Growth Hacking, Email and Mullets

Jason Putorti had a great post on Quora regarding how Mint.com acquired 1.5M customers without a high viral coefficient. Check it out:<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/How-did-Mint-acquire-1-5m+-users-without-a-high-viral-coefficient-scalable-SEO-strategy-or-paid-customer-acquisition-channel" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/How-did-Mint-acquire-1-5m+-users-withou...</a>

wow, Patrick Mckenzie is really THE main influence behind this kind of marketing.<p><a href="http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/</a>

Ok, now tell us how to actually attract those email subscribers in the first place.<p>Maybe I'm cynical but getting existing subscribers to do something like a call to action is trivial compared to building that subscriber base in the first place.

How do you get those subscribers in the first place? Ask them. Pitch them something. Offer something of value. Give them a free trial if they sign up to the newsletter. Doesn't matter what it is, just find something useful to offer as a reward for signing up and make the offer incredibly visible.<p>It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.

I think this is the first time I've seen the spacing effect used for spam^Wemail notifications. I'm not sure how I feel about it.