To Achieve Product-Market Fit, Your Minimum Viable Product Needs an Email Marketing Campaign

How to build your email list and tap its value

If you’re building a minimum viable product, there’s a valuable metric you should start monitoring, one that a lot of entrepreneurs ignore. And it’s not customer revenue.

While MVP revenue is important, it’s not as critical as it will be once the product has found market fit. Don’t get me wrong, zero or close-to-zero revenue is one thing, and that’s still a bad sign. But unless you’re one of those rare and — let’s face it — lucky startups to launch an MVP to immediate mass acceptance, you’ll always be questioning whether your run rate is tracking towards fit or if it’s just hitting its peak on the way back down to, well, zero or close-to-zero.

So if I had to pick the best quantitative health metric for an MVP, it would have to be valid email addresses: prospects who have proactively opted in to receive emails from your company.

What you do or don’t do to tap the value of those email addresses might end up being the difference in eventually finding that elusive market fit.

The Sneaky Value of the Lowly Email Address

Email has seen its peak usefulness, for sure. But in 2022, a valid, opted-in email address is still more valuable than a social follower or even a mobile phone number, mainly because of the nature of those marketing “touches.”

Social messaging is blasted from one to many, viewed by few and then usually swiped away in less than a second. Mobile messaging, while almost always viewed, is usually discarded unless there’s a built-in urgency to act immediately.

Email messaging offers the possibility of a more intimate and trusted communication channel that at least feels one-to-one. In most cases, the email subject gets viewed, and when that subject draws the prospect to open the email, you usually have their attention for at least a few seconds.

But that means an email address is only as valuable as the content you send to it.

• Send a poorly written subject line, and no one will open the email.