How I'd grow Vetter

March 4, 2020

Vetter is a tool that tells you if your email will get delivered to recipients’ inboxes, or go to spam.

You paste an actual email you’re going to send into their system, and they use a network of real email accounts to show you inbox placement results.

The homepage does a good job explaining what Vetter does, and I particularly like that you can test the service right away.

Familiarizing users with their tool means the users will be more likely to sign up, or upgrade to the more accurate premium version.

But there is one thing that I don’t really like: their domain. Vetter resides on a subdomain of another website called Monsoon Yeti.

You look up the Monsoon Yeti domain, and you got redirected to yet another website called Medical Joyworks. It doesn’t make any sense.

This begs the question: “How much does a medical company know about email deliverability?” And Vetter absolutely shouldn’t want this to happen.

I would recommend getting a custom domain, and eventually creating an “About” page with founders and other companies.

I think many users would like to use Vetter every once in a while to make sure their deliverability is fine. But you can’t get a one-time check right now, just a monthly subscription.

I understand the desire to have recurring revenue, but they may be leaving money on the table.

To promote Vetter, I’d go heavy on content marketing. I think it’s a niche that could offer a lot of opportunities.

The first thing I’d do is a roundup test of email marketing services with Vetter ranking them from the best inbox placement performer to the worst.

I’d then reach out to the top 3 to let them know of the results. Hopefully they’ll want to share their great performance with their own users.

Doing so, they’d mention and link to Vetter, giving the tool a lot of exposure to the same target audience that Vetter is after.

Acquisition is important, but I’d also try to maximize retention. A cool way to do that can be gamification, and Vetter seems to fit well.

For example, a leaderboard where customers with the best streak of Vetter inbox placement performances get prizes.

At the moment Vetter isn’t present on any social media platform. That’s definitely a missed opportunity.

I feel the best platform would be Twitter. It’s where their potential customers hang out, and where Vetter could join email deliverability discussions.

What kind of content would do well on Twitter? I’d try creating threads around real customers’ stories (with their consent, obviously).

Short case studies with the changes customers made (thanks to Vetter) that made them go from 25% to 75% inbox placement.

Their website isn’t optimized for SEO. Even if they only have one page, I’d still try to target their main commercial keywords.

They won’t be able to rank on the first page right away, but why not try? 1 free visitor per day is better than none.

This is a niche where educational blogs do great. They have a ton of potential keywords they can rank for - it’d be crazy not to do it.

Their launch already got them a few good backlinks that will help their rankings for less competitive long-tail keywords.

Still, they’ll need additional link building. They can pitch the tool to dozens of websites that already wrote about email deliverability.

So with a good dose of patience and customized outreach emails, they should be able to secure quality links.

If I was the founder, I’d also try to leverage my personal story to get Vetter in front of new potentially interested audiences.

A physician that builds an email deliverability tool? The “I built a tool to solve my own problem” storytelling could do pretty well on Reddit.

The key to this content type is providing regular updates on development while staying as human and transparent as possible.

For example, the founders could write quarterly posts about struggles, lessons learned and victories.

Learn marketing from case studies

Every month I pick a new website and write a marketing case study explaining exactly how I’d grow it