There may well be companies in the B2C or social space which would, six weeks after launch, say "Damn, we missed the opportunity to make a Facebook page on launch day! Now how can we possibly make our rent?" I would bet against this being a huge win for many startups/businesses.
If you put a gun to my head and said "Make business value out of a one-time burst of transient traffic, the overwhelming majority of which won't be customers" I would
a) Aggressively attempt to capture their email address, for follow-up in a scalable fashion over the upcoming weeks. The Trough of Sorrow is a very happy place to be if you have thousands of people who want to talk to you. A significant portion of the audience for early stage startups hates getting email. That's not a problem, because 5,000 of them plus $3 will buy you a cup of coffee.
b) tail -f email_submission_log.txt
c) "Hiya $REPORTER | $INVESTOR | $CEO | $INFLUENCER I just happened to notice that you signed up for $COMPANY. Let me know if I can do anything for you. Signed, the CEO. (Psst we have a super secret VIP only tour at $LINK.)"
But that's only if you put a gun to my head. My truest feeling is that there is an overemphasis placed on launch because of a) community sentiment that it represents an important milestone, b) we suck so bad at marketing that 1,000 transient users feels like an accomplishment, and c) launch activities feel like high status (Talk to the press! Be the center of attention!) and standard day-in-and-day-out-marketing feels low status. (When's the last time an email campaign generated a celebratory dinner after it for everyone involved?)
P.S. A micro-tip for receiving PR. If one expects PR, one can trivially create a landing page specific to that source of PR -- e.g. "Welcome TechCrunch readers..." There's a variety of ways to do this -- if you have a programmer who can 302 redirect their way out of a paper bag the simplest way is to look at the referer. You pre-write copy that uses the social proof of whatever the media source was with the name and logo of the source abstracted out, then launch those pages in real time as required. You can pitch an exclusive benefit for people coming from, without loss of generality, TechCrunch -- perhaps a special offer or an exclusive premium created by the founding team -- as an incentive to that particular audience... and offer it in parallel to several audiences.
You can arrange this with media in advance with their co-operation but, again, you don't need people's buy-in to make this happen. It's two hours of work or less. Your conversion rates will notice the difference.
I think starting out, every potential pageview is worth fighting for. Facebook provides the potential for broader distribution, as does Twitter, email and other socially connected technology. Plus its free to use and startup founders generally already hav a network to leverage in those places.
For option C - you could already have an auto reply email all set to go and trigger as soon as people sign up (drip campaign) style. I tried to pick things I knew companies could do for the first time around, but maybe I need to raise the bar with regard to having email already working and a lead processing flow in place. Do you think that is really crucial at this early point?
I agree - this isn't high quality traffic, its transient registrations
Yes, you should certainly be sending folks a welcome email, but additive to the welcome email there are probably some high value targets signing up who would justify a personal contact, right?
"james.smith@nytimes.com" <-- automatic welcome email + CEO quickly tells James that he enjoyed that article on the whatever and that if James has any questions he'd, oh, be happy to hop on a call or whatnot.
You can even heuristically figure out who the high-value targets are likely to be and forward that directly to the people who would be writing that email. That's also five minutes of work if you know names, email addresses, or domains corresponding to folks you know you'd like to talk to.
But, since you're unlikely to get a bazillion registrations on day one, simply tailing (or having someone sitting in MailChimp and refreshing every 5 / 15 minutes) with a visual inspection is likely to catch enough value to make it worthwhile.
I can definitely vouch for getting value out of simply tailing a log of new signups or just refreshing our admin of signups every few when we were collecting a lot of email address.
The ones that look valuable stick out like a sore thumb and emailing them custom content is way more useful than generic gmail accounts.
A variant, less useful for launch (too much to do, not enough time to do it, PR outlets institutionally less motivated by it): let's say you desire coverage by, e.g., a particular blogger. You might try to offer the blogger something. The traditional offer is free or discounted $PRODUCT for them personally or for their readers. This is often less than motivational, because a) it can feel like a bribe, b) your $PRODUCT may not solve a problem for the blogger, and c) the blogger may feel that their writeup of you explicitly feels like hawking $PRODUCT.
Instead of offering $PRODUCT, get deep enough insight into the blogger or their audience to identify a problem that is of mutual interest of you, then create an exclusive incentive about that. The sky's the limit on options, but if someone on the founding team is an expert about something the blogger's audience cares about, then something like "A 30 minute video tutorial about $SUBJECT by $EXPERT" is incredibly motivational. You can use the offer to create something like that as bait for coverage. Highly motivational, totally above board, scales impressively. (The pitch writes itself. "We want to create something of high perceived value exclusive to your readers. Here's an example of us doing it before. Don't worry, no sales pitch included. Interested? Spiffy -- we can have it ready next Tuesday or delay launch until is convenient for your publishing schedule. Can we get a write-up out of this to introduce this to your readers? It might look something like this...")
You can then prepare a landing page for that coverage knowing it will happen, and that landing page should probably have an attractive, mutually beneficial offer leveraging the social proof to the hilt. (I seem to always suggest "Trade something extra for their email address!" so that would be my go-to suggestion.)
In addition I would suggest emailing any peoples blogs you've read over the past few years.
After our launch, I emailed a bunch of people who I'd never had any connection with other than reading the content they put out and simply thanked them for all the lessons I got to learn the easy way because of their writing.
Most ended up promoting our launch in some fashion and a few even became users even though they'd never heard of us until then.
If you put a gun to my head and said "Make business value out of a one-time burst of transient traffic, the overwhelming majority of which won't be customers" I would
a) Aggressively attempt to capture their email address, for follow-up in a scalable fashion over the upcoming weeks. The Trough of Sorrow is a very happy place to be if you have thousands of people who want to talk to you. A significant portion of the audience for early stage startups hates getting email. That's not a problem, because 5,000 of them plus $3 will buy you a cup of coffee.
b) tail -f email_submission_log.txt
c) "Hiya $REPORTER | $INVESTOR | $CEO | $INFLUENCER I just happened to notice that you signed up for $COMPANY. Let me know if I can do anything for you. Signed, the CEO. (Psst we have a super secret VIP only tour at $LINK.)"
But that's only if you put a gun to my head. My truest feeling is that there is an overemphasis placed on launch because of a) community sentiment that it represents an important milestone, b) we suck so bad at marketing that 1,000 transient users feels like an accomplishment, and c) launch activities feel like high status (Talk to the press! Be the center of attention!) and standard day-in-and-day-out-marketing feels low status. (When's the last time an email campaign generated a celebratory dinner after it for everyone involved?)
P.S. A micro-tip for receiving PR. If one expects PR, one can trivially create a landing page specific to that source of PR -- e.g. "Welcome TechCrunch readers..." There's a variety of ways to do this -- if you have a programmer who can 302 redirect their way out of a paper bag the simplest way is to look at the referer. You pre-write copy that uses the social proof of whatever the media source was with the name and logo of the source abstracted out, then launch those pages in real time as required. You can pitch an exclusive benefit for people coming from, without loss of generality, TechCrunch -- perhaps a special offer or an exclusive premium created by the founding team -- as an incentive to that particular audience... and offer it in parallel to several audiences.
You can arrange this with media in advance with their co-operation but, again, you don't need people's buy-in to make this happen. It's two hours of work or less. Your conversion rates will notice the difference.