Email Marketing: Newsletter Engagement, Acquisition & Monetization w/Emanuel from Stacked Marketer

Hey, Manu, how are you? Hey, thanks for having me. How's it going? I'm doing well, thank you. I'm really pumped to have you on. I know we were talking briefly before this about how newsletters right now are really hot with the hustle getting acquired and morning brew getting acquired. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about that. Maybe we won't, but really want to kind of introduce you to everyone because I think you're doing some awesome things. So you are the founder of Stacked Marketer and you mind kind of telling us about your background, Stacked Marketer and so on? Sure. So I started Stacked Marketer about almost three years ago. So it was in April, 2018. The name wasn't Stacked Marketer back then. It was more focused for affiliate marketers. Over time, it evolved into something for more performance-based marketers. It's a strange thing as a lot of affiliates that I knew from back in the day, they also switched to things like e-commerce and lead generation or like building their own companies and products. So I guess it kind of came natural that our audience evolved that way. And yeah, and Stacked Marketer is the only focus that I have now. I've been enjoying doing it for around three years, as I mentioned. So yeah, glad to be here. Awesome, man. That sounds great. So you send five days a week, right? So it's Monday through Friday, is that correct? Yeah, Monday through Friday and 1 p.m. Central European time. So depending on time zone differences, daylight savings, it might be a little bit different for North America, but in the morning for North America. Okay. And I want to talk about the content one minute, but to the point that you just mentioned, so five days a week, Monday through Friday, and at the same time every single day, is that coincidental, is that intentional? You know, and if it's intentional, can you explain why you do it every day at the same time? It's definitely intentional. So at the very, very beginning, we didn't schedule, we just sent it as it was done and, you know, kind of around the same time as now, but it wasn't scheduled. So if we finished at a kind of an odd time, let's say like 12.35 instead of exactly 1 p.m. our time, we just send it out. But we've noticed that we kind of want a more structure and we want to make it a more predictable habit for our readers as well. So the second part is probably the more important one. So we explicitly say, even on our homepage, it gets sent at this time, Monday to Friday, so people know when to expect it. It's hard to know how much it matters, but we did have people who, you know, when they didn't get their email for whatever reason, whether it was because we had some time off during the holidays, or because it went to spam or something like that, or, you know, their email bounced, whatever issues they had, they got in touch and they're like, hey, I didn't get my email today. So apparently in the end, it does create a habit. And I would definitely say, easier for you as the content creator to do it on a certain schedule, I would say at least, and then better for any reader to know this is when they get it, they can make time if they really want to read it every day. Awesome. Yeah, it makes full sense. So kind of quickly touching on the content, I want to ask you about the first email that you send when people subscribe, and then kind of the ongoing email. So in the first email, like the confirmation or welcome email, is there anything unique or interesting that you're doing there? Are you asking people to reply? Are you asking people to move it to the inbox? Are you doing anything there to try to get people to engage? Yeah, definitely. So we know for sure that the first email ends up being more or less the most important one. So right now we have around 80% open rate on it. So if you get the, like 80% of the people are gonna have that contact with the first contact with you there, which is, you know, it's massive. So because of that, we tried to do, we tried a few different things. We tried to get replies. We tried to get people to drive to their primary if it's not there, get some sort of click, get a survey filled in as well. So what we've noticed is that we tried to do too many things at once. And now what we focus on is like the highest value compared to friction ratio, which is a click for Gmail specifically. So getting a click from a subscriber is, it makes it like, if you already have a good domain reputation, it makes it very likely that you're gonna head into their inbox or like their updates, whatever folder they have, where they get a notification when you send their email. And that's, you know, highly valuable. Of course, I assume a reply is more valuable, but getting a reply is much trickier. And if you tell people to do too many things at once, they might not do any of them. So what we do is we put the request for a click very high. And then of course we do have some phrasing, you know, in case you're not, it's not in primary, you can do this or hit us up, things like that. But just that click difference, just like encouraging that click makes a world of a difference. That's awesome. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And then talking about the content that people receive, you know, every single day of the workweek, is that curated content? Is it unique content? Is it both? You know, how many people on the team that are responsible for creating and kind of curating that content? What does that look like? Um, it's, I would say around 90% curated content. And then there's a few different types of curated content. There is obviously the latest news. So, you know, if something happens with any major social media platform, any sort of marketing news that applies in general to people, to advertisers, that's kind of hard to predict. Then we also try to always look for some sort of actional tidbits of information, case studies, you know, guides, structures like that. And sometimes we create our own. Like I said, it's like 90% curated. I would say around 10%. We kind of connect the dots ourselves and make our own piece, of course, with some sources. And we also include, aside from that, we still, we also have a section where we want to include a little bit more like fun, semi-off-topic things, you know, like funny Super Bowl ads, you know, it's relevant to some marketers, but not a huge thing. Or some tech things that are relevant to, like a lot of marketers are in front of their computer a lot. So tech-related news might be relevant for them and stuff like that. So we try to bring the news first, then more actionable advice. And then some, you know, easy to digest, off-topic, uplifting content. Awesome, that makes sense. We talk about tools and then also the team. Like what tools are you using to facilitate like workflow, to actually send the email? And then what does the team look like? Like you teach yourself and then what do people do? Yeah, so there are two more people who write the content. So like curate and write it. So I kind of wear more hats as it is when you're a smaller team and you're the founder. But obviously I can also do when it comes to content creation and curation. But there are two people who mainly focus on that. And they are basically the ones that provide the daily content that you see. It's just like, you know, if they take some time off, there's an emergency or there's some other ideas where I step in. And then when it comes to tools, it's kind of very simple and maybe underwhelming for some people. It's just, we use Google Docs, like Google Drive and Google Docs, shared docs, comments there and everything. And Slack, of course, for real-time communication. But that's essentially it. I think it's maybe like, it's more interesting to know that we have like probably over 100 links that we check every day. So kind of like sources and carefully going through the sources is probably more important than the tools that we use. Awesome. And then what email platform are you using? Right now we use Campaign Monitor. We started off with ActiveCampaign and not that it's bad or anything, but Campaign Monitor had two big benefits for me. And just to kind of say it outright from the beginning, it wasn't deliverability, it wasn't open rates and stuff like that, but it was more functionality focused. So when it comes to ActiveCampaign, it was, they only had their drag and drop editor or like they have coding option, but you cannot code a template then use like drag and drop or like a visual editor from that, at least back then. So the issue that created was that when using a drag and drop editor, it's very easy to go past the 102 kilobytes approximate limit that Gmail has. So emails got clipped very often and we send, you know, like we have a lot of texts in our emails, a lot of images sometimes. So we had a problem that we were limited by ActiveCampaign or like its style of workflow to how much content we can put in the email and usually less than we would have wanted and subscribers want. So we looked for an alternative where we could make a custom HTML, but that turns into a visual template that we can edit easily. Campaign monitor was one of the options that had that. We liked that, so we tried it out. And then the second benefit less important or like, you know, something that you think about less, but it's still nice to have was user permission and management. So ActiveCampaign, if you gave someone permission to send emails to a list, they would see all the data. And that, I mean, it's not like you don't trust people. It's just like you need one time something to happen and then, you know, bad things happen. While with campaign monitor, people can send the list, they can see stats, they can see everything except personal data of people who subscribed. And that's really useful because then you can really segment things pretty nice. Like in our case, there's someone who can do sponsor reports and see open rates and click through rates, but not who actually clicked and what happened. And I don't have to go in there. I don't have to worry that someone, you know, sees your email and then they leak it or someone. I trust people that we work with, they wouldn't do that. But as I said, it's kind of like, if you can have that feature, why not? And it seems like a no brainer. Yeah, totally get it. It makes sense. If you're comfortable, can we talk about metrics, like list size, average engagement, things like that? Yeah, sure thing. So right now we have a little bit over 17,000 subscribers, all marketers, obviously. I mean, I guess maybe some people stay even if they're not in marketing, but that's what I would expect. And in terms of engagement, so I can share two stats, two interesting stats at least. So we're working on a yearly report where we will publish these stats in the newsletter as well, probably in the next couple of weeks. But the average open rate for 2020, so last year was 46.6%. And that's like unique open rates. So like 46.6% unique people out of our subscriber base opened them. And now what I'm, you know, a little bit even happier about is that so far this year, we are averaging 48% openness, which is pretty nice. In terms of click-through rates, it didn't increase or anything. It's still around 7% out of the total subscribers. So like 17,000 times 7%, whatever that number comes up to. And again, like unique people clicking on it. That's one of the things that I noticed with email. And I think we had a conversation somewhere, or maybe with someone else, but total opens versus unique opens, that's a significant difference. Yeah, no, 100% agree. I appreciate you sharing that. Can we talk about like segmentation and like, you know, how you kind of suppress people? Like, you know, do you hit your whole list? Because I mean, almost a 50% open rate, it's huge. Are you hitting like a 30 day, 60, 90 day engaged? How often are you kind of unsubscribing or suppressing people that are not engaged? What does that look like? So we do send to the whole list, but we have an ongoing process to clean up the list all the time. So what we do is we look at new subscribers that are disengaged and try to re-engage them. And if they don't re-engage, we just, you know, take them out of the active list. So what we try to look at is, did they open any of their first five emails? That seems to be like a good number. What tends to happen is either someone is, you know, the average email reader. So they open between, you know, 20 to 80%, depending on how relevant stuff is for them. Or they just don't open any emails. It gets lost somewhere. And we want to get rid of those that get that kind of, you know, where our emails get lost in their inbox for some reason. It tends to happen if like, it happened a lot when we did Facebook ads. So early ones are very important also because of deliverability issues. As you scale, if people don't open their first emails, that's really bad for Gmail. It seems like it. So we do that. And then we look at last two months, if people didn't open any email, which maybe we can do more aggressively, I don't know. But if someone didn't open any email in the last two months, so older than two months and didn't open any email, we also send them a re-engagement email explaining, you know, we saw that they didn't open. If they want to keep reading, just click here. It tends to happen once in a while that there are people who use hey.com or like an inbox that blocks tracking and they just click or reply, hey, please keep me in. And that's fine. We don't need to see that they open. We just want them to, we just want to make sure that the emails don't go in a black hole or something. But then we have this every single day, right? So we send an email today and then later today, we look at these stats again. Like it's an automation basically to segment these people and then take them out of the active list. Because otherwise, at the very beginning, obviously I made the mistake of doing it once in a while. But you, it doesn't work so well because yes, you clean up and you might have better results, but you miss a lot and then the more you miss, the less, the worse it gets. And it becomes kind of like unpredictable what happened. While with this, it's kind of clear. It's like every day this is ongoing. It makes sense. So I appreciate that. Can we talk about acquisition of subscribers? Like what are your top channels? I know you have a referral program. Is that a top channel? How successful has that been or not been? The referral program specifically was very good when we started off. Then it kind of slowed down and now I would say picked up again in the past four or five months or so. So I think like we used Upviral at the very beginning and one downside of it was that even if someone was subscribed to our newsletter already, they had to resubscribe to be able to get the unique referral link. So our referrals kind of suffered there. But at the very beginning, everyone who wanted to refer did that. So it still got us a big boost. And then in November, October of last year, so started in October, probably put it live in November if I remember correctly, we switched to Sparkloop which has direct integration. So basically if someone signs up to the newsletter on our website, if someone signs up to the newsletter in any way, Sparkloop integrates directly with Campaign Monitor and automatically assigns them a unique referral link. So now everyone can be a referral from the very beginning which helped us a little bit more. So now I think it's around 20%, 25% boost from referrals. So compared to organic, which is useful, can be better and probably should be better. It's just like there's only so many things you can do at once. And another extra thing that helped us a lot, and I would recommend to anyone who has a newsletter or is gathering emails is time-limited giveaways. So essentially what we can do is, let's say March 1st, we wanna give away an iPad. We just say like, look, every person who refer is a referral ticket and the winner is announced tomorrow. And in Sparkloop, it's really nice because you basically just do one click and you have the winner. Like they just say, you know, choose a winner for this sort of giveaway from this timeframe. And those usually help quite a bit. Then aside from that, what worked really well for a new subscriber acquisition is advertising or cross-promoting with communities, other newsletters. So finding engaged readers usually comes from other engaged sources. What didn't work so well, which I would want to, I wanted it to work better, but it didn't, is Facebook ads, for example. Even in situations where we had a good cost per acquisition for Facebook ads, it was still half of the people were inactive. So we had to try to drive it really low. And then last year, around summer until end of the year, like towards November or so, when we just decided, okay, let's do something else that makes more sense. We had even like up to 75% of the people inactive from Facebook ads. I don't know why we didn't, like it was very clear what the, or like not very clear, but it was not misleading. Let's just say that, like it was not misleading at all what the value proposition is. So I don't know exactly why that was the case, just kind of disappointed with Facebook ads. So I would say, try to do cross-promotions and advertise in other newsletters or similar kind of communities that you're trying to build. And then aside from that, put together a referral program. You can do it with a lot of tools in like 15 minutes. Just think of the prizes before. So that's, the work is thinking of the prizes and the steps. Technical integration should take you like less than an hour. Awesome, man. No, this is great. You've brought a lot of value. The last thing I wanna end on is monetization. I don't need or wanna know your numbers, but can you talk about how you monetize it? Is it through sponsorships? Is it through info products? Is it through summits? How do you monetize the newsletter currently? Yeah, right now, we only have one monetization model and that's sponsorships. And even that is like one single ad in the newsletter. So any sort of sponsor gets like 100% share of voice, as you would say. So they get the logo at the top of the email. And then in the middle of the email, there is a native content, sponsored content that almost always be right for them. So it fits, it integrates well with the email in general in terms of voice, tone, look and everything. So that's the only model right now. Of course, there are different things that you can do. And I think more ads is possible, but there's a question of how much content that is or completely organic do you have? And how many ads? How do you put them? Managing more sponsors is always a tricky thing as well. So for now, that's the only model that we do. And I think it works pretty well still, depending on your audience size and your audience type. I still think it's probably like one of the top two, three options to do. Yeah, that makes sense. And the last question on monetization, the fact that you serve marketers and founders and brands, do all of your leads for sponsors come from the newsletter? Do you do cold outreach? Do you do anything else to drive actual sponsorships? Oh yeah, that's interesting. It's 100% inbound. So every sponsor is a reader basically, which is really nice. I know we probably can and should in some way do inbound. But it's again, like in terms of how much effort and how much reward would we get from that. And what we've kind of noticed over time is like we did try some outbound. Of course, we weren't great at it. At least the results didn't show that we were great at it. But the thing that like the equation or like, yeah, let's call it the equation that looked, that pointed us in the right direction was more readers means that there are more possible sponsors for one point, which is good. And then even if it's not more sponsors right from the newsletter, whenever someone else hears about us in some other way, we have more readers that they can reach. So it's like more readers generally will equal better advertising opportunities, whether coming directly from the email or from other outbound approaches. Yeah, no, this makes so much sense. Well, thank you so much for all the time and the insight. You know, there's a lot of gold nuggets here, so I really appreciate you sharing. In terms of people that want to learn more about you, want to learn more about Stacked Marketer, is it the website, is it Twitter? How can people find you? Whatever you mentioned, I'll put in the description. So if you're listening to this, you don't have to remember, I'll have all the links. But how can people find out more about you or the newsletter? For the newsletter, just stackedmarketer.com. It's our homepage where you can sign up. And if you don't like it, unsubscribe, that's fine, no problem. And then also at Stacked Marketer on Twitter. It's the social channel where we're most active and everything. So I would say, you know, if you're very active on Twitter, maybe check that out. If you want to check out our emails, stackedmarketer.com. Awesome, yeah, and I'll make sure that I tag you on Twitter when this goes live and I post all the links. So we'll be good, Michael. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. It's nice chatting with you. Likewise.