Alyssa Dulin
Appearances
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Can I get some feedback on my newsletter idea?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Can I get some feedback on my newsletter idea?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yes, this is a great question. Starting with your subscribers that are coming onto your list, remembering that these are all humans. I know sometimes we see email addresses and we are trying to get the biggest list as possible. Sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle that like, okay, these are real humans. How do I take care of them as my subscribers?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And so I think first electing those subscribers, doing so in a way that's consent-based, making sure people want to be on your list and not trying to grow your list in a way that's all about growth. Sometimes that can get us in tricky situations where we're like, what if I run a giveaway for a Peloton if you give me your email address? And then it's like, well...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Those people just wanted a Peloton. They don't really want your newsletter. How do we get them excited about your newsletter? And then once they're on the list, what's the experience? Are you welcoming them? Do they know what to expect? How often are they hearing from you? And all of those things cover a lot of email deliverability issues where emails might start going to spam.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
you're having trouble. Some of that can get into technical weeds, but a lot of times it comes down to the humans, the subscribers. Are they happy on your email list? Do they want to be there or are they marking you as spam? And then that's causing some issues.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I do. I do recommend it for a few different reasons. But one of them is just that we have some short attention spans, a lot of us do. And we're signing up for things and we're forgetful. And so if you don't have a welcome email, someone might sign up to your list after they see something you've posted somewhere or they're excited about something they've seen.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And then a week goes by, they've lived a whole life in a week. And then they get your email and they're like, what is this? Who is this person? I've forgotten this name. I don't know. I didn't sign up for this. Marcus Bam. So that welcome email is a great way to right out of the gate. Someone just signed up. Welcome them. Remind them, hi, here's who I am. Here's what to expect.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I'm going to be sending you X, Y, Z over X amount of time. And another little pro tip in that welcome email, ask them to reply to you. It boosts your sender reputation and will help with deliverability. Because that helps the algorithms that like Gmail and Microsoft have think, oh, this is a wanted email.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
It's kind of a one-to-one email where they're emailing each other instead of seeing you as this bulk sender who's just blasting out emails to a bunch of people at once.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So let me know if this is getting too deep, but essentially your subscribers are sending signals to the mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft that tell them whether this is wanted email or whether it's spam email. And those signals are replying. That's a really positive signal. Opening the email, positive. Clicking, positive. So that's all great and you want to optimize for those.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Some negative signals are not opening emails after time and time again you've sent them emails. Or the most negative one, marking a message as spam. So you want to avoid those signals and optimize for those positive ones where it's showing engagement.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
That's a great question. I think I would do exactly what you're doing, which is starting small with people who you know or they've signed up to be there. And then you should be in a really healthy place. And then from there, if you grow your email list with, again, people who want to be there, then I wouldn't expect to see any issues.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Where I see some issues sometimes is if someone starts that very first send off with a larger list that's maybe gone cold. You haven't emailed these people in a while. You might be like, well, this is from my other side hustle I had two years ago that I kind of abandoned. I collected an email list back then, but now I'm starting a new newsletter. Let's send them this new newsletter.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
That's when I see things start to go wrong and that very first send does not go well. So again, I think as long as you're starting on a really healthy starting point with people who... want to be there, a smaller list, and then you ramp up slowly, then you should be good to go.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Definitely. Yes. Everyone has their own take on this and there isn't a one size fits all. But what we can learn from the top senders is that consistency is key. You know, we all have heard that before. Making sure people know what to expect. So I'm thinking of like Tim Ferriss's Five Bullet Friday is one of our most successful newsletters. Everyone knows you're going to get it on Friday.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
It has the same format every week. There aren't a lot of surprises and it's consistently great content. So whatever you choose, I would just keep it consistent, whether it's a monthly roundup or it's a weekly digest, whatever it may be, just stick to it. And then when I think of our top performers, they keep consistent formats, like I just mentioned, making it easily skimmable too.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
You don't want someone to open it up to a wall of text or a huge list of links. When I think about Tim Ferriss or Sahil Bloom or James Clear's weekly newsletter, I think of the fact that, again, they keep their format consistent every single time. And it's really easy to see the heading. There's some information below, maybe a call to action with a button or an image. And then another heading.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And then you can kind of pick and choose where you want to give your attention. So you don't have to read the full newsletter if it's not all related to you. So those would be my two top recommendations are consistency in the frequency and then consistency in the layout and making it really easily skimmable.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
It's such a loaded question because really over the last like five years, open rates are a tricky metric. They're not totally accurate. So look at open rates more directionally than this is exactly true. 50% of people open my message. Definitely not the case because, again, I'll keep it really high level, but an open is triggered whenever a little invisible pixel in the email is loaded.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
It's basically like an invisible image. And that tells us and mailbox providers the email was opened. But people like Apple, Apple Mail, the app on your phone or your computer always will automatically open emails on your behalf as like a data privacy protection measure. So you're gonna see a lot of people that say they're opening emails and they're not really opening emails.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yeah, which is a bummer, state of email marketing right now, but... The way that I find open rates to be helpful, again, is looking at trends. So if you are used to having a 40% open rate and then one week you send it and it's 32% open rate, then you know something's definitely going on here. But to get to your original question, like how to have those high open rates.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I would say some important things are your subject line, making sure that it's grabbing people's attention. You also don't want to be clickbaity. I know sometimes you can get into that territory, but still like making it engaging so that you stick out in the sea of other senders. For some people, adding like an emoji is helpful. Other people... doesn't work as well.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
That's another thing is get to know your audience. Everyone's audience is different. Run some tests. In Kit, you can A-B test your subject line. So you could do one with an emoji, one without an emoji, and see which one wins. That's one really important way to increase your open rate.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And I think other than that, it's really just providing consistent value so that your readers are excited to go open that message every week. I think you can build trust that way, get people excited for your email versus... if you start to kind of drop off inconsistency or quality of content, then it's going to be a situation where your subscribers aren't like jumping to open the email every week.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I have a few ideas here. That's one thing my team at Kit helps people with. And I've seen such really creative ways to do this. One of my favorite ways I'm seeing people do this lately is using Instagram to create reels that are related to your newsletter, whatever it may be. And then using, I think the tool a lot of people use is mini chat.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
where you say like comment newsletter, and I'll send you a link to the newsletter. So grabbing people's attention that way is really great. And then it kind of goes along the second idea. You could kind of combine the two, which is lead magnets, or I've seen people do this through an email course. So let's say,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
You're an interior designer and you say, I have a five-day redo your house on a budget course. Sign up here and I'm going to send you an email every day. Or you can do email challenges. Things like that really get a lot of subscribers. And then they'll start receiving your newsletter and then They know you better. They know your content better.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
You provided them free value off, you know, right at the beginning. And that sets such a great subscriber relationship up when you've already given them free value. They're usually a lot more loyal to your newsletter, really engaged.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So I would think about how can you create some sort of free email course challenge, something like that, where you can get people opted in and then they'll start receiving your newsletter.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Let's say it's the new year and you are a copywriter coach. You can say, join me in this writing challenge in January every single day. I'm going to send you an email with a prompt and I'm going to want you to journal on that prompt. Send me a reply. Let me know how it went for you. And then you can start to include people's replies in future emails, which is really cool way to tie things in.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
On the money side of things, budgeting, you could say, we're going to do a no spend budgeting challenge together. Sign up for my email. I'm going to send you a daily email with tips on how to budget better. I mean, I'm like, I would sign up for that right now. Somebody offered that. So just sort of like in sending daily short emails where you're giving someone a prompt or a challenge.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And then it's really fun again, if you can tie it into like reply and tell me how it went or go to this Facebook group. We're all going to be in this group together and we're going to talk about the challenge, the prompt of the day and create some community there.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yes. Such a great question. I love chatting about this. It's our recommendations tool.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
You might've heard us call it the creator network, but I would say that it's helpful to kind of think about it through your subscribers perspective and think about which creators would be helpful for them, which newsletters would be helpful for them that might be within the same niche as you, which is great, or it might be an adjacent niche.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So for example, I have a newsletter on there that's all about email deliverability and And I have people who recommend me who are focused on email marketing strategies. And our content's a little different, but it's similar niches. Or you might have like a lifestyle blogger recommending a food blogger. And it's very related. So I think that's what I would look for.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Luckily, our Discover tab, you'll see it in the app where you can kind of browse through people. I actually was looking at it today. I was like, wow, this has gotten so robust. Where if you start to find people that make sense for you and you recommend them, it's
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
That page is going to get way smarter and now it's going to show you people that we think you might be a good fit with based on who you've started to recommend. Because we're going to look at, well, who are they recommending? You might like who they're recommending. Oh, very cool. Yeah, the tool will kind of help surface that. some ideas for you.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And then from there, just wanted to call out that once you start using it, which it's been awesome for me, I don't even touch it. And I've gained like 2000 subscribers, really doing nothing. Some people, those numbers are way higher. It's crazy.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
But I would say, make sure that you have a welcome email set up for anyone who comes through recommendations because they're really not going to know anything. much of who you are at all. So that introduction is so important. And then you can also set up an automation that will automatically remove anyone who comes in through recommendations and doesn't open an email within X amount of days.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So you can decide whether you want that to be really strict at 30 days or 90 days, something like that. So those are the two big things I would recommend to have success with it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
They do. They receive an email to letting them know. Okay, yeah. So there are multiple kinds of things because we want the same thing like for people to find connections and to recommend each other. So the interface is going to give them plenty of prompts and let them know that you're recommending them, which is great.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
It helps a lot of people get visibility that they wouldn't have had otherwise or like get to know other newsletter operators that they wouldn't have known previously.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
One, I'm thinking of like two things. If you're like me and the weekly consistency is hard, there's a tool I've used in the past that's so helpful, which is setting up an evergreen newsletter. And again, this is like, if you're not able or you're having a hard time keeping up that
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
writing an email every week you can set up an automation where someone will subscribe to your list and then they start they get email one and then it says one week later send them email two and you can have this just set up take the time to write the content for as many weeks as you'd like and then it's there it's running in the background for you and And you can go update the copy anytime.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So you definitely want it to be pretty evergreen to where it makes sense in any month or whatever. But I've just found that so helpful for me to make email more sustainable for me. So if you're a person who's like always wanted to do this, but it feels scary to commit to it, look into doing an evergreen automatic newsletter.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yeah, it's called Deliverability Dispatch. Honestly, it's not getting a lot of love right now. But if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, I want to learn a lot more about email deliverability, we do have a podcast. It's called Deliverability Defined. That we have here at ConvertKit, or it now, it's me and my coworker Melissa.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So we have a few seasons out and highly recommend checking that out if you're interested.