Send an infotainment email with soft sell every day.
That’s what Ben Settle preaches and people love it because it is such a simple system. Send more emails, and make more money. However, there are some SERIOUS flaws behind email newsletters.
For example, there is no real, sustainable email list building in the system. Emails don’t get traffic and republishing them on a blog isn’t nearly as effective as it is sold to be.
Email newsletters are very one-dimensional. The daily emails themselves are great for awareness but don’t do a good job if you want sales. So if that’s all you are doing, you are not going to be very profitable.
Start daily email?
Daily emails are very internet marketing influenced. This is fine if you are in the internet marketing space, but if you are trying to build an actual startup by starting a newsletter business, then you are going to want to level up your thinking.
While daily emails can be great for initial brand awareness, there are limitations to explore when it comes to building a sustainable daily newsletter business. Here’s why:
1. Limited List Growth: The “send more emails” approach often neglects strategies for long-term “email newsletter business” success. Building a loyal subscriber base is essential, and daily blasts might not be the most effective way to achieve that.
2. Content Churn vs. Content Value: Daily emails can become a content creation hamster wheel, focusing on quantity over quality. For a “newsletter business” to thrive, value-driven content that fosters engagement is key.
3. Beyond Awareness: While daily emails excel at raising brand awareness, they might fall short in driving sales conversions, a crucial aspect of any successful “email newsletter business.”
4. Beyond “Internet Marketing”: The daily email strategy is heavily rooted in Internet marketing tactics. If your goal is to build a robust “start a newsletter business” outside the internet marketing niche, a more comprehensive approach is necessary.
In this article, we explain the newsletter business models, and strategies for building a sustainable and profitable email list, crafting valuable content, and fostering long-term engagement with your audience. Here is how to start a newsletter business with a strategic edge.
Newsletter business model
The daily email blast with a soft sell approach has limitations for building a sustainable newsletter business model. Here are some alternative models that focus on long-term subscriber value and engagement:
1. Freemium Model
- Offer a free tier with valuable content that establishes your expertise.
- Provide exclusive, in-depth content or benefits for paid subscribers. This could be extended analysis or insights, early access to new information or products, and Q&A sessions or direct communication with the author.
- This allows you to build an audience and demonstrate value before asking for payment.
2. Paid Subscriptions
- This model charges a subscription fee for access to all your newsletter content.
- Focus on high-quality, exclusive content that justifies the subscription cost.
- Offer different tiers with varying levels of access to cater to different needs.
3. Sponsorships and Affiliate Marketing
- Partner with relevant brands to promote their products or services within your newsletter.
- This can be a good revenue stream, but ensure that sponsored content aligns with your audience’s interests and doesn’t feel intrusive.
- Promote affiliate products you genuinely believe in and offer value to your readers.
4. Community Building
- Foster a sense of community around your newsletter by encouraging interaction between subscribers.
- Host Q&A sessions, polls, or discussions to create a loyal following.
- This can lead to increased engagement and potentially paid subscriptions or product sales down the line.
5. Product or Service Sales
- Leverage your newsletter to promote your products or services related to your niche.
- Offer valuable content that positions yourself as an expert and builds trust with your audience.
- This can be particularly effective if your newsletter focuses on a specific industry or interest.
The best model depends on your niche, audience, and content strategy. Consider a hybrid approach, combining elements from different models, to maximize your revenue potential.
7 Steps to Starting A Newsletter Business
The question now is if you want to build a business that revolves around a daily email newsletter, what is the best way to do it? This is what I think is the right way to start a newsletter business.
Step 1: Signup Optimization
Go all in on being a media company that publishes daily via an email newsletter.
This means saying “no” to anything that doesn’t support that business model. That means optimizing 100 percent for the email signup with the right intention.
This means creating something unique and valuable. That also means you are not just an email marketer anymore. Instead, you are now the producer of a daily “show” that people tune into every time they open their inbox. Think theSkimm or theHustle.
Step 2: Value
Make sure all your email subscription landing pages, sign-up boxes, and popups tell people the frequency and value prop of your email newsletter.
Do this even if you are giving away lead magnets. And make sure you have at least one place where people can subscribe directly to the newsletter without a lead magnet. Ideally, your home page and an easy-to-find landing page.
Make sure you show an example of an email you’ve sent out on those pages. These will be your best subscribers because of their intention. If you are going to use lead magnets, give away tools not information.
Step 3: First 1,000 Subscribers
Now, it is time to get your first 1,000 subscribers.
First, manually contact every single person you know who is an ideal reader and ask them to sign up. Then, get them to sign a friend up. Then after that, use curiosity posts on social to get anyone else you didn’t contact.
Second, you need to produce 5-10 pillar blog posts. Distribute through paid ads, SEO, social, communities, influencers, and anything other avenue possible. Squeeze the juice out of those posts. You just need to produce 2 per month to make this work. Optimize for the email signup.
Last, leverage other people’s audiences. This means guest posting, getting on podcasts, etc. Re-purpose those 5-10 pillar blog posts to form the foundation for this content.
Step 4: Email Frequency
The moment you get your first subscriber, you should be sending out your daily emails or not. This depends on your subscribers and what they want.
You can start with a simple non-formatted email, but eventually, you want something a little more designed like the way theHustle and theSkimm have theirs set up. And of course, focus on infotainment. Since you are not creating content elsewhere though, you must deliver the goods education-wise in your email.
The specifics of the emails will completely depend on what type of business you are building and what your style looks like. And yes, you can republish your emails as blog posts.
Step 5: Incentivisation
Incentivize growth with an ambassador program. This is the key to making this email newsletter business model work.
Now that you’ve got 1,000 or so subscribers, the number one way to grow organically is to give away free branded merchandise, products, secret Facebook group access, or whatever else you may have in exchange for how many referrals your fans get you with their unique link.
Make this your main call to action (CTA) in every newsletter, especially if you are looking to grow.
Keep in mind, that this is not the same thing as a regular giveaway. It is an evergreen strategy that constantly incentivizes your true fans to talk to their network about how great your email newsletter is, not people who just want free stuff in exchange for giving their email again.
Step 6: Email Newsletters Monetization
Monetize by combining ads with dedicated pitches. In your daily email newsletter, you want to promote your products and services through “sponsored banners”, relevant linking, using the P.S. section, and other non-intrusive tactics.
You can do this every day if you want but don’t overdo it.
When you need to sell something though, keep sending your daily newsletter, but then send additional emails dedicated to promoting your product or service. I suggest 3-4 promotional emails max per week. Agora does this very well. They send those emails every other day and it’s delivered about 5-6 hours after they’ve sent their newsletter.
If you can’t handle sending 10 emails a week, then an alternative strategy is to send 5 newsletters per week and dedicate 1-2 days per week to send promotional emails on those “off days” or some variation of that.
Step 7: Sales and Email Replies
Focus on the two metrics that matter, sales and email replies.
Sales are obvious, but no one thinks about email replies. You need to answer every person who replies to you. This is the key to making your subscriber a true fan. And if for some reason no one is emailing you, that’s something you have to fix! Either by sending out better emails and/or asking for it from time to time.
Conclusion
And that’s it. Yes, it’s slightly more work than Ben Settle’s original method. But as I said earlier, that method is also incomplete and incompatible in every market besides info-products.
If you follow this guide though, you are going to end up with something much more profitable and scalable than what any internet marketer will ever have: A media company based around daily email newsletters.
The one and only CopyMonk! Join https://web.facebook.com/copymonk/ for his infinite copywriting wisdom.