- Speaker #0
The newsletter is the most powerful, most influential thing I have ever done in 10 years of being a quote unquote influencer in this business. This year will make me over a half a million dollars in pure profit. That's not counting what it's selling to BDSS or some of the other stuff that I do. I charge $4,500 for a single email. I'm sold out for four times a week for the next two and a half months right now.
- Speaker #1
What are some mistakes that people are making?
- Speaker #2
They think newsletters are kind of like YouTube. Like if I just build an audience. then the advertisers will come to me. And YouTube doesn't even work like that. That's not how it works. If you build an audience, that's awesome. But then you need to go out and either find a way to sell a similar product that you create or go out and find advertisers so you can sell their product. That part is just as hard, if not harder, than actually building the audience.
- Speaker #3
Your watch on marketing misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King.
- Speaker #0
Hey, Norm, I've got something for you, man. Did you know? that we've been doing this all wrong, email is freaking dead. Who in the world would want to send email now when you have social media and you have all this? It's dead. It's like 1980s. Don't you agree?
- Speaker #1
I heard it wasn't dead. It just smelled funny.
- Speaker #0
It's like, why in the world would you want to email somebody?
- Speaker #1
Oh, yeah.
- Speaker #0
What if you upset them? What if they get unsubscribed or what if they get mad? Just go post on social media. I mean, it's faster.
- Speaker #1
Complete wrong mindset, right?
- Speaker #0
Why? I don't get it.
- Speaker #1
We'll find out.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I mean, you're going to find out. Well, I think both of us can vouch that what I just said is total BS because email has never been better than it is right now. And that goes counter to what most people think. And I think... I've said this, and I think you will agree, we both have our individual podcasts that we do in the Amazon world. We have this podcast that we do together. You and I speak on a lot of stages. You and I do webinars. We do a whole bunch of stuff. But I can speak for me, and I think you will probably echo most of this. It's two years ago, almost August 14th of 2023, I put out my first edition of the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter. It went out to about 1,700 people. that first one. Now I've had 56,000 people sign up. It's going out to about 30,000 because I've weeded out some, some have unsubscribed. And my open rates on my last one last Monday was 62% on that. And I can unequivocally say that the newsletter is the most powerful, most influential thing I have ever done in 10 years of being a quote unquote influencer in this business. It's moved the needle more. It's given me more authority. This year will make me over a half a million dollars in pure profit. And that's not counting what it's selling to BDSS or some of the other stuff that I do. And I think you're starting to see the same thing with lunch with more, with your newsletter.
- Speaker #1
Absolutely. Yeah. It's the exact same thing. Where we're making our money is on sponsorship with a newsletter. But why don't we talk? to our guest today, because I think he probably had a bit of a heart attack when we started talking at the beginning.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. I mean, our guest today is Matt McGarry. And Matt is who, I believe, I'll endorse Matt. Matt is probably the premier expert on newsletters in the world right now. There's a lot of other people that show internet marketing and show you how to use Klaviyo and all this stuff. But when it comes to actually true newsletters, I think he is the guy And I think a lot of us are, you out there that don't know him are about to find out why. So if you want, just remember how to hit that button, hit that little button and bring on the guest.
- Speaker #1
I know how to do this. Just a sec. That'll keep him quiet, Matt. Okay. I'll bring him on. How are you doing,
- Speaker #0
Matt?
- Speaker #2
I'm doing good. Thanks for the kind words. Yeah,
- Speaker #0
no problem. So. So newsletters, you got your start. Tell us with one of the bigger, well-known newsletters out there, that's kind of where you cut your teeth on this. Or were you doing something in email marketing before that? Can you kind of walk us down that little path?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, long story short, I started my career in marketing just trying to figure out something that would work. After not really having a path, you know, I dropped out of college and no really normal credentials or path, right? Um, that eventually led to a job at a company called The Hustle, which grew to one of the largest newsletter publishers in the world. We got acquired by HubSpot. Um, I eventually left that and started my own thing afterwards, but that's really where I cut my teeth and actually got to see behind the scenes on how big newsletter focused businesses were built.
- Speaker #0
And you, you weren't, when you were doing that, my understanding was that you were kind of the trailblazer getting the arrows in your back, uh, because there wasn't really a model. There was a couple other people doing at the same time you had, uh, the guys at the morning brew and the hustle were kind of competing and kind of going and stair step with each other. Uh, but You were kind of like figuring this out as you went, right?
- Speaker #2
Yeah. I mean, when I joined, it was definitely an established business. I wasn't one of the first employees. There might have been a team size of like 20 or 30 people by the time I joined. And actually, after I joined, we got acquired about within eight months to a year. And I stayed on board and we grew a lot at the company that acquired us, HubSpot. We continued to operate separately and we grew a lot after that. So the answer is yes. The earlier team of the hustle probably had a lot more of that experience than I did. I got to do a lot more of the scaling after it was already working, which was fun. But even back then, like in 2019, 2020, 2021, it doesn't feel that long ago, but newsletters have become a lot more popular since. And so we definitely popularized the strategy, even though people have been doing it 20 years before the hustle existed. It just gets kind of popped up more recently.
- Speaker #1
You know, I remember Kevin approaching me, telling me that he was going to start this newsletter. And I remember just going, are you nuts? Like, why? You know, I don't get it. I don't get why you want to do a newsletter. It's kind of outdated. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no. I just went to this conference. It's coming back. I'm going to do something completely different. And, you know, now I got to eat my words. I'm never going to admit to them, but I got to eat my words now that the way we're putting together the newsletters, I have one as well, fairly similar. And then we see others. Well, we know why it's not working for them. In fact, I just want to back up just a bit. I remember at a BDSS event, Kevin was up and he was talking about he was just starting to see some success. with his newsletter.
- Speaker #0
I haven't launched it yet. That was the one in Puerto Rico.
- Speaker #1
Oh, yeah, right, right. I had to launch it.
- Speaker #0
I had gone to an AI summit, AI bot summit that Perry Belcher does, and he was talking about doing AI newsletters. He's like, this is this great new opportunity to do AI newsletters, and I'm doing 19 a day, and you can do this and this, and it's one VA, and I was like, crap, they can't be any good. I signed up for them. They were pure crap. I'm like, you know what? I used to do a newsletter 20 years ago before... can spam before this and we had 250 000 people on that list and so i know the power of it and it just got me thinking like all right i'm going to dive deep and that's why i discovered you i discovered i read everything consumed everything i could on it and i spoke at this event that i host in puerto rico and then that's the one norm's referring to and go ahead norm from there i just want to lay out that background yeah
- Speaker #1
so he's on stage he's talking about newsletters and you know everybody in the audience is just kind of looking around like what's what's he getting into And then he pulled up and he announced, I don't know, it was five or six. Some of the sponsors of the event. Oh, crappy. Yeah, some were sponsors sitting in the audience and saying, yours is awful. Yours is awful. This is crap. And they're all looking at each other because, yeah, sponsors of the event, big sponsors of the event. And then we started to see this evolve and he explained. And it's just, it got a lot of people on the bandwagon, but it takes a lot of work. I don't know if you'll agree with that, you know, but it takes work.
- Speaker #2
It does. I think it's one of the few channels that are actually worth putting all that work in. But I mean, I look at it like anything else. You know, newsletters have some unique advantages and some unique trade-offs or even cons to them. But it's a content channel just like anything else, whether you're doing a podcast, posting to LinkedIn, posting blog posts to try and build up some type of SEO traffic. It's just a content channel. and like most... people who publish content are not great, but if you're able to execute and do it right, I think you have a lot more leverage you'll gain from a newsletter versus other channels. And I'm sure we'll get into why.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. So most people I know there's like you just, you said that the morning brew and the hustle and they kind of set the tone and then all these press articles came out. This one sells for 75 million. This one sells for 9 million. This one sells for 635 million and became this hot, shiny object that everybody wanted to do. And there's this big rush and all these new tools came out and agencies and all kinds of stuff. And then you start seeing people get into it. And I had, since I did that talk, I've had seven or eight people do newsletters after I did that talk. And including my trainer. And he bit off more than he can chew. He's trying to do it three times a week. I told him, cut it back to once. And now he's kind of fallen off completely because it wasn't giving him a return right away. And it was a lot of work. And I was like, look, dude, my first year, I was grinding. And I didn't make hardly any money. I sold a few ads here and there. But that first year, I never missed a Monday or a Thursday because I do it twice a week. And I was grinding and growing and growing. and growing and now I'm printing money with it. Literally. And so it took a while. Most people can't do that. They don't understand going into this that this is media. Media is you must, just like doing a podcast, you have to be consistent. If you say every Tuesday is the new issue of edition of Marketing Misfits, you better meet that. Even if I come hell or high water and the same thing with a newsletter, you can't do one, put a best of issue out or recycle something or whatever. And I think a lot of people don't realize what it takes, even with the AI tools and stuff. Can you explain for someone listening to this? A lot of these people are listening to this are marketers. Some of them are e-commerce people. Why should they have a newsletter for either for their brand or should it be for their brand or should be for their industry? Or why why should they even consider it? What's worth it? And what's what's it take to actually get one star? I know you have a course and stuff. And but for the pure beginner, for the pure beginner, explain it to them.
- Speaker #2
There's a stat about podcasts where it's something like only 4% of podcasts have published more than 10 episodes and published four in the past three months or something like that. And so like 96, 95% of podcasts just don't exist after six months. And that's probably true of any content channel, whether it's blogs, newsletters, trying to grow on social media. Most people are just in that 95%. So that's step number one is understand that whatever you're starting. whether it's a business, a newsletter, something else, you got to do it consistently for at least a year to get what you truly want. And yeah, we'll talk about ways to get results way faster than that. And people can, you know, people get their first 1000 subscribers in 30 days and they make tens of thousands of dollars even from scratch within a few months. But if you're not willing to do it for that reason, or for that long, you know, maybe consider doing something else. The reality is whatever you do, you're going to run into the same issue, whether it's a newsletter or not. So that's step number one. And that's why not biting off more than you can choose is so important. I started my first newsletter in 2018. I had no idea what I was doing, but I thought the model was really cool. And I was like, I'm going to have a daily newsletter. I'm going to cover this. And it's going to be this long. And that lasted like a month. But when I relaunched the newsletter that I have now in 23, I started with a weekly newsletter. Initially, it was too much. I cut back, made it shorter. And I've been publishing that for like 130 weeks straight and that's made me 90% of the revenue in my business. And so that's step number one, like do a short weekly newsletter that you are not going to struggle to complete every single week. If you get there, you're going to be in a great spot. And then understand like, what do you want to get out of it? There's a lot of people who maybe saw like the Milk Road get acquired, which was a company that I worked at or the Hustle or Industry Dive. industry I've sold for half a billion dollars. And their business was all built around like 30 different newsletters and different B2B industries. And they think if they're going to start a newsletter, they're going to get acquired for seven figures in six or 12 months. And really acquisitions are not a good business goal to have for most people, especially if they haven't built a business before. So have a realistic goal. And that should probably be a goal of growing your existing business if you have one. or using the newsletter to launch a new business or generate revenue from scratch. So those are really the first two things I think about. Should we get into how to actually grow one and launch one for the beginner? Yeah, we can. I'd love to hear that.
- Speaker #0
We can do that. But just real quick, I want to clarify something, and then we'll do that. Can you describe the difference between a newsletter and a promotional email? I have a lot of people, like SaaS companies and people in our space, oh yeah, I've got a newsletter. They send it out and it's nothing but promotions about themselves and little ads. Can you, and I think the people have a, when you say newsletter, they have a misconception in their mind between what's actually a truly like a kind of more of a media piece and what's more of a, just a promotional sales email. Can you, can you explain that? Yeah,
- Speaker #2
that's a really important question. Yeah. So I believe myself as the newsletter guy, but I think newsletters and email marketing are both important and I don't think you can succeed without having both. Okay. So if a newsletter in the way that we'll talk about it just means like an editorial email. So it's all about value that the email itself is going to be 80% valuable content. or even 90% or 100%. And then it's like 20 or 10%, actually some type of call to action or promotion in some way. That's the minority of the content, right? It's all about gaining trust, credibility, giving away free value. And then a marketing email is essentially the opposite. They're usually shorter, and it's going to be 80, 90% sales, persuasion, call to actions. And you might give away a little bit of value in a marketing email, but not much. Some people try and combine things and do both where their newsletter is like 50 sales 50 value i don't i don't think that really works i like to have like a barbell strategy where it's like my newsletter it's once a week it's almost 100 value and then i send marketing emails um in an automated fashion to try and be relevant or around certain promotions i'm doing and they're 100 sales and um you get to know like and trust me that the weekly newsletter and you get to convert and buy from me for the marketing emails that I send to targeted segments of my list. So that's the way I look at it. Does that make sense? Yeah,
- Speaker #0
that's good.
- Speaker #1
Makes sense. I want to talk about what you're doing with the promotional, like the email that's going out and the newsletter. So do you find that they conflict? Do you find that people get annoyed with that promo email and it could affect your unsubscribe rate?
- Speaker #2
Certainly. Yeah, and there's all types of factors that depend on why. So most people think of cadence. Like if I send too many marketing emails, people are going to get upset and unsubscribe. That can happen. What I worry about more is how relevant it is. So like, is what you're marketing actually relevant to the audience? If you're showing them how this is going to solve a problem for them, even if they don't buy now, they're not really going to mind those marketing emails, even if you're sending them a couple of times a week. If it's completely not relevant to them, they're probably going to unsubscribe. But in many cases, that's okay because they weren't really for you anyways. Like you weren't going to monetize them. Having them on your list was really just a vanity metric. So I don't think unsubscribes matter as much as people think. You know, I'm perfectly fine with sending out emails and having a 0.5 or 0.6 unsubscribe rate. When you start to get above 1%, that's concerning. But another thing that I do and recommend is... The newsletter goes out to your entire list, so all of your active subscribers. But marketing emails should rarely be sent to your entire list. They should be sent to segments or based off of activity. So a segment of engaged subscribers or a segment of subscribers that completed the survey and they answered a certain question. So you send a marketing email that's relevant to people who answered that question. There's all different types of ways to do fancy segments and automations with really any basic tool you have, MailChimp, Beehive, whatever it might be. And so. What I'm trying to say is if they're relevant, it's totally fine. And frankly, it's necessary. So you're going to get the occasional hate email. Like I think a couple weeks ago, I sent six emails in a day to my list. I didn't send six emails to the entire list. Those were all to different segments. And like the max someone would receive would be four emails. I got out of, you know, 50,000 subscribers, I got four or five complaints. I got maybe 200 unsubscribes. but I got a lot more customers than that, right? Way, way more customers than that. So it was totally worth it.
- Speaker #0
One of the things that I do, like, I know you talk about this in your newsletter that comes out every Saturday about newsletter, newsletter about newsletters. It is that the ads inside the newsletter, and there's Beehive that does placements and all these police will take the new placements. Those typically don't work as well. And they're harder to monetize. They're great if you can get them. But that's the old. you know, magazine model. But the model now is like have something to sell, have a course or have an event or have a product or have something that's on the backside where you can monetize it. And in my case on these emails, what one I found most successful is I sell for 600 bucks or so a spot in my newsletter and I sell those pretty good. I mean, they don't completely sell out, but then I'll just drop in a Beehive automation one in there to fill this gap because I have two spots. But where I make the money is on the dedicated emails, what we were just talking about. So I send a newsletter on Mondays and Thursdays. And on Tuesday, four days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, I send an email. I send it to the entire list. I do do segmentations based on who clicked on certain articles or whatever. But I send it to the entire list, including the unsubscribes, including the people that I took off that did not engage with my newsletter after signing up to it. And I do that on a whole separate system on Aweber instead of Beehive. So if they unsubscribe there, it doesn't affect the newsletter. It doesn't affect the metrics or the open rates on the newsletter. And I now. I maintain that list pretty good, but I charge $4,500 for a single email. I'm sold out for four times a week for the next two and a half months right now. Literally every single spot is sold out. And into Christmas, I've only got about 20% inventory left. And next year, someone's already bought every Tuesday for the entire year. That's the power of those. But it goes to something that you just said that's important, I think, not to overlook, is if what you're offering resonates with... the audience. And what I'm offering is different software tools and different things that resonates with this e-commerce audience. And so they don't mind it as much. But it's extremely powerful. And a lot of people are afraid to email their list because they don't want those five or six complaints or those 200 unsubscribes. But I'm of the school like, no, email them until they say, keep your newsletter super clean. But the other side, email until they say stop. or they just haven't done anything in 90 days and it's affecting your open rates and your Gmail and starting to penalize you for legitimate emails and all that stuff. What are your thoughts on that kind of stuff?
- Speaker #2
I think unsubscribes are generally a good thing. And yeah, there are some people who are going to listen to this and then like abuse systems and go too far. But 99% of people don't do that. And the way I look at it is so I don't have a sponsorship-based business. And so everything I'm promoting in my newsletter or... through sending a marketing email is just my products or services. And I just believe that I can help those people way more if they pay me money and they work with me closely in some type of program or service. And so I'm almost doing them a disservice if I'm not actively telling them why this is valuable to them. And so that's kind of like the philosophical point of view. The practical point of view is just that if you're under that 0.5% unsubscribed threshold, if you're under the spam complaint threshold, You're going to be totally fine.
- Speaker #0
Which I stay under.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, absolutely. And everybody's different, right? Like you normally don't start with five marketing emails. No, I didn't do that.
- Speaker #0
I didn't do that until like six months ago. So this is.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. So that may seem like a lot for some people listening, but like if you start with one newsletter a week and one marketing email, you're going to be way more successful than just having one newsletter or just one marketing email. And then over time, when you have more to share or you understand how to send better marketing emails. you can add more. And then the good thing about marketing emails is like, you don't have to have a consistent cadence. Like the newsletter, it's editorial. It should be sent to the same day every week. Marketing emails, like you can go for weeks without doing them. And then leading up to a launch, you have dozens of them. And so it's more of an as needed thing. And so I think the bottom line is like, don't hesitate. You're really not inconvenience people that much. Like you hear the complaints from people where it's like, oh, you filled in my inbox, but like it took you. a millisecond to archive the email or unsubscribe in one click, you're not really inconveniencing anybody. The people who actually respond to things and complain, I've never done that. I've never taken the time to respond to something and complain. If it's not for me, I click unsubscribe and I'm totally fine if people do that to me.
- Speaker #0
Hey, Norm, you'll love this, man. I talked to a seller the other day doing 50K a month, but when I asked them what their actual profit was, they just kind of stared at me.
- Speaker #1
Are you serious? That's kind of like driving blindfolded.
- Speaker #0
Exactly, man. I told them, you got to check out Sellerboard, this cool profit tool that's built just for Amazon sellers. It tracks everything like fees, PPC, refunds, promos, even changing COGS using FIFO.
- Speaker #1
Aha. But does it do FBM shipping costs too?
- Speaker #0
Sure does. That way you can keep your Quarter four, chaos totally under control. and know your numbers because not only does it do that, but it makes your PPC bids, it forecasts inventory, it sends review requests, and even helps you get reimbursements from Amazon.
- Speaker #1
Now that's like having a CFO in your back pocket. You know what?
- Speaker #0
It's just $15 a month, but you got to go to sellerboard.com forward slash misfits, sellerboard.com forward slash misfits. And if you do that, they'll even throw in a free two-month trial.
- Speaker #1
So you want me to say, go to sellerboard.com misfits? And get your numbers straight before your accountant loses it.
- Speaker #0
Exactly.
- Speaker #1
All right. What about, so you're building an email list. And wherever, it could be from a webinar, it could be from anywhere. And then you decide to put them on the list and send them an email. This just came up for us. What happens if you're sending it to Europe and they've got...
- Speaker #2
different compliance oh yeah i'm probably not the guy for that question because it falls in the line of like of legal things. Generally for smaller companies, I don't worry about, you know, GDPR compliance. And, you know, someone's going to like dog me for that. Who knows way more about this than I do. So most of my customers and subscribers are U.S. based or Canada.
- Speaker #1
I just got had somebody reach out about that. Scared the hell out of me.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. I don't know. There's like you're supposed to if someone is in Europe, they're supposed to have a double opt in. And frankly, like most... tools just don't allow that. Like it's either all or nothing. Either you have GDP complaints turned on for everything and everyone on the entire world, or you have it turned off. And so really until those software systems are available to like identify where the user is in the world and walk them to the right marketing practices, there's only so much we can do. And so I try not to worry about it too much, but again, I'm giving you a marketer's perspective, of not
- Speaker #0
A lot of people, they email, they blast their newsletter to their entire list. And that's not what I did. When I started, my list was 20,000 or so people. And I sent an email to them saying, hey, do you want my newsletter? And originally, it was a double opt-in where they had to actually confirm. And that's why there was only 1,700 when I first sent the very first one out because they actually had to opt-in. And I still, to this day, I don't do double opt-in anymore. But they have to opt-in. I don't just blast it to anybody that ever sent me an email. Now I will send a cold email to them saying, Hey, do you want it? But I don't just blast it to them. What are your thoughts on that? People that blast to everybody versus people that make you actually request it?
- Speaker #2
Yeah. Well, of course, if they manually offer that on your landing page, your website for your newsletter, obviously you send them, right? But a lot of people are in a situation where they have a list for another business, their main business, something like that. Exactly. So that's a common scenario I run into. And what I recommend is sending kind of like, I wouldn't call it a cold email, so a worm email, where it basically just says, hey, here, I'm publishing this newsletter every week. Like, here's why it's awesome. Here's what you're going to get. If you don't want it, here's the link to unsubscribe. Or you could just say, go to the bottom of this email and unsubscribe. So what you did works totally fine, where you could say, if you do want it, click here. That works, but of course, you're going to get less people because they have to manually opt in. For people who have already opted in some way, customer list, context, whatever, CRM, I prefer to make them opt out. Obviously, we're talking about basically a consensual email here. In the context of a cold email, you would have to have them manually opt in because they don't know who you are. But also, cold emails don't really make sense for growing your email list in most cases. And so that's what I would do.
- Speaker #0
Now, back on the beginners that we kind of got off the subject, you gave us a couple of things, but back on beginning a newsletter, what's the next, you gave us the first couple steps there. What would be next and how to figure out what you want to do? Let's say you're an e-com product seller. That's what your business is. You sell stuff on Shopify or Walmart or Amazon or somewhere like that. What kind of newsletter should you consider? Should it be? something for your brand? If I sell, if I sell dog bowls, should I do a newsletter about dog bowls or should I do a newsletter about the general industry of dogs? Or should I niche down because my bowls are really good for dachshunds and chihuahuas into a newsletter for dachshunds and chihuahua owners? Or what, what would, how would you guide somebody to like, okay, where, what should I do?
- Speaker #2
Yeah. And so like we talked about earlier, I'm just going to talk about editorial news players. I'm sure a lot of those brands have what they might call a newsletter, but it's really a marketing email where it's like product updates, sales, that type of stuff. You may call it a newsletter. I'm going to call that a marketing email, and I'm just going to talk about editorial newsletters here. So in that case, I think about the newsletter like a standalone product. If you were to launch a new physical product, you would think about the ideal customer avatar for this, the features and benefits of this product, all the different things along those lines. I would think about all those things, but how it applies to your newsletter. You would also think about the name of the product. And so this wouldn't be the first thing, but I would probably have a separate name for the newsletter. So it's newsletter name from brand name. So it distinguishes itself as a separate editorial property or editorial email. Then I would think about the value proposition. Actually, in reverse, I would actually think about the ideal reader or the avatar, and then the value proposition. So who is it for? in this case, dog owners, right? And we could go pretty broad. We're dog owners who want to go above and beyond and help their dog live the longest, healthiest, happiest life, right? So not every dog owner.
- Speaker #0
does all that, right? And then what does it provide to them? That's where it could go in many different directions. It could curate the latest news on dog health, probably not a good value proposition because people don't really read that stuff. It could give you one useful tip every week about your dog health or about training your dog. There's so many different value propositions. And of course, the brand owner is probably going to know that better than I would, right? But that's what I would think about. Well, another thing that... people don't do is just talk to their readers. So like pull up your database, who are your top 100 customers, like send them an email, ask for their phone number, call them and ask them what content they're consuming about whatever you do or about dogs, whatever it might be. And now you have a dozen other competitors that you can go look at and see what content that they're publishing is most popular. And you can apply that to your newsletter. And it doesn't have to be other newsletters. It could be YouTube channels, blogs, Instagram, et cetera. you can still find other mediums and you can find the types of content or the angles that work there and apply that to email newsletters. And that's oftentimes a better strategy than copying other email newsletters because those have been done before. So after we figure that out, that's like the foundational stuff. Now we just need like a template and a format for the newsletter. So do we have an introduction section? Do we have like a mini article or a curated section or a meme of the day, image of the day? There's a different... dozen different sections we can have in a newsletter. It's kind of hard to explain this about visuals, but you get the idea. We write the newsletter, we publish it, and that's essentially it. And then the final thing I would add to that is like you asked for feedback. So, you know, me and you, Kevin, we have a poll at the bottom of the newsletter that says something like, how do you like today's newsletter? And you could have like five star, three star, one star, or something else. Or you could say, if you have ideas on how to improve the content, reply to this and let us know. And you'll get a lot of... good constructive feedback from the readers that you'll then use to improve the content. So that's a lot, but that's basically how I think about content strategy for an email newsletter.
- Speaker #1
So how do you get your first subscribers if you don't have a list? If you have a list of customers, you could do what you said earlier, where you let them decide to opt out. But let's say you don't have a list. You're brand new. You don't know any other than your sister and your mom and your neighbors that have a dog. What do you do?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I think the first thing is understanding what newsletters are for. So newsletters are a content medium for building relationships, retaining your audience and monetizing your audience. Newsletters are not really a medium where you're going to publish content and organically grow your audience. That's what social media is for. That's what SEO is for. That's what YouTube is for. When you publish on LinkedIn, the LinkedIn algorithm can show your content to other people. People can share that LinkedIn post. And so it gets discovered by more people. So newsletters don't have that. It's retention, monetization, engagement. So you need to have some type of discovery platform, like I alluded to. So you need to pick really one to pair with your newsletter. I like to say one discovery platform, one monetization platform. So our monetization platform's email. Our discovery platform is going to be up to whatever the person's personal experience and situation is. And so all of them work, frankly, like YouTube works. Instagram works, LinkedIn works, et cetera, et cetera. It has to be about what's good for your audience and what's good for you. I personally like YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram more than pretty much any other platform that's out there. And you need to also publish content to that platform. And at a basic level, people see content that they like on this discovery platform, and then they subscribe to your newsletter for more content or exclusive content that they're not getting on. Instagram, YouTube, et cetera, or they subscribe to your newsletter because you gave them some type of incentive to do so. And that incentive would be a lead magnet. Send me your email and I will send you this thing, essentially. And so you're giving them the extra push to get off of that platform and have an email relationship with you. There's a lot more to it, right? Like that's the foundations and the fundamentals, but there's a lot of other.
- Speaker #1
list growth tactics we can talk about as well.
- Speaker #2
I always like talking to our guests about managing expectations. What can somebody expect when they launch a newsletter?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I think for the super beginners, it's probably a good idea to actually not start with a newsletter, but just start publishing content to a discovery platform because you probably don't know your niche, who you're serving or what to write about. And so that's a great place to figure that out. Like do three LinkedIn posts a week for a month and figure that stuff out. Do one YouTube video a week for a month, figure that out. And then when you have an idea of that. You don't even need to start a newsletter. You can just like sign up for Beehive, Substack, whatever you choose, set up a landing page and just start collecting emails. And then as you're publishing content, learning about your audience, having conversations with them in the comments and the DMs or even phone calls, then you'll start to form like what the newsletter should be. And when you're ready, you can start publishing it. And just by doing that process and you having your landing page and your bio, all that stuff, you've probably built up an audience of 50, 100. 200 subscribers without really trying to promote the newsletter. Because that's one thing to think about too. I don't know if that totally answered your question though.
- Speaker #2
No, no, that's fine.
- Speaker #1
What's the difference when you're doing a newsletter? There's curated newsletters. There's original content newsletters. There's a variety of styles that you can do. Is there one that you write or a mix like you kind of mentioned earlier? What do you recommend is... Because a lot of people are just trying to be the next morning brewer, the next hustle, and they kind of just copy that format. Is that original enough or should you, what's standing out to you? What are you seeing people having the most success with and all the clients and stuff that you work with?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I see a lot of formats work. I have kind of a framework for this and I'll see if I can remember all of it off the bat. So I view it as like different types of newsletters. One of them is the curated newsletter where you're basically just curating and summarizing the best of. something else. So the news of the day, the Bible verse of the day, like it could be so many things, you know, different wine that's coming out, just curating interesting stuff to your audience. And that can totally work. Another is the expert, which is probably more like Kevin's newsletter, where you're just doing like how-to articles, listicles, teaching people, helping people how to do a specific thing or topic, something like that. Those are the analysts. Have you guys ever retro techery or like Ben Thompson. or something like that. So he's just analyzing stocks, some type of industry space, and he still doesn't have to be a business, just analyzing something and helping you make more informed decisions about that thing. There's also one that I call the writer, which is just more for creative work. And those are the main different types. There might be one that I'm missing. And the reality is like all those works, so like Ben Thompson, analyst, super successful, a lot of expert newsletters. I fall into that category. We've been successful. The Hustle and Morning Brew started more as curated newsletters. Basically, Morning Brew, when it started, it was just like a two-page PDF that just summarized all the most important content from the Wall Street Journal. So it just curated from that one source, and that's all it was. The reality is everything works. It's more about what your audience truly needs and what actually solves a problem for them. What I see, mistakes, like the mistakes I see are just like... things that are just not truly helpful and don't truly solve a problem. Like I see someone curating content, but like they're just copying and pasting it from another source. And so it's like, why should I read this when I can just go to that source? So if you're curating, you really have to find things that I wouldn't have found without you, or you have to save me time. It just has to be truly valuable in some way. And people, they don't think about newsletters like a product or service that has value propositions. and solves a problem, they think about it like, I'm just going to throw content at you and somehow I'm going to make money that way. And so it just comes back to those fundamental things every time.
- Speaker #1
Sometimes you see some of those curated newsletters, that's one or two sentences, and then you click to see the rest of the story to the blog post or whatever. And I've always said that that's not good, that you actually need to provide content within the newsletter. So that you need to give a summary or a nugget or so if I never clicked that link, I got something from it. And
- Speaker #0
I'm a big believer in that because you just like, if that's the problem with curated newsletters, like if people are never truly coming for you, how are you going to build a business, right? Maybe you can build an audience that way, but how are you going to make money? Because like, they're not, you're just bringing them stuff from somewhere else and they're never building a true relationship or trust with you, the actual writer or publisher. They're just, they're doing that with someone else. And so I think it's fine to have curated sections in the newsletter, like Kevin's top links that he found the past week. And like you share some cool tidbits that you found that week. That's cool. That increases your click-through rate of the newsletter massively. I do that.
- Speaker #1
I do that.
- Speaker #0
But if that's the whole thing, I'm not a fan of it. And then also, I like repurposing. I like publishing one newsletter a week, and then I turn that into three to five posts on LinkedIn. I turn that into scripts for YouTube videos. I turn that into podcast topics. And so if I'm just curating content, then I can't do that.
- Speaker #1
do you do your newsletter on linkedin too linkedin has a newsletter option do you do that
- Speaker #0
That's a fun question I get a lot. I don't. I get this question all the time. I have never seen someone use a LinkedIn newsletter to get actual email subscribers or generate some type of leads or revenue in any meaningful way. I have never seen hundreds of people try LinkedIn newsletters, never seen one person have success with them. And I really think it's like a feature that, you know, LinkedIn has like so many features and like it's such a mess, the UI. I think it's just a feature they launched. They thought it was a good idea. They supported it for a while and then they just stopped and they never removed the feature. And so everybody's thinking like a LinkedIn newsletter is going to help them in some way. And it never truly does.
- Speaker #1
We just are, we recorded just before we recorded with you, we recorded with a LinkedIn guy expert. He's like number three in the world, according to several studies or whatever on LinkedIn. And he said, newsletters there are totally underrated. But you got to do them right. And he kind of walked us through. And I'm not doing it right. And he walked us through and he pulled up his screen and showed us how you can get some of the demographics. And I can get the open rates. And I can reach this. And how you can actually then get that over to a webinar and actually get the email addresses of everybody that signs up for the webinar. It was interesting.
- Speaker #0
I'll watch it. Because I would love to see somebody make it work. The thing is, I just haven't seen. Like, I've seen people get a lot of subscribers. I haven't seen them get real leads and customers from it. And so I'll check that out.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
But the,
- Speaker #1
go ahead.
- Speaker #0
One of the final thing on that is like when you publish that LinkedIn newsletter, it publishes as a LinkedIn post. And also email.
- Speaker #1
He said it emails everybody. What was it? What did you say, Norm?
- Speaker #0
Your on your contact,
- Speaker #1
everybody on your contact list. And he's seeing like 20, 25% open, right? So like me, I've got 14,000 or something people. He said, every one of them will get an email and he, he pulled up and showing 20 to 30% open rates of people actually clicking through. Uh, and then he puts a big call to action at the bottom, not like a little link. Oh, if you like this subscribe, because I told him what I used to do is truncate the newsletter, but like half of them and say, to see the rest of it, click here and go sign up on Beehive basically. And he's like, no, no, no. Put a big, huge like banner at the bottom. You can't miss it to get them. And he said that type of stuff works and he's, he's having, his clients are having good success with that. So I don't know. I'm going to try it and see, but I was just curious.
- Speaker #0
Definitely makes sense to have a really big call to action within it. because if you're just sending content, like when it publishes that as a LinkedIn post, like a regular LinkedIn post, like an image-based post, a carousel, is always going to get more impressions and engagement than just a newsletter.
- Speaker #1
Right.
- Speaker #0
Because people have to be clicking and read the newsletter on the platform. The email is obvious. Like if it actually sends it as an email newsletter to your contacts, et cetera, that's great. I don't know. I've heard mixed things about that because I've heard sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't in your visibility. That might be limited. I'm not an expert, but I hope. I think everybody should probably watch that and I'll watch it too. I just haven't seen it work so far. So I'm kind of have mixed feelings about it essentially, but I'm going to, I love to be proven wrong.
- Speaker #2
What do you think about organic versus paid? Do you think there should be a combination, send out your email and then have a paid section?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Like paid newsletters, paywalls, that type of stuff. I'm a strong believer for most people, you shouldn't put newsletter content behind a paywall. It's almost always a bad idea, but there are some notable exceptions. The reason is that's often your best content and that's now behind a paywall. And then you can't use that to go and grow your audience and get more people onto your newsletter or use that to build trust so you can sell a product. So I'm a fan of having other types of paid products. And I like media products because that's where my experience is. So like paid media products, like courses. events, info products, digital products, coaching, that type of stuff. And I would rather just grow my audience and then get one to 5% of those people on my email list to convert to one of those higher priced products, then try and sell them a paid newsletter for 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month. It's just really hard. The churn's super high on these types of paid newsletters. I know everybody thinks Substack is the hottest thing and it's a great platform. It's just really hard to build a business selling $10, $20 a month email newsletters. You have a lot of customers. And then you have to figure out how to grow that because that content's behind a paywall, so you can't share it to grow it. And so it's like, how does that work? And there's some exceptions. Obviously, there's a lot of people that cover politics or news that are able to build big paywall premium content businesses. There's the financial newsletter companies like Agora. or market-wise that have built billion-dollar paid newsletters. But they kind of operate in a different category than most people listening to this.
- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #2
They've helped up-and-coming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top category positioning, while... also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilever launch their new products.
- Speaker #1
Right now is one of the best times to get started with Stack Influence. You can sign up at stackinfluence.com or click the link in this video down in the description or notes below and mention Misfits, that's M-I-S-F-I-T-S, to get 10% off your first campaign. Stackinfluence.com. What I do on mine is instead of trying to charge them, if I have a really good nugget or a really good piece of information, I put it in a VIP section. With Beehive, you can actually say, you can say only show this little module or this little section if you've referred X number of subscribers or more. So I set that to you've had to refer one or more, which is two basically, but that's an easy win. And if the... If they've referred two subscribers, that section shows up. Otherwise, it's a little tease at the top and says, this is the VIP section. Inside is a trick on how to double your CTR on Amazon in 48 hours or less. It will not appear unless you've referred. Here's how to refer. And then it just continues on. That's been very effective. And then another thing I do to increase the click rate, you mentioned the little curated section at the end that can help you click. I do that. I call it the hot picks or something. It's three or four links. But another thing I've been doing the last month that's very successful is a surprise link. So the little box, it says surprise link of the day. And it's just you don't know what you're going to get when you click it. You click it and it could be like a really cool chat GPT bot or it could be to a really cool tool or to a really cool PDF of something. And that's been extremely effective as well. It's probably the number one or number two most clicked thing in the entire newsletter. And that helps the CTRs and helps stuff. So those are some tricks based on what Norm, I just want people to think about. You can think outside of the box, more like a misfit, rather than trying to charge for it. And there's other ways to use these things.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I love that tactic. And really, if you're confused about your newsletter format, you just got to go and sign up for like 10, 20, 30 good newsletters and see what they're doing and kind of take the sections you like, take what you don't like. and then build out your own. So, you know, Kevin has a great newsletter. I think I have a format that works decently well. I also like Alex Ramosi. He's new to newsletters, but yeah, he's got like Mosey Money Minute, which I think more people should steal that because not the name, but just the format. I haven't seen many people copy it. It's basically a one-minute tip. And then there's basically...
- Speaker #1
Clear is the same, very shortened to the point with three things.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, James Clear is another one to model. But it's like one minute tip, one call to action. It's like one sentence. And then he has kind of like what you do. He has a surprise link where it's like PS and it's usually a funny meme. And they get off the chart click-through rates on that.
- Speaker #1
I think a lot of people don't understand about design. It pisses me off when I design something in Beehive. It looks beautiful on my phone, on my iPad, on my laptop, on a Mac. And then someone replies back to me on... using an Android, you know, they reply back to the newsletter and the whole newsletter is down below. And I'm looking at the formatting going, man, there's the line breaks. There's supposed to be a line break here. It's supposed to be this there. It's jumbled. And I've been fighting that and I've gotten a lot better at it. But the readability of a newsletter, the skimmability, most people don't read everything. They need to be able to skim it. And short sentence, short paragraphs, short things and headers and dividers and all that kind of stuff. What's your take on? the actual cosmetics of a newsletter to make it more engaging and attractive and to get people to not just go, here's a big block of text. I ain't reading that.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I think design is super important, but it's exactly what you said. Design in newsletter context, it's way more about readability and skimmability than it is about making it look pretty. And that's where people make the mistake. Either they don't care about design at all and it looks ugly, or they try and make it look pretty and they add like all these images and all this fancy stuff. But that actually makes the readability worse. And so your entire design should be about functionality and not about aesthetics, in a newsletter at least. And it's hard to explain without a visual, but Morning Brew, everybody should just go copy their design. Um, so if you have a longer form newsletter, the way they do it is just boxes. So it's like each section, there's a box around it, like small, thin gray line. And then there's a section header. So it might say, um, story of the day. And then below the section, there's a headline. So whatever the story of the day is, you know, Matt goes on the marketing misfits podcast and there's a story. And then there's another box for the next section, et cetera. And if you do that, that's, that's what I do. That's going to. get the job done 99% of the time.
- Speaker #2
How are you seeing AI fit into all of this, into the writing and into the strategy, growth strategy?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, well, AI is, you know, it's like, you guys know it's like, it's going to be in everything. I'll speak to the writing stuff first because that's where I'm dabbling more into it. What I don't think is happening right now is like completely automated newsletters that are actually good. Just like, I think you mentioned that earlier, Kevin, where it's like... Some people, like I have subscribed to these newsletters, I've seen them. And when it's 100% automated, it's never good. You need a human editor, but AI could get you 50% there, 80% there a lot of times. So I'm a more fan. I'm a fan of having like manual workflows and not trying to automate a newsletter process because you still need a human touch to really make it incredible. And maybe because there's more and more AI content, that human touch. will matter even more in the future. But I like, I like Claude for writing. So like, you can create different projects in Claude and you can upload your data. So you can upload like all of your past newsletter issues that you wrote. You can upload like your customer avatar document. You can upload information about your product. So basically give that project context on your newsletter and your business and your content. And then I just do different chats within that project. And so usually for me, I'm writing drafts first and then giving it to AI after that to like punch it up, add context or edit it. But you could have if the cloud project has context, a lot of people have it write newsletters from scratch. But I think having that like source material context is so important because if you just like say, hey, Chad should be to you write a newsletter about this topic, it's going to be garbage. But if you have that context. your result is going to be way better. And usually Claude's better at writing than ChachiBT. One final thing I'll add to that is, you know that like long prompts are way better than short prompts. So that's one thing I do. And what I've been doing, I learned this from a buddy, Ryan Carr, is just using a transcription tool like WhisperFlow. And instead of just like me typing a couple sentences about what I want, I just talk about what I want to write and what I want the newsletter to be about for like three, five minutes. And so just give it all of this context. And then that's the prompt that I use to get the first output. And that's way better than me trying to explain everything I want in two sentences. I can just talk about it for five minutes.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, Whisper's good.
- Speaker #0
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
I mean, the way I do some where I write originally, like you said, and then I have AI spruce it up. Sometimes I'll try it in Cloud. Sometimes I'll try it in OpenAI. And lately I've been using more Cloud. But then if I'm doing a summary, a piece on like some topic, maybe there's been seven articles that have been published out there about it in different places. I'll grab all seven of those articles and sometimes I have to cut and paste them. I can't, they won't read the links. And I'll say using, I'll give it a big problem. Using these, you're a newsletter, you're writing for an Amazon seller's newsletter. Use the information inside the quotes or attached to the PDF or whatever it is here. And I want you to write a summarized story. I'll be specific in article format or bullet point format or whatever. And then I'll have read or at least skimmed all of those articles. And so I will guide it. I'll say, I want you to make sure you emphasize this piece, end with this, do this, do that. And then it will spit out something for me. And that's been very effective. It's saving me a lot of time and giving me something that's original. And then I'll credit the sources or if there's a main source. that according to Matt McGarry's blah, blah, blah, you know, there'll be a link to your... newsletter or your website or whatever. And that way nobody could really ever complain. But it's not a, it's not a plagiarism. It's not a lift. It's a, it's a drudge report, expanded drudge report linking out. And that's been very effective.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. And I think the trick here, if it could go on a trick is treating a tool like Clot or ChatGPT as an employee, like it's, it's your researcher, it's your, you know first draft writer it's your proofreader it's your editor uh it's your assistant Like you treat it like that and you have conversations with it rather than saying, AI, do all this work for me and like automate 100% of it. It's like, it's just another employee that you're going to work with. And what I'm trying to do more of is just think AI first, because I'm still building the habit of using AI. So it used to be like a year ago, it's like if I wanted to make an image, I go into Canva and I start messing around. I have to train myself to go into chat GPT first or mid-journey first and do it that way. And I think if, you know... I'm really speaking to myself here, but really if everybody, if we all just like try and do it with AI first before we try and do it on our own, we're going to figure out how to get good results. I don't think there's like a perfect course you can take or blog post that's going to give you all the answers or a new AI tool that's really just a wrapper that's going to give you everything you want. Try that stuff out, but it's really just a matter of doing the work every day.
- Speaker #1
I'll do it where I'll get the story done and then I'll say, okay, now create me three different prompts. image prompts to create an image that will represent this story. And if I have something to emphasize a chart or emphasize this or whatever I may be, and I'll do that in chat in GPT 4.0. And then I'll take that same prompts when spits it out using Claude. And I take that over to 4.0 and put it in there. And then I take the same prompts and I put them into ideogram three, which I find usually about 80% of the time does the best images. And sometimes it jacks it up and then chat GC does better. And then if I find one I like in one of them and it's messed up something, I'll use it as a reference photo and go to the other one and say, okay, this is the style I like. Now create me something else that looks similar to this. And that's pretty effective at getting graphics and images or charts or whatever. And just like you said, that's like an employee. Instead of me going to the graphic artist and work with Canva, the tool is doing it for me.
- Speaker #0
I love that. I think I'm just a fan of workflows, not AI workflows, not AI automations. So what you described as a great workflow. People need to figure those out. The automations will come later after you figure out what the workflow is.
- Speaker #1
And I think a lot of people, they make a mistake of writing every newsletter from scratch. You should have a template. And so I have dummy templates for my Monday and my Thursday news that are slightly different. And so I start with a template and it's got the header in there with some gobbledygook text and the first sentence, like seven letters of the first sentence. And so all I got to do is backspace to seven, start it, and everything is... formatted. Everything's in the right. It's consistent. People know what to expect. And then I'll mix that up every once in a while because people then start to know what to expect too much and they skip over an ad or they skip over something. So I'll hide things or move them around. But that seems to be pretty effective. What's your thoughts on something like that?
- Speaker #0
I think that's a must. And after you kind of figure out all the foundational things we talked about earlier, the template is the next step. And you got to think about it like, you know, This is a magazine. This is a newspaper. People are expecting certain sections. And they're basically going to be the same every single newsletter. Yeah, you're going to play around with them and tweak them and test different things over time. But that's just as much for the reader as it is for you. So you can just essentially fill in the blanks and not have to write or create totally from scratch every single time. So I've stuck to more or less the exact same template for over a year now. And I haven't edited it at all. I can walk you through that or people can go see it if they want to. Um, but yeah, that's a game changer. Once you figure that out, it's awesome. And the one advice I'll add to new people is just, it should be a lot simpler than you think. Like I started my first newsletter and I was like, I'm going to have like, I kind of copied James Clear. James Clear has like the, uh, one, two, three newsletter. So it's like, I forget what the one is, what the two is, what the three is, but it's like one idea from James. Uh, no, it's like three quotes, two ideas from James. And then one question to ponder. So he talks about habits and personal development and all that stuff. So I was like, I'm going to have the 5-3-1 newsletter. I'll have five different valuable links that I found that week. Three different examples of people doing something cool in the newsletter space, like growing, monetizing some cool landing page, add something. So three examples and then one deep dive on a strategy for me. And that was way too much stuff. And I was able to cut that back to like three to five links and then just one deep dive. And I've stuck with that format for a year or two at this point. It's been great.
- Speaker #2
What are some mistakes that people are making?
- Speaker #0
Just there's, I mean, there's a lot. We talked about a couple like publishing too often, trying to have this long, complicated newsletter. One we didn't talk about is monetization, because that's what everybody cares about. If they want to grow an audience, get people to subscribe, they want to make money. And I do too. So the only way you can monetize a newsletter is to sell something. That could be your own product or service that you have or you create, or that could be your sponsor or advertiser's product or service. So if you can't actually sell something through your newsletter, through your email list, you're not going to be financially successful. And both of those options work. Like some people, I personally have built a business around my own products and services. I prefer that. It's a better fit for what I'm doing. Some people are 90, 100% sponsorships and advertising. That works too. Some people are more like 50, 50 or 80, 20. All that can work. but you just have to be able to sell effectively. And so like the content has to be valuable. The ads in the newsletter have to be great. The marketing emails have to be great. And you have to build an audience that, you know, either has the buying power to actually buy something or has a problem that you can solve. So what I'm trying to say is like, there's no shortcuts. A common mistake people make is like, they think newsletters are kind of like YouTube. Like if I just build an audience. then the advertisers will come to me. And YouTube doesn't even work like that, but they imagine YouTube works like that. That's not how it works. If you build an audience, that's awesome. But then you need to go out and either find a way to sell some more product that you create or go out and find advertisers so you can sell their product. Like that part, selling products and getting sponsors is just as hard, if not harder, than actually building the audience. And so... you're not going to get to 10,000 subscribers and automatically be making $10,000 a month if you don't have the capability and the skill to sell.
- Speaker #1
I think a lot of people, one thing that's important that is not discussed enough, I think, in the newsletter space is deliverability, is understanding the DKMs and the SKFs and all that and staying in that inbox and doing testing. Certain words in your newsletter can trip it up. And what are your thoughts around deliverability and that kind of thing?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, it's definitely not understood, but it's also simpler and easier than a lot of people think. I don't claim to be like a technical deliverability expert, so I can't explain how all the email systems work and all that stuff. And I don't think people care to hear about it anyways. But like when you, you can either send like the most foundational thing is you can either send from a custom domain. So it's like kevinking.com or a shared domain. So you use Beehive, I think, kevinking.beehive.com. If you're just trying to like, if you're just getting started, it's fine to send from a shared domain because the email service provider takes care of all that like deliverability stuff for you. But if you want to set yourself up for long term success, setting up a custom domain is usually a guided process now. So like when you set it up, Beehive or Substack or whatever tool you use will walk you through how to set up DKM, all the different acronyms. Right. And you can knock that out in about 15 minutes. So the technical part of deliverability isn't rocket science. I think engagement and inbox placement is actually the really tough part. So actually being in the primary folder, not going to promotions, spam, stuff like that. And that's where I have some frameworks that I just don't see 99% of people do. Would it be good to walk you through those?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, please.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, so how to actually land in the primary inbox. And then... The thing about this is you have a reputation that you build. You send from your domain in Gmail, Yahoo. They see your reputation. So if you increase your engagement with some subscribers, that will start moving all of your emails into better placements. And then the individual level, if a user interacts with your email, like they take your email, move to the primary inbox, or start or reply to it, that will improve the placement you have of that individual recipient. If you're moved to the primary inbox, you're going to stay there at least as long as they keep opening your emails. If they reply, they're going to open. So anyways, the tactic is this. After someone signs up, your thank you page is super important. So you see a lot of thank you pages, right, Kevin, where it's just like, you're in. Thanks for joining. Like, that's the entire thing. That's a big missed opportunity because after someone signs up for something, they're most excited to take whatever the next step you recommend is. And so it's great to have like a call to action for a product or service there. But one of the key things you should do on the thank you page is incentivize someone to go and open your welcome email. And I'll explain why in a minute. The welcome email is super important because we want them to take some key actions in that welcome email. And if you don't incentivize it, most people are going to ignore the welcome email because they are trained to ignore that. Most welcome emails have nothing important in them. Like think about all the newsletters you sign up, all the stuff you've ever signed up for. Most of the welcome emails. just have nothing valuable. They just reiterate what you already know about what you signed up for. And most people just ignore them. And that's a big problem. So incentivize someone to open your welcome email. And usually it's through some type of free gift or lead magnet. I'm going to send you this guide on XYZ, whatever it might be. And so if you're able to actually get that welcome email open, that helps a lot. Also, have a welcome email subject line that's not generic. If you just say, thanks for joining, welcome, there's no reason for me to open that. It's just like, thanks for joining. You're welcome. I'm not going to open that. I'm just going to ignore that email. It's not a priority. So have a unique subject line that actually gets people to open it. And then here's the important part. In the welcome email, we want them to take three. what I call key deliverability actions. So we want them to move the email to their primary inbox, click a link within that email, and reply to that email. If they do all three of those things, you're almost guaranteed to stay in the primary folder for a very long time. If they don't do any of those things and they don't continue to read your newsletter, you're probably going to stay in promotions forever or worse. And one final thing on that is just how they do that tactically. So for move to primary, you just ask for that. Move my emails to the primary inbox so you actually see them. For asking for a reply, what I like to do is ask for a one-word reply. So you could say, reply yes to this email to show inbox providers like Gmail or Yahoo that you actually want to get this. So explain why you're asking for it. But just ask for a one-word reply because you'll get the highest compliance that way. And then to click a link, you just need a... a link that they'll actually click. So like you remember the thing we incentivized before on the thank you page. So like the free gift, the lead magnets, the link is going to be to that thing. And if they're expecting to get that thing, that link is going to have an extremely high click through rate. And so that's, I mean, that's a lot of stuff that I just walked through. But that is simple, but super powerful. And when I see people implement this stuff, they increase their engagement. really, really fast of new subscribers. And that also helps their engagement with existing subscribers.
- Speaker #1
Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player. Or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?
- Speaker #2
Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not going to know what I say.
- Speaker #2
I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. And we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another. Yikes. But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up. there there's a banner click on it and you'll go to another episode of the marketing misfits make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like norm oh I had something crazy happen with beehive recently I just saw the open rates just plummet by 75% so trying to figure it out I I got a guy to take a look at it And he figured it out fairly quickly. Beehive was sending it out through Beehive and everything was cool. Then somehow, nobody knows how, it started sending out through an email that had my domain. I have lwn.news, but it was sending it to outfromhigh at lwn.news. Nobody knows how that happened. We do have it pointed. Like if somebody goes to LWN.news, it's pointed over to the Beehive address. But it just changed. And it was the week that it changed, it happened. And I don't have a high.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I don't know. I've never heard that issue before. It seems like a bug or something was set up wrong. Most likely a bug from the way you explained it. And so what, I mean, I'm glad you found the issue there. It's like what happened is like you had all the positive sender reputation in those inboxes built up with the one that you were sending from. And then when it switched over, that new domain had no reputation.
- Speaker #2
The reputation, we checked it out and it was, it wasn't completely, it was in the middle. So it went from high to medium. And so this, this is along the lines of deliverability. We could either switch back, which we didn't, or what we started to do was seed the inbox. So when we started to seed. the email. So now it's slowly gaining. We are using a high, but it's a pain.
- Speaker #0
See, Dominion like send to smaller segments of the list and then build up over time.
- Speaker #2
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. And that's a tactic people use if you're doing that from scratch. I probably would have switched back and then also did that kind of separately because I would just want to get back to that engagement right away. And it seems like you probably could. But yeah, That's just, I mean, that stuff. I haven't heard of that happening. Like issues happen. Most of the time you can avoid them. You know, that sounds like a bug that was kind of unavoidable. Most of the time you can avoid those things. Um, what I think the overall point would be like, the good thing about it is email is just way more consistent than every other channel. Like those things happen all the time on social media or Google search algorithms. They're very rare to happen via email. Like I literally got. restricted from LinkedIn today by accident. I was able to get my account restart, but now I have half the followers that I used to. And so I'll have to see if I can fix that. But at least I have the email list where I have those issues almost never way, way less than social media.
- Speaker #1
And one of the things to do too, just real quick to add on to the deliverability is to actually wean your list. Don't just keep sending to everybody. I mean, Matt shared something, and I think it was in his newsletter or maybe it's on a podcast or somewhere. where he showed a little way in Beehive. I shared this with you, Norm, where you go and you put some filters in segment and you say something, I forget the exact, but something to the effect of only send to people who have signed up in the last 14 days and who have clicked or opened at least once in the last 45 days or 30 days or whatever it is. And you build these segments. So if I got 50,000 people on my list, I build that segment and it might cut it down to 20, 22,000. And those other 28,000, they're basically dead weight. And they're actually costing you in this reputation that he was talking about. And because nobody's opening them, maybe they're going to the spam. And when they then only send to those 22,000, you're like, some people are like, man, when I have 50,000 people, what if one of those people wants to see it? But you send it to the 22,000 who have been engaged, the others will come back. If they start to realize they're not getting your newsletter, they're like, hey, I quit getting your newsletter. What happened? They'll figure it out. But those 22,000, now your open rates jump. Your inboxing jumps, your everything jumps, your engagement jumps on the clicks and all that kind of stuff makes a huge difference on the ESPs and for the long term health of your reputation and your newsletter. So that's something important that you got to pay attention to, too. Don't just keep sending to everybody.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. And Matt just sent over a link to an article that we'll put into the podcast.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, that's what you're referring to. And what's crazy, it's kind of intuitive, but this is how email works. When you send to an active segment versus just all the emails that you have in your database, you not only will get like a higher percentage open rate, a higher percent click through it. You will actually get more opens in more clicks because your inbox placement will improve and your sender reputation will improve. And so I've seen this personally on some of clients where I'm sending to 50,000 people. I cut back to what I call, I don't think I originated this term, but a base sending segment. And let's say that's like 35,000 people. The emails or the newsletters that I sent to that smaller, more active-based sending segment, not only did the opening increase, I'm getting like 1,000, 2,000 more unique opens per newsletter send. I'm getting a couple hundred more unique clicks per newsletter send by sending to less quote-unquote people. But the reality is not everybody on your email list is actually a person who's opening. It's a lot of people who signed up. stopped using that email address. It was a secondary email address. It got lost in promotions and they haven't opened it in three weeks or three months. And your active audience is much smaller than everybody in your database. And it's good just to focus on them. And we can talk about some specifications on how to do that if we need to.
- Speaker #1
Something else that's really good. I don't know if you're using this or not, Matt, Megahit.app. I use that to supplement a lot of data. with LinkedIn and I can see who are sponsorship partners or director of partnerships or media buying or whatever it all is, subscribers, and I can reach out to them and it gives me some good demographics and good stuff. So there's lots of tools you can lay on top of your newsletter and get a lot of good demographic data too.
- Speaker #0
That's the power of email. It's really the only place where you're getting a real useful data on your audience. maybe sms you get a phone number uh podcast is a great channel but like you have no idea who downloaded it when they downloaded that where the download came from other than like apple podcast versus spotify etc i love podcasts but it's challenging that way but like email you can see like what email address opened it when they opened it, all the interactions they've ever had of your emails and other things too. And then you can use a tool like MegaHit or something else to connect that email address to actual LinkedIn accounts. So you see the real person who they are. You can also, what I really encourage is to have a post-signup survey. So after someone signs up for the newsletter, they're redirected to a five, 10 question multiple choice survey where you're collecting more first party data on who they are, job titles, challenges, problems. what software they use. And then all those responses can inform what emails you send to them or what automations you put them in. And so the data just unlocks so much more because you actually know who you're talking to. And because of that, you can send them more relevant messages. And there's just no other channel where you have the ability to do that.
- Speaker #1
The other thing that I think a lot of people overlook is like in Beehive, you can go in there and let's say I've been running for the last year stories on here, every third or fourth or fifth newsletter has a story about an AI tool. I can... create segments of everybody who's ever clicked on one of those links for, to go look at an AI tour to download it. And maybe that's out of my 50,000 people, that's 832 of them. But I know all 832 of those people are into AI, AI tools. And then I can turn around and I can target that just those 832, send an email to them or a message to them or reach out to them through mega hit on, on LinkedIn. and actually target them with an ad or with a special offer that's highly, highly tailored to their interest. And you get massive open rates and massive responses. And that's something a lot of people are not taking advantage of, I don't think, as well as really diving into that data and segmenting it and actually using it.
- Speaker #0
Nobody's really doing that. And that's actually where email becomes so overpowered in that way is when you do stuff like that. Another simple one is like you're selling a product or you're pitching your service. Um, if someone, you can create a segment of people who clicked on the landing page for your product or service, and then you send that segment, a follow-up email or a series of follow-up emails. If someone clicked on the product or service three or more times, uh, they basically abandoned cart. So you could send them and put them into an abandoned cart sequence of more follow-up emails. And so when I mentioned earlier, like I sent six emails or seven emails in a day, you know, four or five of those emails were just to people who had clicked the sales page multiple times just to follow up with them. overcome objections and the majority of the sales came from those emails to a segment of like 3 000 people who actually clicked and i didn't have to like bother my whole list with that and get hundreds of unsubscribes i made more money just by sending to a more targeted smaller audience emails
- Speaker #1
emails amazing you can do a lot of stuff with it most people don't realize it we've just barely touched the surface here but uh awesome good yeah we could go for
- Speaker #2
a whole new podcast.
- Speaker #1
We might have to have a podcast about newsletters. So if people want to reach out to you, Matt, I know you have the agency and you have your podcast and you have your newsletter. So how would people reach out or learn more about you guys?
- Speaker #0
Best place is newsletteroperator.com. That's where you can see my newsletter sign up, learn about all of our products and services there. If you like podcasts, you can search newsletter operator. in a podcast player to listen to our podcast, or you can just search Matt McGeary on YouTube to get it there as well.
- Speaker #2
Fantastic. So at the end of every podcast, we always ask our misfits if they know a misfit.
- Speaker #0
I think I know a lot. I'm definitely falling to that category myself, but I won't speak about myself. We talked about the hustle of the beginning. I think Sam Barr, the founder, is probably the definition of a marketing misfit. I could speak a lot about Sam, but he was an alcoholic, got it together, moved out to San Francisco, started the newsletter back in 2016, 2017. And everybody thought that was a really, really stupid idea. Built that not just into a bigger newsletter, but a really culturally relevant media brand in tech. And then sold that for tens of millions of dollars. And is now doing cool things as well. So I love Sam. is a cool, like if you have, if a lot of people probably know of his podcast, you listen to this and he spoke at our event last year and he's like the exact same guy in person as he is in the podcast. I've, I used to work for him too. So I know it from that perspective as well. So that, that would be my example.
- Speaker #2
Very good. Thank you so much. And I think that's it. Yeah,
- Speaker #1
this has been fun. Thanks for coming on and sharing, Matt. This has been great.
- Speaker #2
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Thank you for having me.
- Speaker #2
All right, Matt. We'll talk to you soon.
- Speaker #1
Here we go. So you see, it's not just me and you saying that you got to have a newsletter. Newsletters are powerful. If you get nothing else from this, you can see that a newsletter should be a powerful part of your marketing mix. And it's a commitment, though. I mean, as you know, Norm, and I know it's a commitment. It's not something don't just jump into it. Start small and then grow it. And but it can definitely be a needle mover. And there's a lot. to it. It's not just grab something off of AI, put a link in and send an email. There's a lot to it, but it's really, really powerful.
- Speaker #2
Absolutely. And for something like this, I would definitely check out Matt.
- Speaker #1
He's got a course, a really good course on, he didn't mention it, but I guess you could probably find it at newsletter operators, our newsletter operator, that he's got a course and I think he does it. I know he used to do it cohort style. I'm not sure if it's recorded now or what it is, but it's a really good step-by-step course. And there's probably a free webinar or something there. You can probably find a webinar on YouTube where he talks about all the steps and goes into detail more than what we were able to here. So definitely, if this is something you're interested in, I highly recommend you check that out. It'll probably help guide you and help you think about how you want to do this.
- Speaker #2
Something tells me he's going to ask for your name and your email.
- Speaker #1
Just a hunch. He might. Speaking of names and emails, if you like this episode, you know someone that wants to start a newsletter, forward this episode to them and let them say, hey, you've got to check this out. This is pretty good with Matt. I know you're thinking about doing a newsletter. Or hit that subscribe button and make sure you subscribe. We have a new episode that comes out every single Tuesday. So look for that. Look for the Marketing Misfits newsletter coming soon where we take the podcast and we create a newsletter from the podcast and supplement it with a few other cool goodies. You don't want to miss that. You'll be able to sign up for that at marketingmisfits.co. And we have some other stuff out there, Norm. What is it? Some on the talk ticks or the clock? What's that?
- Speaker #2
yep we have a tiktok channel under marketing misfits and we also have a youtube channel for our long-form videos under Marketing Misfits Podcast. And we have a second YouTube channel for all the three-minute and under nuggets, and that's called the Marketing Misfits Clips.
- Speaker #1
So there you go. After that one of these days. You'll have something on LinkedIn around that as well. But, hey, thanks for joining us today, and we'll see you all again next week. Take care. See you. Hmm. We're in. Here.
