Mailmodo Update: We 10x'd Revenue In Just One Year
This is a follow up story for Mailmodo. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hi, I am Aquibur Rahman, Founder, and CEO of Mailmodo, an email marketing platform that boosts email ROI and simplifies interactive emails. You can read about our journey here.
We publicly launched Mailmodo in January 2021, and since then, we have worked with over 300 brands and expanded our footprint globally. In our mission of bringing emails to the future, we’ve enabled marketers to boost their email ROI by -
- Collecting feedback inside emails
- Increasing webinar registration by enabling users to register inside an email
- Improving demo sign-ups with bookings inside an email
- Boosting cart recovery by allowing users to complete their transactions inside the inbox.
- Fixing their deliverability issue
In just one year, we’ve witnessed a 10x increase in our revenue; in fact, when the economy was experiencing a downward slump, we were able to double our revenue.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Since last featured in the Starter Story, our business has grown steadily, and we continue to grow upwards with our eyes set on the global market. However, our biggest win has been the innovation we’ve driven in the email marketing landscape. For example, we collaborated with the Indian Express to bring live RSS feeds into the customers’ inbox. Thanks to our combined efforts, now Indian Express subscribers get to read updated news three times a day in the same newsletter.
We’re grateful that we got a chance to work with clients who value breakthrough ideas, but the road to reaching such people required efforts on our part. From day 1, we worked towards building brand awareness and establishing trust with our organic content marketing efforts, and the results have started to show.
Like our revenue, our SEO traffic has grown 10X in one year. In fact, we generally see a 2X QoQ increase in organic signups. This success attributes directly to our single-minded focus on producing value-driven, high-quality content across channels.
We’ve also been consistent with Product Hunt launches of our resources, such as email flows that help marketers find a ready-to-use template for their email automation sequences or our favorite project WordleMail, which enables you to play wordle inside your email every day.
What has helped us immensely in this journey is that we build in public and ensure that our customers have an insider's view of what’s happening at Mailmodo. From sharing updates on social media to making our product roadmap public, we prioritize customers’ feedback and prepare our action plan based on their needs.
Customer success, too, has been pivotal in our growth story. Our team has been applauded repeatedly for being readily available, solving queries, and being true partners in customers’ email marketing practices.
Moreover, I have been actively attending both online and offline events and conducting lectures about entrepreneurship, email marketing, and the possibilities of interactive emails. This has helped me educate marketers about the potential of emails, how they can leverage them better, and how interactivity can be a game-changer in the coming years. In the past 1 year, I have had the opportunity to converse with the CloudEagle Community, ULIC Entrepreneurship Society, Indian Startup Stories, PayU India, and Qapita.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
One of the biggest challenges we faced last year was growing the team in proportion to our requirements. Finding and retaining the right people who align with your values and visions can be difficult, especially at an early stage.
What helps us find them is asking them the right questions during the interview, ie, what kind of projects they worked on during college? or how quickly they have been given the biggest responsibilities during their previous job.
When it comes to retaining, we ensure an open door policy - anybody from the team can approach me if they face any issues so that the process remains transparent and upfront. Currently, our team has grown 4X from last year.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
The most important lesson we learned last year is the impact of customer sentiments. Your customers should be the guiding force of your product. Keep checking in on them, and gauge what they like and what doesn’t excite them as much. For example, we noticed that our “add to calendar” widget had caught audiences’ attention, and we’ve prioritized it as an update.
Similarly, our discussion with the customers has made us realize that they’ve grown accustomed to Mailmodo because of its easy-to-use editor and features such as batch scheduling and email deliverability services besides interactive email. Our focus now is to optimize these features and also create more awareness around them.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year and the next 5 years?
Until now, we’ve established a niche for ourselves in the interactive email space. Our customers have been using our widgets for conducting surveys, webinar bookings, and cart abandonment emails. We aim to create more such widgets and help marketers adopt them in their strategies and boost their revenue.
In the long run, we want to increase and democratize interactive emails and create a global email marketing ecosystem for sending more engaging campaigns. To achieve this, we’ve plans to open APIs for other developers so that they can build their widgets on top of our platform. The future is free-flowing, and we’re all for it.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
Last year, I started listening to podcasts on the go. In fact, we wanted to create something similar for our audience, and that’s how we came up with “Mailmodo Growth Chats.” During these live discussions, we invite industry experts from the marketing and growth field to talk about niche areas ranging from emails, and branding, to growth hacking and campaign management. We’ve had experts like Mark Robbins, Loren Baker, Lauren Meyer, and Samar Owais join us on our Growth Chat.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their businesses?
- Go back to the basics: In today’s ecosystem, you will find that every day there’s new tech that will “revolutionize” the market and new tools that are a “must-add” to your stack. Keeping up with trends is great, but until it starts giving you FOMO. You don’t need all the tools in the world, you need to sort out your basics. Ask yourself these questions -
# Does your product help the target market solve a problem?
# Do you know the right messaging to communicate how your product can help?
# Once you’ve convinced a customer, do you have the right support team to help them onboard and retain them? - Talk to your customers: Every single customer review, be it good or bad, matters. You can narrow down what’s working with good testimonials and find out where you’re going wrong with negative feedback. So, it's important to keep asking your customers about their experience and what they’d like to see in the future. Our product roadmap is public for the same reason - we are building for the people, with the people.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We’re looking to hire more email marketers right now, and our application process is pretty simple - head over to my DMs and leaves a message.
Where can we go to learn more?
We have another announcement in store. We’ve launched an Email Masterclass that covers email marketing fundamentals like deliverability, authenticity, design, and copy, besides teaching learners about interactive emails. You can check it out here.
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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