← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
303 - How To Start/Scale A Newsletter in 2025 with Matt McGarry, Founder + CEO of GrowLetter
00:35:06
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind Marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the if you're not thinking about starting a newsletter in 2025, you're already behind. Why? Because newsletters are the ultimate content flywheel. They're where audiences are built, trust is earned, and revenue scales. Today we're breaking down why a newsletter should be at the core of your strategy. This year we'll cover where to start, how to build your list, why newsletters are so powerful, and how to monetize them effectively. Joining us is Matt McGarry, a marketing pro who's worked with some of the most well known newsletters including the Hustle, 1440, the Milk Road and Mo. He helps media companies and creators turn newsletters into serious growth and he's here to share his insights. Let's get into it. What is up Matt, welcome to the podcast today.
- [01:26]
B
Hey, thanks Daniel. Thanks for having me.
- [01:28]
A
I just want to give everybody a quick rundown. You can give your 30 to 90 second pitch of who you are to set the conversation up for today, but I'll let you take the stage on giving your quick background.
- [01:42]
B
Sounds good. I run a marketing agency called Grow Letter. We work with media and education companies and creators. We help them grow and monetize their newsletters, their email list, sell more information products, sell more ads in their newsletter sponsorship, stuff like that. So we've been fortunate to work with a lot of great media companies like 1440 creators like Cody Sanchez, Sahil Bloom, James Clear. And before this I did a ton of different digital marketing stuff. But I got my start in the media world and the newsletter world at the Hustle, which was acquired by HubSpot, later left that to start what became this agency.
- [02:19]
A
Well, let's get into it. I think one of the most underrated and underutilized assets for most B2B companies and people in general as a newsletter. So like let's talk about like why a newsletter is important first and then go into how to build scale a newsletter.
- [02:40]
B
Yeah, I think having an engaged audience is a huge advantage whatever type of business you have. Right. And there's lots of different types of audiences. I like to break them down into rented audience. So the audience you have on social media or you get from search traffic from Google or Bing, then there's earned media. So going on other podcasts, being featured in a Publication, press, stuff like that. And then there's owned audience or owned media. And that's the audience that you own and control through a platform that doesn't have an algorithm filtering your content from your audience. So that's really the only ones out there are email, sms, meaning text messages and podcasts through the RSS feedback and podcast and SMS are great, but there's some challenges with those. And email is by far the best type of owned audience channel and it's the most valuable type of audience you can have. And so if you can build a growing and engaged email list, you're going to be a lot more successful in generating more customers, more revenue. And usually for most people, a newsletter is the best way to actually build that list, get that list engaged and liking your content. And that's what I help people do.
- [03:49]
A
Let's start at ground zero. I really want to start a newsletter, let's say for myself or a company, or I'm a marketing manager at a company right now, or director of marketing. I want to start a newsletter. What is the first thing I need to do to even get started with a newsletter? What would you recommend?
- [04:08]
B
Yeah, I think you don't need a lot and you want to start quickly and get something out quickly so you can iterate on it. Because really, the only way you're going to know what works is to start getting people on your newsletter, sending them emails and getting feedback on those. So don't spend too long figuring out all the details of being a perfectionist. But you need some idea of, you know, what is the value proposition or the offer of this newsletter? What is it going to give to readers? How is it going to help them? A lot of times I think about this in the jobs to be done framework, like, what job is this newsletter doing for the reader is going to help me get smarter, invest better, save time, et cetera. Those are kind of generic value propositions and you want to be more specific and exact in how you add value to the reader. So I outline what that is. And you also want to outline, like, who's the target market for this newsletter, what's the niche? Sometimes we think about the audience of one, like, who's the one customer avatar that's going to love this and write out a paragraph or so about them. And so if we have that value proposition, we have that niche. Now we're in a good position to create or think about what type of content is going to be valuable to this niche and it's going to solve this job to be done or do this job to be done, I should say. And we want to just, you know, the content will evolve over time as you get feedback on it. The best way to get better at content is to publish content. So we don't want to spend way too much time writing the first newsletter. But I would outline some type of template for your newsletter. Usually a newsletter is going to have three to five sections. It's going to be less than a five minute total reading time. It might have images, it might not include images. It really depends on what your audience needs and how it's going to solve a problem for them. What I like to do is look at other great newsletters. Morning Brew, you can look at the Marketing millennials, the Hustle, 1440 other newsletters in your niche that your audience is reading. Take what sections you like from those and think about how you can use those in your newsletter. And you can kind of build your newsletter like Legos or like a building block. You can take sections that you like, remove sections that you don't like, come up with three to five sections that are good for you, publish that first newsletter, get feedback from readers, and over time iterate and change that.
- [06:10]
A
One thing I think people will think about here is, hey, okay, do I publish once a week, once a month? What do I commit to upfront?
- [06:21]
B
Yeah, the simple answer for maybe 90% of people is probably should start as a weekly newsletter. But it really depends on the problem you're solving. Are you solving a problem that the reader needs content every single day? Maybe it should be daily. If they only need content once a month, maybe it's just a monthly newsletter or sometimes even less. For some people, that's. But that's going to be more rare for most people, it's more of a weekly problem. Even bi weekly is fine to start with, but that's the most important thing. I would always start with less and you could add more newsletters later. And weekly is a good cadence because it's enough to keep people engaged, build a habit of opening every single week. It's not too much where it's a huge commitment that takes up way too much of your time. And so it's a good balance for most people. And then, you know, what we're talking about here is like a newsletter you send on a regular cadence. That's a broadcast email essentially. Sometimes for some businesses, they don't even need a broadcast newsletter and they might have an automated newsletter that's sent as a automated email sequence that sends the same day every week or it sends a series of emails over a month or two. It really all depends on what your needs are and what the audience needs are. But weekly is a good rule of thumb.
- [07:28]
A
And I think most marketers out there are pretty decent writers. They can put together a pretty decent newsletter. I mean, your advice of not reinventing the wheel and basically taking from the wheels that already exist is very smart. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can take sections you like from newsletters also based on your writing style. But I think one of the hardest parts to think about is now I'm going to write my newsletter, but I don't have a list or anything like that. Where do I get started with the list?
- [08:02]
B
And I would try and get people on this list even before you send the first newsletter. Even if you only have 10, 20, 50 people to send to, that's going to help us stay consistent, have somebody to write to every single week so we actually stick with it and grow more in the long run. So I would. Even before the newsletter is published, after you come up with your offer, your niche, your landing page, you set up your newsletter publication. You can use something like Beehive or Kit. There's a lot of great tools out there, but I would just have some type of simple announcement. And so a simple way I see people do this and get 100 subscribers very quickly is they'll go into their contact list, all the emails they've ever interacted with in Gmail or whatever it might be, all the, all the numbers they have on their phone, and just send them a short email and message that just announces that you're starting a newsletter. Here's what it's about, here's why you should join and then share a link to sign up. And that can often get your first 50, 100 subscribers very quickly. And then do the same type of post on social media, whatever social platforms you have, even if you have a small audience. We just want to get some momentum at this point. If you have a business you're working with for, working for, and they have more followers, that's even better, right? But just like put the announcement out there via email, text, and social and get your first 50 to 150 subscribers before you even send the first issue. The next best way is content. Really, like newsletters are a content strategy. And so the best way you're going to grow is through a content flywheel. So you want to publish content on social, whatever the channel might be for your business. If people like that content, they're going to join the newsletter for more content or more differentiated content or more valuable content that they'll get via email and not on social. You know, one thing I like to do is like the fundamentals. So like what is all of our digital real estate like? All of our social profiles? Let's make sure they're optimized to drive subscribers to the newsletter. Our link in bio should be a newsletter landing page, not a link tree because a link tree is going to have five different links distracting them. You just want to send people straight to a great newsletter landing page. Optimize your website to get email signups. All that stuff is super important because we want to maximize the amount of signups we can get from the traffic that we have now, even before we try and get go out and get more traffic or more followers. Another more tactical thing that works really well for converting a social audience into a newsletter audience is pre and post CTAs. I think I've seen you use these and a lot of people do as well. I use them almost every week. Justin Welsh does them very well. A pre call to action pre CTA is simply a teaser that you post on social, usually 24 hours before your newsletter is sent. So if you're writing a newsletter on XYZ topic, you might be like, okay, here's all the cool things you're going to learn in tomorrow's newsletter. You get A, B and C, click this link or go to my profile to sign up and get that issue for free. And so people have, you know, even though they may be able to get that issue later, they have like FOMO if they don't sign up now. And it's a really simple but effective way to get a lot of subscribers from your existing following. And you can also do a post cta. You can be like, yesterday I sent out a newsletter on this topic to my email list. They learn these three things. Click here to sign up and I'll send you the issue after you sign up. Or click here to read the issue. And the issue could be email gated. So people have to enter their email address to actually read that newsletter issue, for example, on your website or on your blog. There's a lot more things. Another fundamental one is like lead magnets. Most people should be creating a new lead magnet at least once, maybe once a month, at least once a quarter. And if that content is good, that's going to attract more people to your newsletter.
- [11:31]
A
I think one part you mentioned here, but we kind of skimmed over, but how important and what should Be on the capture page or the landing page of a newsletter. How can I make it so enticing that I know you? You only have a few seconds to say, hey, I want to subscribe to this newsletter. So what is your advice for that capture page? To get people in.
- [11:55]
B
Yeah, newsletter capture pages, or sometimes I'll call them landing pages or squeeze pages are super important and most people just completely overlook them. You want to be converting at least 50% of your traffic into a subscriber on that landing page. Not on your website because the website's going to have other things on it. But on a landing page you want at least a 50% conversion rate. It's pretty simple to get right, but you just have to get the fundamentals down. Like you have to have a great value proposition. You have to be focused on your niche, your ideal audience. And I find these simple 1 section landing pages work best. We can't give a visual example in the podcast, but if I think Marketing Millennials has a great one, if you go to newsletter operator.com and click the sign up page, you'll see mine too. And so basically the entire page format is you're going to have, you know, a logo on the page somewhere, you're going to have a headline, sub headline form to sign up below that and you might have some copy below the form and you might have a couple testimonials on the page, but that's it. If you're looking at it on mobile or on your desktop, you basically can't even scroll because that's really all you need to persuade people. And if the copy is good in those elements, it's going to convert well. Really all comes down to having a simple page that makes it easy to sign up with little friction and good copy. And the best way to learn from this is to look at examples. Go look at those examples. Go look at Morning brew, the hustle, 1440 is very good. And other newsletters that follow that same format.
- [13:19]
A
I think also one of the reasons why it's so important to start a newsletter is it is actually a pretty good data capture tool as well. Not only as a we do this at the Marketing Millennials, but it's a really good way to get interest based things, more information in your audience so you can deliver better content on the back end. And having a secondary, an email capture and then the secondary form, which usually we see 30 to 40% of fill out the secondary form. But you're getting things like interest stuff, what they care about and we're in an age where first party data is just so important. So if companies are starting this, and this is a one way to get that gold, where you can learn more about your audience, get deeper with the audience, create better content for your audience, create better ads for your audience is a great tool for that. So I just wanted to sprinkle that.
- [14:17]
B
That'S a must do. And the best time to do that, like you said, is immediately after someone signs up for the newsletter. So usually in your landing page, you're only asking for an email address that's going to give you the highest conversion rate. Every single thing you ask for, like a name or a phone number, you're going to decrease your conversion rate by 5, 10% or more. But after they sign up, you can ask for everything. You can ask for their full name, email address, company, et cetera. I mean you can look at the marketing. Millennials has like a good example of that form. Workweek has some other newsletters that have good examples of those signup forms too. I do as well. And it's powerful to not only get data and understand your audience, but the ability to send segmented emails or create email automations that only send to a segment of your list based off of what they care about or who they are is extremely powerful because those messages are going to be so much more relevant than the average email you send to your entire list and they're going to be much more effective that way.
- [15:08]
A
And it's also newsletters are very lower barrier to entry than trying to get a lead. So you could use it as that low barrier into you. You're delivering free content to your subscribers. Hopefully you deliver delivering content that's better than the average out there. But it's a way low barrier to get someone into your world, collect that, build that email list so you can market to them later as well. So I think that's good. I think the next part of it is I started building some of an email list because I've done all your techniques. I've been doing it on social. I blasted my contact list. I got, let's say I got my first hundred subscribers. Where do I go from here? How do I get more engagement in my content? The open rates and click through rates go up and then how do I keep scaling this newsletter so I eventually get more and more people on the list?
- [16:05]
B
Yeah, well, I'll talk about growth first and then engagement second. And so it really comes back to that content flywheel. And what I like to do is you're creating a newsletter every Single week. That takes a lot of work and I like to repurpose that content. What I want to do is publish once and distribute that content everywhere that I can. And so when I publish newsletters, I publish my newsletter once a week. And every newsletter that I publish turns into 10 different pieces of social content. And so basically one of those pieces is just like a summary of the newsletter that I'll post as a Twitter thread, a long post or a LinkedIn carousel. And then from that same newsletter I'll find usually three to four shorter tweets, text based images or LinkedIn posts that I can create that are maybe one paragraph longer, a couple sentences long. Basically one newsletter is five posts on one platform. And then I do a similar post on LinkedIn. So now it's 10 posts across two different platforms. And I also publish that newsletter as a blog post and we try and optimize that for SEO. And so now I have, instead of just, you know, hoping people sign up for my newsletter, we're getting subscribers from Twitter, LinkedIn and search as well. And you can do that across other platforms too. That could be done on Instagram, on threads, other stuff. That's just what I do personally. And then every single social piece of content I publish has some type of call to action. Usually I'm using some type of auto plug if it's on Twitter or X. So after the post gets 20 likes, you know, there will be a call to action that's automatically posted below that. You can use hypefury or Tweet Hunter to do that if it's a longer post on Twitter or a thread or a carousel on LinkedIn. Usually the last tweet or the last image is going to have a call to action to go to my profile to subscribe. If I have some type of lead magnet related to the content that I'm talking about, I'll have a call to action for that lead magnet. That's going to be more effective than just having a newsletter call to action. That's more general and that's where I got my first 10,000 subscribers and where most people do too. It's just doing that social content flywheel and then over time building up that SEO juice where you're getting more traffic from Google that's signing up for your newsletter on your website capture forms. So that's the fundamental stuff. I'm still doing those pre and post call to actions every single week because that's probably where I'm going to get the majority of my subscribers. Another simple thing that I do is I have a virtual assistant. Reach out to people who follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn or connect with me and just send like a nice message that is not super salesy but just says hey, thanks for following me. I have this newsletter on this topic. Here's how I can help you. If you like it, here's the link to sign up. And so that's not a cold DM or a cold message, but it's a warm message. And because they already followed me, they're way more likely to actually go and subscribe to my newsletter. And so I want to get everything out of those followers that I can. It's a little bit lower now, but when I first started like seriously growing on Twitter, I think out of my first 10,000 Twitter followers, between 6 and 8,000 subscribed to my newsletter. So I had a really good follower to subscriber conversion rate. And that's something you want to keep tracking when it comes to engagement. Just naturally posting content on social and getting feedback on social comments, replies, seeing what works and what doesn't is going to make your newsletter content better because you know what the audience cares about, but you want to get feedback from your newsletter audience as well. And so obviously things like open rate and click through rate matter, we could talk about what are good metrics for that and what are bad metrics. But what I recommend is to have a poll at the bottom of every newsletter that just asks people like how did they like it? And so at the Hustle we did this for many years and we would get thousands of responses every single newsletter that we sent. And at the Hustle it was like three smiley faces. It was like happy face, kind of normal, like straight mouth face and then sad face. And then people could click one of those smiley faces and then leave feedback via Google form afterwards. There's now tools like Beehive that have like a built in poll feature where you can customize it. You can say like how'd you like today's newsletter? Was it 5 stars, 3 stars, 1 star or was it love it, okay, don't like it. And that feedback is so helpful because open red and click. The rate only tells you so much. You know, it's just the sending data. It doesn't tell you people really cared about the content or had feedback on the content. So I think having a poll in every newsletter is a must.
- [20:24]
A
One of the most important thing I think you said here is a newsletter is not only something you send out once a month, it's in a way to Create so much content. It's, it's this long form piece of work that can be used to create social posts that you can use to create a blog post. It could use to become a podcast idea. It could be used to, you can make it into so many things. And that's the beauty of it. It's also a content play to create more content. So it's not only sending out one newsletter and then you're done. It has to do. And the feedback loop, you're so right that social is the best feedback loop. I would say that's why probably in the world of like for content marketers or something, you get immediate feedback. The platform tells you through retweets or likes or shares or whatever. The platform you're using works if this content works or not. And with newsletter platforms, even if you have, let's say 50 plus open rate or a high click through rate, a lot different problems count that differently. Some people, some have auto opens like Apple Mail. Auto opens a lot of emails so you can have like a metric that is actually wrong. A lot of platforms, if you have a link on the top, parts of the links are clicked by bots. They're not actually clicked by real people. So you can really, I think you've, you tweeted a post about it kind of today about how newsletters who are monetizing can mess with those metrics too. Because you, you can send out an email and you can, there's so much skewed data that you can use that.
- [22:15]
B
Could be gamed if, if you wanted to game it. It doesn't really benefit you to game it other than just making the numbers look better. But it's important. And so when it comes to sending the newsletter, the feedback I look at is like, what are the poll replies that I'm getting? I want to, if I'm doing the three star, five star, three star, one star format, I want to get 75% or higher five star and I want to get more of those five star ratings. And I want to look at the replies I'm getting from readers. Are they replying to my newsletter, telling me it was good, giving me constructive positive feedback testimonials. That's awesome. And I would even ask people to reply like, hey, if you like this, reply to this. Hey, if you have feedback, reply to this. I would do that at least once a month. And I have in my newsletter and those replies are super helpful. And then with marketing emails because opens and clicks are so unreliable, you know, if you're doing A marketing email, the number one metric matters is sales. You know, doesn't really matter how many clicks it drove or opens if it drove more or less sales. And so it's important to understand the metrics that matter because you can easily kind of fool yourself by focusing on the wrong things.
- [23:15]
A
Yeah. And that's why I think like doing extra things above and go like if you have a virtual event and you plug it in your newsletter and you see how many signups you actually can get, it shows more intentional data than an actual click because you're getting a sign up through it or doing things where you have a lead magnet in the newsletter to download a piece of content or something like that, you could see more intentional things. If you have something behind the click that drives some to somewhere, it could be sales as well, like demoing a product, whatever. But what matters is that conversion rate after. I think also there's so many tools out there now that can tell who hits the website. Are they actually in your ideal customer profile? Are you actually driving people who are actually in your profile? Are you driving people who aren't? And that's a good sign to say, hey, maybe your content and your newsletter is attracting the wrong audience as well. So there's a lot of ways to tell.
- [24:18]
B
And you can do that through your survey. Right. So you can be, I does a good job of this. I don't know about every other tool but like you can say okay, who clicked this link? And then look at those subscribers, even put them in a segment and say, okay, what were their survey responses and are they matching my ICP or not? And that's very helpful. Going back to what you said about the like the flywheel that newsletter creates, I really think that's the main benefit of newsletter is like everything can trickle down from it. It can create a flywheel in your business to grow your audience and create more engaging content. So it does that on social like we talked about, but it also does that with email. Because the reality is most of your sales, if you're selling product, service, e commerce, et cetera, they're not going to come from your weekly newsletter. Because a newsletter should be, you know, 80% or more value based content, editorial content and 20% or less call to actions. Most of your sales should come from marketing emails that are mostly, you know, 80% or more call to actions, persuasion, sales and in 20% or less content. But if you have a good weekly newsletter, people are getting value from it. They're opening and clicking every week your inbox placement is improving, you're getting more of your emails in the primary inbox. That's going to improve the results of all your marketing emails. And so that's one of the biggest benefits people don't talk about is it's going to make all your marketing via email more effective. And if you're someone who just like most businesses only sends marketing emails, you probably have very poor email list retention, you probably have very poor engagement because you don't send them anything valuable via email.
- [25:49]
A
I think that's another thing I'll even add on top of that as a benefit is one of the biggest goals of marketing is to stay top of mind. You have to stay top of mind and you could. Social is one way of doing it but it's, it's very, it's algorithm based. So you are at the mercy of an algorithm a newsletter, you're at the, you can send it anytime you want and all that stuff but you're bringing more top of mind. So once a week or twice a week or once a month you're getting in front of someone who's reminding you you exist with value which is, that's the key part with value which builds more trust. So you in that inbox once a week and if you creating value you're getting in that primary inbox and you like you said and being more top of mind more of the time.
- [26:37]
B
Yeah, there's no better place to do that. You know, you have social, there's filters, paid ads where you got to pay to reach that audience and email is by far the best. Maybe outside of text messages, SMS but that's much harder to get a phone number. And one of the best ways to get or build an SMS list is they get someone in your email list first and then ask for that phone number immediately afterwards. And so it all, it all works together.
- [26:59]
A
Yeah. And I think one thing B2B companies do really poorly is like not using pop ups like you said at the beginning or having a pop up mechanism on their blog or on places to grab an email if they're not haven't clicked the demo yet. I think it's very underrated that just get them in your list and then figure it out later instead of losing that contact for.
- [27:26]
B
Oh yeah, that's one of the biggest, lowest hanging fruit we see when we work with clients is like their website email capture is just bad and we're very easily able to take that the conversion rate from just a website visitor, blog visitor to a subscriber and we're very easily Able to double that or more many times just through simple email capture stuff. And so just having at least four or five different ways on the website, on the blog that people can sign up. A lot of times, like if I wanted to sign up for your newsletter, I have to work to even find it. That's most businesses that I see. And so email capture is so important and it's kind of hard to do that with like WordPress out of the box. But if you use a pop up tool like an optinmonster that gives you these different widgets and pop ups, and it's not just pop ups, it's also like in content, left or right rail of content, different sections of the website, it's going to drastically improve your results.
- [28:18]
A
I think the last part I want to chat about, which is more relevant if you're trying to build a business off of newsletter, is monetization. So what are some ways that people can, if they grow in the newsletter? When should I start monetizing and what does monetization look like for newsletter?
- [28:38]
B
Yeah, so if you're building your newsletter for an existing business, like the answer is immediately, as most people may or may not realize. Some people think, oh shit, I should send my newsletter for a month or so before I have a call to action. But every newsletter should have a call to action, even if it's at the end. But still, 80% of the content is editorial based or value based, not call to actions. And so just having like a promotional section or an ad or a call to action for your business and the newsletter, that's a, that's a no brainer. You should also do email marketing in email automation too. For people that are building more of a media or education company where they're monetized in the audience itself through media products like sponsorships, advertising, information products, subscription, stuff like that. The answer is immediately or as soon as possible. You know, someone's like a beginner and they're building a newsletter to build a business through that or on top of that, we want to do that as soon as possible. The challenge is you have the chicken neck problem. If you're, if you're building a sponsorship focused business, you have to have a large enough audience to sell sponsorships and that's where you have to wait a little bit. But if you're building a media business, you can still sell information or media based products like a subscription, an ebook, digital product, course, et cetera. Even your time, like a consulting call to your audience immediately, even if you have five subscribers and A lot of people are making their first sale through products like that. When they have 5, 10, 12 subscribers. It doesn't take a lot. Now you're not going to be making loads of money, but it's something to give you momentum and keep going. And so what I would do is if I was starting a newsletter, I would, you know, maybe the first 500 subscribers, I'm just focused on content and being consistent. And then after I have that and after I have a clear niche and I have some idea what they want, I would create some type of information based product to sell to them. Even if I'm selling it for $10, doesn't really matter. I just need to get some momentum there. A lot of people just wait way too long to try and make money. They think an audience in and of itself is valuable when it's really not. A business is all based off of revenue and profit. And so you have to do that as soon as possible. And then when I have north of between 1,000 to 5,000 subscribers, if I want to build a sponsorship focused business or I want to have that as part of my revenue streams, I'm going to start selling sponsorships to advertisers. And they may not be for a lot at first, especially with that audience size, but you want to start as soon as possible so people aren't surprised later. And you also learn the business of selling sponsorships and delivering them.
- [31:03]
A
I think that's perfect. I think there's so many different angles. One is actually monetizing through sponsoring any newsletter. Like you said, having advertisers and newsletter, but you have to have some sort of volume for that. But the easiest way to start at the beginning is selling some. Having something where you of course say consulting call, something like that, which you could do tomorrow. You only need. It doesn't really matter. And I always tell people who are doing a newsletter get into the mentality of like, what does it look like to talk to 20 people? What does it look like to talk to 100 people? Because having 100 people in your newsletter is actually like talking to almost like a college class. Having a thousand is like talking to a huge like lecturer hall. Talking to 10,000 you almost had now like a soccer stadium size, talking to 50,000. You're talking to a stadium now. So just getting the mentality is like you don't need who you're talking to. Like 100 subscribers is still a lot of people you're connecting with.
- [32:14]
B
And no one would go to like an event and be like, oh, I'M only talking to 100 people. It's not a lot. And I shouldn't even try and make money from this because it's only 100 people. But people go and they send an email to 100 people on their list and they think, oh, it's too small, I can't make money from this. But that's a lot of people. Even if 1% buy something, you're making something. But you can also often do much better than that because often small lists are much more engaged than large list. So, I mean, don't wait. It is hard to figure out what you're going to sell to people if you've never sold anything before online. That's probably something we can't answer in the time we have on this podcast, but at least you can start selling your time at the very least.
- [32:51]
A
Okay, the last part of this podcast is the question I ask everybody in this podcast is what is a marketing kill you would die on?
- [32:58]
B
Yeah, I didn't think, I haven't thought about this super deeply. I mean, we've, we've probably like hit email over the head a ton on this podcast. And so I hate to go back to that, but that is true. Like, I believe email is the most valuable audience you should, you can build and you should prioritize that over any type of audience growth you have out there. So I can definitely die on that one. Other than that, I'm not super dogmatic. There's certain things I care about. Like I believe another hill I could die on is like onboarding is more important than retention, especially when it comes to email newsletters. If you can onboard someone in an amazing way, you should spend more of your time on that than trying to retain subscribers who are disengaged. And I think that's true for a lot of businesses, not just email newsletter focused businesses. But I'll think about that more. But those are two that I can definitely die on.
- [33:53]
A
I'm glad email hasn't died yet. I mean, I thought it was dead 10 years ago, I thought it was dead five years ago. But 20, 25, it's still thriving. So build your email us today. Lastly, Matt, where can people find you and what you're doing?
- [34:07]
B
Yeah, the best place is newsletter operator.com where you can check out my newsletter, check out my content, and you can find any way to work with me there. And we also have a conference coming up soon in, in Austin and that's Newsletter Marketing Summit, that's also on my website. So those are the main things and hope to see you there.
- [34:25]
A
Cool. Well, thank you so much.
- [34:27]
B
Thank you.
- [34:31]
A
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.