7 Lessons Learned at the Newsletter Marketing Summit in Austin, TX.

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THIS WEEK’S LESSON

7 Lessons Learned at the Newsletter Marketing Summit in Austin, TX.

Every time I go to a conference I add on an extra day.

It’s something I call the Golden 24-Hour Rule.

Meaning … take an extra day to process your notes and make a plan of action. Otherwise, you were just entertained. You are playing business, but not serious.

Supposedly Einstein said, “Fortune favors the bold.” And when people quote Einstein you think, “this dude is smart AF.”

The bottom line: Take action.

Otherwise you’re just pretending.

So I thought a great way to spend my Golden 24-Hours, would be to review the most meaningful insights I had at the Newsletter Marketing Summit, and pass those insights onto you.

That’s nice. I know 😉

Sell your sawdust.

Former Educator Founders sometimes get it backward.

They jump on the hamster wheel of social media, posting everyday. When the better approach would be to build something legendary …

Then use the “sawdust” from that product to drive your audience to your product.

That’s something I could improve on for my next launch of The 90-Day Accelerator.

How I could sell my sawdust:

• Share an image of a template I created and talk about it on social.

• Share one of the teaching videos on social (or a clip).

• Talk about the group coach calls inside the program and preview the agenda for the kick-off call

Make sense?

Read the original thread from Jack Butcher here.

Test, test, and test.

In all my years, I’ve collected data, but rarely tested much besides A/B headlines tests.

This year I’ve gotten much more serious about it after investing in a business course.

I created a process where my assistant reviews all my social posts from the month and identifies six engagement metrics. I’m reviewing email data from headlines, open + click rates, and poll responses. And I also invested in Fathom to track site visits to dial in where customers come from and performance of pages.

For example:

When I took this picture I had 30 unique visitors to my sales page and 4 sales. That’s a 13% conversion. Not bad when the average is 2-5% conversion and top sales pages convert between 10-15%.

I watched one presentation at the newsletter marketing summit where the team was able to improve conversion on a newsletter sign up page from

43% ➡️ 53% ➡️ 60% ➡️ 70% conversion rate.

That’s amazing.

They tweaked:

• Headlines

• Copy in the body

• Images

• Button CTA copy

• Social proof

• And more …

Do what your audience wants

Ask your audience what they want and do it.

Create content and products they want.

Simple. Rarely is it done.

The most successful Former Educator Founders obsess over this.

The only secret to success 👇

Create LEGENDARY stuff.

A reason many Former Educator Founders don’t grow their audience or sell their products: their stuff is average, or worse, it sucks.

Hard truth, but real.

The key to selling …

… is to write engaging content, that is less of a pitch.

And more of an integration with an idea where toe product helps your audience get a result.

So if you want to sell by email, you really should have a swipe file. If you’re not learning from me what works, you should learn somewhere, from someone who has done it before, making more than you’ve made before.

Starting with AI is a bad idea because you don’t know the principles of selling.

Today is the last day to get my 69 page swipe file + 2 landing page breakdowns of my current launch.

Do things that don’t scale

• Reply to every email.

• Call or text your audience (if you have their contact info).

• Write handwritten notes.

Nobody cares about your launch

This was a hard one for me to hear, given I’ve invested a 💩-ton of money in learning online launches. This idea doesn’t mean launches don’t work. It just means that people don’t care about your launch as much as you think they do.

So instead of stressing about some grand launch …

Just tell some friends about the cool stuff you got going on.

Make an invitation. They might just want to hop along for the ride.