Uncommon Advice

Transforming Newsletters into Profit, Harnessing SMS Marketing, and Navigating Marketing Automation

• Nate Kennedy

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Are you ready to transform your newsletter into a revenue-generating powerhouse? In this episode, we unpack the realities of the saturated newsletter market, offering you actionable strategies to stand out amidst the competition. We'll guide you through leveraging the current boom in newsletter-specific services and caution against the pitfalls of following inexperienced advice. With insights from our journey running a successful newsletter media company, we emphasize the importance of treating your newsletter as a serious business to unlock its full potential.

Ever wondered how SMS marketing can significantly boost your revenue? Discover the untapped potential of your SMS list by mastering strategies to grow and maintain it effectively. We'll share practical tips on expanding your list through follow-up email campaigns and enticing incentives. Learn why an engaged SMS list can be more financially rewarding than email marketing, and get familiar with essential tools like Emotive and Customer Automation that can enhance your efforts. We’ll break down best practices for targeting active users and navigating the regulatory landscape to maximize your campaign success.

Finally, we'll discuss the powerful synergy between newsletters and SMS marketing. Learn the critical importance of explicit opt-in consent and how engagement-based segmentation can optimize your costs and profits. Hosting sales offers on your website builds trust and ensures compliance, keeping your campaigns running smoothly. We'll also explore marketing automation solutions, whether you choose to go solo or partner with experts like Marketing Rebels for seamless implementation. Tune in for comprehensive, practical advice designed to help you excel in the competitive world of marketing and online advertising.

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Speaker 1:

here to back at it. Number three we did two previous ones and diving in today on a new strategy. So, if you are in the newsletter business or email business, I want to talk about a way that you can drive more revenue. Okay, so, and there's a difference. I want to get into a few things today. I want to get into the state of the newsletter market. I'm going to get into the fastest way to increase revenue. If you have a newsletter, tools that you can use to do that one thing as well, and then how to get started with it. Ok, so, appreciate you all jumping in. So those are the things I'm going to get into and should be should be some detailed information. So if you're watching, got questions, let me know. If you're watching and you got want to take notes, I'd highly recommend that as well. So, state of the market state of the newsletter market, right? So it is one of those things, that is, it's becoming saturated. So the newsletters are launching daily. New newsletters are launching daily. It's becoming saturated, so the newsletters are launching daily. New newsletters are launching daily.

Speaker 1:

And what does that mean for you? What that means is that there's more, there's more competition, right? So when there's more newsletters. You're not. If you're in a niche, there's going to be more people in that same niche, which means there's going to be more people going after the similar advertisers that you have Now. The good thing is. So there's a lot of people going to newsletters because they're just trying to spin it up, get it going, and then they don't really know that, hey, this is a. They don't treat it like a real business. So for you and me, that's great news, because it gives you the opportunity. If you're serious about leveraging the newsletter space building, building your own audience, driving your own, building your own audience and then driving revenue as a media company, right, so you're going to be able to do that pretty, pretty easily if you just put some effort into it, because a lot of people are just doing it kind of half-assed as opposed to really looking at it as a true business. Now, with newsletters, though, the good part about more people getting newsletters is there's more services being built for newsletters. You can kind of see these ad platforms, you can see these lead platforms companies that do newsletters, companies that do lead generating All that stuff's out there. It's growing the service side of the industry as well, and there's companies like ours that will do it for you if you want to do that. But either way, the newsletter market is expanding. There's more and more people get into it, more and more services, which is actually a good thing, and from there now the other kind of when something becomes a hot topic in the Internet space is more gurus popping up daily trying to sell stuff to you. So, real quick, I've been sending emails since 2007. And then I launched a newsletter media company in 2020. We still run that company on a daily basis right now. We send millions of emails every day and because of that we're in it consistently.

Speaker 1:

I've had some of these new. A prime example is about a year ago. I had someone slide up in my DMs asking me how we were able to grow and launch our newsletter business so fast. And then, shortly after we launched it, I started seeing him doing, or after I told him kind of what we were doing and everything else, and and then he kind of ghosted me on having me help him. What he ended up doing was going out and he's now training people on newsletters. So the guy doesn't have experience doing it, but he was taking the stuff that I was teaching and teaching that Right. So it's part of the game. So just be cautious of who you're paying attention to and what you're listening to. Now the next thing is, with that, it's make sure there's a lot of different things going on in the marketplace, so you want to make sure that you're following the right people and get your information from people that are doing it daily and and actually actively growing a newsletter business, not just talking about doing it.

Speaker 1:

So, with that said, let's talk about the discipline of media company and a newsletter company. It's moving to that section. I think this is a very important distinction. So a media company is a larger brand that is built, that has multiple facets to it, has multiple audience, different types of audiences that you own and different outlets to reach those audiences. A newsletter business is simply just that. It's a newsletter that you send emails out of, and sometimes you do advertising, sometimes you promote your own products. So those are the different things, and the media company is a company. It's a brand, it's a business that grows. A newsletter tends to just be something that someone sends, sometimes only once a week.

Speaker 1:

So, for me, the newsletter we have a media company Newsletters is one of our driving factors inside of it. What I'm going to talk about now of how to increase revenue is one of our other pieces of that as well. So there's three ways, there's multiple ways we make money in the media company. But our media company has email newsletters, it has sms lists, which I'm going to talk about how to how to use those to leverage, uh, your bit, to leverage them in your business. And then we also you have the social media outlet that you can reach people and there's other. So those are kind of some of the core avenues for you to to leverage the media company and grow it out. But anyways, uh, oh and sorry, onsite revenue, right? So where a lot of newsletters aren't actually leveraging onsite content anymore, it's just a landing page where you can opt in which, hey, it's, it's, uh, we have some of those as well and we're going to move back into building each individual property we have into a full its own, full blown media property, because now you've got on site revenue and on site ad opportunities.

Speaker 1:

So the fastest way if you do have a newsletter, to start moving towards media company, the fastest way is to to increase that revenue, is to build an SMS list from your current subscribers. To increase that revenue is to build an SMS list from your current subscribers. So a lot of companies and a lot of newsletters are really flat out sleeping on this. I slept on it for the first three years of the four and a half we've been rocking on the media side. I wish I wouldn't have because I could only imagine where we'd be at, frankly, if we didn't. But we slept on it no longer and I'm telling you not to do it as well. So hopefully you listen better than I did back when I first started growing those media properties. And SMS is one of the fastest ways, the way that you can do this. You can give new subscribers.

Speaker 1:

When you get an opt-in to your newsletter. You can ask them to opt in with the phone number and say, hey, would you like text updates or text results. So I've talked on a previous live about our process for getting a thousand leads a day like clockwork, and in that live I walk you through the exact flow that we use, the exact funnel and process we use to generate a thousand leads a day like clockwork and monetize those leads. Well, inside of that process you can ask for the phone number and when they put their phone number in, you can add them to your text message list so you can actually message out to them now and get information. So follow up, you can also send up. Key thing is I want to make sure you got to. We have a page with it where you can check a box and it says yes, I agree to get text messages right. So you want to make sure you're doing all the proper things you need to on that page when they do opt it. So you have that Now.

Speaker 1:

The next thing is in your follow-up email campaigns you can also give them incentives to opt into your text message list. Hey, text me now and I'll send you this free lead magnet. Text me now, send this free report, fill out this poll and we'll let them put in their number. So there's a lot of ways that you can start growing that SMS list and growing it really, really fast. Now text messaging costs a little bit more than email costs, so you want to make sure that you're getting active, engaged users in there as well, just like in a newsletter when you're building out segments. You do the same thing inside of your SMS list. I'll get to that in a second. So one thing.

Speaker 1:

Another thing I want to drive home here is so if you have a hundred thousand email subscribers and you can get 25,000 of them to subscribe to your SMS list and your this new audience that you've got, you can go to the to your advertiser and say by the way, we've got our text list that we can send your offer out to. And the cool thing, what I learned really, really fast was we sell a hundred. We have a hundred thousand person list. It sells for about, you know, on average $1,500 for that list. For our niche that we're in, it's a B2C niche, so our advertising dollars aren't as high as if we were to B2B. Now, a 40,000 SMS lists that I've got, they actually pay $1,500 for that. Now it's easier, it's less characters, it's less setup, it's less HTML, it's less content. So they're paying more money per CPM, even on the B2C being business to consumer, b2b being business to business.

Speaker 1:

So for us, when we were able to build out multiple lists, we, for our different brands, started attaching SMS lists to our different brands. We were able to now sell to a day, so we could sell an email a day and now we can sell an SMS a day. We also let me preface that with. We don't like to sell a SMS every single day. We also, but let me preface that with. We don't like to sell a SMS every single day. It's just not how we operate. You can, but we're going to sell about three to four a week per brand in our same weather newsletter. We're trying to do four to five a week sponsorships. So that is, in essence. You're able to drive more revenue as soon as you have that list, because now you've doubled the amount of ad space that you can sell and the advertisers are getting really, really strong results. If you go look at the data I don't want to bore you with too much data, but if you go look at it, there's like 95 percent SMS open rate, right.

Speaker 1:

And on top of that, the big metric that you want to follow in SMS I want to make sure you understand this, though, because it is a little bit different newsletters is you want to make sure you're tracking clicks. Clicks are super important and because of that, your list, and then eventually you can start segmenting your list based on the amount of clickers and everything else. People that opt out, they're opted out, move on, right. Don't start trying to text those people, but if they click and they're engaged, that's obviously a hyper targeted client. Especially now you can do the same thing you do in newsletters you can start building out a health clicker list inside your SMS. You can start building out a financial clicker list in your SMS list and start creating targeted, targeted list and SMS for these people as well, which opportunities are abundant at that point once you start doing that.

Speaker 1:

So a couple of tools I want to talk about so you can get rolling on. This is we've used a lot of tools over the year. Over the last year and a half two years, right. We've kind of gone through and tested stuff to see what's working, and we've got two that we really like. We've got Emotive, which is a platform we're using right now. If you want me to hook you up with them, let me know, but we have our current news general news subscribers inside of there, and the one thing is, though, about it is it does require a large commitment up front. They want an annual contract. They want a commitment on how many you're going to send every month, which could be a tough thing to commit to if you're a smaller business and you don't know how many of those SMS, you're actually going to grow right out of the gate. So I get that. So there's other solution, which is we are actually in beta right now with our own solution called customer automation, where it's handling newsletters and email automations newsletters and email automations, as well as SMS and chat functionality and things to acquire leads and engage those leads, right. So that's what customer automation is. You can actually buy credits and then so you can commit to the amount of credits that you want to sell and then when you send a text that just drops down your credits when you need more, you buy more, right? So it's a little bit better if you've got a smaller brand to that. You want to get into the SMS game and start growing it, so it's a great way to do that. So, anyways, those are the two kind of tools I would recommend. Now, best practices.

Speaker 1:

So I want to talk about a couple of things on the SMS front. Number one is this is stuff we're doing, so I just want to share it with you. So I'm open book on this stuff. Number one is when you sign up for SMS, you either get a phone number or you get a five-digit code. You've probably seen them if you're on people's text list. So the phone number side is a little bit more strict on what you can send and there's some regulation, a little bit more regulation and all that a little bit tougher to get kind of approvals on some of those sends, right. And if you go to the five digit code, you got a little bit more flexibility, a little bit more control over that. So, but it also does cost more money, right? You're paying for that five-digit code. If you look at some of the major brands that send out SMS, a lot of them send them on a five-digit code because they're sending massive amounts of SMS and they're doing that because it works.

Speaker 1:

So now, if you're promoting affiliate products or CPA offers or someone buys a text from you to their product, even on a CPM side, right. One thing that's super important on that is that you can do and we just learned this one, so this is fresh, right out of the gate. What's working now, information for you is people are driving. You're able to set up those offers on your website and that way, when they click on the link, so they you, let's say brand A sends a text message, they click on that link and it's to, let's say, brand A is selling product B for client one, right, they're selling for client one. Well, client one allows you, has you put your sales, their sales offer, on your website, so it creates a level of continuity and trust for them to click a link and land on your page. But it also looks better for the carriers that are allowing us to send those text messages. Right, there's more congruency. It doesn't look like it's going out to other sites.

Speaker 1:

You got a little bit of control over it to make sure it's not spam. You could send one bad text and your account could get shut down. That is one part of it. So you got to make sure that you're sending legit stuff. You know you don't want to be sending some of that, some of those things you shouldn't be sending, so we don't even get into what those are. But so that's another thing Now, and I mentioned this previous.

Speaker 1:

But when people opt in to join your text list, have them check a box and record that they checked a box. For you to go ahead and check the box that they approve for you to message them, right, so they're opting in, they're going from there. So that's that. And then the next thing is start, and I already mentioned this, but I'll come back to it they're opting in, they're going from there, so that's that. And then the next thing is start, and I already mentioned this, but I'll come back to it.

Speaker 1:

Start to segment your list by clickers, because SMS costs can go up. So if you text somebody, let's say, five times different messages, they don't open it. Let's say you got 100 people, 30 of them don't open, and only, let's say, 70 of them don't open, and only let's say 70 of them click. Well, you don't want to keep sending to those 30 that aren't engaged, that aren't clicking right, because your cost goes up at that point. And now what happens is your profit margins go down. So if you're sending to 100,000, but only, let's say, 50,000 of those are clickers, all your actions coming in at 50,000, all the performance coming in that 50,000. So you don't want to go send to a hundred thousand and pay double the cost If those people aren't engaging.

Speaker 1:

Now there's ways to go engage those ones that have it and everything else which we go through in the fast track, but either way, that's. That's an opportunity for you. So now here, so to wrap this up. That's an opportunity for you. So now here. So to wrap this up, that's I kind of went through state of newsletter market, how to increase revenue, some tools for you to use and best practices, and then from there getting started is get a solution in place. If you have a newsletter, you are missing out on the opportunity right now to actually drive revenue with SMS if you're not using it. So I highly recommend getting a solution in place and executing on that.

Speaker 1:

The second thing is you can go pick a solution, whatever one you want, enroll with it, do it yourself. You could potentially also with us at Marketing Rebels. We can actually do it for you. We'll set it up for you. We can connect you with a beta account of customer automation. We can build out the entire flow to get your opt-ins for you and whatnot to help you out, make sure you're compliant, make sure things are done right, make sure that you're on the up and up so you don't get any issues, and help you with that as well. Right, so it's up to you, I and help you with that as well. Right, so it's up to you, I'm good.

Speaker 1:

Either way, if you got questions on kind of what to leverage, if you want to go look at another tool, dm me. Shoot it over, happy to look at it. If you want us to help you same thing, sign up in DMs, let me know. I'll happily jump on and help you out and see what we can do to get this thing launched for you. So, with that, appreciate you showing up. These lives that I'm doing are meant to be quick hitters of useful, impactful information that you can leverage yourself. It's a lot of times you're going to hear us talking about common marketing and advertising strategies and how to do them uncommonly well, because so many people don't do them well, they do them halfway, and you can win in the marketing space, in the online advertising space, if you just do it really really well, get really really good at a couple things, instead of trying to do all the things. So, with that said, appreciate you showing up. You know reach out if you got any questions. Thank you,