How to easily set up a paid newsletter with Leaky Paywall and your email marketing service

This is going to be a framework in order to move people from free, casual interested into paid. Okay. Now I was reading an article the other day and it was from Neiman Lab. And what they surveyed is that 65% of people like getting newsletters because it's convenient. And for a publisher, this is really your number one direct marketing tool to proactively reach out and land in a subscriber's inbox. That gives you a huge advantage over social media, which in our view today is actually on the decline. It was NPR just reported that they, when they got kicked off of Twitter, which was a few months ago, maybe they reported it had essentially zero, almost zero effect on their revenues. And Facebook is in Canada is a bit of a problem. They're not kind to news publishers. They're in the business, they're out of the business. And so your newsletter becomes a place where you have total control over the experience with your best audience and you got to take care of them, right? So some of the problems I run into and I look at a lot of newsletters both from you guys and from, from other bigger publishers, smaller publishers, I subscribe to a bunch of them. And the problems that I see that you may think this is something I should probably take care of is publishers that have say just their newsletter, right? It's a one size fits all newsletter. It goes out to everybody. And whether you're paid or whether you're just subscribed for free. And that's a problem because you can't message appropriately, right? Like your free newsletter should be all about upgrading to paid to a paid subscription. And your paid newsletter needs to really take care of those paid readers and you may have other offers for them or other benefits from them that they need that they can take advantage of. Newsletter pop ups are just not working as well. The free registration, if you were with us on our last mastermind, we spent a lot of time on setting that up. If you don't have a free registration set up, please go and watch that. Set it up. It will turbocharge your free. Your list of free but engaged readership. Wrong send frequency. I find magazine publishers tend to suffer a little bit the most here because you have issue based content. And what you really need to do is you need to bring in the articles onto your website. Website in a digital strategy, in a real time sort of flow, right? So that when an article is ready to go, you just get it on the site. You still assemble your issue, but your readers want the articles now. Okay, so let's go all right, free newsletters. You gotta be obvious about your subscription messaging. I see a lot of that missing sponsorship. If you're growing your free newsletter properly, where's your sponsor like you? This is the future, a big current and future of digital advertising revenue. We talked about social media. Ooh, workflow, double posting. I know you guys use mailchimp, you use Campaign Monitor. Use all these services. You have to double post. You got to post in WordPress, you got to post somewhere else. There are there, there's a better way to handle that. So you're just posting once from WordPress in WordPress and sending out. Either way works fine. It's just more workflow if you're going out to a SaaS service. Okay, so here's the framework. Surprise, right? You have your free newsletter, you have your subscriber only newsletter. And I'm going to say right away that creating a subscriber only newsletter is super easy and doesn't need to be a big deal. It can just be subtle things that make a big difference to the reading experience. But like I mentioned before, this is the free newsletter. It's your direct marketing tool, should be growing like very aggressively. Its main focus is to nurture your reader. That's its main focus. And I'm going to mute somebody who needs muting. Okay. And nurturing your reader means that it takes time. In other words, I sign up for your free newsletter. I'm probably not ready to pay for a subscription right away, but I might pay in a month or two or six or 12 or whatever it takes. And with social softening in terms of effectiveness, your newsletter are the things that can go viral. People pass on their newsletter. They'll see a story and say, oh, that's great, because they'll go to your site and they'll copy that URL into Facebook and that's what you want. You want your best readers to be sharing stuff in social media for you, and yet that's maybe a little tougher to track. But the newsletter is where you have just 100% control over the experience. Okay. When you have a subscriber only newsletter, you also have a big new value add. This is a big deal. The paid newsletter world has been around for hundreds of years on paper and today in digital, it's just exploded. If you look at what substack is doing as an example, and it's a big value and it can be worked right into your upgrade messaging because not only do you get full access to your content and whatever other benefits that you're going to give. But you also get the subscriber only. The special newsletter where you're taking care of those pages. Readers with some extra benefits that helps with retention. Super easy to automate and we'll show you that in a minute. And I also throw in this little bonus thing with WordPress. If you're using the right tool and you're publishing and sending in WordPress like use newsletter glue. I think mailpoet might do this. I'm not sure. We have a new service I'll talk about at another point called Flow Letter where you're publishing in WordPress once and then that gets sent out to your list and at the same time you're publishing that in WordPress. These tools will create an archive for you that you can essentially lock down with leaky Paywall. Make it a premium archive. So it's another value add. All right, let's talk about the free newsletter. You can't ignore your free registration. Okay. If you have this set up, good for you, great. We're going to dive into the subscriber only newsletter. If you don't, please look at doing this. The subscriber, the reader lands on your website, reads one article. The second article, they get this messaging saying, hey, this is free, but you got to register. Then they'll get one more and you and they'll get your newsletter. And what leaky paywall will do is it will send free tag with this new free registered reader along into mailchimp or whatever you're using and so you'll have this free list that you can target appropriately. That's just building, building because this, when you do the free registration, you're drawing a line in the sand. You have to fill this out to read this story. This works way better than a newsletter pop up. And it also happens at the right time where someone's already enjoyed an article without being bothered. One of the things I will throw out there is that down here is a great place for sponsorship. If you are looking to put a sponsor package together, just look at your website and the sort of the interface that you have. And you have this little space here that, okay, you can subscribe here, but people aren't really doing that. So why don't you, why don't you use text to promote a sponsor as part of your email sponsorship as well. Okay, all right. Okay. So what happens when somebody registers? All right, we're going to pick on the Salem reporter here because they're doing such a fantastic job in a lot of departments and they're a local news Publisher out on the West Coast. They are kicking butt and we're going to share why they're kicking butt with you. So let me go. I set this up so that we can do a little bit of this here. So this is the actual email. It's a welcome email. So if I sign up for my. For your newsletter or register for free, better as a free registered reader, I get a welcome email, right? This welcome email has a personal intro. It's a long intro and it's explains what the mission is and what the intent is and how important the reader is. And then very importantly, has a call to subscribe. Right? And it's a button. And if you talk to me recently, I go crazy over buttons because buttons work. They're. They're compelling, compelling people to click. Right? You need buttons in your emails, easy to set up, and you need that. One thing I also like is that he explains how to get off the. The mailchimp, how to get into the mailchimp primary inbox or Gmail primary inbox. And that's fine. But this, the point is that it's a nice welcome. It's a good chance for you to really talk about who you are in this setup. Okay, so let's go back here. And yes, you could set up, you could set up a drip campaign and trigger a series of emails, maybe three emails, that shows off some of your extra content. Drip is easy to set up these days. And you can drip, you can drip out an email, let's say a day or two after the welcome email. A day or two after that comes another email regarding your, your content or maybe categories of content that, that you really focus on. And then of course, the last email is another. And actually every email is a promotion to upgrade to the free to. To the paid list. Okay. All right, next. Okay, the free newsletter. Now you have all these registered readers newsletter subscribers. And really the point here is to make sure your upgrade messaging is obvious. So let's go here and look at the Salem Reporter again. And this is an email I got latest stories for you from Salem Reporter. There's a personal intro in here. This is really important as far as engagement goes. Talk to Leslie@newsletterglue. She did a session on making newsletters personal. I can send you a link if you're interested in it. But without fail, there's a nice intro and then there's the sort of the standard setup, right, with the title of the article, the excerpt of the article, a big feature image in this case. And if we go all the Way down here you'll see some stuff right now, subscribe to add our evening newsletter. Okay, this is a bit of a spoiler. Salem has a subscriber only newsletter and it's an what you could consider an early edition newsletter. So it goes out in the afternoon and basically they just assemble the stories that happen between the morning newsletter and the afternoon newsletter. And that's pretty easy to do, pretty quick for them to get it out. So you don't have to wait for that newsletter to show up in the morning. And in the morning they still out, they still send out the complete newsletter from the previous day. But this gives, this gives subscribers a good vibe, right? This works. Open rates are great on this. They also have, just as a side note, they have a obituary, digital obituary service which you can create an obituary for someone right online, pay for it right online. And so they're promoting that as well. The only thing I'll strike against them a little bit is that this is not a button, right? It's not obvious enough and you need to be obvious. This is pretty good. And this is on the, this is on the bottom of every single free subscriber email. And it's absolutely working, but make it a button. Okay, let's go back here. Do the magic thing. Okay, so when the free newsletter, when somebody clicks a link on the free newsletter and they go back to your website, this is the, the type of messaging they need to see when they run out of articles. And it's all about nurturing and seeing this sort of upgrade your account message over and over again. And the data is pretty clear that the longer a reader stays on your newsletter, the higher your chance they have of finally getting tired of seeing this message and saying, okay, yeah, let's do it, let's subscribe, let's pay. It works. Okay. Okay, so now we've covered sort of the free side. Let's talk a little bit about the what, what is a subscriber only newsletter? There are two things that I think are super easy to pull off without a lot of extra effort. One I mentioned before, which is early delivery, and that's something that you're really just assembling your articles for. And if you do it in WordPress, it's like check in newsletter glue and boom, they're done and you send it out. The second is a full text newsletter. This works really well for magazine publishers. You have some long form articles, you probably should be kicking out an article at a time, maybe two articles at a time. And I forgot something, but I'LL be back to it. And full text is a huge benefit because you're not forcing your readers to click. We're lazy. You're starting to get tired of clicking, right? But you're also not having them log in. Right? So if it's a, if it's a full text newsletter, they can just get it and get it in the email box and enjoy it and they're done. And when somebody, and I forgot to mention when somebody pays for subscription, leaky paywall will take the paid tag and send it over to mailchimp or Campaign Monitor, wherever it's going. And you'll have that person will be tagged as paid and the free tag will go away or the list that they're on will, will change from free to paid. So now they're getting just the, the paid users are getting a paid newsletter. Okay, so different offers now when you have a free list and when you have a paid list, like I mentioned earlier, your free list, those emails are all about the upgrade to paid messaging. That's really your singular focus, right? The, the paid newsletter, the premium, the subscriber only newsletter, you have a chance to speak a little differently to those readers. But maybe you have a donation model so you can go after. This would be the right time to ask for a donation. Or maybe you have a premium product or you have an event or you have something like a one off purchase, a book, an annual book or something like that. This is the, this is the list to go after. And maybe you, you give early access to your book because it's their paid subscriber or whatever. I'm just making stuff up. And you can of course go with creating extra premium content. That's extra work. Maybe some of you guys are doing this now, but you don't have to do it. You can keep this really simple and just focus on an early delivery for subscribers or a full text newsletter. Let me go back here. I'm going to show you some. The premium subscriber only newsletter. But before I do that, I want to show you what a free newsletter looks like from a magazine publisher, which a lot of you guys know, small boats. They continue to do well. And I would. If you're running a magazine and you need some inspiration for a layout and workflow. This is really great. Big pictures, a little personal intro here. This one is just two articles, right? It's, it's two, two archive articles that they brought forward and then. But what I want to show you, what I really want to show you is what happens underneath, right? So under. In every single newsletter that goes out under the content, they have a big promotion here to join, right? Where they give you the features and benefits here and a big button. They're doing this right to join and people click it and people subscribe. So this kind of promotion to upgrade to paid works incredibly well if you're running sponsors, they happen to run their sponsors underneath here. I know some publishers run, have a sort of a featured sponsor up top. And that's fine, but it's all very elegant and very subtle. Okay. All right, so we covered the news free. We covered the magazine free. Let's talk. Let's look at paid. Okay, so here it is, Friday evening update again. Nice personal intro. Same layout, just different articles, right? And then you can see that their messaging changes just a little bit. And it's a link and it's not a button. But it certainly is quick, right? Using our obituary service. Okay, remember, they're speaking to a paid subscriber here, so the language is a little different. Hey, if you're using. Using our obituary service, assumptive language, how to manage your subscription, right? It's really good. And then advertise with us. Now, if you're a paid subscriber, maybe you're a fan, you're the best fan, right? Maybe there's a source of advertise advertising revenue from sponsor revenue from the fans. So again, it's not a lot different here, but the language is subtly different. So you get the advantage of being able to talk to your paid subscribers in a little different way. Okay, just make sure I didn't forget anything here. Okay, So I think that's pretty good. Let's go back to. Okay, premium archives. This is something you could just literally turn on if you use newsletter glue or I don't know about mailchimp, Mail Poet, and certainly with our upcoming flow letter. And what it does is it takes all their newsletters. And so as soon as the newsletter goes out, it gets published in an archive. And that's it. So if I go into the archive here, I'm seeing all the old newsletters. And if I click into an archive here, I have to be a paid subscriber. That's it. It requires a paid subscription. You can use our new targeted messages extension to pull this off. So if somebody's logged in, if somebody's not logged in or logged in, they'll see the. Hey, you gotta pay to access the newsletter archives. Just literally turn that category on and you're in business with an extra value add for your. For Your readers. Okay, let's keep trucking here. Results are fun. Okay, this is a local news publisher, and this is part of our insights that's expanding. And we're tracking what subscribers are doing. And we have two lines here. We have a red line, which are all the free registrations that are coming in, and. And we have a blue line, which are all the paid subscriptions that are coming in. So over this period of time, which I've just hidden, you can see that there's actually, the important thing here is that there's a relationship between. If you look at the peaks, there's a relationship between how many free registered readers come in and how many paid subscribers are triggered. Because what happens is when you're nurturing your readership properly on your website, like they're coming in, they get a free article. They're not bothered. This is fine. This is great. Oh, I want to read a second article. Oh, wait, I have to register to. To read this. Okay. It's just an email and password. That sounds good. These guys are. I'll get their newsletter. Sure, why not? Okay. I register now, I get that article, and then maybe I want to read a third article. Maybe I don't. Maybe I come back later, but maybe I want to read a third article, and then it's all I gotta pay. Hmm. They've had a pretty good experience up till now, and some of them, some will just convert on the spot because they've had a nice experience. And that seamless reader experience is what's really important to driving paid subscriptions. And you can see some really cool data points here. In this time period, you have 640 free registered readers, you have 71 paid subscribers, and you actually have 57 waiting in the wings that are on trial. They're paid trial, too. So a chunk of these are going to add to the new paid subscribers, and the ratio is pretty great. Okay. Okay. How do you set this up? Okay, whatever email service you're using, you can continue to use. What leaky paywall you want to make sure is. Leaky paywall has the right tagging set up on each subscription level. So your free registration level is tagged free and your paid subscriptions are tagged paid. And then those. If you're. As a mailchimp example, when somebody signs up for. I'll repeat myself, signs up for a free subscription, that tag free gets sent to mailchimp, and you have that free list growing. If that person then upgrades, then the paid tag gets sent over to mailchimp, and the free tag gets removed. So you have a clean free list and a clean paid list. And if the credit card fails or they cancel, then the paid tag gets removed and a canceled tag gets added. So you can still target that. Now you can pull this off with anything using any other ESP email service provider, using our zapier integration. And if you need help, just let us know. But you're all equipped to get this, get this cooking. Okay? Okay. Almost there. Set up your free newsletter. What do you do? Set up your free newsletter to promote subscriptions. Okay, Free registration, free newsletter. That's the first thing. Figure out what your subscriber only newsletter is going to be. It's not going to have any ads on it for updating. It's going to have maybe some other call outs on it. Full text early delivery is probably the easiest one. I think full text, you can automate that as well. Make sure your subscription levels and leaky paywall are tagged appropriately. And that's it. You're done. You have yourself a beautiful subscriber only newsletter that will be appreciated and you can promote as part of your subscription. Okay, I have some mystery words here. Looking for a better news newsletter solution? If you happen to be looking for a better newsletter solution, we do have a new product that is launching this month. It's called Flow Letter. It is a WordPress. It's a newsletter glue front end for WordPress. So they're our partner and you publish all your content in newsletter glue and WordPress and it gets sent right to your appropriate free and paid lists. Because it's leaky paywall integrated, cutting your workflow in half. We use Amazon. It's got a simple dashboard, it's turnkey. We've been running the this on over 30 publications and it's going great. We're finally getting around to making a product out of it. And we have a feature that's coming soon which solves a pain point for publishers. And that's with the leaky integration. We can track when somebody gets a newsletter and clicks a link to go back to an article. And if they have a paid subscription in Leaky Paywall, they won't. They'll get access to that article. They won't have to log in and you won't get the, you won't get the email saying I can't log in anymore. We call it instant access and we think that's pretty cool.