Why Newsletters Are Making a Comeback (and Why You Should Care)

0:00All right. So we are going to talk about why newsletters are making a comeback and why you should care. So Neil, you want to kick this one off and then we can just go back and forth? Yeah, right now everyone's using chat GPT, barred, whatever you want to call it to create content, nothing new on that end. But with newsletters, I've been sending on users for a long time. We recently did an episode of me breaking down, sending out, I think it was like 255 million emails and we were screen sharing some of my email stats. But years and years ago, emails would just crush it. And I'm still getting on average, like a 40 plus percent open rate, which is really good.

0:36The big difference though, versus two years ago versus now, emails have lost its luster and they just don't work the same as they used to. And the main reason for that is personalization. When you just send a list size, a large list size, a generic email, it doesn't work the same that it used to. But the beautiful thing is with tools like ChatGPT, you can now crank out customized content for each of your segments. And we're seeing the open rates and the click rates go through the roof. And that's why we're saying users are making a huge comeback because it's really easy to make customized newsletters versus what it was before.

1:19And even though people are saying, oh, email marketing and newsletters are dead, that's not necessarily true. Is it as effective as it used to be? No. but if you personalize the emails and customize them and segment your audience and maybe you have like eight or nine or 10 different emails that you're sending out in a blast in a sense you know one tenth your list gets one email another tenth gets another email and so forth so on we're seeing the conversions just go through the roof so newsletters are a very real business so i mentioned in the past one of our clients axios sold for 553 million dollars and i actually read every day.

1:55There's Morning Brew. They sold for a healthy amount and they're on track to do nine figures. And then you have the Hustle newsletter, which sold to HubSpot and the reported price was $27 million. And so these are very real businesses. And we've talked about this in the past too, in terms of how marketing is getting harder and how you have to figure out how you can collect first party data. And first party data means collecting emails, collecting SMS and things like that. So the way I look at emails now is you're taking more control of your marketing. And here's the other thing. A lot of newsletters out there that have a big audience, they're not necessarily, it's not necessarily the best content, but they use paid traffic to grow the newsletter.

2:34And inside of the newsletter, they provide or they promote their own products and services. Ideally, you're promoting your own products and services because you have the most control and then you have a, usually you have a better margin or you can promote, you can do sponsorships or you can do affiliate. But the point is here, you have more control of your marketing. So doing newsletters, doing SMS at the end of the day, this is why you should care because ultimately if marketing is going to get harder, then you need to take more control. And this also allows for more creativity at the end of the day, because what we were all doing as marketers two, three years ago, where we're just counting on Facebook and Google ads or meta and alphabet or whatever you want to call them, the easy mode is off.

3:10Hard mode is back on and newsletters should be added to your stack. Yeah. The big thing that I recommend anyone doing right now, whether you're buying traffic or you're getting newsletters organically or news subscribers organically, you wanna figure out where they are coming from and add a segmentation automatically. So I'll give you an example of this. On the neilpatel.com blog, I have articles on affiliate marketing, SEO, social media, content marketing, the list goes on and on. If we know that someone came from an SEO article and that's what they're reading when they subscribe to our newsletter, we'll add in a note that they're interested in SEO.

3:44If they came from all the affiliate marketing articles, will do the same thing for affiliate marketing, same with paid advertising or same with social media. So that way, when we send out emails, we can customize a message depending on where they first came to us, because that shows what their interest is. And that's how we're getting our newsletters to convert extremely well. Neil, you also shared something yesterday of a, someone that you met in Utah and kind of what they're doing with their newsletter. Do you want to reshare that? That wasn't really a newsletter, but it was for email. So I was at an event called pattern or acceleration by pattern.

4:17And I met a young kid in there who was showing me his new email tool. It was him and two other co-founders who spent three months building this. And what they've created is you can send an email, but within the email, you can buy, you can be a lead, you can buy, you can do whatever within the email. So you don't have to go to the website. Example of this is if you sell t-shirts in the email, they can select the color, the size, and check out right then and there in the email without going to your website and pay for it and get it delivered to them. And that's really cool. And you're gonna see newsletter conversion rates go through the roof once everyone starts implementing technologies like that.

4:54Let's just call them interactive emails. And so you can buy directly from them. And then the other thing is, we've talked about in the past where you can have a spinning wheel on your website to increase your conversion rates. So you can do a lot of cool things with interactive emails. And so that's just another reason why newsletters could be a consideration. And so, Neil, you use ConvertKit. We just moved over to Beehive. You can use whatever you want to use. Beehive, they were created by, I believe, people that came from the Morning Brew team. So they have a lot of really cool features, especially for newsletter creators.

5:24So you decide what you want to do. You can do a sub stack if you want. It doesn't really matter. It just comes down to, well, you know, do you want to diversify your channels or not? And if you want to build for the long term, I think this makes a lot of sense. Anything else, Neil? Nope, that's it. All right. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. And by the way, you can come hang out with us in Beverly Hills, levelingup.com slash founders. That's August 7th to the 9th. And you can go there and apply. And yeah, catch you later.