Marketing is generally unexciting to a ton of engineers, until it brings eyeballs which bring feedback and dollars. Marketing doesn’t have to always be cheesy campaigns or ads, it can often just be surfacing the things your customers actually do want to care about. My favorite type of marketing is when a service sells me on something at the exact time I want it. Here’s a few short tips on some non-traditional marketing that won’t seem sleezy but still can work quite well.

Email subscriptions to your blog

RSS is pretty dead, google went and killed it with google reader. Sure there’s some decent replacements if you’re really tied to it. In particular newsblur by @samuelclay is a great reader. But now days content emerges on twitter, fb, and ranking services, then later is discovered via search. Both of these work pretty well, but twitter is ephemeral for so many. Email still converts incredibly well, if people are abandoning rss but still care about your content give them the ability for it to be put right in front of their face via email.

Market in transactional emails

Have emails that include receipts? Account confirmations? General notices? No not a monthly newsletter! Transactional emails are obviously valuable to your users. Why not include a small call out to your latest announcement? Have a central hook that your emails can check from and simply include a small call to action within there.

Credit to @stevenbristol on strong business podcast for this one

Retarget to your existing users

In a similar vein of notifying your existing customers in transactional emails about news, you should be doing this all over the web. Retargeting is great to convert people once you’ve already got them on a landing page, but its also incredibly useful to get existing users to use a specific feature. If you track if they’ve never used a feature retargeting is a great way to make them aware of it, and once they’ve used it just count it as a conversion.

My favorite retargeting provider perfect audience makes this quite convenient as they allow a bit more control than most retargeting services

In conclusion

Marketing doesn’t have to be throwing your product and messaging in someones face, but you should make your users aware of it. The more engaged they are they more they’ll stick around and be happy about using you’re product, assuming you’ve built a good one. What are some of your favorite tips?