How To Start a Newsletter The Right Way [3/3]
General Considerations
While your dev team enjoys the implementation of all the detailed user stories, that you have written, there is the one or the other chore waiting for you.
Compelling Caption
Marketing a newsletter is like selling a product. Getting a prospect so sign up is hard. You need to accept the fact, that people do not know you. They have no clue, they have no idea what incredibly helpful, funny and readable content you produce. It is just like a product sale. People can judge the product only AFTER they purchased it. It is the same with your newsletter.
There are a number of countermeasures. (For example having all issues on your website) but in most cases you have just one shot. On your landing page.
You need to convince the user, that the sign up has no risk attached but comes with a lot of value. There are very, very well paid people, that do nothing else but create captivating caption all day long. Hire one, read a book about it, do whatever is necessary, but you need to address one of the 5 basic emotions with your landing page and have a caption set up, which increases the likelihood of a sign up dramatically. Do some funnel math with estimated conversion rates. You will quickly realize, that even the smallest change in your conversion rate on your landing pages will make a huge, huge difference in your profits at the end of the year. Do it. Calculate it.
Domain Warming
Domain warming is underestimated. But with the first issue of your newsletter sent, you will realize, that many of your emails end up in the subscribers spam folders. So you should definitely start with domain warming while you are still in development. Google is your friend, you easily find articles describing the different necessary actions.
Inbound Email Accounts
Set up inbound email accounts. no-reply@some-domain.com … ever seen such a sender address? It literally screams:
We do not value you, we do not want you as a customer, we do not like you and if you want to talk, then make an appointment at your hairdresser.
You do not want to do that! Why would you? Let people interact with you, give them the chance to give feedback directly, by just clicking Reply. But therefore you need a proper inbound setup for your email addresses. There are cost free options which are connected to a lot of fumbling. Finally you might want to spend the money and have a provider which allows you to receive and send email manually. Trust me, big one.
Images & Licensing
Your newsletter will have how many articles each? 5? 10? 15? Most likely you will need images for all of them. That quickly becomes a painful and time consuming process. Not only do you need to find an image, that somehow matches your articles content. You also have to add caption, resize it, in cases even retouch it. Do not fall into the Google trap here.
You can not just start a Google image search and use whatever you find.
I mean you can, but most likely someone will take down your business in days with a legal action. There are platforms where you can buy and license images. There are also plenty of images available with a permissive creative commons license, and there are even free images on platforms like unsplash. Study the subject intensively. Because it will consume a good portion of your time, and a mistake here poses a serious risk to your business.
Tracking vs. Statistics
I referenced the tracking section several times. So let’s talk about it.
Do not implement tracking! Do not implement Google Analytics!
A bold statement, but I mean it. The reasons are so manyfold, that I plan to write a fully fledged article about it soon. But essentially you do not need individual user tracking. Your users don’t need it. It does not make your life easier, nor does it contribute to data protection and privacy for your users.
So what instead you ask? Implement anonymous user statistics. Use UTM Tags. That is all you need. We are not paid by them, nor are we affiliated with the project, but the fine folks at https://plausible.io built an open source statistics tool, that not only provides all data you will ever need to optimize your product, it protects the data and privacy of your subscribers. Who you value, right?
In addition you can or can not decide to use the built-in tracking functionality of your newsletter provider. It grants you insights into numbers like: opens, reads, link-clicks. Depending on your provider that is not very subscriber friendly, but that decision is up to you.
If on the other hand you are convinced, that you need a fully fledged tracking suite like Omniture or Google Analytics, go ahead. You might have your reasons. But it is unlikely, that personalized tracking of your subscribers is of any help to you and your product.
Banner & Logos for Social Platforms
Content is king, right? Unfortunately, armed with an attention span of a fruit fly in a thunderstorm users decide in a few hundred milliseconds whether they want to read your post. If you just post text, you will get lost. Your posts will literally get lost in a stream of attention-hungry, colorful and psychologically clever pieces of content. You have no chance but become a part of it. And since your articles come with at least one image each anyways (they do, right?) you already have a basis. You will need a way to quickly create captivating banners and images for your social posts. If you have a dedicated person on your team for that, awesome. Otherwise take into consideration, that image creation for your newsletter will take longer than the text content creation. Just be warned.
Starter Traffic Campaign
You do not just build your newsletter, publish it, and hope for the best afterwards, do you? If so, let me tell you: been there, won’t work.
The second most important task besides writing your newsletter regularly is driving traffic to your sign up pages. There are many ways to do so. But be aware, that this will never end. You will need to create valuable content on a daily basis. Leverage your personal and professional network, publish blog posts, offer free services, software … whatever it takes. Depending on your topic there are countless ways to create value for your prospects, and this is exactly what you want to do. Create value and give it away for free. In return people will start to trust you, value your work and sign up to your newsletter. This is how it works.
Ads
Paid ads are the other side of the medal. Do not ignore them. Ads — when done ethically correct — are IMO totally fine, because they just leverage reach. Do not fall into the trap of providers, that want to help you do “get your name out there” or create a “reach campaign”. BS. Don’t waste any money on that, you are not Nike or Coca-Cola and nobody cares about your brand!
There are two situations in which you want to use ads.
First: When you just started and the speed of organic growth is not high enough for your personal taste. Create compelling ads, create convincing landing pages, have some content online already and be fair to your prospects. Connect the ad with the landing page and just start. You will have to test a lot. Test everything. Release a campaign, measure, improve. Release again, measure again, improve again. You get it. It will cost you money, but eventually you will end up with customer acquisition costs (CAC) which stands in a healthy relation to your ad budget. But there is no profit yet, just cost.
The second situation in which you want to make use of ads is, when your newsletter became somehow profitable. You make a monthly profit and you do not know, whether to make use of ads again and how much to spend. But it is literally a super easy decision. Calculate the customer lifetime value (CLV) by dividing your profits by the number of active subscribers. This is the money, that one of your subscribers brings in(the one way or the other). If you want to make a profit, it is crystal clear: your CAC must not be bigger than your CLV.
And if your CAC is smaller than your CLV, what keeps you from taking the majority of your net profits and put it into the ad campaign again? The only restraining factor here is the size of the niche you are operating in. But unless you reached that market saturation (luxury problem), you would be dumb not to spend more and more on ads. It is a money printing machine.
I hope all of that did not turn you down. But I also hope, that now you understand, that running a successful newsletter is much more, than just a weekly text, Mailchimp and done. Yes, you can get away with less. Still, there are plenty of challenges waiting for you.
Our Setup
Should you be interested, Bastian and I built all that already. We did not build a SaaS, but rather a service mesh that works very well for us. Following some details about how it works.
Prismic — The CMS
Prismic is a headless content management system. It allows us to create our own datatypes like articles, publications, short urls, landing pages and more. It provides us with a backend, where we can create and store all our content with all comfort. Besides that Prismic generates API endpoints, which allow us to read that content from our main application and work with it.
Vercel — Application Platform
Our main application was built with React and next.js. It fulfills several purposes. On the one hand it renders our homepage, the archive, sign up form as well as all other content. In addition it speaks with our CMS and our newsletter provider. Whenever we are done writing all articles in the CMS, we can automatically build our newsletter template with the push of a button. The build itself is handled by our main application, which pulls all articles and assets via the CMS API, renders everything into a prepared MJML template, transforms it into old-school table based markup for the email clients and hands it into the Mailchimp API — our newsletter provider.
We run that application on Vercel. Static site generation and scaling are not an issue, Vercel and Prismic both come with an integrated CDN, and we do not have to deal with Devops. Golden.
Mailchimp
In Mailchimp we can then schedule the send job, configure additional campaigns to automatically send out posts to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Mailchimp also provides us with statistics and additional automation tools, which for example allow us to send welcome emails, properly handle unsubscribes and more.
Plausible — Analytics
The fourth important service is plausible.io. The integration of the script into all our pages allows us to gather anonymous statistical data of our site. We can see what users like and what not. Where to improve and where time is just wasted. Coming from 20 years of professional development of web applications I can only say, that plausible is the next best thing besides sliced bread. We simply do not need more.
This service mesh has the disadvantage, that during our daily business we need to switch between the different UIs. For us that tradeoff has paid off well. What we get in return is lots of flexibility and continuous development of the underlying platforms without any efforts on our side. In addition these services are all specialized. If we had to built all that functionality of our own, we would still be far from the release of our first newsletter.
It’s not perfect, but it works very well. We have to pay for all of those services on a monthly basis, but pricing is reasonable and affordable. If we hit service limits, we need to upgrade, but that is a luxury problem that I would love to have.
Should you be interested in a demo, Bastian and myself are open for a discussion. You find our contact data easily on https://8bitnews.io
What Else
There are a few learnings, I would like to share with you, so you are prepared.
Publish, Publish & Publish
In the beginning the number of your subscriptions will be low. Don’t worry. Building a newsletter takes time. You are probably not Morningbrew and especially when you chose a niche (which I hope) it will take some time to get a reasonable number of readers. So don’t let that demotivate you. Publish, publish, publish.
Be reachable via Email
Your readers will have questions, comments, ideas. They will want to contact you. And since you send a newsletter, just be available via email. No no-reply@… nonsense. Just create an account, set up spam filtering if you feel like and use your email address as the official sender address of your newsletter. You are sending it! Not an anonymous robot. Be a human, be reachable and respond to your readers should they contact you.
Be Personal
Same story here. Yes, it is about your content. But it is also about you. If you just send out the latest offer for your 10-years existing web shop, fine. But if you are an expert in your niche, chances are, people feel connected to you. So make it personal, do not hide yourself behind business jargon and a wanna-be professional setup that creates the illusion of a 100+ people business. Be honest, be open, be a human.
Make it Easy to Unsubscribe
A big one. Our newsletter has a HUGE unsubscribe button in the footer. You can not miss it. Counterproductive you might think?
Quite the contrary. You will have subscribers, that initially do not get, what they signed up for. Some will change their mind about your content or yourself, after reading one or two of your emails. Some might simply not be interested anymore and there are hundreds of reasons, why people might want to unsubscribe.
If you do not give them a huge button, which is easy to find, they will get frustrated and just hit the spam button in their email client instead. That is the last thing you want, it is a huge risk for your business. If one of the big providers marks your mail as spam by default, it is very hard to reverse that again. A user who wants to unsubscribe, will do that anyways, the one way or the other. A user who loves and reads your content, will never be driven away by that button.
Opens, Clicks & Motivation
In the beginning your open and click rates will probably be low. There are countermeasures, like for example sending your newsletter a second time to people who did not open it in the first place. Be careful here. That technique can work. But you should not apply it, when just having a few hundred subscribers. Chances are, you unsubscribes will skyrocket.
Family & Friends
Your family & friends are awesome! It is not about them. And during the first days and weeks every subscriber from your personal network or family is just that: a new subscriber. But don’t fool yourself. Most of them are no really valuable subscribers, many might not even continue reading after issue 2 or 3. You do not write the newsletter for them, but for your future subscribers.
Care about those, not about your family & friends. Also: many of them will sign up, very few of them will actually share the link to your new newsletter. Just be aware of that and prepare yourself. So it might not be the best use of your time, to write a personal message to all 1223 people in your LinkedIn network.
Conclusion
That was a huge one. If you made it until here, congratulations. You know what it takes to create and run a newsletter. Feel free to contact me with any questions.
