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Send us a Text Message.Owning your audience through an email list gives businesses control over nurturing leads and driving repeat traffic/sales.Ryan Sager, co-founder of Who Sponsors Stuff, joins me to discuss this and much more.He discusses how email marketing is seeing strong growth as a channel for content distribution and readership, including amongst younger demographics who are adopting newsletters. Major brands are investing heavily in building out their own media operations through n...
Owning your audience through an email list gives businesses control over nurturing leads and driving repeat traffic/sales.
Ryan Sager, co-founder of Who Sponsors Stuff, joins me to discuss this and much more.
He discusses how email marketing is seeing strong growth as a channel for content distribution and readership, including amongst younger demographics who are adopting newsletters. Major brands are investing heavily in building out their own media operations through newsletters and content.
Ryan also shares how email does not need to be immediately transactional - it's about gradual engagement over time.
https://www.whosponsorsstuff.com/
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Welcome to “It’s Marketing’s Fault”. If you are a marketer, this phrase is familiar to you. Sometimes deserved, often times not.
Don’t worry, you are among marketers and friends here. Let’s discuss how to do marketing the right way.
As a side note, in episodes 1 through 37, this was Build That Podcast. The goal of this podcast is to help you learn how to use a podcast to grow your business and expand your influence. If you go back and listen to earlier episode (those before November 2023) you will hear that name. Don't worry--it's good content too. :)
All right, welcome to It's Marketing's Fault, the podcast where we discuss how to do marketing the right way.
Now, I'm your host, Eric Rutherford, and I'm thrilled today because I have with me Ryan Sager.
He is co-founder of Who Sponsors Stuff, which tracks, you know, who sponsors email newsletters and brings the data straight to you.
He's also launched and grown major print, web and email products for the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Time and other major brands.
Ryan, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me on.
It is my pleasure.
Now, just as we start off, I got to ask in the age of in this age of TikTok, in this age of reels and YouTube and all of this other stuff, do people really read email newsletters?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we've seen a huge growth in newsletters as a channel for content distribution and for people to read, especially a younger generation, I think, has really adopted them.
You know, if you think of who subscribes to like Morning Brew and the skim, you know, a lot of people have adopted this as a primary means of sort of summarizing the Instead of the noisy social channels and the sort of never ending feed of a Twitter or Facebook, they've really adopted something that has kind of a beginning and an end and newsletters are a primary way a lot of people read.
That is fascinating, especially fascinating when you mention that even younger generation, because if I was just guessing, I would not have thought that particular demographic fell into the newsletter readership.
Would you elaborate on that a little bit?
I'd love to hear more.
Yeah, I mean, I think if you're thinking of, you know, Generation Alpha or whatever, that might be primarily TikTok and stuff, you know, a lot of people don't get on email seriously these days until they are out in the working world.
But you know, anyone who's sort of, you know, 21, 22 and up in the working world, you know, uses email as a primary tool.
And you know, a lot of them are getting, yeah, I mean, the subscribership on, you know, investing newsletters, business newsletters.
If you're serious about whatever industry you're in, B2B newsletters are huge.
And then just, you know, sort of topic specific newsletters if you're a travel enthusiast or, you know, any number of interests.
So yeah, I mean, it really is a huge distribution channel for people.
So then if people are reading newsletters, which is awesome to hear, what would make an email newsletter valuable for businesses or entrepreneurs?
Sure.
So, you know, if you are somebody who's building up a business, that's whether it's in the B2B space or the B2C or DTC space, there's a tremendous amount of value in sort of owning that audience, right?
If you look at what have been the major marketing channels in terms of SEO or, you know, meta ads or YouTube or TikTok, you know, you're always at...
the mercy of exactly what these platforms want to give you.
Right.
So if Metta decides that they want it to be more expensive suddenly to reach the audience, you spend time building up.
They're just going to crank up those rates on you.
And it's going to be painful if you've built anything organic, tried to build anything organic on these platforms, like the media industry itself did 10 years ago.
Facebook can just decide one day, sorry, New York Times, sorry, Wall Street Journal.
you don't get free traffic anymore, we're going to charge you.
So you're always, what's nice about email is that it's an owned channel, right?
You know, TikTok can change its algorithm tomorrow, Meta can change its algorithm tomorrow, and anything you've built organically can disappear in the blink of an eye.
Whereas email, you know, you really own, you have a list that you can go to again and again to generate revenue and to generate traffic back to whatever you're trying to drive.
Do you think more people are becoming aware of this fact, especially with the challenges of social media, whether it's LinkedIn, TikTok, all, you know, you hear about the algorithms and very much what you talked about with Facebook and Instagram.
You think businesses are now more open and realizing, wow, we need to get on to this owned channel platform?
Oh yeah, I mean, you're seeing tons of brands and software companies who are really trying to build out their internal media operations, right?
Starting to become a media company.
Look at Robinhood investing, right?
Investing app for millennials or millennials in Gen Z.
One of their major initiatives right now is, they have the Snacks newsletter and they're building out an entire platform called Sherwood Media, which is, media to bring people to the Robinhood platform, financial media to keep bringing them back to the site.
And not only are they going to build out the website and the email behind that, they're also looking to monetize that by selling ads on this media that they're building.
So we're just seeing more and more brands realize that what used to be sort of content marketing is turning into kind of full-blown content media operations.
That is a big change with that media operations focus and just almost like the business has to have its own media branch, it seems like, in order to, in some ways, to survive.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it's just an audience is a powerful thing.
You've seen DTC brands like Ridge has made a huge investments in newsletter and content.
Yeah, I'm not sure I have all the names off the top of my head, but you do see like, somebody will build out a pet newsletter and then a pet food company is gonna buy that.
Or somebody builds out a mental health thing and a newsletter or a text service.
And then, you know, somebody who's in that space is going to go and buy that because that's like a ready-made audience that, you know, they can plug in, look at HubSpot, buying the Hustle, you know, similar thing, you know, get it, you know, just buy all at once a huge audience of people who are interested in entrepreneurship and marketing and just stick them right into your ecosystem.
Yeah, it's definitely an asset.
And I don't know that it seems like more people are becoming aware of that thinking of the email list or that subscriber base as that asset class that you can truly, I don't wanna say leverage, but I mean, it can be, you can sell the newsletter, you can definitely advertise.
And that kind of rolls into who sponsors stuff.
So would you give the listeners just kind of the, give us the 30,000 foot view of who sponsors stuff What problems do you guys solve?
Right, so we basically serve the industry of newsletter publishers and anyone who wants to market in newsletters.
So we track 400 newsletters.
That's everyone from the biggest stuff you've heard of, again, Morning Brew, Skim, down to much smaller, much more niche stuff.
We have a pretty, as you said, like 30,000 foot view of the industry.
We track who sponsors those newsletters every day.
have a database that we sell to publishers and to marketers where you can go look at who those sponsors are and look at the creative, right?
We're preserving the ad creative for each individual unit, whether that's the landing page that they were sending you to, view and browser links when those are available, and screenshots of the ad.
So you can really see if you want to know what is my competitor doing on email, you can go look up the brands who you compete with and see a full archive of what they've been.
buying if they're in the newsletter space.
And for publishers, we've got about 55 publishers, everyone from Morning Brew, Daily Upside, Flipboard on down again to like solo preneurs, using us to go power their ad sales, right?
Because if you run a newsletter, you wanna know who else is advertising in newsletters and then you can go pitch them your products.
That is the tricky part.
You know, for, if, for anybody who has a newsletter, it's like, okay, who, who can sponsor it and then what will they sponsor?
And then who, who is the person in this giant entity that I can talk to about sponsorship?
So it sounds like you, you have a lot of information that, that your subscribers are able to get access to even down to like contact level or, or just the, okay.
Yeah.
So we choose kind of the best two contacts, the most relevant contacts who might be able to pull the trigger on an email campaign.
And that's the nice thing about email as a channel is like often somebody who is like a marketing manager or a digital marketing manager, somebody in that sort of mid level of the organization can often pull the trigger on like a test campaign on your newsletter.
So it's, it's Most things in the newsletter space are not run through giant RFP processes or through agencies.
And there's some of that at the higher end if you're a morning brew, if you're a scam.
But a lot of it is very one-to-one, very transactional where you're selling to, yeah, somebody in marketing who has a test budget that they can spend on this.
that takes a little bit of the pressure off too, as opposed to like you say, you know, you think of think of big conglomerates, you think of RFPs, you think of months, and you know, all of this information.
But really, it sounds like you can, you know, just having the right conversation with the right person can open up a test sponsorship.
And so kind of with that, because what makes a newsletter attractive for sponsorship?
Sure, it all comes down really to engagement.
I mean, there's a certain minimum level of scale that you're going to want.
And so, you know, that for like a B2C publication, like a general interest publication, it's gonna be hard to get conversation started if you're under 50K, say, subscribers.
But once you're in that 50K, 100K, 200K, you know, you can pretty easily get those conversations started.
And then if you're like B2B, if you're a cybersecurity newsletter that, you know, talks to people in that industry, you know, really you could have 2000 people and get sponsorship conversations started there.
Cause you're, you know, in that case, a software company who serves that industry, you know, you've got people probably on your list who can make a buying decision.
And, you know, so B2B, the list sizes can be much smaller depending on like how concentrated the industry is and how valuable.
a lead is in that industry.
And so your question was about what makes it appealing.
That's minimal list size.
And then past that, it's really engagement.
So open rates are obviously a huge metric in this space.
And an audience of marketers, I imagine most people are familiar with them.
Apple, MPP, and a lot of the problems there in tracking performance.
Currently, given the sort of fudge factor for Apple, Apple automatically opens your emails and makes your open rates look higher.
So, MPP adjusted, you probably wanna have an open rate, 40% minimum, kind of 40 to 60% is a meaty, strong part of the curve there.
And then, it's really like ad clicks, do people engage when you run an ad?
So, if you are getting strong ad engagement, that's probably going to look like you know, one to 2% of your openers clicking on an ad is like a pretty good, like medium strong sort of engagement.
Under 1% is getting a little weak.
And then over that is, you know, people who are super engaged with the products you're sending.
Now, and that's a good framework to kind of think through.
So everybody, if you're listening, if your business either doesn't have a newsletter, you're thinking about starting a newsletter, all of these things are important things to consider to help build not only your brand, but to engage with your audience.
And especially, it sounds like, you know, with sponsorship opportunities, what you can do there.
Now, what...
Is there ever a situation where a business should not do a newsletter or should everybody have at least one?
What do you think?
I mean, it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
I think you always have to have a goal and a way to measure it.
You know, you don't want to just have a newsletter just because you feel like you should have a newsletter.
But yeah, I mean, I'd say for most businesses that have, um, you know, that have leads and that have people that they want to nurture and that have people they want to, you know, have repeat buying behavior, uh, doing something at least, you know, I mean, at least at least monthly and, you know, depending on your business, weekly is probably a good cadence for like a business sending out a newsletter to customers.
I really can't think of a business that shouldn't have one, but I guess I wouldn't do it unless I at least had some idea why I was doing it.
No, that makes sense because to do it just because it doesn't really doesn't really solve a problem.
But it sounds like then, you know, for everybody listening, you know, lots of opportunities to have a newsletter as part of your business and marketing strategy, just to make sure you're building that rapport with potential customers so that when they're ready to buy, you know, they're there.
So how would you say, how have you seen the landscape changing?
in terms of newsletters and sponsorship?
Is it, has it been, you know, holding about even?
Is it, is, I would, yeah, let me just throw that out there.
How is it changing right now?
Sure.
I mean, I think right now we're in a bit of a rough ad market.
You know, here in October of 2023, there's been some slowness probably in the direct-to-consumer markets where companies a couple of years ago were just pumping and pumping money into that and they're being more disciplined about it now and probably their behavior now is correct versus when they were probably wasting some money before.
So B2C is tough and you have to fight harder than ever for that.
B2B has been really strong.
B2B is a great space to be in if you're working content in that area.
And the other thing on, again, going back to B2C is that a lot of brands are now pushing really just for performance marketing.
They just wanna pay on clicks or pay on acquisitions instead of flat fee.
For our publisher clients, we always recommend flat fee.
We do think that publishers should take a hard line on that, but certainly the marketers are pushing very hard for performance.
So for everybody who's listening who might not quite understand the difference between flat fee and then the per click or per performance, would you elaborate on that just a little?
Sure, so you know, flat fee would be okay.
This newsletter costs $1,000 to get the lead spot, you know, any day of the week that we're selling it to you.
CPC would be you drove 500 clicks, I'm gonna pay you $1 per click, you get paid$500.
Or cost per acquisition, I sold 10 pairs of shoes, I'm gonna give you, you know, $5 per pair of shoes, and then, you know, do the math.
That makes sense.
I think a lot of times we get, we get stuck in the, in the performance space and we forget there is a flat option out there.
So I appreciate kind of going into that.
And then that just, you hear all kinds of things about newsletters and about newsletter sponsorship.
I, you know, I'll call them, you know, do you have a couple of, of myths?
that are very popular and how would you bust those myths?
We'll go total myth buster and just see.
Would love to hear that because there is a lot of information out there.
I would love to hear because you are a very, very strategic source.
Would love to hear it.
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that marketers often worry about when they're buying on newsletter is sort of wearing out an audience with repeat runs.
I've not seen that effect much.
Like I've been to a lot of places, seen a lot of ad campaigns run with like high frequency and I find that high frequency tends to do very well.
You know, you kind of work your way into people's consciousness.
Maybe they don't buy on the first impression, but they buy on the fifth.
So I've definitely seen, from the marketing side, skepticism of doing like higher frequency.
And I don't know that you do 20 days in a row, but maybe you do it two times a week for 10 weeks.
So high frequency definitely can work.
And email doesn't have to be immediately transactional, which is what a lot of people try and treat it as.
It's like, okay, we sent one email, we didn't get any conversions.
I'm not buying on your email.
that that's probably not a great way to approach it.
You're not always gonna get that sale in the first set.
That's a good point.
It's a little bit of a long curve or long play in terms of the marketing, in terms of the lead gen, but it sounds like then just keep sending them and it will get to their inbox and they open it and they will engage.
So that's encouraging for everybody listening.
Let me just ask, what do you see in terms of next year and like the year after 2024.
How can businesses better leverage their newsletters, you know, going forward as far as what you see the landscape looking like?
Yeah, I mean, I think that there are a lot of ways to grow your newsletter.
It sort of depends on how purely transactional and how purely, you know, commerce based it is versus whether you're taking more of an editorial slant on things like, you know, if you're running, I think there's a lot of virtue to be had in a more content based model for a lot of businesses.
I mean, obviously this can vary tremendously, but if you're, you know, if you're a pet food company and you're running, an email list and you're kind of just sending them offers and coupons and things like that.
You know, I think you'll get a lot more opens and a lot more long-term engagement with like a fun newsletter about pets and whether it's memes or whatever fun thing it is or whatever kind of coverage or human interest stories, you know, heartwarming stories about pets.
I think something like that is going to benefit you a lot more in the long term than just kind of sending coupon offers.
So I think that's the main thing.
And as we were talking about a little bit earlier, I think a lot of brands are getting that, that there's a tremendous amount of value to be had in that kind of content.
Yeah, that almost that personality of a brand that content as email without sort of that hard sell.
I seem to it resonates with me when I read newsletters that way.
Do you it's and it sounds like then more people are getting on board with that idea as opposed to just straight.
As you say, here's your coupon.
and go with it.
So you see you see that kind of changing in terms of mentality.
Yeah, I think so.
And that was really the, you know, one of my things I built out in my career is something called Ladders News.
So Ladders is a job site.
Some of your users may be familiar with, some of your viewers, you know, so they, you know, a job listing site basically.
And so the theory there was like, okay, people search for a job like every four years, right?
But we want them to think of us first.
We want them to come back day after day to our site.
And so we did, what I came in to do was Ladders News, which was like a daily site of our career, the workplace, the future of work.
And we built out a daily newsletter behind that.
And so, what we were successful in doing is suddenly, getting 5 million people a month to come just to read content about jobs on our site.
And so, that is what you want as a brand is like to have people, they're not gonna just come back cause you send them job alerts when they're happily ensconced in their.
current role, but they will come back to learn, you know, five productivity tips or, you know, thinking about bigger picture things with their career.
Wow, that's so true.
It's like you become very much top of mind because you're drawing them in with content.
You are either entertaining, informing, equipping them, and so suddenly you become a go-to brand even without, in that case with ladders, even without necessarily looking for a job.
You just become a trusted source of information.
Wow, that's brilliant.
And then Kind of with that, let me just ask as sort of we wrap up here, any takeaways you would like to leave with the audience in terms of newsletters, whether that's getting started with one, whether that's through sponsorship, I'd love to, you know, any takeaways you'd like to leave them with.
Yeah, I mean, just the most important thing, and I preach this to publishers, and I think it's just as important for brands and businesses is that aspect of owning your audience.
You can do all you want to build up your business's Facebook page, but at the end of the day, Facebook controls that.
They're gonna take it away.
They're gonna throttle it.
But email is something you own, and that's really, at the end of the day, on a marketing channel, being able to fully own something like that is...
the best thing you can have.
No, and I appreciate you sharing that and encouraging that.
So if you're listening, definitely be thinking about email lists to be able to control the conversation and be able to make sure the conversation happens.
You don't wanna leave that up to chance.
So Ryan, if listeners wanna know more about you, if they wanna know more about who sponsors stuff, where would you like them to go?
Yeah, they can just check us out at whosponsorsstuff.com.
And we also have a email newsletter that you'll find on that page.
And yeah, we do a weekly roundup of everything in the newsletter industry.
And so hopefully that is helpful to folks.
All right.
So who sponsors stuff.com?
Make sure you go check that out.
Ryan, this was a wonderful conversation.
I learned a ton.
I know the audience did too.
Thanks so much for joining me.
Thanks so much for having me.
Okay.