The Secrets Behind The Most Successful Newsletters with Matt McGarry

have you ever wondered the secrets behind the world's largest and fastest growing newsletters try and be different rather than better and so don't try and have a better newsletter than the competition but take a different angle and perspective on it meet Matt McGarry he runs grow letter a newsletter growth agency that has worked with the likes of daily upside milk Road the hustle Cody Sanchez and saho Bloom and in this episode of Graceland air Matt shares how to get more email subscribers and how to turn your newsletter into a thriving business but there's really three main channels I think of so one is is Peg grip which is what my company does we're paying to get subscribers with a Facebook ad or Twitter ad Tick Tock ad that's a great Channel but not the best for everybody then there is organic social growth growing on Twitter and Linkedin those seem to be the most effective platforms to grow your newsletter because they're written content platforms and people are kind of more likely to describe to a written newsletter versus on Tick Tock they may prefer video they're not going to come to a newsletter so that's that's organic social growth and the final one is what I call email platform growth and so this is usually the small swim but it's it's really underlooked and very it can be a source of high quality subscribers this could be a newsletter referral program it could be as simple as asking your readers to forward the newsletter to a friend and having a link to sign up within the newsletter um you can also cross-primp with other newsletters that are a similar size and topic of you or cross recommend with other newsletters using a recommendation tool that like sub stack or beehive or convertkit now has so those are the three categories and we can dive into each of those if you'd like to yeah definitely I mean I'm really interested by what you said about how um like paid ads aren't necessarily for everyone so how did newsletter creators know which category would suit them best yeah it really depends on where you're heading your journey and so if you want to think about paid acquisition some people are very Savvy with it and they have past experience and they know it well so if you're that person you probably know when to start but if you don't what I would recommend is you know of course number one you're already making revenue from your newsletter or you're from your creator business so when you spend on paid acquisition you have a way to recoup that so that's number one you need to already be monetizing it at some level it doesn't need to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in Revenue but at some level you want to get an idea of your subscriber LTV to how much eight subscriber is worth to you you can do that with some simple math kind of like divide in your subscriber count by your your revenue or if that's the I don't know if that's that's the exact math but something like that or you can get more sophisticated with it and I have a calculator I'm going to really assume on this but basically you can look at you know if you know X percent of your subscribers convert to a paid customer like a course customer or a subscription customer you can calculate LTV that way or if you sell sponsorships you can look at the rate that your sign sponsorship said you know how often you're selling them and calculate your LTV that way we won't get into all the the details of how to do that but you want to get at least a rough idea of what that looks like so you know if your LTV is ten dollars per subscriber you can be comfortable paying you know two or three dollars per subscriber from Paid ads and um recoup that over time so those are the the two or three factors I think about okay um what makes a good ad that would actually lead to conversion like is there an approach that people should be taking absolutely yeah what I focus on is authenticity um or authenticity so ads that don't look like ads is what we want them to look like um if you've scrolled you know Instagram or Facebook or Twitter long enough you've probably seen ads where it's like a headline then there's like someone holding the phone there might be a newsletter on it or something that's just very clearly just screams ads and those aren't very effective we want to be more creative and we want our ad to look like an organic social post and hopefully if you're already successful in organic social you kind of know what that looks like and how that works already and so you want your ads to be the same way you know if you're doing Twitter ads for example the types of hooks and ideas that go viral on Twitter also work well as an ad same thing with Facebook or Instagram so you can take a lot of learnings from organic growth over to your paid ads the to get into some examples of what works well um you know one of the ones that has been working for like well over a year now for almost all of our clients is just like an iPhone Notes at so we write some good copy about the newsletter in iPhone Notes we take a screenshot we use that as an ad um even something like you know a text message so like we might text with a friend or text herself about the newsletter take a screenshot of that use that as an ad you can do that with notion too basically people started to call this like user interface hacking so it's like you know I'm seeing like a screenshot of a Reddit post on Facebook like it grabs my attention especially if the copy is interesting to me so that's one example there's many more that the second example that works really well is ugc video so like a tick tock Style video using that as an ad on Instagram Facebook Tick Tock works really well video content is just more engaging you have more time to explain the value of your newsletter too so that can be really effective as well and just a copy of the ad focus more on like what the newsletter is generally about or like specific issues or how do you approach you know how what you're gonna promote yeah typically to focus on the benefits of the newsletter how the newsletter solves a problem for that specific person whoever the ideal reader is and so it's kind of hard to show and tell issues with some issues I mean if you do a lot of like deep dive content whether it's Evergreen you can talk about that in your ads but a lot of newsletters are like it's day-to-day it's a daily newsletter Weekly Newsletter so it's pretty much relevant to that week so it's hard to advertise that content so instead we're focusing on grabbing attention wherever that audience is using what we call dog whistle copy to call out that audience so if it's you know product designers or if it's CEOs or marketers or creators we want to do that in the first part of the ad and then explaining them the benefits of newsletter and how it's going to help them improve them improve their lives make them smarter save them time whatever the benefits are you want to explain that and we like to back up that benefit or that promise of proof so some type of social proof this is read by 10 000 people this is read by people that work at these prestigious companies or organizations or it's written by an expert in this topic so some some way to just explain logically that the promise that we just gave is achievable and then finally we just have a call to action that says click the link to subscribe for free of course if it's free we want to mention them we add too so that's kind of the format that I think about you know the the hook the product introduction and promise and the proof and then the call to action and how do you measure that these ads are like working so like do you audit the results you're getting like what's the best way to go about it yeah we're basically always running conversion campaigns so it's a campaign that's optimized to get someone to sign up for the newsletter and so one mistake people make often is running a traffic campaign just to drive traffic to their newsletter or their landing page or even an engagement campaign you always want to focus on conversions and so when you set up your tracking um with a Facebook console or The Tick Tock pixel you can measure how many people signed up from that particular ad or that ad campaign and we want to verify this too not just what we don't want to listen to Just what Facebook says or what trigger says we want to verify this in our email service provider so we go into beehive or convert whatever we're using and see you know Facebook said they sent us 100 signups um does beehive say that usually we don't have an issue if you set up the track in the way that we do it which is somewhat simple sometimes when there's a discrepancy we'll figure out what the issue is there too so you want to be looking at what Facebook says tracking that the cost per subscriber there and then looking at your email service provider and seeing what the cost purposes forever is based off of that math as well and how long do you typically run ad campaigns like is there a problem in doing it too much or you know is it okay to run ads quite often yeah it's totally fine usually we're doing Evergreen so we're trying to do it year round and so you're not really going to fatigue your ads unless you're at a really really high level of AD spend which most people don't have to worry about this is you know hundreds of thousands of dollars per month that's when the audience starts getting fatigue but there's a lot of people on these social platforms that are want to learn about your newsletter you might run into a problem if you do retargeting which people have heard of where it's like you know you're targeting your Instagram followers or your traffic for that you can do that year around but you would just want to have a smaller budget so you're not showing those people your ads too often in these app platforms you can look at frequency which means how many times someone saw your ad and if you're retargeting your existing audience you want to keep your frequency under 2 per day so people don't see your ad more often than that and they don't get fatigued by saying you're at too often so that's how I want to think about it and you mentioned that um organic posts you you tend to use like similar hooks as ads and things like that what do you do differently for organic posts compared to ads yeah there's a couple things I mean the point of the organic press is really to add value in some way so that people like it share it follow you maybe go and subscribe to your newsletter afterwards whereas an ad there's not really time to add value you know I just have a couple of lines to convince you to click and subscribe and so I'm using the same type of hook or concept or idea to get attention but after I get that attention I'm giving you a very brief pitch of like why you should subscribe to this and then I'm asking you to subscribe and so you're kind of missing that that middle part that you might have in organic post where it's like you know organic buses you have hook you have the core the content then you might have a small call to action at the end where the ads it's just way more condensed yeah and is there a time to do organic posts I mean most creators I know tend to like create an issue and then once they've published the issue then they create like a promo post for it is that the right approach or is there a better way of doing things I would take the opposite approach actually so I think a lot of creators get advertised not sabotage but about promoting their newsletter wrong on social media the time to promote it is not after you create the posts since before so I would do what we call a pre-call to action so before your newsletter is sent you have a post that goes out the day before that teases all the content that people are going to get when they subscribe or what they're going to learn from the newsletter and so kind of like a t is a curiosity in inducing post and then in that post you have a link to subscribe so people have almost like fomo of not getting the newsletter if they don't subscribe and those are extremely effective I recommend people do those if you have a Weekly Newsletter do it once a week you can't do it every day because that's too often but you know once a week bi-weekly that's a great time to do this pre-called actions um and then a lot of people just don't have strong and clear call to actions within their profiles and their bios either you know they have says I write a newsletter it doesn't say like click here to subscribe to get this thing you know it's it's very vague and they don't get as many clicks from their profile as they could a lot of people also use a link tree or like a um a multiple link tool in their bio and you know their newsletter is one out of five links in the amount of people who click that then the click the newsletter is so much lower than if you just had your newsletter landing page linked in your bio correctly you might have a 50 conversion rate from your newsletter landing page directly versus if you send people at a link tree only 20 of the people might actually go and click and subscribe to your newsletter and you know 20 versus 50 that's double the subscriber growth if you just have that difference there so it's another common mistake I see um that's a really good point actually and you mentioned that Twitter and Linkedin are two of the best platforms to use I'm really interested to know does it make a difference whether you put the link of your newsletter or the call to action like in the post or in the comments because I see people doing it very differently yeah I'm not not the algorithm expert I typically do it on Twitter I do it beneath the Tweet so it's threads the last tweet if it's a tweet it's the Tweet below that um on LinkedIn I'm not as good at LinkedIn I'm seeing the comments work best or people even just you know you don't even have to have a link sometimes you can just say the link is in my bio as you've seen before and like if you have a well optimized bio I know LinkedIn can have like featured sections in your bio too so you can really have like multiple links for your newsletter within your LinkedIn profile which will give you a higher click-through rate more subscribers so I think the general rule of thumb is avoid links in the actual post you want to reach people and then link below that or in the comments somewhere yeah that makes sense and I feel like you've worked with some really big news letters like the hustle and milk Road what do you think those newsletters have in common that have made them so successful I think they're getting every aspect right so there's really three aspects to a newsletter it's what Oscar reef is the founder of morning Brewery calls this right grow cell so writing is obviously the content that has to be amazing growth is getting subscribers and then selling is monetization for those newsletters you mentioned that that meant selling sponsorships but for others that could be selling a product or subscription or whatever way they're monetizing so there's not a lot of moving Parts but each of those parts you need to do well so we can get into there's all types of directions we can go and like what content is good how to grow we talked about growth a ton already um yeah but if you have all those newsletters you mentioned had all those things done very well were a lot of people that I see are missing they have kind of one part of the pillar they have one pillar for example but they're missing the other two or they may have two but they don't have three that's going to hold them back yeah let's dive into it then let's dive into content what makes good news as a content and especially how important is format as well because I feel like some of these newsletters have this format that you become familiar with if you subscribe yeah that's what performance is that something that's overlooked right you want to think about your newsletter as kind of like the most similar physical medium is like a News newspaper or a magazine and so some people treat their newsletter like a place to write an essay and it's just a long blocks of post and there's no separators or sections or different parts and that's a mistake and so treated like newspaper and magazine have different sections and make it look good with the tools available now with beehive and sub stack of record you can all have you can build a very beautiful newsletter even if you don't have a designer so like take your time doing that and you also want to give people a consistent experience every newsletter and so like every newsletter I know you know this is you know the the tools and Trends section this is like the news and events section this is the meme section and so like if I like a certain section I can just go there I can navigate there right away without having to think about it just like when you open a newspaper like which way you don't do anymore but you know back in the day you know where the sports section is and you can just open to that page and just go to that section immediately people should be able to do the same thing with your newsletter so you want to have different sections in in a consistent template every newsletter sent that doesn't mean you can experiment with it at all and try new things but he wanted to be somewhat consistent make small changes in small improvements over time to your newsletter formatting templates so that's step number one if you just don't have a template which most people don't just take some time to create that and look at other newsletters and get some inspiration from what they do the content is really so unique it's hard to give general advice on right A lot of it comes down to your unique experience as an expertise that you've built up over your lifetime a lot of the most successful newsletters I see are either someone who has deep expertise like they work in the industry or they did something over the past five or ten years and they're right about that or they just have a ton of passion and natural writing skirt or develop writing skill and they write about the passion so it's usually one of those two things that works well for Content it really comes to like on the cool thing is like if you have good newsletter format and template and design that can make up for kind of mediocre writing so if you feel like you're like I am not a great writer at all um and I try and make it for that in other ways right okay and how important is like the length of a newsletter do short newsletters do better because we're in the attention economy or can you get away with writing longer news asses too yeah there are some great long newsletters out there and there's exceptions to every role but you probably want your newsletter to be between a three and five minute read time that's what people prefer by far um I've seen a lot of data on that so you want to go for that I mean short in three minutes is really maybe not enough content but over five minutes is too long for most people and so that's the sweet spot and if you think about email it's really like a skimmable format like you're not spending hours reading one email you want people to be able to get in get value and then get out and not be reading for a very long time however there are some good exceptions we can point to as well and have you found a difference between again like personal newsletters where it's kind of more about the writer versus you know newsletters that are more of a brand in itself yeah I think even if it's about a brand or a better writer you still want to make it personal and so with with email and newsletters you can build a tone from yourself or your brand and people really care about your tone your voice and so you want to have a unique tone and voice that people come back to you want to write to your subscribers like a friend um so not like a PR essay not like a marketing email you want to write personally directly to one person this again is tough to kind of talk about and Define but if you look at some people I mean morning room the hustle are known really well for their tone and their voice um the milk Road I haven't read it as much recently but especially early on I had a really strong tone and voice it was really witty and funny so you want to bring your personality into it for sure and if it's a brand try and create a personality for the brand right okay and then let's move on to monetization because I feel like I feel like it's quite difficult to convert subscribers into paying customers do you have any effective strategies for converting people from subscribers into paying customers absolutely there's a couple ways and again that this is probably one of the big the monetization is honestly the hardest part for this um both in this way another so you want to have call to actions for it um in a couple places so one after because someone subscribes to your newsletter you want to have a confirmation page or a thank you page that tells them more about the newsletter but also has a subtle call to action to your paid product there you want to do it again in your welcome email you don't want to pitch too hard initially because they just joined and you don't want to oversell them but those are two places right away where you can sell people thank you Paige welcome memo that's a great opportunity another opportunity most people Miss is through email automation most and that's okay you don't want to have too many automations and too many um triggered emails either but most people just send a weekly or daily newsletter and nothing outside of that after someone joins your newsletter it makes sense to have like a welcome series as they join so the first email is your welcome email courses sent out immediately then usually 24 hours later is a great time for another email then 72 hours later or 48 hours later and you can have kind of like a three to four email welcome series and what this can do is tell people more about your brand how you help people you can direct people to your best content but you can also educate them and sell them on whatever your premium product is and so this welcome series of three to four emails is probably the best way to convert your new free subscribers into paid subscribers so you want to take time and build out a welcome sales sequence if you have a product like this and of course you want to have a call to action within every broadcast newsletter sent so if you send weekly on Friday some type of call to action within that the call to action should vary a little bit every newsletter because you don't want people to get Banner fatigued if you have a call to action in the same section the same place every single newsletter it's going to become less effective over time so you want to switch it up some weeks you want to have a stronger call to action maybe in your interest section at the top where everybody reads it some weeks you want to have a more soft call to action in your outro section at the bottom where only you're more most like loyal subscribers are reading there and so mix it up don't have Banner fatigue um and then also like pre-called actions like we talked about earlier for organic content work with paid subscriptions too and so like if you're doing um if you're adding new content to the membership or sending the new paid newsletter the only subscribers could access to you want to sell that before it goes out so people have fomo And subscribe to get it there's lots of other psychological and like copywriting tactics to do this we won't get into now because we don't have a ton of time um but that's something you want to think about as well okay amazing and what about um sponsorships as a revenue stream like do you think there's a way to create your newsletter in a way that can attract more sponsors and build more Partnerships yeah sponsorships seem to be the go-to and the place where most people get started and it can make a significant amount of Revenue quickly right so I do recommend for that for most folks I think how to get more revenue from a sponsor really depends on how value your audience is and then what that means is does your audience have buying power the ability to buy things and do they have purchase making ability and so that could be for individual or a household but it also could be for a business in the highest sponsorship rates are all for for B2B newsletters for newsletters that focus on covering a certain business or industry and the people who read them are founders Executives and Professionals in the industry and the more buying power and decision-making ability those readers have the higher the sponsorships rates so if I had a newsletter that just had you know CEOs of Fortune 500 companies on it the sponsorship rates I should I could charge are you know easily 50 or 100x what I could charge of newsletter about you know travel for example um because there's just a big difference in decision making ability and buying power between a Fortune 500 CEO newsletter versus a travel newsletter right you know the average person might spend five thousand dollars per year on travel whereas a CEO can spend millions of dollars per year on the products they buy for their business and so cpms vary a lot usually newsletter ads are price based off of CPM I think the industry average right now is like 40 to 60 dollars but it can vary a ton you know at the lower end in really competitive in big niches you're seeing like a 20 CPM but these B2B newsletters I mentioned often see well over a hundred dollar CPM events or like the the high hundreds in some rare cases so that that's something to think about if you're starting a newsletter from scratch you probably want to start a new space at least if you're focused on sponsorship started in a space that has high cpns from advertisers and has lots of advertisers that are promoting themselves in newsletters um its own right or or does it really depend on Niche and audience on sponsorships alone it can be hard to build a business and that a lot of that is because you need to send more often right is you're selling for your sponsorships the more sponsors you can have the better so if you have a Weekly Newsletter you're probably not going to make an amazing living on sponsorships alone but if you move that to three times a week you know you can sell more sponsorship so it can be a great path for a lot of newsletters and some big newsletter companies have basically been built on sponsorships and advertising support of the loan if you look like morning Brew is 100 million dollar business the hustle is in was in the 20 Millions um or like sold for for over 20 million industry dive is advertising supported newsletter immediate company that sold for over 500 million so like that's definitely a possibility there um I do think the average Creator who's more focused on a small Niche and doesn't want to send a newsletter every day or you know four or five times a week um should think about monetizing some other way usually through some other type of media product like a paid Community paid subscription course coaching Consulting Etc and for for a lot of people that can be a better model and your newsletter can be demanding lead generation for that model okay and let's talk about um like newsletter landing pages like how important are they for you know new social growth monetization and some of the things that we've talked about newsletter landing pages are very important and very overlooked and the reason why is because like we talked about earlier if your newsletter landing page converts at 25 so 25 of people that land a million page become a subscriber and you're able to improve that and increase it to 50 which is very doable you just double the amount of subscribers you can get and so that's a huge difference to your growth and your Revenue over time right and so you want to spend a lot of time on this and the good thing is it's not very complicated to make a great newsletter landing page either um you basically want to have a page that's just one section so if I'm looking it on my phone or on my laptop I can basically see everything about the page there it's not multiple sections it's not a long sales page or website basically there's no scroll in the elements you want to have on the page are very simple too so you're going to have a headline you're going to have a sub headline you're going to have your form and your button to subscribe you might have some text under that you might have some testimonials beneath that some people like to have an image too of something about their brand or like a the newsletter itself on a phone and that's really it and the the key thing is um there's only one action people can take they can enter their email and submit the form and subscribe or they can leave you don't want to have links to everything that ever exists about you on your landing page you just want to focus everybody towards subscribing and then you can direct them to other things afterwards so you want to remove your menu remove your footer remove links to your past newsletter and just focus on people subscribing you know for some people they like to maybe include one link like a small link to the pet to recent newsletters but you want that to be not nearly as visible as everything else right and so that's what it should look like and the key if you have that section format right the key to making a convert high is just having a clear value proposition explain in your headline sub headline how this is going to help people if you subscribe and then backing that episode social proof so including testimonials how many readers where your readers work at Etc that type of that type of group helps a ton that's really interesting because I thought it would be better to have like previous issues so people could see like you know what they were signing up for um what about the design of the actual newsletter itself like is that something that creators should be thinking about like trying to make it more I guess visually appealing and user-friendly or is that not as important as the content itself yeah super important it's it's probably even more important the content in some cases because if you just see ugly you know contents a bunch of blocks and paragraphs that's not going to work and so it's hard to like explain the podcast what a good newsletter should look like but I've mentioned before I love morning Brew I love the hustle check those out um there's probably more design resources on my website and more examples newsletter operator.com that people can see um and like once you see that you'll kind of see each section is different it's kind of like a magazine it has colors there's a very consistent font and font size um and so I think what most people see those examples they'll be able to get it right and how else can use a like creators stand out especially if they're in really like crowded niches yeah it's it's a challenge but I think my take is try and be different rather than better and so don't try and have a better newsletter than the competition but take a different angle and perspective on it um and so for a lot of people it could mean a lot of things but one is just going um Niche or going deeper and going more deeper in a niche and so a lot of people start with financials say like you know AI newsletters are popular we might use that example so I don't if I wouldn't recommend focus on this Niche at all at the moment it's just so crowded but like if you were to you wouldn't start a newsletter about AI news you would go one the two levels deeper and start a newsletter about how marketers can use AI to grow their business or how you know software developers can use AI to write code faster and so you're going one to two levels deeper in a nation that helps you stand out and get more subscribers even though it's a smaller Market people will care more about you because you're actually solving a specific problem for them rather than just AI news it's going to help a lot of people but it's it's going to help them at like a somewhat surface level that makes a lot of sense and you audit a lot of newsletters um as part of your company what are the key metrics that you're looking at and what the key metrics that you think newsletter creators should be looking at good question yeah so one is landing page conversion rate we already talked about I think the Benchmark I have for that is 45 plus conversion rate the second one is open rate open rates become less important because of Apple's changes to email open tracking but it's still you know the top one or two metrics I would look at and so for most plants we aim for 40 to 50 plus a lot of this can depend on the size of your newsletter so if you're a massive newsletter 40 plus open rate can be good but if you're smaller I think you should be aiming for 50 plus unique open rate the other one we look at is click-through rate you need to click the rate so this depends a lot on the newsletter format because some newsletters have a lot of links some have very few links and so there's no really true Benchmark per click-through rate but I would like to see most newsletters have a five to ten percent plus click-through rate five percent in the lower end ten percent on the higher end is really awesome you should look at unsubscribe rate too but again not as many benchmarks you want each newsletter sent to probably have a less than point five percent unsubscribe rate but if you're writing good content and you have a high open rate your unsubscriber is probably going to be very low anyways spam is important to track to every time you send a newsletter look for spam reports ideally that's zero but if you're very large it's going to be a handful of spam complaints but you want to keep it in like less than 10 percent those are the main ones I looked at and like a lot of it comes down to revenue percent and like LTV but that's not gonna apply to everyone quite yet um and we've spoken about landing page conversion already and how to improve that how do you improve things like the open rate and click-through rate yeah so the open rate really comes down to your first impression obviously if you already have a list of 100 000 people and you have a low open rate there's a lot of things you need to do to fix that it's basically going to come down to writing better and better content every single week and it's a really challenging to kind of steer a big shift like that to a higher open right but if you're much smaller it's a lot easier to change that so what I focus on is the first impression what happens after people subscribe what happens immediately after people subscribe so your landing page sells people on subscribing of course but then your thank you page and your welcome email needs to sell people on opening and so a lot of people miss that part of the sales process and they have no landing page or just a very basic landing page and welcome email and so um what I like to do especially in that welcome emails have people take a couple actions and so obviously you want to get them excited about the next newsletter that's coming whatever that's coming but you also want to have them do a couple things one is reply to your welcome email that will get more of your emails on their primary inbox another one is Click some type of Link another one is move the email to their primary inbox if it landed in their spammer promotions folder and those are really the main three things I think inform people about when your newsletter is sent when it's coming why they should read it get people to click a link get people to reply and get people to move it to their primary folder if you do those four things in your welcome email your open rates for future emails will increase significantly and you also want to measure your welcome email open rate over time and so the best way to improve your welcome email open rate is through a great thank you page that tells them to go open the welcome email and gets them excited to to do that so do that on your thank you page also test your welcome email subject line a B test that or test that over time that can make a big difference too because basically the only thing people see in their inbox is the subject line the preview text and if that's mediocre or just very generic or not good they may not open that in a minute and have the opportunity to you know reply to it or click on it if they don't even open in the first place so I know it's a lot of different things to do but that's how I think about it yeah I'm interested about the subject line actually because especially for a welcome email I I didn't realize there could be much of a difference to like subject lines like are there any examples that you've seen do really well or like the way that the copy is written yeah so I like to think a little bit outside the box I have a lot of examples on my website I think I have a post called how to improve your open rate um that has maybe 15 examples I don't remember all of them now a lot of times we see the generic ones like hey welcome thank you you're subscribed I would avoid doing that but don't get too outside the box either so I'll just try and Riff on that a little bit um and so yeah it's really I wish I had more examples on the top of my head I think mine is like want to grow your newsletter and so like I keep it very focused on like what people came for that's that's kind of okay a good thing to think about is like why do they join your newsletter can you just can you show that and you're welcome email immediately um it's also worth thinking about the preview text too does that play together with your subject line because people will see that as well but don't don't go too crazy with it but don't use the generic options either yeah okay that makes a lot of sense and last question I want to ask is you you've worked with so many newsletter creators and you've audited so many newsletters as well what are the most common mistakes that creators tend to make that is holding them apart like from either growth or monetization yeah there's a lot of not one huge mistake comes to mind I think one of the biggest ones is you know if you're growing organically whatever social platform you're big on it's just not having enough call to actions for your newsletter I've talked about that before in this interview but like you you have to have clear call to actions you don't want to to use a link tree you want to send people to your landing page you're going to be really happy you did that later if your reach goes down or your account gets banned or something because newsletters that only truly own platform so I think the main takeaway I have is people just don't spend enough time and effort on it they're so focused on social growth they don't see that a newsletter subscriber is way more valuable and they never send people the newsletter and they don't put any time and effort into actually building it or writing it either so um I think if they do all the things we talked about on this call I think they're going to be a much better space in the long run and they're going to have a better shot at converting people to actually buy from them because email's the best way to do that yeah definitely I feel like I've already learned so much about how to improve passion fruit news lesser so thank you so much for that I'm gonna end with a quick fire round so I'm going to ask you five questions I ask every Grace that comes on air starting with what's your favorite thing about being a creator I think my favorite thing is meeting people and getting great feedback I mean it always feels good to get a positive response on something you post or people talk about how to actually help them so that's amazing um one underrated ability is I hire a lot of people from my agency and being able to find um great talented hard-working people I found so many people just through my Twitter and through my newsletter um whereas before I would have to you know post up job postings post ads take their applications like been able to recruit so many people through my content which has been awesome oh I love that and what's something that gives you the most inspiration for what you create um I think it's tough I think just seeing the feedback every day and seeing the results you know I've actually only been at this for um creating the newsletter and content for about eight months now and so like I've managed to grow a bit now I know I'm just thinking about how that compounds over five years ten years if I keep doing this at the same pace so that keeps me inspired what's one tool that helps you the most as a Creator I love beehive um as you know I mentioned a ton or agency is a beehive partner but I've been using the product for like almost a year now um outside of that and before that so it's really an incredible tool for newsletters I can talk all about this definitely and what's one thing that helps with your creator work-life balance I gotta work on that I think um keeping like keeping a consistent schedule right so like I have one newsletter assigned per week I try and do one long form post on social media per week and I try and do one short front post a day and so that's doable um in my spare time because my my full-time job isn't really being a Creator it's running my agency but I get all the clients buying the Creator so that that keeps me keeps me balance is just like having a realistic posting schedule that's doable yeah and what's one piece of advice that you'd give to other creators um start your newsletter now even if you don't want to read a newsletter we just start capturing emails like spin up a landing page on beehive or whatever email service provider you need to use and just even if you don't want to put it as the main Link in your bio just put it somewhere in there and say you're collecting emails and so when you do decide to write that newsletter you already have subscribers there so just get started and you know not everybody should be collecting emails not everybody has to write a newsletter but just start collecting emails it's going to help you over time amazing thank you so much Matt I feel like this has been such an insightful conversation for newsletter creators I feel like it's definitely been probably our most in-depth conversation that we've had on newsletters so I think it'll be really helpful so thank you so much yeah thanks for having me this was great you can find Matt on Twitter his newsletter newsletter operator and his newsletter growth agency grow letter and if you are a Creator and one of your revenue streams is sponsorships check out passion fruit we help you to streamline your entire workflow I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Creators on Air by Passionfroot

Views: 14,025

Keywords: Passionfroot, passionfroot podcast, creator economy, passionfroot creators, Matt McGarry, Sahil Bloom, Codie Sanchez, newsletter growth, grow your newsletter, newsletter

Id: vGlnvXgISU8

Length: 35min 42sec (2142 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2023