Transcription
[Music] Welcome back to Send Better Emails.
All right. Right, James? All right. How's it going? Yeah, good. Thank you. All good. All good. Um, I think we should address the elephant in the room before we carry on. Um, we missed last week.
Oh, did we miss it last week? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, no, that wasn't the elephant in the room. Oh, was it not? No, that's my That's my elephant in my room. Okay. Well, there's two elephants in the room then. Let's address them one one by one. Okay.
Well, the one of them isn't an elephant in the listener's room. It's just in my room. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So, we missed an episode last week. Sorry about that. James was away. Was that the excuse we're using? I mean, we've managed to cover absences in the past through the magic of pre-recording. Yeah. So, James was away and we're unorganized. Does that cover it? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, but what were you away doing?
I was in Scotland. Um, it Wait, is this the Is this the elephant in the room that you're referring to? Second elephant in the room. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I I'm now a betrothed man. You're So, you are away proposing. That's That's a bigger elephant in the room than just missing a week on the podcast. As in proposing to my girlfriend, not proposing to like a potential client. No. No. because we do run an agency and people might confuse the word proposing there. Yeah. Well, you're only likely to get yes in one of those. So, um situations. True. True. Well, to be fair, I either I don't know which one you're referring to there as the more likely no cuz could go either way. So, the Yeah. The the slightly larger elephant in the room, maybe even Woolly Mammoth in the room was that James is now not a single man.
Yeah. I mean, I wasn't before, you know, cuz I think when you have a girlfriend, then you you shouldn't really be going around saying that you're single. No. Okay, fair. And actually, I still have nothing material to show for my engagement. No. And by in the eyes of the law, you're still nothing's changed. So, yeah, because when you have a stag dude, people are like, "Oh, this is like the last, you know, like night out as a single man." So, I actually feel like I'm nothing's changed in that regard. Okay. Don't worry, ladies. So yeah, so not not that big a news to be honest then uh if nothing's changed.
Um how are you feeling about your your upcoming >> well unplanned and stag do your last night as a single man. I love how you went for the stag do and not not the wedding. How are you feeling about the the stag do? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, how do you how do you feel about the prospect of a stag dude cuz your life you're pretty far away from even getting near planning one? Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. I think we're we're not going to be quite like Brad Pitt and Angelina where they were engaged for like 10 years, you know. We're not going to be I think but I think we also want to you know bask in the in the the rays of of being engaged and and not kind of rush on that this period of our lives too too quickly. But >> yeah, obviously the stagd do is the main thing that's like the light at the end of this tunnel and um >> I'm I am looking forward to it. I'm not really a stag kind of person and anyone who I don't think that will shock anyone who has listened to a couple of episodes of this podcast. Um, I'm not like, you know, I I think my idea of a stagd do um is probably different to kind of what people might imagine when they think of a stag do. Um, but yeah, I I'm looking forward to it on the proviso that the person I choose to organize it knows me well enough that they, you know, can can do something that I'll genuinely enjoy. I'm not a big fan of these stag dues that are sort of just like a weekendl long punishment for the person getting married. I I want to actually have a good time because how often in your life do you get the opportunity to >> to to do something like that. So, um yeah, whoever that person may be, Jamie, uh we'll we'll need to >> take heed of the subtle hints that I might be dropping here and there. Okay. Fair. Right. Well, >> let's keep our fingers crossed for whoever that is then. Yeah, exactly. >> Maybe just like a Thursday evening down the murderers or something. That's all you'll get. That would honestly be preferable to to to to I think like for me like the worst case scenario is that like I find myself in Magalof >> or you've been abducted and just like >> like Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which happens sometimes. That's what I mean. It's like a Darren Brown episode where like suddenly you wake up and you're >> Yeah. you're on a a Jet 2 holiday. I had a a friend who it was actually really bad. So on his stagd do he was ambushed and kidnapped. Um but it was pretty dark. Like he was like stripped naked and uh cable tied his hands together, threw him in the boot. Uh and it was it was filmed as well. So >> Jesus Christ. >> This is what I mean. >> It's like actually Well, that's actually a crime. That's not just like a funny stag dude thing. That was pretty traumatic. So >> yeah, that's horrible. And you hear stories of Yeah. like people being tied to lampost and being like told to stay there all night and it's like >> I know. I just I'd rather Yeah. I'd rather actually have a good time on that. Call me strange, but I'd rather have a good time. >> Okay, fine. Well, that's noted. U Okay. And about the getting married part, how do you feel about that? >> Yeah. >> Coming prospect. >> Fine. I haven't put as much thought into that to be honest. But uh um yeah uh I think it'll be good. I think it's I think I you know I'm not it's not going to be a big wedding I don't think. You know I think we'll all be fairly lowkey. Um one thing that I have been thinking Jamie is just like what terrible disgusting puns can I make out of the fact that I'm now engaged? Because of course as email marketers, one of the frequent words we're using is engaged and engagement and how engaged people are. >> And so there's like no end of potential ways that I can announce this news on LinkedIn and I'm just kind of like, you know, I want to make it as gross as possible. >> Yeah. What's your pun count? Have you you said you drafted a LinkedIn post for it. What's your pun count on the LinkedIn post? >> I've done. And so my my drafted LinkedIn post is like the three grossest ways to announce that you're engaged if you're an email marketer. >> Yeah. >> And so there's three kind of core puns that I'm working with. >> Okay. >> Um Yeah. But I've I actually Yeah. I I feel like I feel like one of those one thing that I haven't included yet is the whole proposal pun, you know, like being an agency owner as well. So that that I might have to make it four. >> Four. Okay. That's a pretty good That's a good pun waiting. >> Yeah, >> four puns. >> I've got I've AB tested and finally landed on my preferred version on my winning version even. >> Okay, >> that's a What do you think to that? >> Okay, which one won? A or B? >> Well, I don't It was actually probably like an AB D C A B C D. So >> there aren't enough letters for all the testing that I did. >> Okay. So you Yeah. Okay. So you've got all of those and some of those AB tests you failed. >> Well, I failed. >> Yeah. >> What do you mean? >> Well, maybe you got dumped. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Very true. Yeah. >> Um, okay. I look forward to that LinkedIn post when it comes out. >> Yeah. Thanks. >> Okay. all of this wedding excitement. I've um forgotten what we were going to talk about. Is this >> Yeah, maybe that's just the episode. Yeah, let's talk about Secret Norwich because I don't think we'll need to talk about it for too long. But um this is the local newsletter that we have been running as a petri dish um for uh some of the stuff that we want to try. Um, and yeah, we just thought we'd give an update cuz we we've given a couple of updates on Secret Norwich and haven't done one for a while, but we're approaching a flashoint, Jamie. So, I feel like now's quite a good time. >> Yeah. Nice. Okay. If So, before we jump into the current state of affairs, for those that haven't listened to the previous updates about Secret Norwich, um, should I just give a quick overview of what it is? >> Sure. I'd like to hear your overview. Yeah. >> Yeah. Um because then I figured you all do most of the talking on the other bit. So we want to give the readers some variety in our slightly different monotonous voices. >> Um okay. So Secret Norwich, James and I created a newsletter. Um when I say James and I, I mean James, and I've I've been a supporting feature uh in the background sometimes, not very much. Um, and that it's a local newsletter and our goal was to create something where we could test things that we wanted to test uh on a live audience that our clients might not be comfortable with us testing. Uh, we wanted to demonstrate and test different list growth tactics, for example. Um, and just walk the walk a little bit. You know, we we're walking the walk when it comes to our clients. Um, but we wanted to do it in, you know, own something. We wanted to do it unhindered and and demonstrate our uh newsletter prowess through a live project. Um and so that's what Secret Norwich is. And it's a newsletter that goes out weekly on a Sunday morning. Uh and it the premise is that it's a uh once a week you get a hidden gem or a secret or something super interesting about the city of Norwich. Our target audience of residents of Norwich. Uh although we have people from outside of Norwich who are subscribed and feedback with, you know, the fact that they love it, which is great. It's a bit cheeky. It's a bit irreverent. Uh but it's also uh stacked full of interesting true things, you know, so actual things that happened, history, maybe urban legends, that kind of stuff. So that's Secret Norwich. Um and it's obviously started at zero subscribers, as every single newsletter does. Uh James, what's the news? What's the subscriber count now? >> Uh so it's now at 9,050. So we passed 9,000 yesterday. >> Nice. >> Um irritating. So we send it every Sunday. Um and we're recording on a Monday. So we passed 9,000 on the day that we sent uh the newsletter. But unfortunately, we didn't make it to 9,000 prior to sending the newslet. So I sent it in the morning. So, if id waited until the evening, we would have been at 9,000 and it would have been our first email being sent to 9,000. But I think it was sent to like 8,992 or something, which is uh you know, I don't know. If you're the sort of person that worries about the size of your list, then that might be the sort of thing that you get peeved about. >> Yeah. >> And I do worry about the size of my list because I'm insecure. >> Yeah. Um there's always the argument about where you kind of start measuring from. Is it? Um, so >> Jamie, >> sorry. Okay. >> So, um, so yeah. So that's where it's at at the moment. That many subscribers. Open rate is uh pretty solid. Good click rates. >> Yeah, it's uh really good. Hang on. I don't actually have it as stupidly I don't have it in front of me. Give me one second. I'll just um double check. We're yeah we're >> so we're averaging um over 50% for open rates which is really good because you know as we've spoken about before as the as the newsletter grows as any newsletter grows you will always see generally you will always see a decline in open rates because that's just kind of how the economics of newsletters work like the quality of the list becomes um slightly worsened you know every time you're gaining significant numbers of subscribers. Um but our open rate is currently 54.8 87% on average uh with a clickth through rate of um 9.48% but that has that's over the last four weeks and because the last email was sent yesterday that has slightly pulled down both of those averages a bit. So >> um yeah the click-through rate is is ordinarily above 10%. Uh which is is really good. >> Nice. Uh and this newsletter has been grown in various ways. Uh predominantly through uh a paid ad campaign. Um so we're testing different types of content. Uh the most successful one being a video which uh our um friends over at Indigo Illusions created for us a little animation video thing. James is the starring voiceover artist on that video. M >> um also through um some referrals uh from the audience although not a large number uh but in the first instance it was through organic posting so just spreading the word as much as we could. So >> um that's how that audience got to that size but James all of that aside um what is the thing that you wanted to update listeners on today when it comes to Secret Norwich? Yeah. Well, it's a good time for an update because we we are exactly six months into launching it. So, um we launched it on March the 11th. Um I remember that cuz it was my birthday. That's when we sent our first uh email. >> Oh, nice. >> Um and yeah, we've sent 26 newsletters. Um so we are literally halfway through the year of of sending an email every single week. Um, and uh, yeah, that also means, Jamie, incidentally, that I am further away now from my birthday than um, I ever will be. It's all downhill from here, baby. >> Nice. Okay, good. >> So, uh, yeah. So, 6 months. And, um, we're now at a number of subscribers where we can seriously start to entertain a a premium product, which was always the plan with this newsletter. So at some point we always wanted to monetize it. Um there were questions for us Jamie because what we had heard uh through the grapevine having never really done it in a serious way ourselves is that if you're acquiring subscribers from paid social media ads as we've been doing as you've already mentioned um they will be low quality by and large on average they tend to be lower quality than um than those who subscribe organically or via referrals. Um, which kind of makes sense, I suppose, because people that subscribe organically have have found it. So, there's an implication there that they are already in the orbit of the sort of stuff you're talking about. You're not just ambushing them on their their social media feeds. Um, but of course, this is a case study in how effective um, paid ad acquisition can be in terms of maintaining really good engagement. And it's worth noting that prior to running paid ads, we we were about a thousand subscribers before we started running paid ads, we had the same, if not lower engagement than we do now. So there hasn't been a noticeable difference for us in terms of organic versus paid. and and the the um the result of that is that whereas I kind of imagined that we might want to start a premium subscription later um because the quality of subscriber wouldn't be that good, I'm now of the view that actually 9,000 is enough that we we ought to launch this sooner rather than later. Um so that's what we're going to do at the end of September. Um we're currently recording in the first well the second week of September. >> Nice. Okay. And so we're thinking premium version of the newsletter. So um this is something that we are helping clients through not necessarily launching premium versions of a newsletter because it's not right for every newsletter but monetizing a newsletter like that's the point for us right that's the point of secret knowledge. There are people who um who might start something like this as a passion project um which it is for us but you know it's not a non for-p profofit kind of situation. we are we do want to monetize and and launching a premium offering is one way of doing that and so what is the what is the model that you're working on James when it comes to the uh monetizing yeah so it's basically just extra content um what we've found is that the historical content goes down really really well um so when it was first launched Secret Norwich the idea was that sometimes it might be history but it might also be like a cafe that nobody's heard of that's really good or like a restaurant that's going under the radar. Um, secrets in every sense of the word. Um, but we found through just reader feedback that actually the historical content is what people love the most. This kind of also is consistent with uh the the demographics that we're attracting. Um, when it comes to say our meta ads for example, we can see the age ranges and most of the subscribers we're getting are kind of between the 45 and 60 age group. Um, I suppose if I'm being if I'm stereotyping here that that kind of demographic is is maybe a little bit more interested in history than younger demographics. And so the premium product is going to be very history focused and we're just offering extra content. So, this is a model that worked really well for uh another newsletter that we run called Lazy FPL where we have a free version and then there's a paid version that goes into more depth and this is about fantasy football and we're doing the exact same thing with Secret Norwich. So, we have the free version that will continue to be free. We're not suddenly charging for the Sunday newsletter, but instead we're introducing an additional weekly newsletter that's written by an actual living breathing historian Jamie. um who will go into who will basically do deep dives into um historical stories and facts about Norwich that wouldn't necessarily be appropriate for the free newsletter or might be like a little bit more complicated um but will be super interesting if you're the sort of person that loves local history as a lot of our subscribers hopefully do. >> Okay, interesting. Um Okay, nice. And what we're what we're going to see then, have you got an idea when you want to send it? What day of the week? >> Yeah, probably Wednesday, just because it's furthest away from Sunday. So, if we're sending the free every Sunday, I think it just follows that the the paid one could tessillate nicely and come in midweek. Um, it means that premium subscribers won't have to go longer than 3 days without hearing from us. Um, we're also, I should say, launching a private community as well. Um so again this is something that we did for Lazy FPL which works really well is that we have this community um that sits within the premium product too. So when you join you're not just joining for the extra content you're joining to be a member of this community. We want to kind of invoke this feeling that you're joining a a club almost like a a members club where you might meet people um you might be invited to special events um you might get onetoone interaction with the people that run the newsletter. Um, so we found that that's really powerful. Um, predominant not only because of the initial appeal that it offers when you're deciding whether or not you want to buy, but also because it keeps people premium members. Uh, and this is one thing that we struggled with initially when we've launched premium products is that people receive the emails for a couple of weeks and then maybe they start to think, you know, the invoice comes through again. um the money goes out their account and they think, "Oh, I don't know if this is like completely worth it." But when you introduce a social element, it's really really sticky. It creates sticky experiences because suddenly they're thinking, "Okay, well, if I leave premium, I also have to leave the community and that means that I'm not going to be able to talk to so and so anymore who I was really getting on with or there's an event next month that I really want to go to that I I won't be invited to if I leave." So um the community we found is like brilliant for premium subscriber retention and so I want to introduce one for secret knowledge too. >> Excellent. Okay. So um are you thinking do you know what price we want to charge for this? >> Yeah. So I think it's going to be £5 a month or £50 a year. um which will mean that you get two free months if you go annual um and I was actually speaking to someone I won't reveal the company's name because I you know I didn't ask permission for this person for this information uh to share this information but he runs quite a large membership membership organization they're like a multi-million pound a year membership organization and he was talking to me about how he actually resents the fact that they offer a monthly option at all and that if he could turn back time he would only offer an annual membership. um which is quite an interesting thought experiment and I have not been tempted to do that but I can kind of understand his logic right because if you're only offering annual of course you're going to get fewer subscribers because not everyone can afford that initial outlay but the subscribers you do get are like super high quality and they basically never drop off right whereas monthly if you're only paying a fiverr a month it's easy to just leave whenever you fancy you know and and obviously um that means that you then have to calculate okay what's my churn rate you know it's it makes the economics of running a newsletter way harder or running any membership organization way harder um so there's quite an interesting case that maybe we just offer annual um >> but I think at the moment monthly or fiverr make that bar to entry really low and then annual's 50 quid and I'm going to try and make annual as appealing as possible by offering some extra perks that you don't get if you're only on the monthly. >> Okay, nice. Um, and so we have this idea, we we have secret knowledge, we have the audience, we have um the idea to to kind of offer the pre launch the premium offering. So what is going to be your first step? >> Um, so uh the way that I will launch, uh, Secret Norwich premium is firstly by only telling our most engaged subscribers about it. So, what I would really like to be able to do, Jamie, is um send an email maybe in a week's time, so two weeks before the official launch, and say, "Look, you guys," and this will only go to people that have read like, you know, 90% of the emails that we send them. >> Do you know how many people that is, by the way? >> Uh, I don't know. And because we're subscri because we're acquiring subscribers at quite a rapid rate, it's it's quite hard to measure because of course there are some people that have 100% open rates but they've only received two emails. >> Yeah. >> Um so uh yeah, I haven't done a search yet for like how many people have 100% open rates and who have also been subscribed for at least say two months. Um I I would estimate it's probably going to be around 2,000 people. >> Okay. Um, so I basically want to contact these 2,000 people and say, "Look, you guys, uh, brilliant. You're super engaged, blah blah blah blah. I'm going to give you early access and for a limited time only. It's going to be a cheaper price. Um, and um, you can join uh, Secret Norwich Premium before anyone else." and get them in the community, get them interacting, get them, you know, posting content in the community, get some early feedback on these premium emails that we'll be sending them, and then basically use that activity and that feedback to sell premium into the more casual subscribers. Um, so when we do roll it out, we already have 50 people in the in the Facebook group, you know, we already have testimonials about how excellent the um the extra newsletters are. you know, we already have this stuff um to use as sales material because I think the worst thing is that you you share, you know, your premium community in hopes that people will join and they take a quick glance at it, see that no people are in there or, you know, three people are in there and they get scared off and think, I don't want to be the only person in this. Um, so having a thriving community from the very start, I think, is important. And really the only way you can do that is by giving the users you trust the most exclusive access first. >> Okay, nice. Good stuff. >> How do you feel about that? >> Well, I feel great about that. Um, yeah. No, that sounds good. Okay. Um, is there anything else that I've forgotten to ask here that you want to bring up in this episode about Secret Orange? >> Um, I don't think so. All I would say is that um the whole reason we're doing this obviously you know Jamie and I want this to be a profitable endeavor and we want the secret knowledge to stop being a money drain which is what it is at the moment because we're running meta ads. We pay for the platform. We're using my time to send these emails and we've been doing that for 6 months. So there's you know some not insignificant investment that's gone into this. So, we want it to make money. But really, the most illuminating thing about launching a premium product when it comes to newsletters is that by monetizing our audience, we're then able to calculate exactly how much a free subscriber is worth to us. You know, because if we just and we do some tabletop maths here, you know, if we take 100 free subscribers and we know that we can convert 2% of our free subscribers into premium. So let's say that's two people out of every 100. And we know that on average those two people are going to spend50 each subscribing if they take out an annual membership. So that's £50 a year each. So £100 a year. What that tells us then is that if we spend one pound uh per free subscriber, so we spend £100 to get 100 subscribers, we're going to make that money back on premium memberships across the course of a year if if that follows. Hope hopefully that isn't I appreciate when you're listening to this. It's a little bit tricky to visualize. Um but we effectively break even on that on spending £1 per subscriber uh after a year. Um so based on that we can then figure out all kinds of stuff. You know all what we know for example is that if we're only spending 50p on a subscriber suddenly we're making a profit on those subscribers right? If we're we're spending 50p on average per subscriber and suddenly we're doubling uh the money that we're making on them if we're converting at 2%. It also means that if we're able to increase our premium conversion from 2% to 3%, suddenly we're profiting even if we're spending a pound on these subscribers. So, you know, what this does is it gives us the the knowledge to be able to make informed decisions about how well our meta ads need to be performing. you know, how much we can invest in um organic growth, you know, how much we can invest in other channels in order to grow, you know, like for example, cross newsletter collaboration. Um so all of these questions suddenly they the answers to them stop being speculative and start being concrete. And that's really really powerful for us because if we know that we can make a profit on subscribers so long as we acquire them below a certain threshold theoretically there's no reason why we can't just spend you know, as much money as we possibly can on acquiring them because it's almost like you know we know that eventually we're going to see a return on that investment which is like an incredible position to be in and why newsletters as a business model are so appetizing in my opinion and and that's exactly what's happening with Lazy FPL by the way, we know how much we can spend on a subscriber and it means anything under that expenditure is like a huge success and we'll just continue to do it. >> Excellent. Cool. And uh one last question for me. Are there any any other routes to monetization that you're that you have in your mind to explore in the future? >> Yeah, I mean advertising is the obvious one. um and that I I have not ruled out um advertising and if an opportunity came my way I would certainly entertain it. Um but you know we uh if if we were able to convert at 2% for example and we have 10,000 people on the list it means we're already making about £1,000 a month through premium um memberships. It would be very difficult to make that through advertising for a weekly newsletter if we were sending daily. I I suspect that advertising would be a much more important part of how we monetize. But, you know, if we take a 20 C uh CPM uh which is cost per 1,000 subscribers that we're reaching, that means even with 10,000 subscribers, the maximum we could charge for an advert is £200 a newsletter, which, you know, if we were able to do that every week, which I think would be a minor miracle, um we would we would make 800. Um, so for me in a in a strange way, Jamie, one of the most compelling reasons to start running ads in Secret Norwich is because then we can offer an ad-free experience to premiums. And in a way, it almost incentivizes us to to to find, you know, to make the ads a little bit annoying and a little bit invasive because at the moment, I'm not advertising ad free as a bonus for paid subscribers because we don't run ads in the free version anyway. So it's not an inconvenience that people would pay to be rid of in a way that you know YouTube you pay for ad free. Um that's not something that I I can offer here. So running ads would be good just because then we can use the lack of ads as an upsell for premium. I don't see it as like a huge monetization channel for now though. >> Okay. Interesting. Okay. Great. Is there anything else? >> I don't think so. No, I'm I'm I'm happy. I also feel like this has been a long long episode. I don't know. I haven't looked at the time, but Oh, yeah. We're past half an hour. So, >> yeah, it's cuz you wouldn't shut up about your engagement. >> Yeah. Sorry. >> Okay. Well, thanks. This has been a secret Norwich update. This has been Send Better Emails. Thanks for listening. Uh, and we'll we'll catch you next time. >> Yes, we will definitely update about how this has gone. I think that's um really important. So, we'll there'll be some accountability here as well. >> And if if if the monetization experiment fails, uh we will still update you. Um, this this has been the whole reason we've been doing this, right? We've been building this in public and some things work and some things don't and we'll tell you the story either way. >> Yeah, indeed. >> Perfect. Thanks everyone. >> Cheers folks. >> Bye. [Music]