How I'm Putting Together the Second Edition of Email Marketing Demystified

Hey, guys, Matt Paulson here. I want to record a quick video on a new book project that I'm going to be doing in 2019. I am going to be doing a second edition of my email marketing book. I published that book in 2015, March, April, May, somewhere in that time frame. So I'm hoping that the second edition of that book will come out four years after that, in March, April, May of 2019. I had been taking kind of a break from my book projects for the last year and a half or so to focus on MarketBeat. And now with a couple new employees, I'm freed up a little bit to focus on my book projects again. So I want to talk about what does a second edition of a book look like and what's going to be different and how I'm approaching this project in this video. It really came out. I really started thinking about this seriously. In the fall, Zio asked me to teach a class in email marketing. So I pulled out my old email marketing demystified PowerPoint, did the talk, gave the info, and we had a great time. Everybody learned a lot. It was a good event. But one of the questions was, is this information still up to date? Because the book's three and a half years old and with technology stuff moves quickly. So I said I thought it was. But then I went back and I kind of looked through the book after the class and thought a lot of the fine details. Some of that stuff's changed, like the big principles and like how to do email marketing, those haven't changed, but some of the specific technologies, platforms, some of the legal stuff, like who is a good email service provider, some of that kind of stuff has changed. And there's also just some new legal considerations and deliverability considerations that really weren't there before. Some kind of developments that have happened in email marketing since that book came out. One was Europe's General Data Protection Rules. And they put some pretty onerous requirements on businesses that have consumer data. Of course, that includes email addresses. So there's going to be a new section in a book about GDPR compliance in the legal chapter of the book. Going to get that in there. And then kind of the other big development is that spam filters have gotten a lot more strict and a lot smarter since the book came out. So both Hotmail and Gmail have really kind of tightened what they let into the inbox. And, you know, we have really tightened up our deliverability practices since then. You know, pretty much nowadays we won't send a lot of email to somebody that hasn't opened in 30 days and we won't open send any email to somebody that hasn't opened in 90 days. So we've really cut that back. When I wrote that book, I think we were doing sending people that haven't opened an email in a year. So to kind of stay in Google and Hotmail's good graces, we really cut that down and we're just very careful about who we email and only send email to engaged people. So we're going to talk about how the deliverability, staying in the inbox, staying out of the spam forward game, how that's kind of changed in the last three years as well. That'll be another big focus of the book, kind of the third edition to the book. There's going to be a brand new chapter and it's going to cover web push notifications. Our business, MarketBeat, has made over a million dollars this year with ads against our web push notifications list. We have 300,000 push subscribers. So I am going to talk about that technology and how web push notifications are almost a second email list. And it's just an incredibly valuable marketing tool that inbound marketers have. And I really think everybody with the website should use it because it's just such a good monetization and acquisition kind of opportunity for anybody that's trying to get people that come to your website to come back later and buy something. You use email for that, but you can also use web Push for that. So there's going to be a chapter on web push. I am also going through every chapter, chapter by chapter, just updating the information with my latest ideas and thoughts. When I wrote the book, we had about a quarter million subscribers and maybe a couple million in revenue. And today we're at three quarters of a million subscribers and six million in revenue. So certainly I picked up a lot. And I'm just going to try to make sure all the latest information that's in my brain about email marketing makes it into that book. So that's kind of the, you know, that's kind of the focus of the book. Just one, make sure everything's updated, you know, two, the GDPR stuff, three, the deliverability stuff and four, push notifications. So we're going to have, you know, I'm targeting getting the manuscript kind of done into my editor by middle of January, try to get all that stuff formatted in February, March, and then launch that sometime in March or April. This is probably second big financial thing for me. I have never made a ton of money from my books, certainly not compared to MarketBeat. But I do think Email Marketing Demystified is kind of a special book in terms of that industry, because there are no really other books that are just kind of like the primer for email marketing. This book kind of teaches you the basics and what you need to know and how to implement stuff. So I think it's important as a resource for business owners, people in my community, people elsewhere that want to learn email marketing. I think it's important that this resource exists, and I'm kind of proud to be the person that has put it together. So that's kind of what we're doing. Keep an eye on my blog. I'll certainly have more updates for it, and then as this project develops, I'll clue you in. As we get closer to launch.