← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
The Newsletter Growth Playbook for 2026 with Matt McGarry
00:46:05
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- [00:00]
A
It's like, oh, you build a newsletter audience and the sponsors will just come and then you just have one ad per newsletter. That's a really bad business model, and maybe it used to be good. Sponsorships are one of the worst ways to monetize audiences. You really want to have direct audience monetization, but the lead quality from LinkedIn is crazy high. And that's where we've got probably like 80% of the thousands of subscribers I've gotten from LinkedIn. And we're making like $76 from everybody who signs up from LinkedIn. Most recently, it's been YouTube. I just hit 10 or 11,000 subscribers, and that one is really recently become a newsletter growth channel. We got hundreds of subscribers from that video.
- [00:42]
B
Welcome back to the Growth in Reverse podcast. My name is Dylan.
- [00:45]
C
And I'm Chanel.
- [00:47]
B
We are here today. We're really excited, actually, because we've got our guest, Matt McGarry, who is joining us today on the podcast. And if you don't know Matt, which if you're listening to this podcast, you probably have an inkling or you might have heard his name or. Or you're very familiar with him. Matt is the founder of Grow Letter Growletter Co, where he's helped massive newsletters like the hustle, Milk Road 1440, the gist, just to name a few, grow their subscribers and their list to many of these over a million subscribers and some multiple millions. So Matt's company is also hosting successful live Events like the 2025 Newsletter Marketing Summit in Austin, Texas. He's also hosted Audience Camp in North Carolina. Needless to say, Matt is one of the first people I look to. Chanel, I'm sure as well that we look to when we want to learn more about newsletters and media. So, Matt, we're stoked to have you here on the show. Thanks for coming on.
- [01:41]
A
Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
- [01:43]
B
No problem. So thanks for doing this. We have a lot of questions teed up for you, but I thought it would be interesting to start by maybe just talking a little bit about your newsletter itself. Newsletter operator, which you're helping a bunch of other newsletters grow. But you also knew the power of starting an email list. So talk to us a little bit about how you've grown a how big is your newsletter now? When did you start it and what were kind of some of the key strategies you've used to grow Newsletter operator.
- [02:09]
A
Yeah, I've been sending a newsletter for. Since January 2023. Over 50,000 subscribers now. We get great engagement you know, 50% plus open rate, 5% plus click through rate. Even at that level of scale is it gets way harder as you grow. And I've definitely seen that in the past couple years. We've. One thing I'm working on is branding this year and like I have so many different brands. Like last year our event was called Newsletter Marketing Summit. We changed it to New Media Summit. Our company's called Grow Letter, but my newsletter is called Newsletter Operator. So trying to simplify things and eventually kind of everything will be under the Grow Letter umbrella and then we'll have like the event New Media Summit under that. And then the newsletter may not even have a name anymore. It's just our newsletter, Grow Letters newsletter. What's the stuff that's worked well to grow? It has evolved so much. I'm sure you guys have seen this where it's like what I did in 2023, what that crushed. It got me my first 1,000, 10,000, 20,000 subscribers is completely non existent now. What's working now is totally different than back then. Can I walk into like the evolution of it?
- [03:17]
B
Yeah, please.
- [03:17]
A
Please. Yeah. And it's just, I mean it's just typical marketing. This platforms change and evolve over time and you know, work too well and then everybody adapts and then that, that dies out. The only thing that pretty much stays relatively consistent is actually email itself. That's why we're always trying to get people onto our email list. So first it was Twitter and Chanel did a lot of that too. Back in the day we were super active on there and now we're non existent on there anymore it feels like. And that just, it was just so easy to get website traffic from it. Like the, the, the bio people would click it. You had that like embed in your profile to collect email addresses. You could do threads that actually worked. Auto replies, comment. To get something you DM hundreds of people. And so I got my first 1,000 subscribers just through posting, you know, two to four times a week. Like a quality thread, quality posts, stuff like that on Twitter, which still works. There's just probably different platforms now. We did, we did a lot of paid, we've done paid ads throughout the years. We've done meta, we done, we did Twitter ads. Twitter ads also used to work super well. Now they just, it's not a great platform. We've done meta ads consistently since around when I started, but with relatively low budgets it still is mostly organic growth and we've just had so much more success taking people who sign up from organic sources like social media, YouTube in search and converting them into buyers where it's pretty easy to get signups from meta ads. But getting them to buy something and get value from those people has been always a challenge. And it's a challenge for our clients too. So after kind of Twitter fell off for me and I moved on other platforms, it's been LinkedIn which is still one of our biggest growth sources. Now throughout that evolution, because I've been posting a newsletter every week and I just published that exact newsletter or the article of that newsletter to my website, to my blog, we've built up pretty good search traffic without even trying. Like I've done no optimization, no backlink strategy, but just publishing good stuff for a couple years. You start to build up search traffic. So we do some email, some basic email capture stuff and that's been a great consistent channel. It's not huge and maybe AI is affecting that more. But it's not my only channel, so I'm not too worried. So we gotta, we got a lot of people just from Google who are searching for terms around newsletters or marketing and stuff like that. And then most recently, just like you guys have, it's been YouTube for the past year, or I'd say 2025 is when I started focusing on that. I just hit 10 or 11,000 subscribers and that one has only really recently become a newsletter growth channel. And our strategy in all these places has been really simple. It's just like publish useful content that gets people to view or watch or read and then just have some type of next step for them to get onto the email list. Whether that's just asking them to join the newsletter for more content strategy about that or a relevant lead magnet that's related to the content. So I did a YouTube video on Cohort based courses. I promoted a lead magnet. There was a free guide on cohorts and because the content's relevant, we got hundreds of subscribers from that video.
- [06:31]
C
Hold on, hold on, hold on. Did Matt just say he got hundreds of subscribers from that one video? I had to go and research it because I was so curious about this. I could barely concentrate after he said this. So I went down the rabbit hole as I normally do and I found all the places he promoted it, how he optimized his video for this thing. And I actually texted him to get the results and he said he'd driven over a third thousand email subscribers from that one video. And so I put together a free resource and lead magnet to show you exactly how he did that and you can grab it down below. Okay, back to the video.
- [07:03]
A
And so it's, it's a lot of fundamental stuff like that. There's definitely some growth hacks in there I can talk about later. But that's kind of the evolution From Twitter to LinkedIn to YouTube and in Google as well.
- [07:13]
C
It's so funny, Matt, because we actually, I think so I started my newsletter December 2022 and yours was like right, right there, right around the same time. So it's fun, it's been fun to like grow alongside you and just kind of like see how this, how this is going. Yeah, definitely miss the old Twitter days of just like, you know, post your stuff, engage with people, get some subscribers and go from there. But like you said, I think just trying out new channels, like it probably still works just on different channels. So YouTube seems to be a good spot. Instagram is another one. So hoping to play around with that a little bit. What, what similarities are you seeing from like Twitter, LinkedIn those, those good old days to like YouTube now? Like, what are you seeing is like a good, good strategy there?
- [07:59]
A
Well, I'll start kind of step by step for each LinkedIn. We could talk forever about each of these.
- [08:04]
B
Right.
- [08:04]
A
But LinkedIn what I see works is you have to have just good editorial value based content and not really worry about the call to actions too much on those posts. That's just the foundation. You know, it's the classic like jab, jab, right hook. Gary Vaynerchuk. And I say that because some people miss that. Like I talk a lot about these list growth strategies where it's like how to get subscribers from social media. And I share all the list growth stuff. And then people do that, but they forget you actually still have to post useful content because if you don't post useful content, no one follows you, no one sees your stuff, and then there's no one to actually take action when you do have some type of call to action or way to get them on your list. So that's step number one. And I don't, you know, I've tried like, you know, mentioning, hey, go to my bio, hey, click the view my profile, review my newsletter link in my profile. All that stuff hasn't worked very well to actually get people onto the list. The best way to get people on the list I found is comment to get giveaways or comment to get whatever you want to call them. Right. Where you, you basically promote some lead magnet. And I'll talk about how I don't even make Lead magnets. But I still do the strategy in a minute. But promote a lead magnet type thing and you say, hey, if you want to get this comment, one relevant word, one keyword, 1k comment, newsletter comment, email and I'll DM it to you. And they comment that feeds the engagement on the post so it gets more views, more comments, and then you DM them a link to your landing page where they sign up. And that's, you know, where we've got probably like 80% of the thousands of subscribers I've gotten from LinkedIn. And we make, you know, I track my revenue per signup source and we're making like $76 from everybody who signs up from LinkedIn, for example. There's a lot of them buying products and they're great leads. So it's hard to grow your list there without comment to get. But the lead quality from LinkedIn is crazy high, right? And of course there's an art form like writing a comment to get post that like hooks people in and actually gets them in your comment. A lot of that just comes down to having a good lead magnet that's like relevant. We could get into the difference between good lead magnets and bad lead magnets, but what I do is I haven't made a dedicated lead magnet ever, which is not necessarily a good thing, but I just never do it. What I try and do is each newsletter I write every week, I try and just write something so valuable, so concise and insightful that it could become a lead magnet. And so every time I promote a quote unquote lead magnet, it's just one of my newsletters behind what I call an email gate where people have to enter their email address to actually read the content. And so it just creates no additional work for me. I just have to actually write the post and then do it. So that's the main LinkedIn growth strategy. There's a couple others like pre Call to actions post Call to Actions I could talk about later. But that's like the, the bread and butter of LinkedIn newsletter growth.
- [10:47]
B
How much are you optimizing or testing your bio and like your links in.
- [10:51]
A
Your bio and stuff like that on LinkedIn, not enough. But I also think there's only so much juice you can squeeze out of that. I think you have, you know, if you have a LinkedIn Premium account, a premium account, you have like the View my newsletter button, kind of a no brainer to have. You can have a featured link and if you're going to have that, you should probably only have one or two links. One of them should be your newsletter, or maybe the only one should be your newsletter. And probably even better than your newsletter is the lead Magnet. What I'm finding now is that people are just less excited to sign up for another newsletter than they were a couple years ago. And, but, but people like lead magnets have been around for, for decades, maybe since the beginning of time. Who knows? And they're just not going away. So I think, I think everybody who's struggling to grow their email list grow their newsletter. Either you don't have a lead magnet or you haven't tested enough lead magnets. And then if some, for some reason you've already done that, which is that actually eliminates 99% of people because most people don't fit the two criteria, then you need to find better ways to promote those lead magnets. And I think organic list growth really just comes down to those three things. And so lead magnet in the future section, your description of your LinkedIn account. I don't think anybody reads those anyways. And that's, that's about it as far as profile optimization. Maybe a call to action, your banner for the lead magnet. Just directing all that traffic to one place and then avoiding the common mistakes of like, you've talked about this on the program, like don't have a link tree in your bio because that distracts people with five different options. Just send people to one or two places.
- [12:21]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's pretty sound advice. I, I put a, my main link before I signed up for LinkedIn freemium. My main link was get your first 1000 subscribers was the link. And so that was a really great. It went right to my 5 day email course of getting a thousand subscribers. My lead magnet and I found that worked actually pretty decently to, to at least get the right kind of person on my subscriber list.
- [12:49]
A
So I think that's a, for me.
- [12:51]
B
It'S, it's worked decently. I think that's a good piece of advice.
- [12:54]
A
Yeah. And honestly, YouTube is not that much different than every social platform. It's just like the format and layout is slightly different. So it's like you have a video about a topic, you have a lead magnet related to that topic to condense it or give them more useful information. You could get fancy to lead magnets. A lot of times I'll just say like if I'm doing a video of slides, hey, do you want the slides so you can like read this and revisit it? Click below and Opt in to get the slides. Like, it doesn't have to be that complicated.
- [13:21]
B
And you've already created the slides so it's like no extra work for you.
- [13:25]
A
Exactly, yeah. We're like AI prompts work great now. It's like, hey, I made this. This video teaches this thing. But like, do you want a prompt that like does a lot of it for you? Click here to get it. And then that's the, the placement's important. So like the first link in bio needs to be the lead magnet. Of course you have your description below that with timestamps and all that stuff. And then the pin comment also needs to be the lead magnet.
- [13:45]
B
Right. We're talking on YouTube for that.
- [13:46]
A
On YouTube? Yeah, yeah. And that, that's YouTube listerif. I mean, I'm sure you can get more complicated, but that's like where your prime real estate is and that's how to use it.
- [13:56]
C
Yeah, I like that. Are you doing like shorts or anything on YouTube as well, or just straight long form video and just. That's it.
- [14:03]
A
We just started. I have neglected it because of my personal addiction to shorts and like, I don't want to contribute to the, all the slop that I, I feel like it's just not healthy and I'm, I'm the, I'm a victim. Right. But I think it's, I think I'm just like putting my personal beliefs above what works in business and marketing. So I'm going to stop doing that and start posting more shorts. Of course there's a bandwidth issue that like all of us have, like, oh, I gotta write a newsletter and do one video a week and then shorts on top of that. It's like, how do I manage all that? I have a team that helps and, and right now we're just, you know, clipping, which can work. I think dedicated shorts will work better and I haven't put in the effort to do that yet.
- [14:46]
B
Can you just explain for the audience what a distinct or distinction between clipping and a dedicated short?
- [14:51]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So just like a long form video, like a podcast or a long form kind of teaching YouTube video like I do, taking a 32nd, 60 second, 90 second clip from that and doing that as a short and same thing with reels and TikToks and all that stuff.
- [15:06]
B
Yeah.
- [15:07]
A
And then dedicated is just like something really meant and built for that platform that I film and I want to do more of that. I think a lot of people can go a long way with like just doing shorts and then having a weekly newsletter like, not everybody has to do a long form or make long form YouTube videos or do podcast. You know, the short form mediums is really powerful and kind of still underutilized, especially in like the more business B2B space.
- [15:35]
B
Yeah, definitely agree there. Chanel and I have both. We've had Millie Tamati on our podcast who's just blown up her list on TikTok, just with shorts or like, you know, TikToks.
- [15:46]
A
Right.
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B
Short form video and that lead to like a quiz and then that's like her lead magnet. And then we also have somebody in the growth reverse pro community, her name's Charlie, who's done something very similar on TikTok. Again, just with short form video, like two, maybe three minutes long that lead to another lead magnet. So I think you're. You're spot on with that, with that insight.
- [16:07]
A
Yeah. And I wish I could speak more from experience, but like, I just think people need to do it more and get over being on camera and not worry about editing and treat these like throwaway videos, because they are. It doesn't matter if one gets 100 views or 50 views. Like that won't affect you in the long run because it's just. I see people growing way faster when they just focus on making some half decent shorts versus trying to like write amazing LinkedIn post or figure out SEO or try and make Twitter work when it really doesn't work for email audience growth anymore.
- [16:40]
B
Yeah, I said 2025 was gonna be my year of short form video, and it wasn't. So 2026 is the year.
- [16:47]
C
Spoiler alert.
- [16:47]
B
My year. Yeah, exactly. But no, I've seen. I've seen so many people just crush it with short form and it's like my. I just overthink it. So I need to put that aside and just start recording. Get over that, get over the ego, get over the fear of looking like an idiot and just start publishing.
- [17:06]
A
I'll do some with you. We'll talk about it later. Ah, there we go.
- [17:09]
B
I like it.
- [17:10]
A
Maybe at our event. Maybe I'll film some of you there.
- [17:13]
B
Yes, yes, why don't we? I mean, that's a great segue, Matt. So let's lead in a little bit to the New Media Summit. It was called the Newsletter Marketing Summit last year. We're changing it. We're changing a little bit of the scope. So talk to us and the audience a little bit about the New Media Summit coming up.
- [17:32]
A
Yeah, well, I can talk. I'll talk about the event and if you ever want to talk about event businesses and like how they do them, I can talk about that too. But New Media Summit which just it's becoming and it's going to become the event for what I call the new media and content economy. So it's kind of people like us, people that listen to this, people like speakers that we have, like Sampar, Cody Sanchez, Sagar from Breaking Points, Tim huels camp from 1440. We have about 25 plus speakers now. Ryan Dice, Chanel, Basilio. Yeah, and Chanel, Bastilio and Dylan who's going to be our mc. So it's like everybody here is actually going to be the event too. I've been to a lot of media events, I've been to even some newsletter events and I'm never, never really satisfied with them. Media events, they tend to focus on like legacy media, you know and just like they're all talking about the same topics every time. I don't know if you ever listen to like media podcasts or been to some of these media events where it's like there's a certain like media corporate speak that they use and the content is just totally non actionable. And some events have been fun, some events I've been really disappointed with there. There's some great conferences about just newsletters which is kind of what we did last year. Even though the, the name was about newsletters but the content at the conference was not. And I just want to have a wider scope. We want to cover people who are building media businesses, newsletter businesses, education information businesses and community businesses too, all at one event. Because I really think you need to be, you don't have to do everything as a business but you need to have a full stack understanding of the information space. And so we're going to talk about how to grow on YouTube, how to grow on social, how to grow and monetize your newsletter, how to grow, how to sell information products, how to build communities, so on and so forth. So that's what the event's about. And also a lot of it's just about networking. Like we don't have back to back sessions forever. We have really cool dinners that we host, lounges that we have so people can have those conversations where the real insights happen off stage. So that's all I'll share about it. If you have more you want to ask me about it, let me know. But if you want to check it out, it's new mediasummit.com and I won't promote it again. But if you want to attend, of course we have a Discount code. I'm a marketer. I got to share one. So it's GIR 20 for 20 off.
- [19:47]
C
I think that was my next question because we actually had that on our list. So thanks for doing that. We'll make sure to put that in the, in the show notes too.
- [19:55]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [19:56]
C
But I think, I think you're under 100 tickets left, so people needed to move.
- [19:59]
A
Yeah. By the time you see this, like, prices are probably going to increase soon. Tickets are going to be nearly sold out, but there'll still be time left. But if you want to take, if you want to attend, take a look soon.
- [20:08]
B
I would say, and forgive me if you did mention this, but I should repeat it. February 25th to 26th.
- [20:15]
A
I didn't. Yeah, it's probably the most important thing is like where it is and when it is. It's in Austin, Texas on February 26th and 27th. 26th.
- [20:23]
B
27Th.
- [20:24]
A
Great.
- [20:25]
B
And that's of 2026, obviously, if you're watching this in 2027. I'm sorry. So come hang out with me and Matt and Chanel. We're going to be there with bells on and you'll hear us because we'll be jingling. So, yeah, I think it's going to be, it's going to be a great time. I'm really excited. I've never been to Austin, so selfishly I'm. I'm even just excited to check out the city.
- [20:43]
A
It's great. It's like right in the center of downtown Austin where like everything is. You know, there's a zillion bars and restaurants and stuff that do around the event venue. Awesome.
- [20:51]
C
Exciting. It was a great time last year. Just to be near and around like all of the people in the newsletter space was so fun. And it was actually right. Right after we launched this podcast and this was the event that I went to where everyone was like, I love the podcast. I love the podcast. And I was like, what about the newsletter, guys? Like, I spend more time on that.
- [21:12]
A
That's the funny thing about when you go to events and people talk to you and we're fortunate enough for like, you know, some people know us at events or a lot of people in Chanel's case.
- [21:20]
B
Right.
- [21:20]
A
But people generally mention your podcast or long form content like YouTube and they don't mention the newsletter as much. But the inverse is they all buy from your emails. You know, maybe they discover it or kind of make the decision after listening to a podcast or YouTube video. But then like the marketing emails and the Newsletters, get them to take action and move them off the fence.
- [21:44]
C
Yeah, totally.
- [21:46]
B
Well, Matt, you just published a video that was. I'm not going to, I'm going to paraphrase sort of the title, but it's basically like you don't need a big email list to grow a really successful business. And I assume this is by doing things like maybe events or selling courses. But do you want to give us a lowdown of kind of this new idea that, you know, when Chanel started Growth in Reverse Pro, or sorry, Growth in Reverse, the newsletter was like how people got 50,000 and beyond subscribers and all these, you know, large lists which, which are great. But talk to us a little bit about why the big list isn't always necessarily the best list.
- [22:23]
A
Yeah, it's a lot of the. There's a couple of reasons for that. A lot of the big, big list people can grow with just a general audience that isn't valuable with like paid acquisition sources or car reg or, or various, I wouldn't call them growth hacks, but just ways to acquire emails. That doesn't actually build an audience. You, like, get people to join the list, but they don't know like, and trust you and therefore they're not financially valuable. And I think people mostly wised up and stopped doing that. That doesn't mean paid acquisition or anything is bad. It just means not every email address is created equal that you acquire. And I think a lot of people, when they look from the outside into this space, they look at the big creators and publishers who have tens of thousands, hundreds or millions of subscribers. And they are using. Their businesses are at scale and they're using ways to monetize an audience that is also at scale, which means large. So they're, they're monetizing with sponsorships in their newsletter, podcast, YouTube, they're selling lower ticket digital products. $100, 500 bucks, 50 bucks. And they can move a lot of volume as they have a large audience. You get it like at scale stuff that's really. If you're just starting from scratch, as most people probably are that are listening to this, if you do the exact same things that those folks are doing and build your business model in the same way, it's harder to become successful. You have to approach things differently. And what I recommend, not to everybody, but to most people and what I talk about that video in that video is like, how do you acquire a targeted small group of people? And there's always the ability to scale well beyond a thousand or ten thousand subscribers later. Because the reality is if you can get to a thousand subscribers organically, you have the skillset. You have the momentum to get to an audience of 10,000 plus newsletter subscribers. And if you can get to 10k over a long enough timeline, you'll be at 50k or 100k too. So that's important to note. It's like it's you're not going to be at 1k forever, but you should probably focus on writing content that solves a problem for a more niche or group of people. It shouldn't be like here's the news of just the facts. Here's the five hot stop tips for just a huge audience. You should try and differentiate differentiate yourself at first first because you can always expand and broaden your content and your audience later. And the way to monetize an audience like that that cares about a certain thing and has a specific set of problems that aren't relevant to the general population is not through sponsorship. It's not through low ticket products. It's through higher ticket services like an agency service, like a consulting service, a higher ticket or higher touch coaching or consulting program, maybe with some actual deliverables. You shouldn't be afraid of actually selling your time. A lot of people get into newsletters because they're like I don't want to sell my time, I don't want to do any services. But everybody starts that way. And the best way to build a scalable business is to do stuff that doesn't scale first, like do services and then transform that into a scalable product or digital product later on anyways. So I think in that video, like I say some pretty straightforward things like if you have. I forget the math now and I'm not going to do it. But it's like if you have a thousand email subscribers and like 1% by 2, $2,000 per month service, I think you're around 20k. Mrr. My math may be off but like a really 1, 2% conversion rate when people are buying something that's a thousand dollars, $2,000 a month or even one time becomes really meaningful revenue very quickly where you can get to 10k per month, 20k 50k. Because I had a high ticket service when I started my newsletter when I was about at about 935 subscribers. I have the exact number in that video. I was at 50k per month mrr. Because we just had a service that was around 3k per month in fees and you don't have to do a service. You could have a higher ticket product that's 1,000, 2,000, $5,000. So you could do an event that has a ticket cost of 1 to $5,000 and then has sponsorships on top, on top of that. And so that's what I encourage people to explore. We could talk about the details later. Is that build your business model, not just your audience, and build a business model where you don't need tens of thousands of customers or an audience of millions to actually make a great living.
- [26:34]
B
Yeah, I think the sexy temptation is you look at, you know, some of the, to be honest, some of the email or some of the newsletters we just listed in your intro, like 1440 and the hustle and Morning Brew and those who grew these massive email lists and then can get these cpm, you know, ad placements that are making them, you know, six figures a month. But that's not the reality for the 99.9% of people. And so I think the, you know, the, again, the vanity metric of having these large lists is not, is not the same thing that it used to be.
- [27:10]
C
Yeah, I made this mistake when I first started to like, I kind of fell into growth in reverse, which is hilarious looking back. But like, I had no idea what I was doing. Zero clue, wouldn't sell a course, didn't want to do anything. I was like, nope, sponsorships. I'm not going to charge my audience anything. No paid newsletter, nothing. And then over time I'm like, oh, this is really silly. Like, what am I doing here? Like, I am spending more than a full time job's worth of work every week and not getting paid very much. And so it wasn't sustainable. And so I quickly realized, like, oh, I do need to start doing like coaching and like newsletter audits and all that Stu. So over time it's grown, but it's just, yeah, I would highly recommend people listen and do not make that mistake from the beginning because it does happen. Yeah, great advice.
- [27:54]
B
Yeah.
- [27:55]
A
A lot of people, just for whatever reason I've kind of, when I was a beginner, I felt this way too. It's like, oh, you build a newsletter audience and the sponsors will just come and then you just have one ad per newsletter. That's a really bad business model and maybe it used to be good. Sponsorships are one of the worst ways to monetize audiences. You really want to have direct audience monetization. There's lot of ways you can do that that we mentioned and we can talk about more and people think like, because they haven't experienced it firsthand. They think sponsorships are a magic bullet, but they actually suck. I mean, we work with do like six figures and sponsorship sales at our event. And I love all the sponsors and we only have to work with like 10 of them. But like it's, it's really difficult. And at the Hustle, when I used to work there, we're talking 100 plus sponsors a year. Constant grind to get new ones, keep them happy, satisfy them, deliver the creative, get it reviewed. It becomes like a service business. So why not just do a service for your customers instead, right? And then eventually you can productize that service and turn it into something digital and more scalable. And maybe one actionable thing I would add to that is if you're not sure where to start, you know, first is start publishing a weekly newsletter, building an audience on a discovery platform like YouTube, LinkedIn, so on and so forth. But just sell a 45 minute, 30 minute consulting call for 100 bucks, 200 bucks or less. And then just try and help people work through a problem that they have. After you do five or ten of these calls, you're going to see clear patterns in the problems that your audience has. And then you could develop maybe a more structured coaching service to solve it, Maybe an actual done for you service or maybe some type of digital product that solves that problem too. But you don't want to be a hammer looking for a nail where it's like, I, I'm going to sell a course, I'm going to sell a sponsorship, I'm going to sell an ebook, I'm going to sell a paid newsletter. That is the completely reverse way to do it. You should do it in the reverse way. I should say, right? Growth in reverse or whatever. But you should go in. So much reverse is going on here. You should go and just find the problem and then whatever problem pattern that you see, you identify a product or service that is the best solution for that problem and not the other way around. I think that makes sense.
- [30:11]
C
Yeah, it does. And I think, I think a lot of people go for the sponsorship route in the beginning because they're so scared to like ask their audience or like charge them any money. But honestly, if you think about it like your audience is probably reading your stuff, they trust you, they think what you're talking about is interesting and you know what you're talking about. And so it's like you're almost doing them a disservice by not having something for them to buy from you and being like, hey, I read your stuff every week. But you're not actually helping me pass that because I need, I have this question. I'm not able to get past it. And you're like, well, I'm just gonna like put sponsors in my newsletter where it's like, if you actually had a call like Brett's talking about or a product that people could buy, it's so much more valuable for them too. So you're not just like, you know, grifting money out of your audience. Like, you're actually giving them something of value as well.
- [30:58]
A
Yeah, it took me a long time to develop that mindset. I want to share maybe a rule that would help people who have that, please have that, you know, are not sure to overcome that. But I would, I've, I started with that mindset too, and I've eventually shifted. And this also can become toxic. Toxic if you go too far. Whereas, like, if you don't buy this, you are worse off. And I'm doing you a disservice if you don't buy it. Because now that I've acquired so many customers and worked with thousands of people I know people who just read my free stuff are not going to get the same results of people who just pay me, you know, $1,500, for example, for, you know, one product or one, one cohort that I do or a service or an event. Like I, I, I'm. So the confidence has come from doing it for a long time, for doing it for at least two or three years. It doesn't, that's not going to happen overnight. But I think everyone can develop that over time. There also is a point where you can take it too far. But the rules that I have, because I'm a very like rule based person that have helped me with this are the following. So, you know, I send a weekly newsletter. I try and just make that all value. And at the bottom I just put like, here's how I can help you. Here's the three products I have, the three third, the three products or services I have. So it's like, I'm not selling there. I'm just listing out what the options are if you want to take action. And then you have to send marketing emails to sell things. But I don't send anyone a marketing email until they reach some type of engagement threshold. So they've opened at least three or two emails and they've clicked at least one. I won't market or sell to you until you've done that. So I don't feel like you're so you don't feel like you're getting hit over the head with like a call to action without really getting some value first. And the final rule I have is that at the bottom of any marketing email, I'll just give you a way to opt out. Not interested in this product. Click here to opt out and you click that button. I won't ever email you about it again. And so I feel like for me that's just giving me more confidence to market more because I know I don't market them until a certain threshold and I always give them a way to opt out every single time. And so I just, I feel more safe marketing. And the one thing I'll add to that is that the click through rate on that, like click here to opt out and I won't ever email you about this is very, very low. It's like 0.51%, 0.05%. So most people are not telling me explicitly they're not interested, they're just not quite ready yet.
- [33:20]
B
It's emailing with integrity is what I know it feels like.
- [33:25]
A
Right.
- [33:25]
B
You're not, you're not doing, trying to, yeah, you're not doing the kind of the grubby sort of like email marketing. 3. It's our launch, we're doing like 8 emails a day and you have no choice but to receive all of them or unsubscribe, you know, completely. And yeah, I, I've been part of your launches and you do a couple days where there's multiple emails a day. But like you said, you have this option to, hey, I don't hear about this anymore. But I still like Matt. I still want to get his newsletter, but I just don't want to be part of this launch. And so you have given them that option to opt out. And I could see that giving, you know, if I did that, that would give me some peace of mind as well that I'm not doing them a disservice and wasting their time and crowding their inbox for and making them resent me.
- [34:07]
A
Yeah, and I'll say one more thing. I do multiple emails a day are great for deadlines. It's not, you know, like the final day of a real, you know, legit deadline. But I only send those to people who click. So it's like, okay, if you don't, if you don't click my sales page to buy my thing, you're not going to get email number two. And I've done like a max of three usually maybe there's one or two Exceptions to that in the past couple years, but those are not going out to everybody. It's just like people who really raise their hands.
- [34:36]
B
Nice. I've got Chanel. Unless you have a follow up question that I've got, I think we could do some like sort of rapid ish fire questions.
- [34:44]
C
Sure, go for it.
- [34:45]
B
Yeah. Okay. Matt, what do you see as the biggest opportunity for newsletters or newsletter operators in the coming year?
- [34:55]
A
I think it's all a business model and monetization. I don't think it's like hey, if you set up TikTok ads, you know you're going to crush it and grow your audience. I think, you know, the audience growth and lead generation opportunities I feel have been getting more and more difficult except for a couple exceptions like short form video like YouTube, like the comment to get things to works on LinkedIn. Meta ads are always going to keep working. But what makes all that stuff work better, especially paid ads, is just having a business model or you have high customer ltv, you have repeat purchases, you have high customer satisfaction. So people buy again, tell their friends and you have, you build a positive reputation for the product. That's one of the things that a lot of beginners won't realize is that like you get some of the biggest gains in business after you've been selling the same product, service, or in my case event for multiple years. Like when I did the first event, really hard to get people there, really hard to get sponsors because the first ever event has no reputation. Yeah, but with Rikers, all my cohort now we're in like the seventh cohort that I'm doing and it's been around for over two years and like people have thought about it for six or 12 months and they're much more likely to buy now because they've already thought about it. So it's like starting that product, whatever it is for your product service event, starting that as soon as possible so that one year, two years, 10 years from now you reap the benefits and staying consistent is the biggest opportunity. But I think people struggle to identify what is the type of product or server that actually solves a problem for their audience. And then how do you market it and sell it and how do you actually deliver it? Kind of hard for us to answer that question, like rapid fire format. I've done some content on this that I hope helps and maybe we could, I could send to you later, you could put it in the description, but that's the main thing.
- [36:39]
B
Okay, awesome. When should someone start paid growth for Their newsletter. This ties in kind of, I think, a little bit to what you were just talking about.
- [36:46]
A
Yeah, there's no right or wrong answer because I've seen people never do it because you don't, you don't have to use that as a channel ever to build a successful business. I've seen people start from day one. I generally say you want some semblance, some idea of content market fit and monetization and understanding of your subscriber lifetime value. There's some nuances to that. So content market, and I think you want all of those things, all three of those things if for like a clear criteria before starting. So content market fit is like, my newsletter consistently hits 50% plus open rate, 5 to 10% plus click through rate. I don't have some astronomical unsubscribe rate. Most people can achieve that, right? Monetization, that's the hard 1. Getting 1, 5, 10% of your customers to convert into buyers or some way, or having a large enough list where you're already selling ads and monetizing, that's the harder one. But it's important because there's not really much of a reason to start paid advertising unless you can make that money back in 30, 60, 90 days after someone joins your email list. And then the third, I think I forgot what it was. But the final thing that I'll say is that some people do it from day one just to like, kind of like build momentum and dip their toes in like. I think Chanel has talked about how Dan from the TLDR newsletter has done this. He just like set up an ad campaign at five bucks a day and he gets ten subscribers a day. And it's like, that's a great way to just learn the platforms, like understand how to use paid ads. Kind of like you're, you're paying money to Facebook to learn the platform, you're getting some subscribers, you may or may not be able to monetize them effectively, but it, it's probably worth doing if you want to learn paid ads in three, six months from now, when you have content market fit and monetization, then you can dial that ad, spend up more. The final thing, the third thing I forgot was some idea of ARPU average revenue per newsletter subscriber or LTV lifetime value per subscriber. And so that could just be taken like total revenue from your list and then your total list size. And that's your rough LTV. The challenge of that is, let's say I make $76 from everybody who joins from LinkedIn. I'm not going to make that much money from someone who joins from Meta because there's a different quality of lead, different audience intent that they have. They have less experience than me if they just saw one ad. And so as a rule of thumb, it might be safe to say that your LTV from paid sources. If you're just kind of like guesstimating to just get started, it's probably half over organic sources or less. Yeah.
- [39:15]
C
I'm curious. Sorry to disrupt your speed round, Dylan, for lifetime value, are you just using like Beehive metrics? Are you pulling in anything else, like any other tools you're using? Because I know Beehive has now started to like take into account website traffic and revenue from that, but I'm curious how you've been doing that in the past.
- [39:35]
A
It's, it's, that's also. Everybody has this, whether it's like a huge business or a small business, it's this ARPU for, for a newsletter subscriber or Elite is really tough and Beehive hasn't totally solved it, but it's actually a lot better than other platforms because you can combine other things to figure it out. It's a good opportunity for someone to like actually have a software or service that does this. But what we do is like we kind of export our Beehive subscribers and Beehive does a good job of giving you newsletter subscriber by source. So I got a thousand subscribers from LinkedIn, 500 from YouTube, 100 from Google search. And then I go into. Because we don't really sell sponsorships really, but I go into my customer database of all of their email addresses and how much revenue we have made from those customers. And a separate CSV file. I put those both in the chat GBT and I forget the prompt, but it's like find the matching email addresses, see how much revenue came from each signup source. LinkedIn versus Google versus all this. And then it gives me how much revenue from each source and then the revenue per subscriber from that source. So LinkedIn at 76, Google, it's 55, etc. And that's, that's manual. But like that would be a good. Maybe we might do it every other month. Probably good to do once a month or once a quarter.
- [40:57]
C
Yeah, I just started playing around with Segmetrics. It's a tool that kind of promises to do this, but it's not perfect. But yeah, it'll take into account like website visits and email subscribers and Then figure out like where your revenue comes from and stuff like that. So, but again, it's another, another cost. So it's not super simple, but yeah.
- [41:17]
B
Matt, Substack. We can't, I don't wanna make this about ESPs, but just one word.
- [41:22]
C
Substack.
- [41:22]
B
Just one word. Substack. Go.
- [41:25]
A
I, I was trying to think of something funny. This, I don't know, I, I, I'm.
- [41:30]
C
Gonna laugh if Matt goes. I actually started a substack last week.
- [41:33]
A
That's right. You know what? I because Substack people get real tribal about their email service providers. Like when I talk about Kit or Beehive or Substack, people who don't use one of those platforms are like, what about flodesk? I'm like, sure, I haven't used Flodesk, but if it's working for you, go, go for it. I think Substack is like as, as a lot of people who are kind of in the know realize that it's becoming a social platform with some email and newsletter features. It's not a, a platform to build your media business exclusively on. It's not an email marketing platform. It's not a true newsletter platform. There's a lot of limitations and Substack really wants to funnel your audience into their app into other newsletters on the platform. So it's, it's closer to Twitter or LinkedIn than it is to building a business through tools like Kit and Beehive and HubSpot or whatever you choose to use. So in that case, I think think of it as like a discovery platform. I want to, I'm going to start utilizing Substack Notes eventually. It's been on my to do list forever. Just like short form video and you could post the type of stuff that you post on LinkedIn or Twitter to Substack Notes or maybe some custom stuff. And that could be a great way to acquire email addresses because they do have a frictionless signup process on Substack Notes. Like there's a little subscribe button and they're added to your substack email list and you get the email and you can send via substack or you can export that email to whatever sending tool you use your other esp. But I would be concerned about building my entire business on Substack for a number of reasons we don't need to get into. But I generally it's helping people so I'm a fan of it. I'm not like anti Substack by any means. They need to sponsor our event, maybe I'll be more positive.
- [43:11]
B
Right.
- [43:12]
A
I don't think they will, but yeah, so that's my thoughts. You know, treat it like a social platform but you know, I think you just have to have something else in the long run. But if you're like starting news, you're just trying to get up in live and going like. Yeah. And you, and you like substack and are comfortable with it already, go for it. Yeah.
- [43:29]
B
I mean it's free. So whereas these other platforms, I mean some of them have free plans but they're somewhat limiting. So you can really kind of grow, use the network effects, user social platform. You can grow a decent sized list there. I think you get some momentum and then when it comes time, export, transport, whatever you want to do to a different platform.
- [43:48]
A
Yeah. And another maybe like obvious prediction is like everybody in the future will just have multiple ways to send multiple ESPs. Like they'll have a beehive account and a kit account or they'll have substack and beehive or beehive and high level just, just as a insurance policy and also for maybe for like, maybe you send some marketing emails from one and you send newsletters from another. It's not something that beginners should do, but it's just a way to kind of hedge your bets because, you know, platforms could go down. Maybe one platform gets more affected by a deliverability issue than another. Yep, that's a good point.
- [44:21]
B
Oh, this has been great. I, I've got more questions but I'm also, I want to respect your time and the listeners and stuff. We've talked about a lot of great stuff. So Chanel, do you have anything else you want to hit Matt with?
- [44:36]
C
I don't think so. I think this was, this was good. I'm excited to get this out there and I don't know, have people listen to it and discover Matt's world and that kind of thing.
- [44:44]
A
So thank you. You're really fun to talk to and it went by fast, but we did cover a lot of ground. I hope this is helpful. New media summit.com. yeah, I was going to say R20. That's it.
- [44:58]
B
Give all of the places where we can connect with you. You know, LinkedIn, we'll, we'll obviously share them in the show notes, but for people listening who are maybe driving and stuff like that, what's your best platform, what's your website and all that stuff.
- [45:09]
A
Yeah, it's really just the thing I would recommend is new media summit.com and check out my YouTube channel. If you just search Matt McGarry, you'll find me there. And you can find my newsletter from there, too. I've been putting a lot of effort. Hopefully there'll be more videos by the time you see this. And if you follow me on YouTube, there'll be more to watch. But I think that's a great place to start. Yeah.
- [45:28]
C
Awesome.
- [45:28]
B
Matt's Dish. A lot of good content there, so highly recommend.
- [45:31]
C
Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show, Matt.
- [45:34]
B
This was fun.
- [45:34]
A
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
- [45:36]
B
And we'll see in a few weeks if people enjoyed.
- [45:38]
C
Yeah, if people enjoyed this, they should actually go check out. I. I was on Matt's podcast recently, so we'll have to link to that one in the show notes, too. You want more content like this?
- [45:46]
A
Absolutely.
- [45:47]
C
Watch that one next.
- [45:48]
A
Yeah, we covered. We covered a lot of different topics, too, so it'll be very different types of content.
- [45:52]
C
Yeah.
- [45:53]
A
Sweet.
- [45:54]
B
All right.
- [45:54]
C
Awesome. Cool.
- [45:55]
B
All right, we'll see you all in Austin.
- [45:57]
C
Howdy.