Eric Siu and Neil Patel break down how to grow an email newsletter from zero. Morning Brew and The Hustle started with direct outreach to college students, then scaled with paid ads on Facebook and TikTok. A strong offer, like a $5,000 giveaway, can push opt-in rates from 0.5% to 5-10%.
Today, we are going to talk about how to build an email newsletter from scratch in 2021. So here's the thing that we're seeing, the trends we're seeing right now with email, the rise of Substack, right? Andreessen Horowitz, I think they gave him $16 million or something like that. And here's the other thing. Twitter might just come in and say, forget about you, Substack. Here's the, here's our $5.99 or $4.99 subscription. And you can make a newsletter straight up using our user base. So they can say, hey, forget about you. We already have an established user base. So the key thing here is understanding that But the creator economy is getting bigger and bigger. And I think there's, there's a lot of different ways to grow an email newsletter. And what I would say if I was starting from scratch right now, thinking about, I would really study the big newsletters out there. So Morning Brew sold to, I believe, Business Insider. And I think The Hustle sold to HubSpot, right? They, both of these companies, they're 8-figure newsletters. They started out by, it was a lot of hand-to-hand combat. I think Morning Brew, they would reach out to a bunch of students in the colleges and then they started to get, start to build a user base that way. So a lot of hand-to-hand combat first. But then once they started to get a good user base, they started to understand their lifetime value of an email. They started running paid ads for it, right? And they started running a ton of Facebook ads, Instagram ads, things like that. And one of the key things I remember listening to the CEO of Morning Brew, I was listening to a podcast. He said whenever they found a new channel like Snapchat, for example, or TikTok ads, they jumped on it so fast because the costs were so low and people were still getting used to getting a hang of it. And they would acquire new emails for super, super cheap. Nailing it first, then a lot of hand-to-hand combat and then ramping it up with ads. I think that's a high-level strategy.
Yeah. And if you want to take the long-term approach and the cheaper approach, what Eric and I do is create a ton of blog content, let it rank over time, because whether you write amazing content or mediocre content, I'm not saying Eric and I do either, but I'm just, just telling you the truth on how it works. If you just write enough content, When you're starting off, you'll get some traffic. Something's better than nothing, right? If you want to really grow to millions and millions of visitors, it makes it a little bit harder. But still, as you just create blog content and you wait some time, and then you do exit popups, sliders, top-down scroll bars, and you just put in there email collections. And if you do the email collection through either journeys, I used to do like from aha to oh shit, I'm sharing everything in my journey to 100,000 monthly visitors. I'm learning a lot and so will you. Put in your name and email. Sorry for saying the S-word. And when I did that, it was one of my highest converting email opt-ins. From there, I ended up building a massive list. You can also do quizzes. There's tools like LeadQuizzes that can help you with the quiz side. And if you just collect a lot of emails, eventually every time you release new content or sell new products, you can just email out to those people.
Yeah. One core thing, we've had Billie Jean on this podcast. If you want to just search for it, go to marketingschool.io. And he made a really good point. As marketers, you can focus on optimizing the ads, then you can focus on optimizing the creative. But the number one thing that you can drive that can really affect conversions is your offer. How strong is your offer at the end of the day? So if you're getting good SEO traffic or whatever traffic coming to your website, your email conversion rate, let's say it's half a percent or so. How can you make your offer such a no-brainer that, that you might drive the conversion rate to 5% or 10%? Maybe you're giving away a free $5,000 software. That seems like a no-brainer or free, the free opportunity to hang out with, or to live in Neil's house for the rest of your life. And that's an amazing offer. And so your conversion rate might jump to 5%, 10% at that point. Think about your offer quite a bit. I really recommend listening to that episode, but you got really 2 ways you can grow via paid or take the SEO route. But both, I would stress that really both take a lot of time to get going first. It's not really easy. I'm simplifying by saying nail it. It takes a lot to actually nail something and get kind of product-market fit or message-market fit, however you want to see it. Neil, you have anything else?
Yeah. Make sure you go to your iTunes store or your Android store. I don't know what it's called for Android. Google Play. Make sure you rate, review this podcast. We really do appreciate it. Thank you for your time. And based on that, as you can tell, I probably have an iPhone and not an Android device.
