
Ask HN: How to set up a landing page to collect email from a niche group? - subrat_rout
I would like to start an Appsumo like web portal which will provide ridiculously cheap deals on instruments and lab kits to a bunch of people in a particular niche group. Say for the people who are in universities and Govt. organizations doing physics and astronomy. However, I have no technical background(coding) for launching a good landing page which can collect email address from a niche group. Also I have little business experience on how to collect enough numbers of email addresses to start with.<p>So here are my questions.<p>Q1. How should I set up a landing page to collect required information.Should I go with any landing page template off the shelf to test the idea or hire a freelance developer to do it?<p>Q2. 1. How do I go out and collect large number of email addresses from a particular niche group?<p>Thanks
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patio11
So, from your point of view, you have a problem (lack of business) and
something that would help you out (people giving you their email address).
Let's reframe this: your audience has a problem (fill this in for me), and you
have something which would help them out (fill this in for me), which _as a
consequence_ results in you getting their email address and permission to
contact them.

You're presumably the expert on this subject, so just take this as an example:
let's say your target audience spends a lot of time grant-writing. Aha! You,
being the expert on their needs, might _also_ know a lot about grant-writing,
maybe specific with grant-writing-for-physical-goods-purchases. Why don't you
collect your expertise about that subject in, say, a 15-page report?

Then, instead of "Please give me your email address because that would help me
a lot", you'd say "Do you have a problem grant-writing? Of course you do. I'll
send you a free copy of my 15-page report on grant writing, including these 3
tips which will save you time/stress and make it more likely that your grant
is successful. Where should I send your report? [email address] [Get My Free
Report]"

You make it clear on this page that, in addition to the report, you'll be
sending them other stuff that they'll find valuable, and if they don't, they
can stop receiving it at any time.

Other stuff:

1) AppSumo will tell you that, for your first 1000 customers, your issue is
less "How do I collect a large number of email addresses?" and more "How do I
bang down the door of 1,000 people in this niche to have meaningful
conversations with them?" You can _literally_ justify putting your email
signup on an iPad and going door-to-door or conference-to-conference getting
signups at this point, just to have a better understanding of where your
target customer is at.

2) In specific response to Q1, at this stage, any landing page template off
the shelf is better than what you have now, and paying a developer is a poor
use of your limited resources. You can hook together e.g. Unbounce or e.g. any
landing page template on ThemeForest.net to e.g. Mailchimp in under 15
minutes, even with no special development skill.

3) In direct response to your Q2, this question is "How do I do marketing?",
and that is outside the scope of an HN comment. Don't worry about that right
now. Get the incentive written, get the landing page up, and get things to the
point where you can take someone out to coffee and browbeat them into signing
up on the spot. _If you cannot convince someone to sign up for your mailing
list while you're looking them in the eye you will never convince 10,000
people to sign up for your mailing list just from looking at your landing
page._

~~~
subrat_rout
Hi patio11, Thanks for the comment. Really makes sense. Collecting email is
not the only hard part. Once you have sufficient number of people who want a
specific product, the next hard part is to do the deal with the companies to
push them to sell you the same product at a lower price. I believe if I have
sufficient number of customers I can do the negotiation with the company to
bring down the price to a certain level. But that is now in assumption phase.

~~~
patio11
If the core source of risk to the business is not "Can I get 1,000 buyers of
X" but rather "Can I get a discounted supply of X if I buy 1,000 of it at a
time", that should be investigated with a phone call prior to building an
audience.

~~~
subrat_rout
That is a great pointer which needs to be taken care of first. Though getting
1000 buyers for product X is as equally important as getting a discounted
supply, inquiring the supplier(or it's competitor) will save a bunch of time
and give an idea whether the business idea is good to start with or not.

~~~
orangethirty
patio11 just:

    
    
        a)made you lots of money
        b) saved you lots of money and time
    

His response was just spot on. You should follow his advice. Really.

------
joelrunyon
I'm assuming you want to MVP this sucker, get it up and test it as quick as
possible. I'll also approach this from a "tools you need" to build it as I'll
assume you've thought through the marketing aspect.

If that's the case, there is no reason you need to hire a developer to build
this. If you want to MVP this and just test something, you can throw up a
landing page with Premise 2.0 software from copyblogger. I've written a
tutorial on this here - <http://socialmouths.com/blog/2012/04/17/premise-2-0/>
. It's almost offensively simple to do and you should be able to have a decent
opt-in page up and running in 20 minutes.

If you're looking to collect emails, I would integrate it with MailChimp
(Aweber is better, but MailChimp is free for your first 2000 contacts).

As for marketing, we'd have to know more about what you're interested in
selling eventually to these customers as your incentives for getting them to
sign up will vary based on wherever their interest should be targeted.

Hope that helps.

~~~
subrat_rout
Thanks Joel for your suggestion. I was debating between unbounce.com and using
mediatemple (I have a plan with them). But after reading about premise 2.0, I
think it is worth to look for. Can you please describe the difference between
unbounce and premise 2.0?

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adrianwaj
You can register yourdomain.com, and register an account with tinyletter and
redirect it to <http://tinyletter.com/yourdomain> \- then tell people to go to
yourdomain.com

At least with Tiny Letter you're ready to go to send emails once the emails
are collected.

Or you can create a basic page using Google Sites and embed the tinyletter
code on it to collect the email addresses. I've done something similar here:
<http://goo.gl/OyAXK> (you can also embed a twitter widget on the page too as
I've done to publish updates to the page from twitter)

\- just find organizations, and specifically people in those organizations who
can push out your message. Also go to online forums and post there. In your
postings, have your webpage as your signature. Try yahoo and google groups.

------
aleprok
Q1: You should find developer to do the landing page and many different
versions of it for testing which gives most traffic and email addresses. After
a while just keep those that actually work with your marketing campaign.

Q2: Simple google hack gives you easily email addresses from forums and other
websites where this niche group shares their email address publicly. Query
something like this "@gmail.com site:mmorpg.com" the email address domain
works so that it will search for email addresses from that email provider and
the site keyword specifies the website where you want to find the email
addresses.

Anyway with a landing page you should use google adwords for advertising
campaign instead of trying to spam users to get their email address which you
already have.

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prehnra
A) Use something off the shelf. Simple and cheap is best when starting out so
that you can focus on finding business.

B) Explain exactly why the customer should fill in the email. I don't like
bribing the customer with some other unrelated thing, like a white paper
because people who want the whitepaper just want the white paper. They might
not be your actual customers. Instead I would honestly say (example) "Do you
want awesome deals on physics and astronomy instruments? Well we're going to
find deals for you and send an email every month."

C - Niche products need niche sales strategy. Find out where your customers
spend time and figure out how you can get in to meet people. Explain what you
can do for them and ask for an email on the spot.

~~~
subrat_rout
You are right. The landing page should be clear and has a clean call to action
describing only one goal. That is, how the customers/users will be benefited
by providing their contact information such as email and which products or
kits do they want at a ridiculous price.

------
jabo
You should look at <http://launchrock.com/>

~~~
subrat_rout
Thanks Jabo, Looks like a great launching platform for landing page. Will have
to dig deeper to find out more about it.

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creativeone
Unbounce.com

~~~
subrat_rout
Yes, I am debating between Unbounce and hosting plan with a landing page
option where I will have more control.

