You know that little thrill you get as you click “send” and that important email you wrote goes off through cyberspace towards its recipient’s inbox.
There is a similar, though slightly more intense, thrill to be had when clicking on a button that sends 5000 emails at once, each one to be delivered into the inbox of a subscriber of a local events newsletter.
It has been a year since my friend and I started a local events newsletter, so today is a good time to write down my experience and what I learned along the way.
It started when my friend told me: “Then we should create a local events newsletter.” We were sitting in a café, and I had just told him that I was no longer interested in marketing his app in exchange for a percentage of it.
“Make something people want” is the motto of the famous startup incubator, Y-Combinator. After chatting online with members of the target demographic for my friend’s app, I had some real doubts about that app being something that people wanted.
A local events newsletter, on the other hand, sounded like something people might want. Who has never heard colleagues talk about some cool event they went to during the weekend and wished they had heard about that event before it took place?
We did a lot of research to find the right email service provider.
We chose MailerLite because we had read that it has a high deliverability rate, which ensures that our emails end up in our subscribers’ inboxes (rather than in their spam folder). Another factor in our decision was that MailerLite was free for up to 1000 subscribers.
The first method we tried for getting subscribers was to order two thousand business cards with the logo of our newsletter, the URL of the signup page, and a QR code for that URL.
My friend (who is an extrovert) would go to the center of the city where he would hand out cards and talk to people about our local events newsletter.
Being more of an introvert myself, I was impressed by my friend’s courage in approaching strangers on the street. However, this method for acquiring subscribers had two major downsides.
The first downside was the rate at which we were signing up subscribers: we would only get about ten subscribers per hour of working this way. And yet, my friend worked hard at it —though occasionally, he would get sidetracked when talking to an attractive lady.
The second downside of this method was that some people who were not that interested would subscribe just to be nice, only to unsubscribe a week later.
Promoting the newsletter to passersby on the street got us our initial 300 subscribers over the course of two summer months.
Not only was this method slow, but it would become less practical as the rainy weather of October and November approached.
So we decided to try paid ads as a new method for growing our newsletter. The reason we hadn’t tried this sooner was because, years ago, I had used paid ads to promote some apps that I had built; it had been rather expensive and unsuccessful.
While the paid ads for my apps had produced disappointing results, the same type of paid ads produced surprisingly good results for our newsletter. In hindsight, the reason is obvious: those apps were not something that people wanted, whereas this local events newsletter is something that people really do want.
With our Facebook ads, our subscriber acquisition cost was about 30 cents. This is in Western Europe, so I would expect it to be more expensive in the United States.
Another reason that our subscriber acquisition cost was so low has to do with the topic of our newsletter: local events are a topic with a broad appeal, so our Facebook ads can be shown to a very large fraction of the residents of our metropolitan area.
This broad relevance keeps the prices of bidding for ads lower compared to a newsletter on a highly specialized topic, which has to compete with many other advertisers for a narrow segment of Facebook users.
Although our target audience is a broad segment of the residents of our metropolitan area, we still used the Facebook pixel on the thank-you page that is shown to people after they subscribe. With the pixel data, Facebook can optimize by showing our ads to people who are like those who have already subscribed to our newsletter. This makes our ads more targeted.
With the low subscriber acquisition cost that we were getting from online ads, my friend obviously stopped marketing our newsletter by handing out business cards. One hour of that kind of work would result in roughly the same number of newsletter signups as 3 dollars of paid ads.
We still, however, had a large stack of business cards with the logo and URL for our newsletter signup page. So we tried the method of distributing those cards in mailboxes.
That turned out to be the worst performing of all the methods we used to get subscribers to our mailing list.
We walked the city and a neighboring suburb for 3 hours. Over half the mailboxes that we came across had a “no advertising” sticker on them, so we couldn’t leave our business cards in them.
We did end up finding a neighborhood where most of the mailboxes didn’t have “no advertising” stickers on them and were able to distribute about 100 cards.
The next day, the number of subscribers to our mailing list had barely changed (after adjusting for the new subscribers attributed to the paid ads that we were running at the time). Clearly, almost all those business cards had gone directly from the mailbox to the trash can (or hopefully the recycle bin).
Monetizing an email list is quite different from monetizing a website. For a website, you can just paste the JavaScript code for an ad network in each of the HTML pages and the website starts displaying ads.
Email is different because it doesn’t run JavaScript. You cannot just paste a bit of JavaScript code in your newsletter and have it display ads automatically.
For our local events newsletter, we realized that we had to sell ad placements directly to advertisers.
We found two different methods for selling ads. The first was to talk directly to restaurant owners and other local small business owners to sell them ad placements in the newsletter.
Our second method for selling ads was to reach out to our audience to offer ad placements directly to our subscribers.
We did this by creating a contact form on our website and adding a sentence at the bottom of our newsletter that says “If you would like to sponsor this newsletter contact us here” (with a link to the contact form).
Initially, we would get messages through the contact form from people who just wanted us to include an event for free. Things improved considerably after we included pricing information directly above the contact form. That worked very well because we started only getting messages from people who were actually ready to spend money on ads.