3 min read

Superscribe - Email SaaS

Superscribe - Email SaaS

TL:DR – We’ve just launched Superscribe – an email marketing service for growing businesses.

Email is powerful and a fantastic way to nurture prospective visitors into paying customers.

It was one of the main takeaways I learnt as I built up this site and YoGrow (an e-commerce analytics business).

One of the main reasons works so well is that we all visit so many websites. If you stumble across a website you may only stay for a few minutes. There have been so many occasions that I’ve remembered a website, but forgot it’s name.

I’m having a drink with someone and they tell me their problem. I think, aha – you need this cool site that solves that problem. Alas, i have no idea what it is called. Google isn’t always going to help either.

The more you develop a relationship with a person the more stick you become. You’ll be remembered.

You’re even more likely to get remembered if you help people out.

Email only works if you provide trust and value. If you spam or provide cookie-cutter content, you’ll loose interest and get unsubscribed. Many are (rightly) sceptical at the first place, so you’ll often have to entice the visitor. Often this is something juicy and once provided demonstrates your email list is worth staying subscribed to.

A common example is an ebook. In fact I have this exact proposition on this site (scroll to the top).

Once you have an email list, it’s your job to send value to that person and convert them from vague interest to warm interest to paid up customer. We want to push them along your sales funnel (to use the jargon!).

Setting this up on your site (and how I came up with Superscribe)

So when I was setting this up for my site and YoGrow I spotted a problem. It was faffy and expensive.

First off — the faff. There were a number of email lead capture and popup services. I used a bunch of them like opt-in monster and Icegram. I liked what they did but didn’t want a lot of the features like A/B testing.

I also had to then integrate this with an email service and sometimes this wasn’t as straightforward as it should be. In fact I saw this as an unnecessary step.

I liked how Drip had it’s own popup and was an email service. I was not a fan of the automated email plans so Drip wasn’t for me.

There are lots of other email services, but many I found overkill. It was also another inconvenience to have your welcome download hosted outside of your email service. This is the typical workflow if you currently want an email popup with a welcome gift download:

Popup Service > Email Service > PDF hosted on your website 

If you wanted to update your copy or download or list you needed to work with these three separate services. Three services which should be one.

Ongoing the email service provider is then used to send emails. Mailchimp sells itself as a simple service but many of my clients have found it unnecessarily bloated. They are not so much interested in the list making, the segmentation or the infinite variety of templates.

They want to collect emails and send emails. Something super simple that provides value.

I know I wanted this service and went about building it.

Superscribe is launched

And now I have built it. You can see the popup in action on this site (bottom left and as a WordPress widget at the top of this page). Once a user has subscribed they can download their welcome gift from the Superscribe site. They can also subscribe to other newsletters there.

The site owner can then head to their Superscribe account to amend their digital download, their popup content as well as email their list.

I have deliberately made this a lightweight and simple service. It’s a Minimum Loveable Product at the moment. I’ll await feedback before deciding the next direction to take. (If you have any, let me know in the comments!)

For the developers

For the developers out there I have used the following components to build this service:

You can add the popup to your site using the WordPress plugin (or by manually adding some JavaScript to your site).