In this Q&A video, Matt Paulson, joined by intern Lily, answers audience-submitted questions covering a range of practical marketing and monetization topics relevant to email and SMS list owners. He outlines best‑practice setup for the Beehive ESP, including daily and weekly segmentation and leveraging Beehive’s programmatic ad network. He explains co‑registration (co‑reg) options, naming major financial networks (AfterOffers, Investing Media Solutions, SparkLoop, Tiburon) and how to use co‑reg on thank‑you pages. For small lists seeking private CPA offers, he advises starting as a sub‑affiliate with large finance networks (Investing Media Solutions, StrikePoint) to build volume. He details Gmail deliverability requirements—SPF/DKIM/DMARC, unsubscribe headers, engagement windows, and spam‑report thresholds (<0.1%). He discusses SMS cost (≈$0.006‑$0.01 per text) and a 30‑day inactivity cutoff to keep the bill manageable. He warns that open rates are now unreliable due to privacy protections and recommends focusing on click‑through rates. He shares his revenue‑on‑ad‑spend target (4 × return over two years) and how he calculates ad budget from trailing revenue. He describes the advertiser mix that succeeds on MarketBeat (financial newsletters, investor‑relations, lead‑gen for media) and notes occasional success with crowdfunding campaigns. He states that Twitter/X generates little direct revenue for MarketBeat, serving mainly personal branding. Finally, he suggests the next owned‑audience channels after email/SMS: web‑push notifications and YouTube, emphasizing their low cost and discoverability benefits.
Chapters
Hey everyone, uh, we are here today, um, on whatever social platform you're watching this. Maybe YouTube, maybe Twitter, maybe Instagram, could be anywhere. But, um, I posted on Twitter the other day, or X as the kids call it these days, um, and just said, hey, uh, I want to get on camera in our new studio, answer some business questions, uh, what do you have? Uh, Lily and Lacey put them together, um, and we're going to answer some of them live on camera. Lily is our summer intern. She is going to be a senior at USD and graduates next May. So Lily's going to turn some of these into clips later, so we thought it would be fun to have her answer some of the questions— ask some of the questions, and then I would answer them. We're doing 3 parts. This is going to be the first video of 3 that we're doing today, but we're going to start off with some kind of marketing, email marketing, digital advertising type questions, and hopefully you guys enjoy them.
Awesome. Good intro.
Or Lily, excuse me. What's the first question?
Okay, so the first question that someone asked is, when you start a new Beehive list, what is your roadmap or best practice?
Yeah, so Beehive is a popular email service provider. We use that at MarketBeat. A lot of people use it these days. Beehive out of the box does a lot of stuff for you, but there are a couple things that it doesn't do that you really need to set up. One of those are your segments, and these are kind of the groups of your subscribers that you email. You don't want to email all of your subscribers because that includes maybe people that haven't opened messages in a year, and you typically don't want to email those people. So you want to set up a daily segment. Those are your people that open, that you're going to email every day. That's typically people that have opened in the last 30 days, clicked in the last 60 days, or maybe been added to your list in the last 15 to 30 days, and then a weekly segment that's a little bit broader. That's typically maybe like a 90-day opener number, 90-day clicker number. It's a little bit less active people, but still maybe are worth emailing once a week. I would say another thing to really look at when you get Beehive up and going is their ad network. They just launched programmatic ads where you can just have a spot in your email and they'll pick out which ad to run and you can kind of make money on autopilot, that's pretty cool. And beyond that, like, it is a pretty good plug-and-play platform. There's not a whole lot you need to do to get it going other than to start adding some subscribers. Their website builder is getting better, so you can build out a nice website on Beehive. We just launched a list called stocknews.com on Beehive. You guys can go check that out and see how that works. So that's it.
Great answer. The next question is, how would you get started with Coreg? If there aren't many offers in your niche?
Yeah, so what we're talking about is co-registration. Some people call it co-reg or co-reg depending on whatever. Co-reg works really well in the financial space because there are financial-specific co-registration networks. AfterOffers and Investing Media Solutions are the big two. In other niches, you could still do it. The big network right now is called SparkLoop. There's another one called Tiburon. So if you want to sell it like on the back of your email signup process, you can certainly do that. If you want to buy it as like a lead source, you can do that, but you have to have really good performance tracking in place to know if you're buying good co-reg or generic stuff where people aren't really engaging. You really want to like know the quality of the leads that you're getting. And if you're in a niche where there isn't co-reg, like that's totally fine. You can still do the same type of thing. So co-reg ads or co-registration typically adds on your thank you page after you sign up for a newsletter. And if you don't have co-reg in your space, you can put an advertisement for anything. So go find an affiliate offer, put it on your thank you page, and you can make money that way.
Yeah, awesome. Um, the next question is, how would you go about getting private CPA offers if your list is still small?
Yeah, um, so CPA is cost per action. That's generally when you get paid to generate a sale. A lot of the emails that MarketBeat sends out are CPA for some big financial newsletter advertisers like Agora and MarketWise, and then some smaller independents like Behind the Markets and some others. And often what happens is when you're just getting started, you maybe are doing $10,000 to $50,000 a month in affiliate commissions, people just don't care about you because you're not big enough to move the needle. And really, when you're there and you're just getting started, you need to start out as a sub-affiliate for one of the big networks in the finance space. Investing Media Solutions is usually who I tell people to go to. There's another one called StrikePoint that people can work with. But you just have to go find one of those. You don't get, like, probably the same CPA that you would if you had direct deals, but you kind of have to earn your way into getting a direct deal with Agora or MarketWise. And the way to do that is to show volume as a subaffiliate with one of the networks that are out there.
The next question that everyone is wondering is, "How do you avoid Gmail's spam folder when you're sending so many emails every single day?" Yeah, so there's a few things Gmail is looking for these days.
First, you kind of need to have your basic authentication set up. So that's your SPF records, your DKIM, DKIM records, your DMARC records, like, You just have to do that even to deliver it all these days. Along with that, you need a list unsubscribe header, which is kind of built into all the email service providers. So, like, if you're using Beehive or Kit or any of the normal ones, they should set this all up for you. And beyond that, like, the basic kind of setup stuff, you know, what Gmail is looking for is the engagement rate, like what percentage of your people are actually opening emails, clicking on emails, replying to your emails. So if you're not delivering to Gmail, you want to kind of cut back your windows. Maybe you don't send to 30-day openers, maybe you only send to 14-day openers. And then the other thing, you know, they're looking for spam report rates. So you can set up Google Postmaster Tools, and then it will tell you what your spam report rate is every day. You want to keep that below 0.1%, pretty much always. So if you can get people opening your email, clicking on your email, replying to your email, and not clicking the spam report button, That's what Gmail wants to see, and you can engineer those things in different ways, primarily by kind of adjusting your sunset window. So that's that.
Awesome. For SMS specifically, how do you keep the monthly bill manageable? How long does somebody need to go without clicking a link before you stop sending to them?
Yeah, so if you've only ever emailed before, haven't done SMS before, the first thing that will surprise you is just the cost. To send, you know, a text, it's typically about 1 cent. If you have a lot of volume, you can get that down to about 0.7 cents. The lowest I've ever seen it with carrier fees is like 0.0 or 0.6 cents, or 0.006. I think we pay 0.0065 or something like that. I don't know exactly, but it's pretty expensive. Our SMS bill is $400,000 a month, but we also make like $1.7 million, $1.8 million a month, so. I really like to look at the profit margin of SMS, and for every dollar that I spend on SMS fees, I wanna generate about $5 in revenue. The way that you keep it manageable is only by texting people that are active. So if somebody hasn't clicked on a text in about 30 days, we just stop texting at that point. Maybe we'll text them once a week to try to reactivate them, but we don't text very often past 30 days.
Awesome. Sounds great. What acquisition metrics should you stop trusting?
Yeah. So when you're running an email list or an SMS list, you know, you're looking at how many signups are you getting, what's your open rate, what's your click-through rate, what are your conversion rates, unsubscribe rates. And the thing that's really changed in the last 5 years is that open rates are very unreliable now because there are some ESPs like Yahoo that block open pixels. And then there are others that fake open pixels like Apple with their Apple, you know, the MPP, Mail Privacy Protection, opens. So open rates as a metric, you know, people will say they get 50, 60% open rates, and that's just not true. Before Apple MPP launched, like a 15% open rate was good, and now open rates are so inflated they're just not really accurate anymore. So the whole email industry is really moving away from opens and moving more towards tracking click-through rates, and that's kind of what we're looking at now.
Awesome. What is your revenue on ad spend ratio?
Yes, so what you— the way that I think about this is, you know, for every dollar I spend on advertising, what return am I looking for? For us, over the long term, maybe 2 years or so, if I spend $1 today, I want to make $4 over the next 2 years. So typically what we'll do is we'll take our trailing 3 months revenue, average it out. So, for MarketBeat, that's been, you know, 6, let's say $6 million a month for the last 3 months. So, I'll take that number, divide it by 4. My kind of target advertising budget is about $1.5 million a month in advertising. Then as MarketBeat grows, we'll continue to grow that ad spend number.
Awesome. What types of advertisers see the most success on your platform? And which are the ones that you didn't expect to see?
Yeah, so MarketBeat has a variety of financial advertisers. We've tried non-financial offers before, and they just don't work. People sign up to receive stock market content, and if they're going to buy anything, it's probably stock market related. Maybe the thing that surprised me, there are crowdfunding campaigns that will advertise to generate additional transaction volume on their crowdfunding campaign. I never really saw that coming, but that has kind of come and gone over the years. It's something that does come back every now and then. What really works, I'd say the main thing are the boutique financial newsletter publishers, what Agora and MarketWise publish. We also do investor relations campaigns for public companies. We do a lot of those. We do lead generation campaigns for other financial media companies. That's kind of the core of what we advertise.
Awesome. Does being active on Twitter or X generate revenue for MarketBeat directly or indirectly?
I would say it probably doesn't generate a lot of revenue for MarketBeat. We've tried to run like a MarketBeat X account. We've never really gotten anywhere with it. Like the Matt Paulson account is a lot of fun and like I've made money on that through like consulting and stuff like that. I don't think it makes MarketBeat money directly. We have gotten a couple deals because of it, but I think we probably would have got them anyways. Twitter is mostly a fun thing for me. I wouldn't say it helps MarketBeat that much.
It's a passion.
Got one more question. What is it?
Okay, the last question. What do you think is the next best marketing channel after email and SMS?
Yes. Email and SMS are great channels. They're owned audience channels. So I like to look for other things where you really own your audience and you're not like trying to, or you don't have to pay Facebook to access them, or you don't have to pay TikTok to access them through ads. I would say the two that I like, one is web push notifications. That is an owned audience channel where it doesn't really cost you anything to get subscribers. You can just put the opt-in button on your website and then When you send out an email, you can send out a push along with it and get some additional clicks that way. I really like web push. And then YouTube. I mean, if you want discoverability these days, when I was coming up in my business, like, the thing was blogging. Now it's entirely YouTube. If you want to, you know, if you want to get, like, build an audience, like, you have to be on YouTube these days. Like, that's where it's at.
Awesome.
I love it. Yeah. So that's what we have for the first set of questions. That's this video. If you liked it, go to the Matt Paulson Presents YouTube channel. Like, subscribe, tell your friends, graffiti it multiple places, write it on a bathroom stall. Matt Paulson Presents is the channel. Go check it out.
