Advanced Email Marketing Strategies with Nathan Barry

Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand Podcast. This is the place where you'll learn cutting-edge personal brand strategies from today's most recognizable influencers. We're going to teach you how to build a rock-solid reputation and then how to turn that reputation into revenue. I'm your lead host, Rory Baden, co-founder of Brand Builders Group, Hall of Fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of Take the Stairs. I have to say that one of the most powerful forces in the world, I think, is marketing automation. And we hear about social media and we hear about podcasting and we hear about YouTube and all this stuff. But man, the thing that has changed my life in terms of the digital landscape the most in the last 10 years is marketing automation in general, and specifically email. And we're gonna talk about that today with someone who is definitely an expert on the subject. We're talking to Nathan Barry. He is actually the founder of ConvertKit, which is one of the largest and most well-known and respected tools among creators for email marketing. And so we're gonna talk a little bit about that. Just so you know, he's also an author himself, and ConvertKit as an entrepreneur is a tremendously impressive success story. So they've got over 25 $1 million a year in annual recurring revenue, over $3 million in profits. They've got almost 60 team members and they bootstrapped the company 100%. So this was not where you had millions of dollars of investor money, like from Silicon Valley flooding in. They built this for creators. And Nathan was a successful blogger before and just kind of created this himself. So he's also the dad of 3 boys, which I can appreciate. I've got 2. So anyone who's got more than me, I'm like, man, I don't know how you do it, but brother, you've done a bunch of awesome stuff. Stuff and thanks for making time for us.

Yeah, thanks for having me on the show.

So I'd love to just hear the story of ConvertKit, like your personal journey, because you started as a blogger, right? And then all of a sudden you kind of were like, saw the need for this and then how'd it go down?

Yeah, so my like traditional skill set is software design. I got started in web design and then started building software for the web. And then when the iPad came out in 2010, I was working on a team that was trying to have an iPad app out the day the iPad was released, which was a fun challenge of like designing and trying to test an app, like all in the simulator. Like you don't actually, the device doesn't exist yet. And it was fun, like going to the Apple Store and like buying a dozen iPads, like on launch day and testing our software and all of that. So that was a fun world. And I got pretty deep into iPhone and iPad app design. And then from there, I had this idea. That if I wrote a book about designing iOS apps, then people would want to hire me to be the one to design their app. And I thought, I'll make money from this book too. This isn't a charity, but the main thing that I want is design clients.

Sure.

Right. You want to hire the guy who wrote the book, obviously.

Of course.

And so what I did, I built up a small pre-launch email list on MailChimp, got to 800 subscribers, teased that, wrote the book, self-published it. And my goal was to make $10,000 over the lifetime of sales for the book and see how many clients I could get. I ended up launching it and I made $12,000 on the first day and never took on another design client. Just like, nope, that world is, I'm not a freelancer anymore. I'm a content creator and this is what we're doing going forward.

I love it. I love it.

Really quick in the process, I had made my own iPhone app that was a habits app called Commit. It's not around anymore, but there's other apps that do similar stuff. It was just for building a streak, and I had this streak of writing 1,000 words a day after I published the book. My app popped up and said, hey, you're going to write 1,000 words today. And I was like, uh, no, I've published the book. But it was like I saw 80 days in a row and I didn't want to break the streak. So I was like, you know what, I'll write a blog post about the book launch. So I did that, shared the numbers, And then the next day the app did what it did and popped up. I was like, are you gonna write 1,000 words today? And I was like, no, I don't have anything to write. And it was 81 days in a row. So I was thinking like, ah, you know what, I'm gonna write another book. And so I wrote another book on designing web applications. So similar topic, different medium. And wrote, like edited and published that in like just over 90 days.

So it was self-published also?

Self-published as well.

Okay.

Made $26,000 in sales on the first day from that. And I was off to the races, but in that process, I really got obsessed with email marketing and I was seeing that all of the sales were coming from the email list, you know, and that was where like giving away a sample chapter, getting people on the email list and then dripping out emails and then them coming back and buying the book. All these things were working super well and it was driving more sales than like Twitter and Instagram and everything else combined. And I told this to a friend of mine who'd been, in online marketing forever.

What year is this?

2013.

Okay.

Yeah. So talking to this friend who's been in online marketing forever, and I hate email is driving more sales than every other channel combined. And he just looks at me, he's like, yeah, man, we've all known that since 2005. Like, do you want a gold star? Like, you know, this is not a new thing.

Epiphany. I was gonna say 2013's not that long ago.

Yeah. And so, but it was, it was brand new to me. And so really I became obsessed with email and email marketing, learning all the best practices. And then I just got really frustrated with MailChimp of trying to implement these best practices in that tool and looked at all the other tools. There were others that were like, had more automation, were powerful, but were super confusing. And I'm like, I'm a designer. I gotta use something that's like elegant and beautiful. And so I decided to start my own. So it was January 1st, 2013 that I started ConvertKit and Yeah, just over a decade later, it's a giant company used by, you know, most of the top creators like James Clear, Tim Ferriss, Ryan Holiday. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a ConvertKit newsletter that he sends out every week and it's super fun.

That's really awesome, man. So congratulations. Like, that's no, that's no easy feat. I mean, to do 8 figures and $20 million plus in recurring revenue is Really, really powerful. So I want to talk about email marketing strategies specifically, especially in today's era. Email marketing has been out a long time. Email marketing automation has been out a long time. You have something that you talk about, just sort of like a general strategy. You were telling me about it. Fly— you call it flywheels for clients. So I'd love to hear about this because here's, here's one of the things that sort of like annoying and frustrating to me is even in just the world of email, one of the things that we teach our students is we think of emails like there's 4 different types of emails. So there's, you send a broadcast email, everyone at the same time gets it. That's what we think of. But then we have RSS emails, which are every time a blog gets posted, that's going to automatically send an email. And then we have like these short-term nurture sequences where you're someone's in like an active selling situation and you're like nurturing them to watch a video or buy something, there's a closed cart or something, and then you just have your long-term automated nurture sequence. And suddenly what happens a lot is you end up going, you're emailing people so much and you, you can even lose sight of track of like, oh my gosh, how are they? They're in all these different sequences getting— so how do you kind of like pull all that together into a, like a, a more cohesive strategy?

Yeah. Well, the first thing is that a lot of people end up in a position like I did where they realize how powerful email marketing is and then become obsessed and they go like way off the deep end and it's so fun and it probably generates a lot of money for your business. And then you get to that point where you're like, oh, now all these cool automations that I've set up are starting to step on each other. Maybe the person that I hired on my team moved on and I now have a new person and it's way too hard for them to understand and like it's not documented well. And so I think keeping things relatively simple is a good way to go. Like one example that I really like is doing something called an evergreen newsletter. And this is where instead of sending, well, let's say half your content that you send out is really timely. Hey, I'm going on book tour, podcast episode's coming out, or you want to respond and comment to recent news that just happened or ride some wave of some conversation in mass media. Maybe we send that email as a broadcast every Tuesday. But then there's also like, you and I have been writing for a very long time. We've produced hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of words at this point of content. And If someone signs up today and they're getting, hey, this is what I write every Tuesday, there's this crazy back catalog that they're never encountering. And so one thing that I like to do is set up an evergreen newsletter sequence, and I might send that out every Thursday. And that is actually a sequence timed to when you join. And it's like, hey, here's my best content over time. They don't really know that one is the same email to everyone at the same time, and the other is like timed just to them. They're just like, I don't know, Nathan kept every Tuesday and Thursday, he sends me great content. And so I could have an evergreen newsletter sequence that's 140 emails long and I got 2 years of content and that's just working for me. And I go, oh, this is a great article that I'm really proud of. I'm going to put that like in week 5 instead of week 100 where it would naturally sit. And so you end up making these systems that work for you. So that's the first thing that I would do is really love it. Really simplify that. Another one, maybe we talk about flywheels for a second. Oh, when was this? Back in 2008, I got the opportunity to do like some public works projects in Lesotho, which is a little landlocked country inside of South Africa. And one of the things that we ended up doing was working on installing this well at an orphanage there. And so if you think about like, as a kid, I went camping and You know, it'd be like this hand pump to like pump the water at the campsite.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so that's this like up and down motion. And if you stop doing it, the water stops flowing immediately. And that's the old well at this orphanage had a pump like that and we actually replaced it with a flywheel, which was my first exposure to a flywheel. And so what that is, is this big metal wheel that sits on top of the well and it's super heavy. And it turns in place. And like, I remember when we got it all hooked up and we were like, okay, let's get this going. And I tried to turn it and it was too heavy. I couldn't turn it by myself. And so like another friend was on the other side and we're pushing as hard as we can and we got it turning. And as it got momentum, it turned easier and easier and faster and faster. And what it got to the point is that my friend stopped helping and I could stand there and with one finger keep this thing spinning and it's just pumping out tons of water for this whole orphanage. And that's the idea of a flywheel is having something that's not a bunch of separate activities. Like it's all the activities put together into one flow and like you get to continue that momentum and we can apply this concept to newsletters and to creators really well. So there's kind of 3 rules of a flywheel.

Okay.

The, the first one is that all these activities have to flow nicely one into the next. So if we apply that to marketing, you might think, okay, when I publish an article, I'm like, okay, you know, how do I, where am I going to promote this new essay or this new article? And you might sporadically promote it a few places. But it's really different if you say, okay, this is my playbook every time. This is what I do every time I publish an article. And here's maybe where I ask for ideas to give me concepts on what to write next. Right. It's like, it's a defined process that, that happens smoothly. The second rule is that each rotation of the flywheel should be slightly easier than the previous one.

Okay.

Right. So as you're building that momentum, it gets easier. So here's an example. Most people have a newsletter where they're sending out weekly content. Guess what happens? You have to write that content.

I know that's not brutal.

That's not easy. And so a little tweak is you go from the content that you're writing, you know, your weekly newsletter, like new subscribers are coming in and in that automated welcome sequence that you're writing, let's say email 3, email 4, let's say we're teaching people marketing. I ask, hey, what's your biggest frustration with marketing in your business right now? And by asking that question, everyone's replying to you, like hit reply and let me know. People are replying. We categorize those replies in a label in Gmail. And now every Monday at 8:00 PM when I'm like, shoot, I don't have an email ready to go for Tuesday yet. What am I going to write about? I go into that label in Gmail and I go, what are, what are people frustrated with? What are they not understanding? And I pick one out that seems interesting and I write a response to that and then I change it a little bit so it's for everyone. And then there we go. And so now in this flywheel, like I just made each rotation easier because now my new subscribers are feeding me content ideas. And that made that rotation easier. Yeah. Let me stop there for a second. We can get into the third rule, but I'm curious if you see any of those things in your business or—

Totally. Yeah. No, I love that. I mean, the whole thing of like having to write a newsletter once a month or once a week, I mean, it really, the problem is it's like inconsistency is the kiss of death. And the one thing marketing automation can do is like solve that problem permanently. I want to hear number 3, but I'm curious. How many emails a week is too many? You're talking about kind of a cadence here, which is you've got your one long-term nurture going and then you have like one broadcast a week. Is that the actual cadence that you sort of follow is like 2 a week? And both what have you seen for yourself, but then also when you look at your top clients, are they sending more frequently? Are they doing more broadcast? Are they doing more evergreen? Do they have multiple things happening? Like, I'm just sort of curious, like in the modern day, what's the right amount of volume?

Yeah, I think the right amount of volume first is it comes down to expectations that you set with your audience. So when, if you sign up for Seth Godin's newsletter, or I think it's actually just a blog, I don't know that's a newsletter, right? Just RSS to email. He posts every day, always has, always will like clockwork. Some of his posts are like 4 sentences long. Some of them might be a couple hundred words. They're not super long, but you can expect that every single day you're gonna get a note from Seth, and you knew that when signing up. And so he's matching expectations. So is 7 days a week or 5 days a week, whatever he does, too much? No, cuz he set that expectation and it's bite-sized enough that you can consume it. I think you need, when you think about cadence, you need to make sure you can maintain 2 bars.

One.

Can you always match this cadence that you set? If you're like, hey, a daily email, but I miss half of them because I'm busy or like the kids got sick or whatever else, like, no, don't do that. So if you can hit an email once a week, every single week, like clockwork and you get ahead, perfect. That's a great cadence for you. And then the other thing is what cadence can you maintain quality? If you can't write great content once a week, You know what's a lot better than that is great content once a month, right? Pick a cadence that you can always hit and say, I will always be able to meet the expectations I set for my audience, and I will always be able to put out content that I'm proud of. And some people do it every day. I personally like twice a week of the balance of the evergreen and the live, because I want both formats. And so I do an evergreen email on Fridays and a live email on Tuesdays. And that I know I can hit and hit every single week and hit my bar for quality. Yeah, though sometimes it's hard where you're like, I love that.

I've heard the like consistency one, but that's a really good about the quality metric. And it's funny because I feel that way about books. It's actually been several years now since I've had a book come out. I've written 3. The last book I wrote was 2015. We sold our company in 2018. And so then it's like we basically been rebuilding for 5 years and people are like, when are you going to write a book? And I've always, I've had mentors tell me you only need to write one book and you spend the rest of your career talking about it. And I really believe you can do that if you do it right. I've had other people say you need to write a book every 2 years, otherwise you'll become irrelevant. And I also see the case for that. And so I think where I've landed is just, I'll write a book when I have something significant to say. And to what you're saying, it's like, Do the same thing with your email. 'Cause I guess it's the big problem is going, whether it's once a week or once a month, the big issue is not that they're not hearing from you frequently enough. The big issue is that they stop listening to you.

Right.

Because either the, the rhythm is inconsistent or the quality is, is inconsistent. That's a good one.

Yeah. They either forgot about you or they decided that you're not worth listening to.

Yeah. I wanna ask you about that too, in terms of how do you warm up a cold list? Because we have a lot of clients who will come to us and they're like, Yeah, you know, I have an email list, but I haven't sent anything to them in like a year. And especially as a, you know, an email service provider, there's a lot of rules there too. I think that you guys have to manage on a global level of her deliverability and all that. So like, what do you do? You go, these people opted in, they wanted to hear from me. I was writing to them for a time, but I haven't written to them in a minute. What's the right way to follow the rules and warm it up and like make use of it? Do you just scrap it and start over? Or like, what do you say? Yeah.

So what you do, one, don't scrap the list and start over unless it's been like a decade.

It's been a decade. We're not gonna do that. Even if you tell us to anyways, we're still, we're still uploading.

We're gonna try to resurrect it somehow. Yeah. So the first thing is to try to look at what do you know about these people? Is there some cohort? Let's say we've got a list of 10,000 people, right? Is there some group that you think for one reason or another is more engaged than others? Right? Maybe they bought a course from you, maybe something else. So if you email all 10,000 people at once, a bunch of people are going to be like, Nathan, who's Nathan? I don't remember him at all. Right? And they're going to mark as spam or whatever, or not engage. And the inbox providers, so like Gmail, Yahoo, et cetera, are going to see that and be like, ooh, this did not go well. And then my reputation, my domain reputation that I have is going to go down, right? My NathanBarry.com domain will not be as respected by the inbox providers because of that, and I'll have a harder time reaching the inbox. So what we want to do instead is warm this up. And so I'm going to look and say, okay, instead of sending all 10,000 at once, I'm going to start to build this reputation so that I'm not showing up with 10,000 people at the party all at once and the host is like, I don't want this, you know? So instead what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, okay, 500 of these people bought a course from me.

Yeah.

I'm gonna email them first and I might, I might write one, hey, I'm back email. Now you can expect a once a week or email from me. Here's what's going on. Here's what's next. Might be the same email, but I'm gonna send it to only 500 people first. And the, the 500 that I think are the most engaged based on how that goes. Then I'm going to take a slightly less engaged group that I might still even know something about. Maybe they showed up to a meetup once. All of these things that I think there's a bit more of a connection with, and I'm gonna gradually expand that circle. And then people who don't engage, or I'm gonna say something in there and say like, hey, if you don't want to be on this list, like click here to unsubscribe. And I'm gonna put that right at the top of the email. I'm gonna make it really easy for someone to hit unsubscribe. Rather than spam. I do not want someone marking this as spam. That would be very bad. And so then really what we're doing is watching that engagement. If people don't engage, I'm going to delete them off of the list because I want, I want to take that 10,000 who may not have heard from me for a couple of years and I want to trim it down to whatever number of people that's really engaged and wants to be there. Let's say 5,000 to 7,000, and I'm going to do it gradually and warm up that reputation. There's other things that like, get more advanced that our deliverability team at ConvertKit can help with, which is like making sure that your domain is authenticated correctly. And, and we can put together a whole warmup plan for this, but that's the basic concept is reach out to the most engaged people first and then gradually layer in people who are a little less known. Hi, it's AJ Vaden, and thanks for listening to the Influential Personal Brand Podcast. Did you know that the ideas we share on the show are things we actually specialize in helping you implement? If you want to raise your public profile and turn your reputation into revenue, please visit freecall.brandbuildersgroup.com to sign up for a free brand strategy call with one of our personal brand strategists. Again, that's freecall.brandbuildersgroup.com to sign up for your free call. Talk to you soon.

Yeah, I love it. So you kind of just like start with the warm circle, work your way out, and then when you get to the, when you get to the remaining cold part of the list, just make something right at the headline to say unsubscribe so that they click that instead of spam and let them self-eject and not mess it up. I think that's a good thing. I mean, I think there's a mentality there for a lot of marketers that are like, well, I'd rather send it to 10,000 people on the hopes that someone might do it. And that's the switch you gotta flip of like, no, what you really want is whoever's really engaged, even if it's 500 people. It's not a good strategy to email people who don't want to hear from you. Like it doesn't actually work. And it has a lot of negative impacts. It's kind of like, what I hear you, what I hear you saying. So I have another question. I do want to, I want to hear number, I want to hear your number 3 of your flywheel or your 3 rules of the flywheel. But here's another thing is when it comes to creating conversions. Okay. So we've been, you've been talking like, what's your long-term nurture strategy? But let's say you're in a launch of some type, like a book launch or a course or a product, or, you know, or if you're just making a fourth quarter push, we have a lot of professional service providers that work with us too. They're doctors and lawyers and chiropractors or whatever, and they're just trying to drive leads into whatever their small business is. So what about when you're, when you're trying to do like a quote unquote closed cart situation?

Yeah.

What do you know about effective email strategies there? Does the volume increase? Does it change? Like, is there anything that you know about if you're trying to use email to actually sell, like not just build trust and add value, but like in the moments where you're going, I need people to buy, like this is my moment where I pay my expenses for the year. How do we treat email differently in those seasons versus just the normal?

Yeah, you send more emails. That's the quick version of it. So let's say we're doing a cart close, right? We're gonna course launch any activity and we're saying, hey, Friday at 10:00 PM, like that's it. You can't buy this anymore. A lot of people Friday at noon would send the last email or they'd be like, I don't know, I told them on Wednesday it's going to close on Friday. So I probably like, they knew that, so I probably shouldn't send another email. I was like, no, no, no, you should definitely send an email. Probably the 3 things that I would do is I would send an email Friday morning saying today's the last day. And I might even kick in some bonus that I'm going to give to everybody who bought, but I'm like, hey, if you bought today, I'm going to Maybe I wasn't talking about it all the way along, but I'll do this extra little thing to kick it over and just make sure to give it to everyone else. That way someone who's like, hey, I bought like day one.

Yeah, early birds got screwed.

Yeah, you don't want that. Well, another thing that helps in any kind of launch is being able to have multiple deadlines. So let's say it's a 5-day launch. I don't know, opens on Monday, closes on Friday. You want something that goes away Monday into the day. Right. So that you can do a cart close on Monday. It's still open, but like this extra bonus went away. Actually, I'd probably do that on Tuesday now that I think about it, because Monday gets you all this hype. Everyone who's excited. Tuesday you get this, hey, this bonus is going away. So let's see, let's you email twice that day because you're like, hey, the bonus goes away in the morning. And then that evening you're like, this is about to, you know, you're about to lose this. So you're going to spike in sales. Find some good educational reasons to email on Wednesday and Thursday. And then Friday morning is like, hey, we're closing tonight. Here's some testimonials. Here's things that people have gotten. And then I would send an email like the last hour. This is the— you have 1 hour left to buy it. And then the final thing, because you'll see a bunch of sales happen then, especially from the people who are like, oh yeah, I've been watching this, but like every time I've gotten an email, I've been doing something with the kids or, you know, whatever else. And you're like, okay, shoot, I actually have 52 minutes left to do this. And throw a countdown timer in the email. That's a feature that's built into ConvertKit. Makes it really easy.

Well, that's really cool to not have— you don't have to like put a little third-party widget or something in there. You can just drop it in native. That's cool.

And then the last thing I would do is on Saturday, in our fictional example, I would do a downsell where I would say basically send the people who are interested in the launch but didn't buy. So make that custom segment and then send them an email and like offer something different. Maybe it's if you've had all of this stuff for one package in your, in your course, maybe you've trimmed it down to a lighter version and you're selling that and say, hey, if that wasn't a good fit, maybe check out this other thing. And it's to a smaller group and you'll drive another maybe 10% of sales off of that. You could also do an email and just say like, hey, I noticed you were really engaged, but you didn't end up buying. Could you let me know what the reason was? And a bunch of people will come back and be like, oh, it's too expensive. I didn't see the value. Like there's some really good customer research that happens in there. And you could even have like your assistant go through and be like, oh, well if it's too expensive, here's this option. Or if you didn't see the value, here's some other case studies. And you know, someone would be like, oh, well that's sales, that's not scalable. And it's like, okay, but if I, if it takes me another 5 minutes to send a custom email to make a $300 sale, like yeah, that's pretty scalable to have a team member be doing that.

Especially if you can copy and paste that email 25 times and like pick up pick up more sales. So basically in that theoretical example, you've probably been adding value the week before.

Yep.

And then when you actually—

I mean, you have to build up to the launch. Like, yeah, it's so important.

Okay. And then when you open the cart, you have like one email on Monday?

I would. A lot of people will send more emails, but yeah, I'm going to end up sending 8 emails in 5 days, basically. It's kind of the cadence.

Yeah. So you got basically 1 on Monday, you got 2 on Tuesday with like that basically the early bird bonus and then 1 on Wednesday, 1 on Thursday. So that's 5 and then 3 on Friday.

That's 2 or 3 on Friday and then definitely 1 on Saturday.

Saturday.

Yeah.

Yeah, I love that.

And you'll get unsubscribes. Another quick little tip is this is another thing that ConvertKit's good at is putting a little link in there and just say, hey, we're going to We are talking about this product all week long. If you don't want to hear about it, but you don't want to unsubscribe, click this. I won't send you another email this week. And like next week we're back to our regular scheduled programming and it'll just pause that for them. Because someone will be like, look, man, I'm not going to buy it for whatever reason, but I love your content every week. And you just don't want that person to get annoyed. And so right at the beginning and actually the week before, you could say, hey, we're rolling into launch week for this. I'm gonna be talking all about it. If you don't want to hear about it, click this link and we'll skip next week and I'll see you later, or I'll see you soon. And that'll save a bunch of unsubscribes and let people kind of control their preferences.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. And it goes back again to just this idea of there's this like weird thought that marketers have that somehow if they spam people enough, that someone who is not interested will accidentally decide one day to buy and become interested. Yeah. And it's like, it's the opposite. It's like, if they don't want to hear from you, let them not hear from you. Or if they don't want to hear from you so frequently, let them slow down the cadence until they're ready. That's the whole point of email is you're just nurturing them in an automated fashion. And then you will catch them on the next launch or the launch after. But if you, if you annoy them, you lose them here and then you've taken money out of your future pocket. So I love that. So I want to go back to number 3. You said there's 3 things a great flywheel should have. And then I want to hear— I have a couple specific questions for you about ConvertKit. So what's the third part about the flywheel?

Yeah, the third rule is that every rotation of the flywheel should produce more results than the previous rotation. So going back to the rules, right, it needs to be in sequence. These can't be scattered tasks. The second rule is each rotation needs to be easier than the previous one. And the third one is that it has to produce more results than the previous rotation. So if you think about that, like our rules are that rules 2 and 3 together is like it has to get easier over time and it has to produce more simultaneously. Like that's kind of a high bar to hit, but there's a lot of creators that have done this. So lemme give you an example. There's a creator, his name's Sahil Bloom, and he writes a lot about habits and mental models and business and you know, all of these kind of things. And he's popular on Twitter, and so he's built up a good size following on Twitter and he drives a lot of subscribers from his Twitter to his email list. And then from there into automations. And he's got a few things going on here. He does a referral program where he says, hey, if you refer 3 friends to my newsletter, then you get this extra guide that I wrote for free. And so that means every subscriber that comes in, you know, maybe 10% of them refer friends. And so that turns into, you know, every 1 subscriber turns into 1.1 or 1.5 subscribers. And that goes from there. The next thing that happens is he's got paid products that he's selling. That's pretty normal. So he is making money off of every subscriber from there. On from there, he's in something called the ConvertKit Sponsor Network, and that's where we sell advertising sponsorships for his newsletter on his behalf. And so he is making a good amount of money from that. And he's actually taking all of the money that he makes and pouring that back into advertising to grow his newsletter faster. And so what happens is if we put some actual numbers to it, at the beginning of the year, or like February 2023, he had 200,000 subscribers on his list, and that's growing at a pretty decent pace from social, but he was able to sell sponsorships and make, about $25,000 a month off of selling sponsorships on his newsletter that he sends twice a week. And he's taking all of that money and putting it into something called the partner network that a company called SparkLoop has. And that's where you can sponsor other creators and like pay them $2 per subscriber that comes to you.

What's it called?

The company is SparkLoop and we have a partnership with them, so you get it for free if you're a ConvertKit customer, but It's their partner network. And so basically you can say, hey, I'll pay $2 for every engaged subscriber that someone sends to me. And then creators can go browse it and say, oh, I like Nathan's stuff. I'd happily get paid to send subscribers to him. So now instead of me going out and like paying Mark Zuckerberg on Instagram for more subscribers, like I'm paying another creator. And so Sahil is taking all the money he makes from sponsorships, spending it there. Picking up another like 10 to 15,000 subscribers a month. And so now like he has this flywheel that keeps going around in circles. He's taking his money, he's reinvesting it, growing his list. But if you think about it, the more subscribers there are on his list, the more he's able to charge brands for sponsors, which means the more money he makes, which means the more money he's spending on advertising. So his list grows faster. And so every rotation, this is actually getting easier and producing more results. So I think he started the year in January at about 150,000 subscribers. And today, what is it, April 20th or so, he's at 300,000 subscribers. So he's doubled the list in Q1 by like running this flywheel very aggressively. And he's a great marketer, but that's how you can kind of put these things in sequence and then make it so that the flywheel, you know, it's like a snowball going downhill. It's like picking up more snow as it goes. It gets bigger and bigger faster.

I love it. Yeah, that is really cool. How do you do the referral thing where you say, hey, if you If you refer 3 people to my newsletter, I'll send you this bonus, which I mean, does that basically mean you have to set up like an affiliate link for every single subscriber and somehow it has to track if that subscriber sends it out and 3 people convert on that link? I mean, that's a— is that how that's being done?

Yeah. So basically what it is in the same way that we're all used to affiliate programs, you know, it's similar. This tool SparkLoop has that built in. And that's something that people get for free with ConvertKit's Creator Pro plan. And that's where it'll set up that system. And in the footer of your email, it'll say, hey, here's your link. You've referred 2 people, refer 1 more to unlock Nathan's free guide to whatever, right? Or it could be an email course. It could be maybe if someone's like, hey, if you refer 10 people, you know, I'll send you this shirt. If you refer 20 people, I'll give you this invite. Like you get to come and do this like one-day workshop or, you know, something else, right? You can offer any kind of custom bonus and it's a really effective way of getting your best, like your biggest fans to refer more people.

Interesting.

It's all automated. You set it up once.

Yeah. And this is basically—

I'm obsessed with flywheels and automation, so there's no way.

Is that like an HTML code you drop into the email and then it's basically reading like how many people somebody has subscribed to and pulling that through? Wow, that's interesting. That's fascinating. Well, okay, so I don't want to let you go before we talk a little bit about, about ConvertKit. And I tell you, like, I love all the marketing automation tools and I also struggle with all of them because there's like certain things that they do. And like, you guys have some really, really awesome features. First of all, a lot of our clients use you and they say it's very easy to use. It doesn't feel overwhelming and complicated. And so a lot of clients really like that, especially if they don't have like developers or a lot of team or like a lot of time for the tech stuff. One of the features that y'all have that I don't think I've never seen anybody else have, and I told you this before and I was like, it's really an amazing feature, is to send emails based on zip code radius to say segment my list by people who are all within some radius range of the zip code, which is huge for anyone that does any type of events. Event marketing and for book tours and stuff like that, or even if you're a speaker and you're like going, I want to have a meetup in all these different places. I mean, it's a really, really cool thing. So anyways, what would you say are like, let's say, let's just take 3. So I've given 1. What would you say are like 3 of your favorite features about ConvertKit? Maybe there are things that you guys either do that other people don't do, or you think you do better or it's easier. But I would just love to hear like, What are your, your top 3 kind of like favorite features of ConvertKit?

Yeah. First, the location-based one I absolutely love. We have a bunch of clients that are musicians, so like Tim McGraw and Leon Bridges and Mandy Moore and a bunch of others, and their teams are doing that whole thing. You know, they're like, oh, we're playing this show, either a huge stadium show or something smaller. And it's like, look, you know, we want to email people within 200 miles of Dallas-Fort Worth, right? Super easy to do. Or another example is you get these customers who are selling like food products. You know, you have like the recipe blog. There's a blog called Hey Grill Hey. She runs this fantastic barbecue blog and she's just getting into selling her own sauces and rubs that are getting carried in grocery stores.

Okay.

And what she does, I think is just brilliant, is if she gets carried in a new grocery store, like they'll just run this little test like, okay, we'll see if people like, if consumers want to buy your product. She's like, cool, what store? I don't know. And then she goes to her email list, you know, it says like, okay, everybody within 50 miles of Denver where like this store is carrying our product, she emails them like, go here and buy this. And then also tell them like, hey, are you, you only have 3 of the flavors, where's the 4th one? You know, whatever. And so these stores are just like, wow, your product was a huge hit. We should carry it more. She's like, yes, you should. I agree. And that's the location-based play. But two other ones, one feature that ConvertKit has that I think no one else has. Well, let's set a scenario. We're in our product launch and we're like, hey, the cart's open, it's live, like go buy it. It's that Monday morning email that we sent out and you hit send and you're like, okay, here we go. You're like refreshing for sales and instead of sales, you get an email back that says like, hey man, your link's broken. And you're like, oh, like just this crushing feeling. You're like, now do I send another email and all of that? No, in ConvertKit, you go in and you click edit on the link and you change it and you remove the like extra slash that you put in or however you type with the link, you fix it and hit save and all the links come through and click through automatically correctly.

So it like can edit embedded links after you've sent them out.

Yeah. And I, as far as I know, no other email tool lets you do that.

That's cool. I don't know of another tool that does that. I mean, that's, that's pretty awesome. It was like one you hope you never have to use, but man, if you did need to use it, it's there for you. It's pretty clutch.

Yep. Like we've got your back. There's a bunch of other fun things and like, you know, like we'll automatically check to see if any of your links are sending you a 404. We'll check your subject, like we'll do a bunch of stuff like that for you automatically before you hit send. But probably the picking 3, I love automations like as a feature and pretty much every tool, email tool is going to have automations. Things that I like about ours is you can click into an email sequence and see all the emails listed down the side so you can move between them really quickly. And so it's easy to see like, oh, what did I send them last week? Or what was yesterday? And you're not like backing out and going back in or opening a ton of tabs. You're just like clicking between them. It's really fast.

I'm like, that's handy. Cause a lot of the time you lose is just in the extra clicks when you're building these things is like click in here and then click in here and then click in here to edit it and click back out and click back out. Yeah.

Yeah. So making things load really quick and then really like these advanced things that you'd have to be normally be like a marketing automation expert to implement. We've got all these recipes, shared automations inside of ConvertKit. And so you can go through and be like, okay, like gimme the book launch template and let me load that in and then just edit it for me. So it's really like, how do we take something that before only the experts could do and make it so it's approachable for—

Yeah, you mentioned that deadline sequence sort of countdown timer inside of an email. That's a cool thing because normally you'd have to use like a third-party plugin or like, how do you install it?

Like paste in this HTML. Nobody knows how to do that. No one wants to. And so it's like click the little plus icon, select countdown timer, set the date you want it to count down to, hit send on the email.

Yeah, that's really cool. That's awesome, man. Well, just so everybody knows, if you go to brandbuildersgroup.com/convert, that is our affiliate link for ConvertKit. So we are, been fans of Nathan. A lot of our clients use ConvertKit. I wanted to have him on the show so you could like hear his story and what they're about. We've heard great feedback on it. Some of these, some of these features are really, really hard to find. So Nathan, this has been awesome. What's the vision for ConvertKit from here? Like, where do you think you guys are going? Like, are there any big things ahead in terms of like what you're working on or what's in the future?

Yeah. So our company mission is that we exist to help creators earn a living. Deeply personal to me. I grew up in a family where money was really scarce, and when I learned about making money on the internet, I was like, does everyone know this? Like, like, I want to make this accessible to as many people as possible. And so everything that we're coming out with, whether it's our sponsorship network that we're building and still in the early days, or ConvertKit Commerce where you can sell digital products, or even this new partner network that we're working on with Sparkloop, those are all about like, hey, how can we, like, how can we get creators paid? And so that's really what we're building is like turning all of this into a flywheel that someone can sign up and say, hey, whether you have like 500 subscribers or 50,000 subscribers, there's a lot of great ways to make money. And so that's kind of, kind of next. That's the North Star. How much money can I pay to creators every single month? And then whatever crazy ideas I can dream up that makes that easier.

I love it. Well, thanks for what you're doing, man. Thank you for supporting creators. We have a shared united passion for, we call them mission-driven messengers and the tools, the tools matter a bunch and, and they're making a big difference, man. So we wish you all the best. We'll stay connected again. Go to brandbuildersgroup.com/convert if you want to learn more specifically about ConvertKit. And Nathan, I'm sure I'll talk to you again soon.

Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

That's all we've got for this episode of the Influential Personal Brand Podcast, but here's some great news. One of the most valuable things you can do to help us and other new potential listeners to find our show is for you to both rate this show and leave a review. So as a special bonus for you, if you leave us a comment in iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen, take a screenshot of your review and email it to podcast@brandbuildersgroup.com, we will give you free 30-day access to 25 of our most popular interviews on video in your own private members-only area. So go right now, rate us, review us, and then send a screenshot of it into podcast@brandbuildersgroup.com, and we'll get you set up with free access to our most popular video interviews all in one place. Also, just please share, share, share this podcast with anyone who you think might enjoy it. And until next time, remember that building a business isn't nearly as valuable as building a reputation.