Email Marketing

The hidden benefit of the disappearing bonus

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A few weeks ago, I offered a 24-hour disappearing bonus for previous and new buyers of my Most Valuable Email course. One of the people to take me up on that disappearing bonus was Al Donaldson, who wrote to say:

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I recently bought your MVE and I’d be keen to see the disappearing bonus offer (before it vanishes).

You asked for my opinion on the MVE course and I have to say I’m impressed. It’s a beautifully simple idea that has many layers to it. And, as you mention, there are an almost unlimited number of ways to apply it.

Thanks for laying it all out so clearly.

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Of course I’m telling you this to promote Most Valuable Email. But I do also have the slightest and lightest of practical takeaways for you.

I curse myself whenever I do one of these disappearing bonuses.

I always get dozens of emails to respond to, personally. And since I make a policy of responding to everyone within 24 hours max, it’s often a hectic, email-blizzard day.

But I noticed that, along with simple requests for the disappearing bonus, I also inevitably get testimonials coming in, like Al’s testimonial above. Maybe those testimonials would have come in time anyhow. Or maybe they wouldn’t.

The fact is, people often need that extra push, that extra bit of motivation, to tell you what they think of your products, particularly when that feedback is positive.

This is nothing more than the most fundamental direct marketing truth — that people often put off all kinds of actions, even ones they mean to take, even ones that align with what they want.

Engagement-baiting emails, the kinds I’m slowly becoming known for, are a very manual-labor way to give people that extra push.

But the testimonials that come in make it worthwhile.

Besides, even though I’m always a bit horrified to send out one of these emails and come back an hour later to see an inbox filled with replies I have to attend to, it’s actually very nice to get in direct contact with my readers.

But now back to Most Valuable Email:

There’s no disappearing bonus today.

But if this course is something you’ve been meaning to buy, you might as well get started today.

If I do offer any disappearing bonus in the future, it will be yours if you want it, since I always make all disappearing bonuses available to previous buyers also.

And you will have that much more of a head start. Most Valuable Email is most valuable because of what it gives you if you use it, not because of the $100 I will get paid.

Besides, you might just like to prove me and every other direct marketer wrong. You might like to take action on something positive today, of your own volition, and not wait until tomorrow, next week, or next year, even without the whip of a deadline or the future pacing of certain ruin and misery that awaits you if you don’t.

If that’s the case, then here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Confessions of a shameless email taker

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Some people just take, take, take. Me, for example.

For years now, I’ve been signed up to the email list of a business owner outside the marketing niche.

As usual, I don’t like to name names, so let’s give this business owner an impenetrable alias. Let’s call him Blimon Sack.

Blimon writes interesting daily emails. I know, because I read them often, and have for years.

He usually opens with some historical anecdote or curiosity. I’m eager to read those.

The second half of Blimon’s emails transition into a “takeaway” — some kind of point he wants to make — and then lead into his offer.

But like I said, I just take, take, take.

I’ve been reading Blimon’s eduselling emails for years. I never bought from him, never even clicked through to the sales page.

Not buying became a habit. Read the interesting historical anecdote… click away.

I had some vague idea of what Blimon is selling. It was the same offer every time. But if you asked me to explain it, I couldn’t really tell you, because I didn’t know.

That is, until one day. That’s when Blimon sent out a different email. He cut out the usual education/entertainment, the first half of his email.

Instead, he simply restated what his core offer is, what he had been promoting all this time. He listed everything that’s included. He stated the price. And he gave some kind of reason for getting it today rather than tomorrow.

I didn’t buy this time either, but I was damn close. I finally had a clear idea of what he sells. It sounded interesting and valuable and reasonably priced.

If Blimon would repeat this bare, “zero value,” pattern interrupt email from time to time, there’s a good chance my resistance would finally crumble and I would buy.

So that’s my “takeaway” for you.

Infotaining, eduselling, Simple Money Emails are great. They keep people reading. And they do get a good number of them to also buy in time.

But there’s always those takers on the list, who enjoy the stories and the gossip and the news, but who are “too smart” to pay for anything.

Of course, not everybody who doesn’t buy is a taker like me.

There’s also a good number of people who joined your list recently, who might not have been around for the long-gone launch of your offer, who enjoy your emails, see that you know what you’re talking about, but whose eyes still glaze over when they reach the B side of your email record, where all the sales deep cuts are.

For those people, all of them, it’s important to send the occasional stripped-down email. Not to hide your offer behind a story or a news item or even a testimonial. But to, as my former copywriting coach used to say, make your offer “on the nose.”

And if you’re wondering why you got two emails from me tonight instead of the usual, well, that’s why.

Perhaps you found this email valuable. ​​If so, you should check out my Most Valuable Email training, because it’s filled with dozens more valuable marketing ideas.

​​You can read about Most Valuable Email it in that other, “zero value” email I sent you. Or directly here on the sales page:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

10 lessons from the ClientRaker promo

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As I write this, it’s 12:36pm on Thursday July 20th, Central European Time, which means that it’s now some 16:36 hours after I finally stopped promoting Steve Raju’s ClientRaker.

Whenever I complete a promo, I like to force myself to look at the dead hulk, lying there on the ground, and ask myself what I see. Sometimes this triggers insights in my little head which I can use on future projects.

So here are 10 curious things I saw during the ClientRaker promotion. Maybe one of them will give you an insight you too can use on a future project:

1. Whenever I sent an email saying that others are buying, and showed proof of that, I made more sales.

2. Building Steve up, and specifically, diagnosing him as a “certifiable genius,” a slightly nonsensical term, also created a spike in sale.

3. I managed to screw up my affiliate links and as a result I could honestly write an email that said ClientRaker is so good I am promoting it without getting paid. From what I can tell, this one email drove more sales than any other. The lesson is clear. Make it clear in whatever way you can that the current promotion is not a cash grab, but first and foremost a benefit to the reader.

4. To date, ClientRaker has only Steve as a successful case study. I called this fact out. Based on the responses I got (I couldn’t tell by the sales), this turned a liability into an asset.

5. I converted about 1.5%-2% of my list. I don’t know the exact numbers because of the screwed up affiliate links for some of the sales.

The only numbers I have to compare to are from my Most Valuable Email launch, which did 4.7% of my list at the time. However, since my list grown since them and since ClientRaker sells for 4x what I sold MVE during its launch, I made more money with this promotion than with the MVE launch. I call that a solid win.

6. I sent out 12 emails over 6 days. My total unsubscribe rate, over the entire 6 days and 12 emails, was 0.4%. I am clearly not pushing my readers enough.

7. Multiple people wrote in to thank me for promoting this offer. Several did it after I wrote an email about my snafu with the affiliate links. And this morning, long-time reader Kasper Lal wrote in, after watching the first ClientRaker training. Kasper’s subject line read “I didn’t believe you…” and the email read:

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I have to admit, when you promoted Steve’s program I was a bit skeptical about that “revolutionary” way of using ChatGPT. Thought it would be just another batch of “expert prompts.”

Boy was I wrong…

Steve dropped so many paradigm changing bombs I’m still in awe.

Thanks for selling me on that chance!

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8. I found it much easier to wholeheartedly promote somebody else’s excellent training that I usually do when promoting my own trainings, which I also aim to make excellent. When I combine this with the sales made, the satisfied buyers writing in to thank me, the fact I don’t actually have to do any of the delivery, then I have to admit I would be happy to do an affiliate promo like this every week if I could. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find somebody like Steve Raju hidden away with a brilliant training that hardly has any previous exposure.

9. I got zero complaints about the emails I was sending, either about the volume or about topics, such as “‘Too many single moms'” in my Facebook DMs.” Again, makes me think I am not pushing my readers enough.

10. I did proactively kick one guy off my list. After the deadline had passed. For doing nothing more than asking me some questions. About ClientRaker. But that’s a story for another time.

For now, let’s get to my offer to you for today:

If you have bought ClientRaker and have gone through the first training, write in and tell me what you thought of it.

In exchange, I will send you the transcript of a call I did with steve, or a part of this call. I had Steve walk me through setting up LinkedIn profile — what actually to put on there, what’s important, what doesn’t matter.

I did this out of laziness, expecting Steve would tell me stuff I already knew. But as Kasper says above… boy was I wrong. Steve told me great stuff I did not know, had not thought about, and would not ever think about, including a tip for that most dreaded part of a LinkedIn profile, and that’s the photo.

Steve’s tips are yours if you want ’em, in exchange for you telling me what you thought of Steve’s first call. Simply hit reply and write away.

I’ve decided to let Arnold Schwarzenegger shortcut his way into my coaching program

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Two days ago I was told that The Austrian Oak, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has started sending out daily emails.

I was curious so I signed up for his list. A fun thank-you page popped up:

“Come with me if you want to subscribe! Check your email! DO IT NOW!”

Good job, big guy. But I wondered about the actual content — will Arnie write it? He’s already had an A-list career as a competitive athlete, a business man, a movie star, and a top-level politician. So why not an email copywriter?

But no. It turns out Arnold employs two editors-in-chief who write the actual emails. Inspiration + diet + health advice. The content feels correct but a bit bland, a bit too earnest, a bit too how-to.

I skimmed the first day’s email. I skipped the second day’s. I’m not looking forward to the third day’s.

The point is unavoidable:

Arnold Schwarzenegger has figured out the importance of daily email, even at this stage of his enormously successful career. Some kinds of influence you just can’t shortcut or replace.

Unfortunately, he’s delegating the writing of the emails to these two editors-in-chief. That’s already a huge minus, because what his audience really wants is something that feels like real, one-on-one contact with Arnie.

To top it off, the content is lacking spice.

For all these reasons, and as a way of saying thanks to the entertainment that Arnold Schwarzenegger provided early on in my life, I’ve decided to take the following dramatic and unprecedented step.
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I offer coaching on writing daily emails. My goal is to get business owners writing daily emails effectively and efficiently. That means:

1. People should enjoy reading your emails.

2. People should do what you tell them to do as a result of your daily emails (Arnold is promoting his Pump Club and preselling his new book, set to be published in October).

3. Writing these daily emails should be manageable, so it fits it into your otherwise busy schedule — in between shooting your new Netflix action show, pumping iron, and trying to mediate the war in Ukraine, for example.

I don’t often advertise this coaching program. I don’t often take on new students. I also don’t accept most people who express interest in this coaching.

But since Arnold has shown so much promise in so many other fields, I’ve decided to accept him into my email coaching program, without the usual screening call I make everyone else go through.

I’m just waiting for word of this uniquely good news to reach him. Once this happens, I will probably get an email from Arnold, and we will coordinate our busy schedules and find a regular time to talk that works for both of us.

I have little doubt that his daily emails will improve dramatically very soon after, and we will make that October book launch a huge success.

And while Arnie and I work to get our schedules synced, I might take on another coaching student.

In case you are interested, reply to this email. Tell me a bit about yourself — who you are, what you do, who you do it for.

I’ll tell you if I think you’re in a place to benefit from the coaching. And if I think you are, we will get on a call to see if it really is a fit. Except Arnold, nobody gets to skip this step.

If it is a fit, then we can start working together towards the goal. As someone asked Arnold once, “What is best in life?”

I don’t have his exact quote in front of me. But he responded with something like:

“Crush your readers’ indifference… see money driven to your bank account… and hear the lamentation of your competitors.” With daily emails, of course.

“So where are we all supposed to go now?”

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A couple days ago, an article on The Verge by David Pierce picked up steam and then really started chugging along, tearing through any obstacles in its path, and demanding the attention and concern even of slack-jawed layabouts who were minding their own business just moments earlier. The title of Pierce’s article:

“So where are we all supposed to go now?”

Pierce was writing about how social media — first Facebook, then Twitter, now Reddit — are dying. And what, he wanted to know, will be next?

I know all about this because I’m a painfully contrary person. After about 20 years of resisting social media, I am now getting on social media full on.

First, I got on Twitter a couple months ago (under a pseudonym). That’s how I came across that runaway Verge article. And I will also most probably get on LinkedIn in the next few days (under my own name).

I figure what others, smarter than I am, have already figured out:

Maybe social media is a cesspool, and maybe it’s now dying to boot. But there are still billions of people on there. I only need a small and select fraction of those people to do very well.

My ultimate goal — as you can probably guess — is to get these people onto my email lists, either this one that you’re reading now, or my new health newsletter. That’s how I can write to them regularly, with something interesting or valuable, and build a relationship, and even do business and exchange money for my offers.

So what will come after Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit? Where are we all supposed to go now?

I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. Because I use a mental shortcut known as the Lindy Law, which says that you can expect technology to survive on average as long as it’s already been around.

Email has been around for 52 years, longer than the Internet as we know it.

Will email still be around 52 years from now? Who knows. I figure its odds are better than any new technology that comes out today or tomorrow.

But you probably knew all this before. What you might not know — something that surprised me yesterday — is that there’s an email platform called Beehiiv.

I promoted Beehiiv in my email yesterday, and I gave people a bit of a carrot-and-stick to sign up for a free account on Beehiiv using my affiliate link.

I got lots of people taking me up on the offer, and I got lots of people thanking me for cluing them in to Beehiiv. That’s the part that was surprising to me — so many people had not heard of Beehiiv before.

I personally use Beehiiv, I’m very happy with it, and that’s why I’m happy to recommend it. As for why you might want to try it for your new newsletter or project, here’s my best case for that:

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Beehiiv is slick and it has a buncha tools that other email providers don’t have. Like a nice-looking website, straight out of the box, that doubles as your email archive. A referral program. Recommendations from and to other newsletters. An ad network if you want to monetize your newsletter that way.

Just as important:

More than any other email platform I’ve directly used or indirectly heard about, Beehiiv is stable and reliable. It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t lock up. It doesn’t fail to send out emails you meant to send and it doesn’t sneakily send out emails you didn’t mean to send.

But really, try it out for yourself and see. Maybe it’s not for you. Or maybe you will love it.

There’s no risk either way. Because Beehiiv is free to start using and to continue using indefinitely — for sending emails and for the website.

You only have to pay something if you wanna upgrade to some of the fancier growth and monetization tools — which I’ve done, because it’s well-worth the money for me, and because I’ve decided to stick with Beehiiv for the long term.

So like I said, I encourage you to give it a try. But—

I know that encouragement, and good arguments, and lists of shiny features, are often not enough to get people to move.

So I’ll give you a bit of a carrot-and-stick too.

Over the past two months, I’ve grown my new newsletter from 73 subscribers to 1,109 subscribers.

And if you try out Beehiiv using my affiliate link, I will send you a recording in which I talk about all the stuff I’ve done to grow that newsletter — what’s worked, what hasn’t, what I plan to do going forward. (I’ll even tell you some stuff I’m planning to do to grow this daily marketing newsletter that you’re reading right now.)

Also, here’s another thing I promise to give you:

I had some deliverability problems early on with my new newsletter. It turned out not to be Beehiiv’s fault. Rather it was that I had failed to set up my DNS right. I fixed that, and my deliverability problems got fixed. But I went one further.

I also came up with a little trick to increase my deliverability going forward and even to increase my open rates.

This trick has nothing to do with DMARC or DKIM records. It has nothing to do with trying to game Gmail. It’s just plain old marketing and psychology. And it’s allowed me to actually increase my open rates while my list has grown quickly and sizeably.

This trick is not complicated — it takes all of five minutes to implement.

And if you take me up on my offer and try out Beehiiv, I will send you a quick writeup of exactly what I did, and how you can do it too, to have the kinds of deliverability and reader engagement that other newsletters can only wonder at.

So that’s the carrot. The stick, or the threat of it, is that there’s a deadline, 24 hours from now, at 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6.

If you’re interested, here’s what to do:

1. Head to Beehiiv using this link: https://bejakovic.com/beehiiv

2. Sign up for a free account. You don’t have to sign up for anything paid. I am counting on Beehiiv’s quality and service to convince you to do that over time.

3. Once you’ve signed up, forward me the confirmation email you get from Beehiiv — and I will reply to you with 1) the recording listing all the things I’ve done and will be doing to grow my new newsletter and 2) a write up of my little deliverability and email open trick. Do it before the deadline — 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6 — and you get the carrot, and not the stick. ​​

Pretentious prick introduces himself

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Hello. My name is John Bejakovic. I was born in Croatia, but I grew up in the US. Since 2015, I’ve been working as a direct response copywriter for a bunch of clients, including many 7- and 8-figure businesses.

These days I mostly work on growing my own newsletter in the health space. I also write these daily emails about copywriting, marketing, and influence. Sometimes, I consult and coach people on things I know about, such as email marketing and copywriting.

And if you’re wondering why I’m telling you all this…

A few days ago, I signed up to a copywriter’s newsletter. The guy’s name is Louis Grenier. I’m not sure how I found him or how I opted in to his list. He sends daily emails, much like this one you’re reading. Except day after day, this guy starts off his emails with “Bonjour bonjour.”

“What a pretentious prick,” I thought to myself.

Yesterday, Louis sent out an email with the subject line, “A cheatcode for non-native speakers.”

“This oughta be good,” I said to myself, and I opened it.

I skimmed the email. Something about how Louis started a podcast, about how he felt insecure at first because of his American accent when speaking French, but how he realized it was actually a competitive advantage.

Huh? There was a kind of fog in my head. Why is this American guy hosting a podcast in French? And what kind of competitive advantage does an American accent in French possibly give you?

I reread the email from the beginning, a little more carefully now.

It only then started to dawn on me that Louis Grenier, though he writes perfectly in English, and though he has a name that could certainly belong to an American, is actually French. “Bonjour bonjour” isn’t the move of a pretentious prick. Rather, it’s a bit of cute personal positioning.

Point being, you have to constantly repeat yourself.

People aren’t paying 100% attention. You’re not the only one in their inbox. They skim. They forget. Plus new people get on your list, and maybe they missed the fact you’re French or Croatian or Pomeranian or whatever.

So you gotta repeat yourself, the core stuff, simply and clearly, over and over. You need to constantly remind people. And you need to constantly introduce yourself to people who just found you.

And now let me repeat the core message of my emails, at least the tail end:

There is something you can do each day to become better as a marketer or copywriter, which I call the Most Valuable Email trick.

I applied this Most Valuable Email trick once at the end of January, and I got a completely unnecessary and unexpected windfall of about $2,900 in sales, with zero work.

I applied it another time and started a buying frenzy even though I had nothing to sell.

I applied it a third time, and got a nice email in response from Joe Schriefer, the former copy chief at Agora Financial.

But even if none of those external valuable things happen, the Most Valuable Email trick is still most valuable, because it makes me a tiny bit better each time I apply it.

And it can do the same for you. If you’d like to start applying this trick today, here’s where you can discover it:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

How to cut your unsubscribes almost in half

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In this email, I’ll write about an idea you’re probably heard before. It might not be anything new to you. In fact, you might not want to read this email at all.

Yesterday I was talking to a coaching client. He recently took over the management of an email list with 50k subscribers.

That’s my preferred position, by the way — a kind of Harry Hopkins-like figure, a back-end advisor and scheme man rather than a front-facing figurehead.

​​Unfortunately I can’t do that with my own emails. Still, I continue to write this newsletter simply because I find the practice so personally valuable.

But back to the coaching call. My coaching client took over the management of this sizable list, and he started sending more regular emails.

At first, he put a paragraph at the top of these emails, warning his audience they would be getting emails more often, along with a link in case they wanted to unsubscribe.

Unsubscribe link right at the start of the email. Result? 50-60 unsubscribes each time.

He then took that paragraph out. Just the usual unsubscribe link left at the end of the email. Result? The unsubscribes jumped to 100.

That’s the idea I warned you about at the start. You’ve probably heard it before.

Really, it’s a tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme. But these days, it mostly gets attributed to Jim Camp’s book Start With No.

Says Camp, never take away your adversary’s right to say no. In fact, go out of your way, make a show, above and beyond, to assure your adversary you respect his or her right to say no. And mean it.

Camp was a negotiator in billion-dollar deals.

In other words, this isn’t just about cutting your unsubscribes. It’s also about making more sales and making more deals. And most importantly, it’s about continuing a valuable relationship into the future.

I’ve repeatedly promoted my Most Valuable Email course in these emails.

Perhaps you’ve decided this course is not for you. Perhaps you’re just not interested in it. That’s fine.

Otherwise, if you’d like more information about Most Valuable Email, you can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Two proven ways to run a city or a newsletter

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I was sitting by the Seine two days ago, part of a trip to Paris with friends. One of my friends looked up and said, in a kind of mock frustration, “All the buildings around here are so beautiful. Don’t they ever get tired of making beautiful buildings?”

Apparently they do. In fact, that same day, we went to visit something very ugly.

In the middle of Paris, on a square lined by elegant, classical architecture, sits the Pompidou Center.

If you look at the back of your refrigerator, where the coils and pipes and wires collect cobwebs and dust, scale that up to a building the size of a sports stadium, paint the different pipes and coils blue and green and red, then you get the Pompidou.

The Pompidou is a cultural center — exhibition spaces and galleries and stages and a huge public library.

It looks shockingly ugly today. ​I suspect it looked much worse to the eyes of Parisians who saw it being built in the 1970s. One of them called it the “incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it — a bit like the black monolith in 2001.”

And yet, people stream into the Pompidou.

In its first two decades, the place attracted 145 million visitors. ​​Five years ago, in 2017, the last year I could find numbers for, the art museum inside the Pompidou had 3.3 million visitors. Untold millions more rode the free escalators to the top of the building to look at the Eiffel tower and Notre Dame and Montmartre, all nicely visible from the roof.

In other words, the Pompidou, ugly though it may be, is also a full-blown success. It’s doing what it’s designed to do, giving masses of people access to art, serving as a kind of new focal point in the city, renewing Paris as a cultural destination.

All that’s to say, there’s two ways to run your city:

One is to give visitors what they want – what they are expecting and demanding, what they have seen on postcards, what they initially came for.

The other is to do something shocking and new — because you have a new agenda for your city, or simply because you got bored of doing the same stuff you’ve done in the past.

The first of course is the more safe, more proven way. But both can work — as proven by the Pompidou.

As I mentioned above, I’m traveling right now. I’ll be away from home for next couple weeks, until May 19.

When I get back home after my trip, I will most likely open up enrollment for the group coaching on email copywriting I announced last month.

Which brings me to my point for this email. The two ways to run a destination city are also the two ways to run a profitable email newsletter.

One is to give readers more of what they came for, what they say they want, or that your research says they want.

The other is to do what you yourself want, what serves your purposes, your desires.

Both can work. But it’s good to be clear with yourself as to what you specifically are doing. This makes your job easier and makes you more effective over the long term.

When I do open up enrollment for the group coaching, I will only do so to people who have signed up to get (and stay) on the waiting list.

If you’ve done this already, there’s nothing more you need to do right now.

On the other hand, if you are curious about this group email coaching, then the first step is not to get on my waiting list, but to get on my main email list. That’s the first requirement I have for all people enrolled in this coaching. To sign up, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Best resource for newsletter growth ideas

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A couple days ago, copywriter and business owner Will Ward, who was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group at the same time as me, forwarded me an email from Quiet Light, an online business broker.

This email described — without naming it – a newsletter that’s for sale right now:

“Social good and transformation” space. 300,000 total subscribers. Paid subscribers totaling almost $50,000 per month in subscription revenue. Started in May 2020. On sale now because the owner is “eager to return to her previous endeavors.” Asking price? $2.55 million.

Those numbers and dates made me wonder where the hell I was in May 2020 and what the hell I was doing then. Well actually, I can tell you almost exactly.

Right around that time, in June 2020, I sent out an email, “Expert advice on how to start an email magazine,” in which I shared an interview with Alex Lieberman.

In 2015, Lieberman started Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter with a summary of the day’s business news.

By 2020, Morning Brew was making $13 million per year in ad revenue. Later that year, in October 2020, Lieberman sold a controlling stake in Morning Brew to Business Insider for $75 million.

Like I wrote in that June 2020 email, I’d been thinking of starting a Morning Brew for X newsletter for a while, where X would be some topic I’m personally interested in.

Had I done it then, maybe today I’d be sitting on a multi-million dollar asset.

I didn’t do it then, but I did do it this past January. I started another newsletter, Morning Brew for X. X is my topic — something I’m interested in, and that I’m not sharing yet publicly. I want to grow this newsletter first and build up a bit of a moat before letting thousands of other marketers in on what I’m up to.

Anyways, as part of starting my own Morning Brew-like newsletter, I discovered there’s already a galaxy of Morning Brew-like newsletters, including many Ponziish Morning Brew-like newsletters that tell you how to grow your own Morning Brew-like newsletter.

My eyes were opened.

For years, I’d been living in the world of direct response-based, daily, Ben Settle-like emails that sell supplements or courses or dog toothbrushes. Most of those daily emails look pretty much the same, sound pretty much the same, and function pretty much the same — a good income or a nice back end.

Meanwhile, you have this cousin industry of people building $2.55 million and $13 million and $75 million businesses, using nothing other than email newsletters.

I’m not ragging on Ben Settle or his ideas. Those ideas, both for growing email lists and for monetizing them, have made me and my clients a healthy amount of money. But I do want to point out how much other stuff is happening in the world of email right now, adjacent to the little Amish world that’s centered on direct response copywriting and marketing.

Of course, this other, Morning Brew-like world has its own Amish tendencies. Also, there are literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of newsletters to choose from right now, all telling you how to make it as a creator or creative entrepreneur or a newsletter operator.

What’s worthwhile in this new world?

I can only tell you the best resource I have personally found. That’s Chenell Basilio’s Growth In Reverse.

Each week, Chenell does a deep dive into the growth strategies of a newsletter businesses — “deep” as in, it takes her 40+ hours of research to produce one of these analyses. For some reason, she does all this work and then gives it away for free.

Some of these strategies Chenell identifies I know about already. Some are new to me. Some are strategies I have no interest in trying myself myself. Some I think are very clever, and they already have me moving.

For example:

You can sign up to Chenell’s newsletter using the link below. It’s an affiliate link — though I’m not getting paid anything.

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I stopped reading a well-known marketer’s newsletter out of confusion and a desire for hygiene

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A couple days ago, I got a newsletter email from a well-known marketer. In what follows, I’m going to pick on this marketer, but as per usual, I don’t want to come across as picking on well-known marketers just as a way of getting exposure.

​​So let me refer to this guy by the impenetrable alias Arthur Lang.

Arthur used to send only one email a week, on Sundays. I would always read Arthur’s Sunday email, because it very often had interesting stories and interesting offers. I also took up Arthur on his offers, on three separate occasions, all in all totaling somewhere north of $700.

A while back though, Arthur upped his mailing frequency, and started sending a second email, on Fridays.

Pretty much since that happened, I find I never read Arthur’s emails any more. For example, I didn’t read his email from last Friday, and I didn’t read the Sunday email before that.

The reason I didn’t read either email is because the two emails are the same, just with a different subject line.

Arthur must be using some clever functionality in his ESP to re-send his Sunday email five days later to people who didn’t open, while camouflaging it with a new subject line.

Only problem is, I used to open and read Arthur’s Sunday emails. And yet I still got the Friday emails. And I used to open and read those too, until I realized, fairly quickly given how slow my brain works, that this is the same email I had read a few days earlier.

After a few weeks of this, I stopped opening both emails. Not out of any kind of irritation or spite, but simply out of confusion and a desire for hygiene. “I must have read this already. This isn’t fresh.”

So my small point for you is, beware of making key business decisions based on email opens. Those decisions can include re-sending emails, kicking people off your list, or determining which content resonates or not.

​​Opens were always flaky. But today, they are more flaky than a pretty 21-year-old girl in a big city on a Saturday night in July.

My bigger point, in case you want it, is to keep your emails fresh or even raw. That doesn’t mean you can never resend or reuse content. But few things are worse for an email newsletter than if your reader imagines, even if he has to squint to do it, that he’s having a real one-on-one interaction with you, only to find unquestionable proof that it’s really not so.

Today being Sunday February 19 means I will likely get a new email from Arthur Lang, which I will most probably ignore.

Today being Sunday February 19 also means I’m already several weeks behind schedule in releasing my training on journaling and taking notes.

I initially planned to call that training Insight Juggernaut, but I decided to rename it Insight Exposed. The reasons for that will become obvious if you keep reading my fresh and even raw email newsletter.

In the meantime, since I’m behind schedule, I don’t have anything planned to promote for you. So let me go back to my Most Valuable Email training. It’s a daily email-writing strategy that helps your emails stay fresh in two ways.

​​First, because of the actual Most Valuable Email trick, and the kind of content it produces, which tends to read fresh.

​​Second, because this trick is actually fun to use, at least for me, and therefore it makes it easy and even inviting to write a new email each day.

In case you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/