves conversion

IKEA's store layout → inspires impulse buys

Grow your community through unscalable interactions.

Especially when it's early days.

Personally welcome all new members.

Connect 1:1. Make note of people's interests and expertise. When relevant community discussions come up, tag them in.

Everyone loves white-glove service.

Give away valuable info to get paying customers.

Marketers have been conditioned to tease value so that people buy.

But freely giving that value — guides, calculators, templates, etc — helps people trust AND refer you.

Eventually, they will buy.

Narrow your focus to sustain healthier growth.

Unless you have an established marketing team, it's unlikely you can create truly excellent blog posts, webinars, podcasts, newsletters, AND social media content.

Master 1 channel, then scale.

Anything worth doing takes time.

Get greater ROI from smaller channels.

Example: Sponsor niche newsletters.

If a list has ~10K subs, open rate can be 50%+.

Which means: High affinity and lower price tag than a mainstream newsletter.

Hint: Find these by way of hidden gem social accounts in SparkToro.

Remind customers of recurring charges to foster loyalty.

We've seen the subscription tricks: Hide the "cancel account" button to keep customers.

But that only causes frustration.

Send reminders or offer a "skip" option.

It keeps customers happy and nurtures word-of-mouth.

Delete subscribers to improve your email program.

Check who hasn't opened your emails in ~90 days.

Send them a note: "We only want to email people who want to be on this list. Click here to stay."

Remove those who don't click.

Your open rates will thank you.

Give free PR to others to enhance your credibility.

I call this "permissionless co-marketing."

When you freely promote others' work, you become more trustworthy.

It even unlocks doors for future collaboration.

I wrote more about this here:

That's all I have... for now.

If you found this thread valuable:

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And for the thread averse, here’s the blog post in which I expounded on the ideas in each tweet…

sparktoro.com/blog/8-counterintuitive-marketing-strategies-that-actually-work/