Transcription
Sweet guys, so, um, this workshop today is going to cover a really, really, uh, that first learn about through Nick, who, uh, you can see on video. And then, um, he taught it to, then another guy, Landon, and then a few other people, and they've just been seeing incredible results. And we call it the newsletter strategy. And essentially, what this is, is if you pull the data and you know, you send a cold email, um, usually, you know, you'll get a fairly decent response. But remember, it's still a cold email. So what this strategy is, is more about leading with value and actually building a newsletter. And this works both for B2B and B2C. So I'll, uh, I'll let Nick kind of take the reign. But basically, um, yeah, this guy's been taking in market data and then forming newsletters, uh, and it's, it's super impressive. Um, and Nick, Landon actually showed the strategy too. He actually just sold one of his newsletters two weeks ago. Good question. I don't know. I don't know what time to start. That's why I want to go and find parking. Um, anyway, all right. So, um, Nick, uh, take it away, man. I'll, uh, I'll basically let you share screen and, uh, just kind of go through your strategy.
Sweet, sweet. Um, hey guys. Uh, what I'm going to show you is, um, is just one of the things I thought of when, you know, when you're getting audiences from Audience Lab. I, I thought about it a bit like property. Like, you buy, buy a raw property, and you go, "I can sell that raw property." But what can I do to increase the value of the property so I can sell it for more? And that's how I kind of thought about, um, you know, what could I do with the audiences that I had access to? And so we decided to do newsletters because I've done them before. Um, the other thing I want to point out with my particular strategy here is that the newsletters that I've, uh, newsletters that I've set up aren't actually under my main brand or the main brand of the people doing it. And so the concept, um, is kind of owned media. So you're building up a newsletter that isn't your brand necessarily, but it's a third party that people are engaged with. And then you can obviously promote your brand as a third party. Um, but it opens up the door for you to promote other things that maybe your brand couldn't promote. Um, it wouldn't make sense for your brand to promote. So other, other affiliate types of commissions or things, or boosting posts, or getting sponsors into your newsletter. Um, uh, so anyway, that's, that's the kind of strategy with it.
And also, just out of the gate, you know, when I first looked at this, I, I did what everyone does when they see, um, dollar bills in their eyes, right? And it's like, "Wow, I can get all these audiences." Surely I can just start doing bulk emails to heaps of people. And I tried to go down that route. You know, I set myself up with an Amazon web server, I bought an email platform, and tried to do all that. And only by speaking to industry veterans did I find out I was probably going to get all my domains banned in, like, inside of a week of sending with the plan I had. So I went the other way, and I, I created quite a, you know, a long, you know, relatively longer type of value funnel. So that the people popping out the end onto my newsletter, I knew were highly engaged. And so my, my kind of theory was, how do I get someone who's completely cold at all? Because I've got the audience from, like, they've got intent because it's an Audience Lab's audience. But how do I turn them into a highly engaged newsletter subscriber? And how do I not piss off all the internet service providers and trigger all the, the flags along the way, so that they get there and it's, there's very low spam rates and there's high open rates and that kind of thing? So this is a strategy I went with and experimented, and it worked. Um, maybe there's a shorter, easier way to do it than even what I'm going to show today. But at least I just want to show you what worked for us and what is working for us.
So, um, let me just see if I can share my screen here. Um, actually, share screen, desktop, to this one. So, can I just, Adam, are you seeing my screen, which is just says "The Strategy Overview"? Or are you seeing? See, I can see. Perfect. Okay. All right. So basically, this is the strategy. Just to walk, walk you through at a top level first, and then I am going to go into the details of how we do it all. So essentially, we start with Audience Lab. And what I was doing at the time was I would take that audience and I ran it through another verification service, just to get rid of hard bounces, syntax errors, that kind of thing. Um, so that's what I did at the time. And then once I had that list that was as clean as poss, uh, I could possibly make it, I then uploaded it to Instantly, which is the cold emailer service that I used. But there's others around that you can use. But I used Instantly. So all my screenshots will be of that. Um, and if you don't know Instantly, what that is, it's, it's not a bulk email sender like Mailchimp or AWeber or Constant Contact or whatever. It, you hook up your own Google email accounts to it, your own email senders, and you're only sending out one email at a time. It doesn't go out as a batch. And so it's really like every single person is being emailed personally from an email account. And that is the way these, these cold emailers differ from like a standard internet, sorry, email service provider. So anyway, that's what Instantly, um, did.
And the way I decided to do it, we tried a number of different campaigns, but the one that worked best for us, I'll show you. We actually sent people in that first email that we sent out, we sent them to a survey. And I will show you the email that we, we used. But essentially, the survey, we kind of positioned ourselves as, "Hey, we're doing research." It was about a topic obviously that related to the audience we downloaded from Audience Lab. So it was all, all in context, right? Um, we'd love to know your feedback. Um, here's why, here's what we're looking at. We made it really personable. And, uh, we said, "If you would like a link to the survey, please, please respond and let us know, and we'll send the link over to you." So the first email didn't actually have a link, which was a click here to go to the survey. The reason I did that was when I was speaking to some cold email specialists, they told me putting the link in the first email that you send out, um, is more likely to get it caught up in spam traps or whatever. So I went with their advice, and that's why I, I did the email that way. But we did include one link in that email, and it actually got results. And I'll show you that link a little bit later where we put it. Um, so then what would happen is the next day, they would get a reminder email about the survey. And what we did, actually, in both these emails, what we did was we said, "Thank you for filling out the survey, we're going to give you a free subscription to a newsletter where the subscription is $240 a year." So it was like a thank you, and it was, it was letting them know straight out of the gate that there is a newsletter that they're going to get access to if they fill in the survey. So just making them aware the fact there is a newsletter coming.
And then we would send out a third email. And what we did in the second and third email, we actually included some content from the newsletter. So we reminded them about the survey, and then we said, "By the way, you're going to get access to this, um, newsletter for free if you fill it out as a thank you. Here's an example of something." And then we would teach them something in the email that was from the newsletter. So they were, they were quite, they were long emails, um, and they were educational-based emails. So that's what we did. So they got three emails, all, all through the cold emailer. Now, what would happen is at the end of, like, every day, there would be people would obviously be going through the sequence. And when someone had completed the sequence, that meant they'd received all three emails and they'd opened at least one email and they hadn't unsubscribed. We considered them to be now engaged. Because if someone was seeing three emails pop into their inbox, they've opened one, and they haven't got annoyed by it and clicked and unsubscribed, my, our rationale was, they're kind of at least now somewhat warmed up. We would then get that list, download it from Instantly as a CSV file, and then we would, um, by webhook, port it across to the newsletter service that we use. Now, there's different places you can send. We used Beehiiv. That's actually spelled incorrect. It should be B, it's B-H-I-I-V. It's not Beehiiv spelled that way. It got autocorrected. Um, but we use Beehiiv. And the reason we, we chose that was that Beehiiv has a whole lot of monetization, um, features built into it that make it easy and quick for you to monetize the newsletter. So because there's a lot of other people, um, with their newsletters on Beehiiv, there's a, there's an ecosystem inside Beehiiv where you can boost other people's newsletters. So you can just literally with a widget, you can grab, grab it and go, "I'm going to recommend someone else's newsletter." And if someone clicks on that link and goes and joins the other person's newsletter, you get paid a commission. So it wasn't like I was using the monetization in Beehiiv to make me the money. I was really using it to cover the cost of the whole thing. Um, and so that's what, that's why we chose to go with Beehiiv as opposed to doing it through our own mailer, which didn't have that monetization built in.
Now, when we first did it, um, we were just having to send people the newsletter straight away, and that was good. But since, um, they introduced a new feature where you could now send a welcome email to a segment of people. So all new people can get a welcome email, and then once they've got that welcome email, then we kind of dropped them into the big audience, which is the newsletter. And then we were, you know, sending out the newsletter weekly. Um, you could have, you could, um, do, you know, as many times as you want. You could do it monthly, you could do it three times a week, five times a week, whatever you want to do. But that obviously becomes a cost and a time thing depending on how much, uh, newsletter content you want to send out. So that's the general flow of how we took someone from Audience Lab, brought up in the top left, all the way down to them being a highly engaged audience in a newsletter.
So, did all that effort pay off? So here's where we are now. So we've got 30,000 subscribers who have come through by doing this process, right? Um, and if we have a look at it, this is just a thing from the top. You can see the open rate. It's just a, um, from the dashboard. The open rate, 65.8%, um, was the open rate. Now, we have to take into account that, um, Apple iPhones are now kind of saying everyone who lands in the Apple inbox is an open. So that's an inflated open rate. So I don't want to say we're getting 65.8. It's probably more around 40 or something like that, if you discount that, um, and make a guess of what it is. But the thing is, it's not 20%, right? This is, uh, people who are opening it up. And if you have a look just at the top posts that are listed there, um, you know, that top one there, "How to Get Rid of Those Pesky Sugar Cravings," 71% open rate. "Values and Goals," 70% open rate. So, you know, we're testing different content, um, and, uh, and different headlines. And it's got, Beehiiv has got kind of A/B split tests and all that kind of stuff built into it, so you can try and make sure you get the, the best opens. But that's a slightly different topic, right? So just to show you, there we go. We've sent almost a million emails. Um, and in, in total of people opening the newsletter, we got 660,000 opens, um, which is pretty cool.
Here's another one that we've done that's a smaller one. This is more up to about 4,500 subscribers, uh, right now. And on this one, we're getting a lower open rate. You can see it's only 47%, not the 65, but still, um, a good, uh, a good open rate. Um, and you can see it's been higher. If you look at those top posts, we've had a 52%, a 50%, but it's kind of hanging around that, that kind of, um, mark. You know, here's the other really key, cool thing I wanted to show you. So this is the new welcome email that Beehiiv have introduced. That all new people who get the email, um, get, you know, get added to the newsletter. This, this triggers automatically. So I want you to think, this is people who've come through Audience Lab, they've gone through a three-part email sequence over in Instantly, and then they've been transported across here. They haven't opted in for the newsletter. They've just been told about the newsletter. That these are people who didn't necessarily fill in the survey at all. In fact, I would say 99% of these people didn't fill the survey in. They just went through the sequence of three emails, and they, so they completed the sequence, they opened at least one, and they haven't unsubscribed. That's the criteria. So look at this. Out of this screenshot I've just taken on the smaller one, we've had 4,500 people. That's where we're up to. 2,800 opened. And look at the spam reports. Zero. So I think what that does is pretty much satisfies me that at least the structure that I've set up and that we're working here is filtering out people who would complain, and we're getting a highly engaged audience. Because if you look at the open rate there, who opened that first welcome email at 61.5%? You know, give or take the Apple, the Apple side of things, that's huge. Yeah, it's, it's awesome, isn't it?
Um, I love seeing all of Landon's campaigns as well. We, we peeked at it, and he did a similar thing, like the survey. And he actually had a super high response rate just on people wanting to go to the newsletter. One thing he said that he saw when he was testing it was, it's all about picking a very specific, specific topic and then just really using that as, like, the, the thing of authority. So, um, we had a few questions that were talking about, like, you know, um, the lead magnet that you used, or the survey. Are you able to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, in fact, I'll show it to you. Um, it's coming up in the details. Any, any other questions popped up just before I jump into that? Yeah, quick question on your initial, uh, campaign you showed that got to the 30,000. Uh, what was the spam rate on that? Uh, um, well, that, that was a bit harder because this, this, um, this feature wasn't available then when we did it. It's still very, it's still very low. It was like, it was completely under the radar for, for Beehiiv, because, um, otherwise they wouldn't let us keep on sending. But yeah, it was totally fine. Hey Nick, does it need to be a certain, like, e-commerce thing? Because I have been kind of working on the same thing too, only for college football fans, a particular conference. But I don't know if you'd be able to find a group like that through Audience Lab. Oh, you would for sure. I mean, um, it would probably be a custom model that you need to use for that. But as long as it exists online, you should be able to find it. I mean, unless it's like something where, you know, it's, it's people that are GMs of college football places. I mean, I don't know too much about college football because I'm in Australia. But, um, if, unless it's something where it's like, there's only like a few hundred people that you really want to get on there, it can absolutely work. Um, it's just that there's such a huge fan group for all of these NFL teams or college teams. And if we have insider info, it makes for a great newsletter. But I just like trying to figure out without doing a custom, if there's such a thing in the markets. Oh, yeah, we absolutely could do that for sure. I mean, and, and if you're doing that, it's really just people that are celebrating those teams. Um, one thing I think we're actually doing this for the Medicare space at the moment, about to launch out a big Medicare newsletter, which is going to be super cool.
Nick, I was wondering if you could, like, share a little bit about, like, what the first email looks like? Because I think that was an eye-opener for me, seeing how you actually included like a bit of a snippet, so like to see what kind of value people were getting. 100%. I'll show. I've got, I've got a screenshot of it here. So if we go into the details, I'm just going to now talk about the Instantly part of this whole flow, right? So if you look here, this is again, just one of the campaigns we've set. You can see this one's, you know, sent 18,000 emails. Open rate on that was 50, 50%. Um, and you can see that there's a range of emails that we've had. We're trying different types of things, and the survey one for us worked the best. Um, as I just walked through, this is just showing you Instantly. You can see there's email number one going through, and then because that's step one, and then step two is there, and step three is there. And you can see Instantly allows you to split test different emails to see which one's going to get the best results. So that's what we're obviously doing there, right? Um, and you can just, again, showing you the interface. This is what we're looking at in Instantly, because it will tell you who's completed the sequence, who opened an email, who unsubscribed. So all that data is in Instantly, which is why we can then filter out the people and get them over onto the Beehiiv newsletter. Um, and again, just showing Sorry, mate, go ahead. Quick question. Quick question. Yeah. Uh, on, on the spam numbers, I understand on Beehiiv why it was zero. But they had already gone through a series of emails through Instantly. Uh, how many, how many, uh, spam reports that you have on the Instantly side? Because that's where most of it might happen. Yeah, so I think, I think at, at the heart of what we were doing, we had like 50 email accounts sending out of Instantly, and they were all at 99 to 100% health. And if, and if any of them dropped to like 8% or lower, we would just turn that off for a week and let the internal warming system put its score back up to 100. Whether the Instantly scoring system is actually valid, I don't know. But anyway, I played the, I played their game, right? And, and I kept all the email accounts with 98% and above. Perfect. Thank you so much. Um, and one more question for you, Nick, before you go to the next section. Your, your initial audience size to get to that 30,000 subscribers, how big was your Audience Lab audience? Uh, it was like, it was 100,000. That's really good. Yeah. Thank you. Because again, because again, just to, to really emphasize what I was doing here, I, I was wanting to get responses. And I'm just about to show you that part. Because with the people who filled out the survey, we were then going direct to sale. But for building the newsletter, it was a volume thing. I wanted. And so that's why again, it was like, as long as they completed the sequence and opened at least one email, whether they replied to me or not about the survey, um, and they hadn't unsubscribed, they were the ones that formed the basis of the newsletter. But you can see here, people are responding, right? If you look at that, um, the message underneath. Yep, send the survey over. Here's another one. Yes, sent from my iPhone. Here's another one. Hi Susan, I'm Ruth's mother. I will respond to your questions. Right. So people were definitely responding to the survey. Um, and we were then engaging with them and, and, um, you know, starting a conversation with them. But, um, for the newsletter side of things, uh, we, it didn't matter whether they replied to the survey or took the survey or not, as long as they, again, completed the sequence, opened at least one email, and didn't unsubscribe, that was it.
All right. So the survey itself. So here is the first email that we sent out. And look, because it's, um, uh, this, I, I don't know where this recording goes. I've just blurred out some of the details, right? But you'll basically look at, I've got some spintax in the email. And it's basically saying, oh, you can't see the, the top of it, but it's, it's a strength-based thing for women's health. That was the market it's in. Um, and you can see on basically, you know, the Emma, I'll read it out. You know, whereas if you look at the masculine, hang on, let me go back. I'll give you some context. Just to get on my hobby horse here. If you look at the, the characteristics of, um, masculinity, strength is one of them. If you look at the characteristics of femininity, it's strength isn't there. I, I live with two, my wife and my daughter, who are both powerlifters. They're stronger than most men in the gym. So my daughter, who was 18, she's like, "Why isn't strength considered a female trait?" I'm like, "Good question." So she did a research project on that for her uni thing, and we turned that real-life thing into a survey. And we were essentially asking women, "What do you think about strength? Do you think it is a feminine trait? Do you think it shouldn't be either or? It should just be people can be strong?" And that's the, that was the gist of the survey, right? So I, I won't read all the details out, but there it is. Um, and at the bottom, I want you to see this in the, in the signature on the first email. We put a link. That's it. It wasn't a call to action. It was just the link to the website in the, uh, in the signature of the email. And we still had people clicking on that, going through and taking the survey and responding to us, just from that link. So the reason I'm showing you that is that the advice I received from a guy who just, just runs a cold email agency was that he never puts call to action links, but he does put one in the signature, and they get a heap of clicks coming from that. Um, so that, that's the kind of gist of the, the email that would go out. Um, and do I have another one in the thing? Adam, I don't actually have another one that shows more of the content. I could probably go to, go to one and get one after, but I hadn't. I think, um, what we'll do is we can actually share some ones that were doing with Landon and myself. It's, it's really, I think the framework, if you were to distill it, it's, um, kind of leading in with a, you know, a question. And then it just comes in with a, kind of like a snippet of, like, "Look, if you answer this survey, you know, we actually, as a thank you, you know, and kind of positioning it as, like, the prize, as a thank you, we'll send you the newsletter absolutely free." And then just having a snippet of, like, massive value. And the value content just needs to be hyper-specific. So, um, if this was, like, one person asked if this could be done for B2B, and absolutely it could. We're actually looking at doing that at the moment, um, for a program we have, Exact Match. And, yeah, essentially, it's just about picking one very specific subject. What, what I like about yours is you kind of chose like a bit of a contrarian, in terms of like, you picked something that was a bit thought-provoking. And I think that works really well. The, the vertical, you know what I mean? Because these are people that, well, these are, this is the weight loss niche, right? This is, was that the, you chose? It was weight. Well, in fact, we, no, it was, um, it was all the things that was, it was all it was. So the audience was women in age 35 to 55 who had credit cards, who had a household income of over $90,000, who had an interest in weightlifting or, um, strength training or gym or any kind of sport-related stuff. So we didn't even really go weight loss because we know that, um, our assumption was that, you know, 80% of Americans are overweight anyway. And so if we went for that market, who were doing, we just know so many people in sport who still wanting to, uh, make sure they have weight loss, but we also have a strength training program combined, which is why we went for that. So we knew that they already had an interest in strength, and so we knew that this kind of survey is obviously contextually related to the audience we downloaded from Audience Lab in the first place. Amazing. Okay, what's, uh, oh, sorry, somebody had, and you can see, you can see the line. If you follow the randoms from the top from the bottom up, random, random, random, it goes random. It takes two minutes. And as a big thank you, we're providing participants with our premium evidence-based newsletter. And then we had that in there. So that was just again, the first little dropping the, the clue that they're going to, you know, receive access to a newsletter. So even if they didn't ask for it or complete the survey, they still ended up on the newsletter. Yeah, I like that because I, I think, like, a lot of people are like, "Would see it and they'll be like, 'Oh, this is cool.'" And I'll just forget. But then, as long as you essentially have had them not subscribe or click and open, being able to then monetize that data, I think that's, like, the biggest key, key to B2C cold email. Like, a lot of people, they'll come in and they'll think, "Okay, well, I'll, I'll send this email out to 100,000 people. You know, if 2% buy like a $97 product, I'll be, you know, a millionaire before launch." And it's like, it doesn't really work like that. Because what happens is that first email you send, when you, if you sell something, like, no one, I don't know the last time when I checked my email and it was a cold email and then I just bought on the spot. You know, basically, the first email is just to get clicks and opens. And then you want to move clicks and opens to like a separate platform like Beehiiv, which allows you to, you know, mass send emails out. So I think that's a, yeah, that's a really interesting strategy. And I think it's super powerful. I mean, we know it works because we've already replicated across like a few verticals. Um, I think, uh, let me just kind of, what I'll do is, I'll hit, uh, pause and then I'll, I'll jump. You're going to upload what I upload this, uh, workshop. All right. Yeah, yeah. Just, just a few other more kind of, uh, tips that I used that made things even better. You can see that here's the survey that they went to. So if they did click through, they landed on this page. And you can see that there's a name and email field there. But the thing is, I've already got their name and email. So what I did was I configured the link Instantly so it looked like this. And if you, if any of you are using Instantly, this wasn't easily defined in their help docs. But if you want to look at the, the variables there, it'll carry across the first name. And if you've got it exactly like that, is so if you want to take a screenshot of that, um, that link structure, or whatever platform you're sending it to, because when I use this link in Instantly and they click, that's actually what they see when they get to the survey page. So they don't have to put their name and email in to start the survey. But essentially, what they are doing is they were subscribing themselves and opting in to an email sequence that I then captured again through my email service provider. And that's how we were then going direct to sale in the emails they got after they signed up for the survey, right? So that's just another little tidbit. You can see here, um, down in that link, the, in the bottom of the thing, you can see in that URL thing, that's where I added that. Though it just carried the, the first name and email variables across to the, uh, to the email form, right? So there's that. What, um, oh, I was gonna say, Nick, I noticed on the survey, um, with you said like $200 of value on the newsletter, is that basically saying like, that's what, like, you saying the newsletter we usually charge for, we're going to give it to you for free? Is that the angle you're kind of going with there? Yeah, because if they go to the newsletter itself to subscribe, they can't subscribe. It's got a paywall. So again, I'm just, you go back. Yeah, I'm sorry. Right there where you said "Win a $299 voucher for the," that little blank, what did you put there? Curiosity. For, uh, for, um, oh, because for the product that we sell. Gotcha. The name of the product. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Because you can basically plug in your product as well. So like, you could basically, if you have an e-commerce store and you were doing this, you could actually say, like, "Hey, if you answer this question, you know, we'll give you a 30% off voucher for XYZ." And then you're actually producing sales at the same time. Yeah, you give them the survey, and on the thank you page of the survey, you put them on a cart and you pre-fill the coupon code in that they've got, or you set up the cart so it's already got the discount approved. And then you make sales on the thank you page after they fill in the survey. Yeah, that's super clever. I like how, um, kind of flips the script on that. It like, you know, it makes it, you're not bothering them, you're basically like giving them something. And if it, you know, if the market's right, which sounds like this one was, it it works really, really well. Well, yeah, and we haven't, we haven't yet got to trying it with custom, with custom builds, which I think obviously are going to be even better in terms of the targeting, and, and because being able to feed new audiences non-stop across into into the Instantly flow. Yeah, that's awesome. Um, amazing. Any other questions, uh, specifically related to, uh, the newsletter, in terms of, uh, you know, the copy, anything like that? Hey, I do have a question. Hey, Nick. Yeah. Um, quick question. So the software that you use to validate the emails, what, what do you recommend to use? Well, this is actually the thing, Adam. Back to you, because you guys, since I've done this as well, I'm pretty sure you guys have verification or built into the Audience Lab platform now. So I'm not sure whether that step is even necessary anymore. So we, because I filter, there's a, there's a validation email column that, Adam, correct me if I'm mistaken, but does valid digital, valid, uh, ESP for business email validations? And I've been using that, getting pretty good results. That's why I'm just asking if it's necessary to go through validation, or what kind of results did you get? Like, did it, did it kind of like trim up the last three that typically aren't valid? Or I'm, I'm just a broad question. So if I can chime in on that one real quick, the, the validation signals, how they build is essentially, it's based on ESPs that we partner with directly. So say, like, Mailchimp is an ESP, Klaviyo is an ESP, right? So we're pulling in data from those companies and, and that database, and that's giving us what we call email validation signals. Now, we might see an email when we say "email is validated," we mean that email is active and live. Like, we know that person is real. Um, however, some ESPs, like, you know, sending off, uh, Gmail or sending off somewhere else, it could be, they could say that email is invalid. So I would always recommend going through and doing a second validation, just to be safe. But what you can do is, if you go through and just see anyone that's valid, um, and then you will sort through the date of validation, right? You should be able to then, you know, if, if you want to revalidate that list, you won't be paying a lot of money for the validation. It would just give you that peace of mind, because there may be like 10% where you need to knock off. But yeah, I mean, if it says it's a valid, uh, valid email, and then if it's in a date range of, I would say at least 90 days, where it's like, "Oh, we clocked this email, we've seen this email in 90 days," you should be good to go. But I would still put it through a third-party validation tool just to be safe. Sweet. Yeah, that's kind of exactly what I'm doing, but a little bit further back. I choose like four, four or five months. But what validation tool do you guys recommend or do you use that's fairly cheap? I would recommend Million Verifier. Sweet. Okay. Same page. That's what, that's what I'm pointing towards. Okay. Thanks, Adam. Thanks. Yeah, Million Verifier is really good. I mean, different, different validators are going to have different, like, Million Verifier, I find is stricter than say, like, NeverBounce. Um, so it's really about, like, we're able to see if the email is real. We're able to see if this email is actually active, this person is receiving and sending emails. But different, I'm not a CS expert, but, you know, different sending platforms, like if you send from like Google Domains or Outlook Domains, it's, it's going to be different the way you send it. So, yeah, I always just go through. I think Million Verifier is a good one. ZeroBounce is good. I find it not as accurate as Million Verifier, to be honest. Ugh, Million Verifier, I think is super cheap. I'll find some other ones as well. Um, verification, like the, the more bulk, the cheaper it is. But we do have our own verification signals. So, yeah, you said you didn't verify, right? No, I did verify. Yeah. No, you did verify. You did verify. So, did you use Million Verifier? I used one called, I don't know how to pronounce it. It's run, W-R-E-O-N, Reon. Check out AppSumo for that one. They've actually got a fantastic deal. I did that. I bought the, the biggest level, and I was able to to validate like 500,000 emails for like 300 bucks, and it was really accurate. And they can actually do the, the catch-all emails for like Yahoo, Comcast, Cox, those guys. They can somehow verify it. So it increased the, the level of my list by about 20%. That's huge. Yeah, I mean, Million Verifier, you can get to, you can do like 500,000 for 250. So it's a good deal. Yeah, I mean, and you could probably get, I don't know, maybe I'll speak to them and see if we can do only there. But we already have our email ver, we already have email validation signals. It's just, it depends on if we say, for an example, I know a lot of companies use like a, say it's triple or it's full verified or whatever. That basically just means they're getting verified from, you know, maybe three different verification sources. So it really just depends on how you're sending the emails and what you're sending the emails of. Instantly, you're setting up Google accounts, so it's always best to do a second verification, no matter what, no matter what anyone says. Just because always, always like strict as hell. To give you an idea there too, everyone, what I found happened with Instantly, because we did use all Google, um, essentially, despite doing all of that, almost all the emails toward the end that were going to Outlook or Yahoo were going to spam. So, so someone was an Outlook or a Yahoo user, if someone had a business domain or they were using Gmail, it all went through. So I ended up filtering down my list to just be, you know, to filter out Outlook and Yahoo. I had to do that in the end. But that could be an Instantly thing. It could be because we're only sending through Gmail. I don't know. And Adam, I know that I know that you're kind of doing some work with others for different email platforms now. Anyway, that means we might not even need to do something like Instantly in the future, if you've got some kind of other email sending, um, platform. Yeah, we're working on it. It's, it's not so much the, and, and I don't want to go too much into it, but it really isn't about, um, the platform to send. So essentially, what we built when we built our own ESP was, we rebuilt like the same kind of configuration, something like Mailchimp. But so, you know, we have like rotating IPs and things like that. The hard thing is, is just the domain. That's, that's it, really. So, you know, in theory, we can get a domain, warm it up in two weeks, put it through this ESP, and we can send out millions of emails. But if hundreds and thousands of people, you know, report that same domain as spam, then Google's gonna block it. So that's, that's just like the thing you need to get around. So the thing about Instantly, I, I do like, is it diversifies the risk. It's like a decentralized thing. But I think like once, what we're working on is is figuring out, you know, if, if we're super confident in the list and we're like, "All right, well, the, the, the spam rate is going to be below this score, and we can keep it below this score," then we would look at like, "Okay, cool, we can actually send an P." But, yeah, that's what we're looking at at the moment.
Yeah, I've got only this side to finish up. Or was there another question? I, I just wanted to give some value. I don't know if you guys know this or not yet, but, um, I have a, I have a bunch of domains, obviously, like everybody has. And I used to use Google Workspace, which typically charges what, $20 per account per month. And I've been going through GoDaddy directly and buying the domain and buying the Outlook Professional email with it. You get for $1.99 per month if you buy the 12-year plan. So I'm able to get, I think like 10 to 20 more emails significantly cheaper at an 80% cheaper rate. So I don't know if you guys are doing that, or you're specifically choosing Google because of a different reason. But I figured there, I mean, that's one of one of the hidden, one of the hidden expenses in all of this is, is all the different email accounts you need to, to get. And it may have gone up. I don't think it's $20. Um, I think it's like $1.99 US or something per per account or something in a workspace. Um, but the thing is, Instantly recommends that you don't send more than, more than 30 emails a day per account. So if you're wanting to send 300 emails a day, there's 10 accounts. If you want to send 3,000 emails a day, there's 100 accounts. And so then you've got to add the cost of having all those emails, um, in there. Still, when you think about the cost to get a subscriber onto a newsletter, it's a pittance compared to running ads to try and get them to opt into a newsletter. Absolutely. So right. But then if you've got a way that can do it, I, I just know that there's all, who knows, because I hadn't done enough experiment, but there's a lot of people who go, "No, the only way you should do cold email is by using Google." If you use Outlook or if you use Zoho or whatever it is, people have trouble. But then you don't know what kinds of emails they're sending. If people just go for the, if people are just too a bit too lazy and they don't bother trying to actually add value and they just start going for, you know, they write bad quality emails or they just try and go for a sale straight away, and all those things figure into someone's gonna flag the emails with spam. You know, just an observation. Google, uh, Workspace runs kind of a little bit of a, uh, marketing scam, not really, but it is. So when you see the pricing is $20 and something, if you go in and downgrade your account, each one of those emails actually costs $6 per, per month on the Google side. But they don't show you that. And so you, you literally have to pay for the higher and then downgrade the account. The $6. Yeah, right. Oh, thanks. All makes it, makes it differ. Yeah, yeah. That's huge. So I had a, Oh, sorry. I had a quick question in regards to the, uh, the payment platform that's utilized in the back of the newsletter to autofill the coupon code. What payment gateway do you use? Um, so you were talking about Beehiiv, or you talking about where I was, um, uh, if someone went through and filled in the survey to get, and then after, after they filled in the survey, and you said you should automatically populate the coupon code. Yeah, for the payment gateway, what payment gateway are you using? Ah, um, I mean, I'm just at the moment using Stripe and, um, Stripe and PayPal. And I've used two carts. I used to use StriveCart, but I don't anymore. I'm just using WooCommerce and with a, with a something called FunnelKit, and that's got all that kind of functionality built in. But, but any cart's going to be able to do it. Any good cart, anyway. Yeah, anyway, so this is just a screenshot showing of when I download the CSV from Instantly. It, you can see here, it's easy to find the people who have unsubscribed. You just filter the the column and get all the ones that are completed email open but no reply. They were the, because you can also download the replies. That's how I would get my audience to upload them. And the trick that I did, and I did get a bit of help with this because I'm not that techy, but to get that to get the audience directly into Beehiiv or wherever, I used a webhook to do it. So I use a software called ActivePieces, which is kind of like Make or was Zapier. Um, and what had happened is all I would need to do was copy and paste all the people into a new Google Sheet, and that would trigger an automation and send a webhook across to Beehiiv and add them all in one go. So that's the way I got them. Um.
very quick because I get my VA to do this. She would just go every day, download all the new people from Instantly, um, filtered by the people who fit that criteria, and then just copy-paste those people into a Google sheet. And boom, they'd all be in, um, Beehive. In, you know, all the 10 minutes of work for her to do. So that's how I, I did that. And again, this is the welcome email they got. And I'm just emphasizing the point: 61% open rate, zero spam rate on that first welcome email. That then I heard that somewhere. Theh.
All right, uh, we're back. Um, oh, Nick, you just need to unmute yourself. Yep, there we go. Sweet. Um, so, uh, yeah, Nick, I think, um, just on that, the reason why you do that, uh, kind of thing through through Beehive, because Beehive won't allow you to just upload a manual list that technically hasn't opted into a newsletter. So essentially, what you're doing is you're bypassing that. I think Nick's on mute. Oh, Nick, you're on mute. Sorry. Oh, okay. One second. It, it did. Uh, no, you're good. Um, I guess, yeah, just with the, with Beehive, um, the reason why you do it through like HTTP is to basically bypass Beehive not allowing you to upload lists manually, right? Yeah. So they allow you to upload 10,000 people. Like, just say you come with a list of 10,000, they, and, and you know, they go through the standard verification things that platforms like that do, where, "Where did you get this list from? What page did they opt in on?" That kind of thing. Once you get past 10,000, then, um, then you've got to start, it's not, sorry, it's, it's not an automatic thing. Then, then you're having to go through this rigmarole all the time. Um, whereas because it's coming through the API, you can just, you can just like upload 1,500 a day or 500 a day or whatever it is through the API, and they just land in the account, no problem at all. Okay. Yeah, that's powerful. Well, sweet.
Um, all right, look, guys, we might start wrapping up there. Um, what I'll do. Are you gonna show the survey? Uh, I didn't have a screenshot of it, but it was four questions. And I didn't really think it was just, you know, it's a very simple survey. I mean, it's, I wouldn't overthink that part. Like the survey literally just, it's just three questions related to your business. And I mean, you know, make it where it's actually going to help you as well. And, and people can sniff out if you're just setting a survey to try and get their lead. So try have questions that are well thought out.
Um, all right, sweet. Uh, what I'll do. Question. Quick question. I just wanted to ask, uh, Nick, for the newsletter, once you get them the newsletter, what is your strategy like there? How often do you mail that list? Is it value, value, and then offer? Just curious on how do you monetize? Yeah, I mean, I, I think that's that's another like, it's a deeper topic, right? Because newsletters can serve all kinds of different purposes. Um, but again, that it's value. You're wanting people opening that email all the time. And, you know, we, the way we did it was once a month, we had a direct offer for our particular service. But the rest of the month, what we were looking for was either promoting the newsletters or or taking on sponsors for the newsletter, um, using Beehive's monetization tools or building up our own affiliate, um, relationships with other people. So, um, we've done it for a range of things. But again, the whole point of having it not as our brand as the newsletter was, we chose that strategically because by it not being us and being a third party, it, it could recommend us and sell our product. But then we could sell other products that wouldn't make sense for our brand to sell. Um, so that's that's the reason why we did it. But I mean, gosh, if you build up a big newsletter and you ran a survey and you found that even within your list of people on the newsletter, people had different interests, there's no reason why you couldn't do bi-weekly and do one email that's focused on on this particular issue and another email that's focused on another. Um, you know, but but that is a totally different topic that's, you know, and I, I want to get more expertise in doing that too, because once you've got the asset and you've got that going, that the best ways to monetize that newsletter. Um, you know, we all want to get better at doing that. Yeah, and you can sell the newsletter for a decent chunk of change too. 100%. You can. I don't know what the multiple is exactly, but like Landon, he built his to 5,000 and like flipped it to like, I think it was like 5, 10,000 in like 30 days. It wasn't, it wasn't like a small thing. Um, and that was like, yeah, I mean, that wasn't many subscribers at all.
Um, all right, what we're going to do is we're about to run out of time. So I'm going to. Nick, thank you so much for for jumping in. This has been tremendously valuable. Pleasure. I'm going to do is, um, show you guys where we're putting recordings now. Is we basically are going to chuck them on on YouTube, make them super easy to access. Um, if you look here, everyone can see my screen, essentially. Um, on AudienceSub. we've got our our workshops. And I, I'll send a link out through email. And basically, you've got, you know, the, uh, you've got like the recording, but then we go through and we actually get all the notes from here as well. So it's pretty rad. Um, so we'll send that out and I'll add that through so you guys can watch that.
Uh, finally, you know, if anyone's here and, uh, is anyone here in an agency? Um, let me just quickly. Let me know if you're an agency. Well, yeah, five to 10 multiples, any PR revenue, damn. Um, because if you're an agency and you haven't checked out DAS yet, I would seriously consider, uh, doing it. Uh, if you guys don't know, essentially Nick, a bunch of these other guys that we get to to speak and talk about what they're doing, they're in a program called DAS, which stands for Data as a Service. And essentially, what it is, is we license you all the data you need to be able to do exactly what Nick's doing. And, and there's like 50 plus models that we've seen work extremely effectively inside of. Um, so this is our one-pager, kind of walks you through exactly how DAS works. If you go down to here, there's a breakdown of of if if you are not currently inside Audience Lab, there's a breakdown of of every single thing we have from premades, keyword builder, custom models builder, BB builder, super pixel enrichment, all that stuff. So if you want to know more about that, uh, what we're doing is with our workshops, uh, we actually have Nathan and I think Mark and Adrian as well, basically, they clear out two days of their calendar, um, for really Thursday and Friday, strictly for if anybody wants to discuss DAS after the workshop or has questions or anything like that. Um, I'm into sweet deal. And I always say this, where we're not trying to get too many people in DAS too quickly, if that makes sense. So it's like, it's something where it's like, we may stop letting people in very soon. It just depends on on how how it's growing. And, you know, we want it to be even distributed, everybody can make quite a lot of money doing it. So what I'll do is I'll whack in this link. And if you want to get on DAS and you have questions about DAS or anything like that, I'll chuck it in here and just book with Nathan or one of the guys. Um, there should be calls available for tomorrow and the next day. Um, Nathan, I'm going to use like the main, the main DAS one. And what I'll do is I'll chuck in the, uh, the one sheet as well. I mean, we actually tell people not to do proposals because, you know, we don't, you don't really need to. But, um, this is essentially a proposal that we created for DAS, just so you know what you're getting into. I mean, there's a, there's a lot of aspects to it. Um, and it can seem a little bit overwhelming, but the, the main central theme is that it's, it's just about building something cool. And it's designed for agency owners. So if you're not an agency owner, um, you can still a call, but they may advise you to do something different. We do have other things you can get into if you're looking to start an agency, then it's ideal. But, um, definitely check it out. So I'll chuck the link inside of here as well if you want to check out DAS. And yeah, so, um, we do these workshops every. Oh, okay. Sorry, guys. Uh, the, the link I just posted is, um, if Nathan's link as well. Uh, I'll share this one here. This one's going to go directly to Nathan, who's going to be on standby today. So he's actually blocked out a few spots today if you have any questions, um, that even is after this workshop. So I'll chuck that link in there. Cool.
All right, guys, um, recordings are going to be at AudienceLab.com/workshop. Um, where basically every, every time we do a workshop, we grab the recording, we get the transcript, make it look all pretty, and we upload it to the blog so you can see it. Um, it'll also be on our YouTube on Audience Lab. I'll send this out via email. We're also inside the school. The school is, you know, we're putting content in there, but workshops, we want to be able to share these with as many people as possible because it's pretty, pretty awesome stuff. Um, now, we do these every, uh, Wednesday. We have been doing them Thursday as of late, but every Wednesday is when these go down, unless we have like a special guest like Nick, or we need to change on Thursday. So if you're not on the email list or anything like that, then then just, uh, sorry, AudienceLab.com/workshops. I'll, um, I'll, if you're here, I'll be sending out an email to you with the recording link, so you don't have to worry. Sweet.
All right, I'm going to wrap up there, guys. Hope everyone has a good rest of their day. Um, let me chuck in L one more time, doesn't get lost. And yeah, thank you so much, Nick. This was, uh, this is awesome, dude. Yeah, thanks. It was great. And it's not just sounds good in theory either. Like, you literally showed Landon, and then the guy sold a newsletter in like four weeks. So look, any, anyone, we won't do it, but all you have to do is go figure out what have you got to do to, what would the cost per newsletter subscriber be, you know, when you're adding that on, you got 30,000 people or 5,000 people on a list or whatever it is, when you figure out what the cost of of a newsletter subscriber is, and then you look at what you can build one with this quickly, it's why they assets that you can either hold on to or you can sell to someone else, especially if it's an engaged audience.
Um, what are you using to generate the content? Are you using, are you doing all the content with AI or do you have? I, I, it's a, it's a mixture of AI and human intelligence. So human intelligence. What's that? It's not free. I can tell you that much. All right.
All right, guys, um, wrap it up here. Nick, I, maybe I'll, I'll create a thread in school if other people have questions too, and if they want, you know, consulting help on building their newsletter or anything like that. Yeah, sure. I'm, I'm open to have a chat. Sweet.
Guys, well, there's another model to add to your repertoire, right? If you're using the DAS and you want to figure out how to monetize, how to make money, you can create a newsletter. You know, um, great example is like, let's say Medicare. Right now, we're creating a a newsletter all about Medicare. Uh, the content, you know, we didn't know anything about Medicare, but we, we're finding just topics to to talk about, really. And, um, as we grow that, what we're going to be able to do is then just start jing leads for that, that newsletter. And that's an infinite lead source that you can just tap into whenever you want, which is pretty, pretty sick. So, um, thanks for joining today, uh, everyone. And, um, I'll post the recording out. And yeah, I'll create a little thread on the school, uh, for Nick as well, if anyone wants to like hi or talk about the stuff newsletter. Sweet.
Guys, talk to you soon. Thanks. Thank you.