The newsletter strategy that makes subscriber count irrelevant

What if your email list is already big enough?

For Nathan May, that’s not a rhetorical question.

Meet the Master

Nathan May

Founder, The Feed Media

Claim to fame: For one of his clients, May says that they hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with just 920 subscribers.

Lesson 1: Be known well, not well-known.

Plenty of people — and brands — want to be famous. But “I think it’s much more valuable to be known well,” May tells me.

His approach is almost comically straightforward.

“There are maybe 500 companies with whom we’d want to work,” he tells me.

He’s interested primarily in the founder and the head of growth at each company, so that’s a thousand people, all of whom he can easily identify on LinkedIn. “Can I reach out to a thousand people and bring them onto my email list? It might take a couple months, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable.”

Invite them one by one to your newsletter, he suggests.

“Thirty to 50% of the people you ask will join. Then you’ll end up with a list of 500 - 1,000 people who are perfectly qualified to buy your high-ticket services or software.”

The goal isn’t wide-reaching fame, it’s to get your name in front of the right people. If you become known well by a community of decision-makers who are qualified to buy your product or service, all that manual work pays for itself.

Lesson 2: Turn your welcome sequence into your greatest hits.

May tells me he has a call booked right after our interview. “It’s with somebody who reads my newsletter. They want to become a client, and it’s because they read our content. It works all the time.”

Where marketers go wrong, May explains, is trying to sell instead of providing value.

Because at any given point in time, most people aren’t in market. And if they are, they may not know and trust you enough to buy.

“Rather than having 90% sales, 10% education, I’d rather have 50% - 70% education and 20% - 30% sales,” Mays says. If you already have a library of content, “what I would do as a base automation is take your best-performing educational content of all time.” (And if you don’t have content yet, “you’re gonna be building your welcome sequence in real time just by writing valuable posts.”)

If your welcome sequence is sufficiently valuable, May says, your ideal customers will start responding. “And that makes sales much easier.”

Lesson 3: Replies and CTA clicks are your sales-ready signals.

If you’re selling lower-ticket products, this lesson may not be for you. But “when the contract value is thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a month, it makes a lot of sense to do one-to-one outreach,” May says.

And you can figure out who to reach out to based on who’s clicking on your calls to action — “it’s easy to discern from most major email service providers.”

Replies can help you narrow down potential customers from subscriber lists or segments that number in the thousands. If someone replies — even just one person — “I might hop on the phone with them.”

Ultimately, your strategy will depend on what you’re selling and what the lifetime value is of your customers. “Higher LTV constitutes more individual, personalized, unscalable things.”

Lingering Questions

This Week’s Question

If all other newsletter metrics were banned and newsletter operators could only keep two to track for the rest of time, which two metrics would they be?

—Manny Reyes, Founder, Boletin Growth

This Week’s Answer

May says: I’d track average revenue per user (ARPU) and cost per lead (CPL).

You need to understand the unit economics of your subscribers — everyone loves cheap leads until they realize that they don’t buy anything. You need to treat your newsletter like a business or you will burn tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of your time.

Next Week’s Lingering Question

May asks: What’s the best sales page you’ve ever seen?