Email marketing lessons from a $50M/year client

You probably already know who it is…

Matt Paulson. The CEO of the newsletter behemoth MarketBeat.

He did $50M in revenue last year with his newsletter.

And guess who manages his Meta and TikTok ad spend? We do!

He did a post the other day to recap a recent talk he did. It’s all the valuable lessons he’s learned over the years and the current techniques he’s actively using.

I just had to recap it here…enjoy:

Email lessons from a guy doing $50M/year with his email list:

> winning isn't about cheap leads — it's making each lead so profitable you can outspend everyone else

> most operators think about ads first and monetization second. flip it

> your subscriber will never be more engaged than the moment they opt in. everything else is a downhill slide in attention

> your thank you page is the most valuable real estate on the internet. most people waste it on a "check your inbox" message

> make $3 back before they ever open a single email with great thank you page funnels — then your ad costs are almost irrelevant

> one opt-in can become four: email, second list, SMS, push. same traffic, 4x the touchpoints

> a typical inbox gets 500 emails a week. one email a week is 0.2% share of mind

> frequency feels aggressive to the sender but barely registers to the reader

> trigger email sends when people open your emails (software can do this) — triggered emails get 60-70% open rates

> high engagement trains inbox algorithms that your emails belong there

> SMS is what email was 10 years ago. MarketBeat's SMS list is 10% their email list size, but makes about the same revenue

> organic traffic has a ceiling. paid is the only way to actually scale email lists

> there's no magical ad platform — the funnel is the variable, not the channel

> if you can trace a sale back to the lead source, media buying stops being gambling

> "if you don't know where to start doing lead gen, start with Meta ads. there are people like Gunnar Holm who can get starter campaigns going for you."

Want us to grow your newsletter profitably with Meta ads? Let’s talk.

— Gunnar @ Growjoy