It’s been a month since I rebooted a dead email newsletter for a site of mine that was crushed by the HCU. I partnered up with Thomas Smith on this project because he’s smart and I didn’t have enough time or bandwidth to execute.
I’m sharing all about what we did, what worked, and how much it’s making! 👇
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The Project
I won’t give much backstory, because I don’t really need to. Lets just do this: HCU + this screenshot:
700+ articles on the site, all very decent. Monetized on Raptive. This is key, because being on a premium ad network means the highest possible RPMs for your traffic.
Note – if you’re not on a premium ad network, Journey by Mediavine only requires 10k pageviews per month to qualify. This is what I would target. 10k pageviews per month is only 333 per day…
AND… I had built up a newsletter of 12k or so, just from a pop up on the site.
So, the project is to take all of this content and start emailing the list. Drive traffic to the site and earn off of Raptive ads.
It’s funny… I’ve already written out the whole playbook HERE for a previous newsletter project!
Restarting Emails
First things first, don’t 0 to 100 miles per hour into emailing an old list. You need to warm it up.
There are several things to be wary of:
- In my case, I hadn’t emailed in 2+ years. Many subscribers won’t remember who I am
- As a result, they might mark the email as spam
- Too many spam complaints and your long term deliverability can really suffer
There are also potential deliverability issues with a dormant list like that, which can also affect short term and long term deliverability.
Then, there is the topic of recapturing their interest. Even if they don’t mark you as spam, everyone gets a lot of emails every day. How are you going to stand out in their inbox, and not get unsubscribed?
So, here are a few things we focused on:
- Starting with very broad, engaging topics in emails
- Spacing emails out so we don’t send too many too fast
- Paying close attention to what people are engaging with (and what they aren’t)
I wrote an in-depth tutorial on all of this over the summer when we purchased The Slice email newsletter. I found a tool like Bouncer to be really helpful.
Sending First Batch of Emails
We started with fairly bland, informative emails, paying close attention to deliverability and spam.
We wanted to get to 99%+ deliverability and under 0.1% spam complaints.
After the first few emails, we got a bunch of unsubscribes, but nothing crazy. Deliverability started at 97% and moved up with each email. Spam complaints were very very low, which was the best part of all.
As a result, we were quickly able to move up to one email per day. We explored different types of topics and different types of email formats. What types of content from the site performed best? How many articles and links should we mention in each email? Etc.
Where We Landed
Ultimately, there was a lot of testing. Which I highly recommend. I’m very thankful for Thomas’s measured purpose with this.
One day I messaged him, saying “oh man, we didn’t get much traffic yesterday!” He responded, saying he was trying a new and different email structure, and he had already noted that it didn’t work well. That’s what testing looks like!
So, one month in, here’s what we’re doing: 2 emails every day to the whole list
Email structure is:
- An inspiration-oriented listicle topic as the “lead” story
- then 2-3 highly specific, technical articles that appeal to different segments
Ultimately, this allows people to “choose their own adventure” with some of the more niche topics, and we know that the top level “inspiration” topic appeals to most on the list.
Results One Month In
Deliverability went from about 97% when we started to 99.6%.
Spam complaints are well under 0.1%
Fun fact – we added a line of gratitude at the end of every email. Literally, Thomas added “Thank you for reading our work!”, and that singlehandedly dropped the spam rate in half.
Open rates are around 22% globally.
Click through rates are 4% of total sends. This is based on pageviews rather than sessions, bc most people who click visit 2 pages (and you get paid on every page visit). So, hence the math.
With around 12k ppl on the list, that means that we’re getting around 475 clicks to the website per email send. Two sends per day → lets call it 1k website visits per day.
Here’s an example from December 4th. 1,017 pageviews from email.
Earnings
Over the last 30 days, we have earned $1,350 from Raptive.
By contrast, the site was previously earning around $650 per month from Raptive. Most of that was from Bing and some residual traffic from Pinterest. Here’s October’s earnings:
So, quick math says we’ve made $700 in the first month from our email efforts. I would call that a huge win for the first month. Especially given it is VERY easy to put together these emails and send them out.
What’s Next
A bunch! Let me list them out:
- Move to Kit: This email account was set up in Flodesk many years ago, and there is so much we can do by moving to Kit (previously ConvertKit). We can create email journeys for each subscriber based on their interests, and start targeting specific affiliate products based on this. We’ll be moving to Kit in the coming week or two and I’m very confident we’ll see earnings increase.
- Test 3 emails per day: Sounds crazy, huh? It’s not. Going from 1 email per day to 2 made basically no impact on unsubs or spam reports. The people who want the content want a lot of the content haha.
- Introduce a custom digital download: We’ve already built a digital download that we can sell to this audience. We’ll price it between $15-$30, based on what the market sells this product for. We’ll include it in both email blasts and also in some of the segmented journeys we’re creating. Who knows how it will go!
- Grow the list: Now that we know this works, it’s time to add new subscribers! Since we don’t get much traffic, we’ll have to look elsewhere. Facebook ads coming soon!
Growing the list will be fun. We have some basic numbers that we can use:
12k subs + 2 emails per day = 1k pageviews per day
So, a projection could be:
100k subs + 3 emails per day = 12,500 pageviews per day
At a $50 RPM, that’s $625/day and almost $20k/month.
Yes, some of those numbers will change as the list grows, no doubt. But it still makes a strong case for the path this project is on.
Wrapping Up
There are just so many possibilities once you know how to produce quality content. For this project, email is working great, and it’s totally scalable.
The key is being on a premium ad network and email service provider. Then just spend a little bit of time every day sending emails (or bulk write and schedule).
If you want to learn more from Thomas, I highly recommend joining him over at No Frills Influencer!
