Introduction to Got Marketing and Why Newsletters Are Not the Way Forward
>> Mia Feilman: This is Got Marketing. We unpack the campaigns worth talking about, the marketing nonsense worth calling out, and the strategy behind the ideas that stick. I'm Mia Feilman, strategic advisor to founder led brands and your campaign obsessed friend. You don't need to steal clever marketing. You can create it yourself. Hello, friend, and welcome back to Got Marketing. In today's hopefully short solo episode, we're going to talk about newsletters and why you should absolutely not send one. You do not want to receive a newsletter, right? Ask yourself that question. You don't.
The Fundamental Problem with Newsletters and the Superiority of Email Marketing
Okay. If someone was to say to you, hey, do you want to receive my newsletter? You would say, no, thank you. Your audience feels exactly the same way. Yet somehow newsletters have become the default when it comes to brands and they are not in any way interesting to write and to read. I have a problem with both the format of a newsletter, which is generally the what we have been up to style email, where you give people updates about your company and your brand. Oh, Jill joined the team. Oh. We launched a new product. But I also have a fundamental problem with the name newsletter when it comes to email marketing because it is a name that actually comes with some negative connotations now. So we're going to discuss both now. I am a massive fan of email marketing. It is the channel that delivers the best return on investment for me, all of my clients. And actually, when we look at evidence around the world, email marketing has the best return on investment for all brands. So I am not saying that you shouldn't send emails, I'm saying quite the opposite. But email marketing and newsletters are, um, not the same thing. And I feel like I need to say that because newsletters have become the default, right? Like, if you think about it, all these brands, most brands do send a newsletter. And so if you're sitting there going, well, I should be doing email marketing, and you look around, all you're going to see is newsletters. So you're going to believe that that's what you should do too.
Rethinking Email Strategy: Moving Beyond Generic Newsletters to Engaging Content
And please, my friend, don't do that. Because the thing that we know about email marketing is that, uh, sadly, it's not very good, right? And when I'm trying to convince people to be much more proactive and strategic with their email marketing, they will say to me, but all the emails that I get are junk. I don't like them. I delete them immediately. I hate receiving newsletters. I hate subscribing to people's lists. So I don't want to send emails because people aren't going to Read them, it's valid. I can understand. But that is actually an argument for why you should write better emails. Because imagine the opportunity if you were, to show up in the inbox with something that people genuinely look forward to. And yes, this is absolutely possible. And today I'm going to share heaps of examples of this. But rather than dismissing email marketing because you, uh, don't like newsletters, to me the solution is stop sending newsletters and send something far better. Okay, so let's just talk for a minute about the word newsletter, because it has become quite a common term, but actually it's not the accurate term.
Replacing Newsletters with Publications and Leveraging Founder-Led Brand Advantages
Okay? So from a pure marketing perspective, a regular email that you send to your list is actually called an electronic direct mail, an edm, but we have a shorthand for that because it's not the best name. Right? A shorthand for that has become newsletter, but it's actually not accurate. And so the first thing that I want you to do is actually I want you to stop referring to your emails as newsletters. Because the minute you sit down to write a newsletter, you're going to write something like an update or latest news from Campaign Del Mar, which we've already spoken about, no one wants. So if you can just drop that language internally as well as externally, I think we're already going to be set up for success.
>> Speaker B: Okay?
>> Mia Feilman: And by dropping the language of newsletter, we also drop this idea of what should we put in this month's newsletter? Which is absolutely the wrong question to ask if you are saying to yourself, we haven't sent an email in a while, let's put together an email. What should we put in this month's newsletter? I can almost guarantee that this is going to fail. Instead, the much better question to ask is, why would someone actively look forward to seeing this in their inbox? Okay, so that's a very different proposition to what do we put in this month's newsletter? And, um, founder led brands have an enormous advantage when it comes to this. It's something that big companies spend so much money trying to manufacture, which is an actual human with opinions, stories, taste and a point of view. And so we are already pre positioned for success. So I know you're sitting there thinking, okay, May, you've told me I'm not allowed to send updates about my brand and my company and I'm not allowed to use my emails to just flog my products and my services, so what the hell do I send? And the answer to this is really simple. I want you to start treating your emails as A publication.
Curated Content and Trend Summaries: Inspiring Publications Beyond Basic Product Updates
And Substack has actually paved the way for us to do this without having to use Substack. But Substack has become the business case for this. And there is so much evidence with the success of Substack that this is exactly what audience and readers want. They want a publication in their inbox, not a newsletter. Now, your publication can take so many different formats and I'll share some examples with you. And this is just to give you some inspiration for your regular EDMs. So the first one is curated emails where you pull together the best damn email on a particular topic or theme. And a good example is one of my clients, Byzantine Design. And her EDM is called the Modern Archaeologist. Now, she sells tiles. And so a monthly or fortnightly email about the latest tiles is really boring for the reader. And so we're not going to do that. But does she just sell tiles or does she sell a feeling in a room? And the tiles are just a byproduct of that. And so when we broaden the scope beyond I sell tiles and we think about the world that Byzantine design lives in, it opens us up to so many more possibilities for great content, travel, home decor, home styling, colour history, culture. And that is exactly where we are taking the modern archaeologist. And so the feeling that we want when people read the Modern Archaeologist is they are genuinely inspired, even entertained. They may learn something new. And this goes far beyond just a promotional newsletter on tiles or what's happening behind the scenes, uh, at Byzantine Design. Before we get back to the chat, I wanted to ask whether, uh, all those courses, digital products and lead magnets have actually helped you make better business decisions, or are you still making all the important ones inside your own head?
Building Community Through Email: Encouraging Replies and Deepening Subscriber Relationships
I started the Village for female founders who want clever, kind, experienced women around them when the decision actually matters. People who will challenge your thinking, share what they know, make useful introductions and tell you what they really think. Plus me, obviously, reading the documents, reviewing the work, doing the research and occasionally ruining an idea before you waste money on it. That's the Village. If that sounds like the kind of room you've been missing, you can find the village@campaigndelmar.com another direction you could take your publication is Trend Summaries. You look at what's happening in your industry right now or in your niche and summarise that for your audience, because they don't have time to go and read all the industry publications that you read. I read Campaign Brief and Mumbrella and BNT and Marketing Mag every week and I can Summarise what's really interesting and important for my audience in my edm. And I can also add my point of view, which is the part that's not replicable, that's not AI generatable. Is that a word? And my interpretation becomes part of that value, but so does the fact that I'm spending all this time reading and then summarising it for my audience. And I do that in my edm, which is called the Weekly Roundup. Another way you can take your publication is use it to start conversations with your audience and use it to encourage replies. Because if someone replies to your edm, the chance that they are going to go on to become a paid customer increases astronomically. I would say that about 85% of the people who reply to my EDMs go on to become a customer. So you really need to think about email subscribers as completely different to a social media follower.
Engaging Publications: Building in Public and Sharing Authentic Business Stories
The relationship is entirely different. They have said to you, I want you in my inbox. And that is a massive difference to someone just clicking Follow on Instagram. Conversation starters are, uh, where you ask questions, you share your opinions and you could pick a topic, whether that's cultural, political or societal, and really encourage people to weigh in on that conversation. And my friend Odette Barry does this incredibly well and many of her emails she, uh, talks about a topic, generally it's environmental or it's political, and she encourages debate. And I think that this is a really clever way to use emails. Another way that you can take your publication, which is really popular amongst female founders, is to build in public, tell stories, share behind the scenes of how the sausage is made in your business, experiments that failed magnificently, why you decided to build this campaign, why you decided to launch this product, what goes into launching a new product and really, you know, share those stories that are far more interesting than just updates. So we've spoken about turning your emails, regular emails, your EDMs, into much more of a publication or a magazine rather than a newsletter. Now we need to think about how we're going to get people to sign up for it. Right?
Productizing Your EDM: Creating Compelling Brands and Landing Pages for Your Publication
Because that's often one of the biggest challenges when it comes to email marketing is how do we get people on the list in the first place. And what's absolutely holding you back is the fact that you are asking people to sign up for a newsletter using a generic boring ass web form. I mean, go to 10 websites, scroll down to the bottom and you will see the most generic signup form that says join our newsletter, subscribe to receive the latest news and Updates. And I can tell you right now that absolutely no one signs up that way. It is just not in any way interesting. So this is what we've got to do. Since we are now writing a publication rather than a newsletter, uh, we need to productize it and give it a brand of its own. Okay? And we're seeing this with substack. People don't call their substack campaign Del Mar's monthly updates. They give it a really interesting, compelling name. Okay. We want to treat our emails like a media product I mentioned. Mine is called the Weekly Roundup, which is not the most groundbreaking name, um, but it's very descriptive and you know that it's going to come every week. So it manages expectations and, um, it's a roundup of marketing news curated for female founders. There are some better name examples than mine. For example, the Sleep Collective by Jerry Florence. Her EDM is called Bedtime Stories. Now, she's a sleep educator for babies and infants. And her idiom is stories and helpful tips and safe sleeping.
Analyzing Substack's Model and Crafting Dedicated Landing Pages for Email Publications
And it's far more compelling than a newsletter from a sleep educator. A really great example is the Gist. Now, the gist is a women led inclusive sports media brand. And I just want to read you what is on their signup form, um, on their website, because it does not say sign up for our newsletter. It says, your one stop shop for equal coverage of women's and men's sports. We cover the moments that matter in both women's and men's sports with fun. Takes context and clarity you won't find elsewhere. A five minute read delivered four times per week to 1 million plus fans, 100% free. How much better is that than all the other generic signup forms that you see? It's got social proof. It tells you what it is and why you should want it. It tells you how often you're going to get is so good, so much more compelling. I want you to take this one step further and I want you to build a dedicated landing page on your website for your EDM or your publication.
>> Speaker B: Okay?
>> Mia Feilman: Because I create content telling people to go and read the Weekly Roundup. And I'm not going to say to them, oh, go to the Campaign Del Mar website, scroll down to the bottom, find the generic signup form. When I could just say, head to campaign del mar.com roundup and I can take them exactly where they need to go without too much friction. And so we do need to think about how to create a really easy path, but also by having a dedicated landing page on my website for my edm, I can make a case for why people should sign up for it. A simple web form doesn't give you a lot of scope to really explain why someone should want this and what's even inside it. So by having a landing page and it doesn't have to be 16 blocks long, I can say, okay, what is the weekly roundup? Why should you want it? Why is it of value to you to get this? How often, when, where, how who, and then who wrote this? And an opportunity for me to share a little bit about my expertise and my career history on this landing page. And so we're really productizing our idioms.
Exploring Substack as an Email Marketing Tool and Blog Alternative
Another really great example is Steph Hanson's idiom, which is called that's what she said. I highly recommend you go and read that. She's an incredible storyteller. She, uh, talks about things that go wrong and right behind the scenes of her shoots. It's so interesting and compelling. Making waves. We've spoken a little bit about Substack today, and Substack's a really interesting platform, right? Because it's part email marketing. Like I mentioned, you can upload your email list to Substack, write an article, and it emails everyone on your list. So in effect, it is a substitute to an email service provider like a Klaviyo or a, uh, Mail Alight or an active campaign. But it also kind of operates a little bit like a blog because Substack has a inbuilt website that allows you to create, like, an archive of all the Substack articles that you've written. And so it's a really interesting platform. It doesn't have, though, the same SEO benefits as having a blog on your website because it is on a third party, right? And you're driving traffic to Substack rather than traffic to your website. And I've wanted to experiment with Substack because it is gaining in popularity massively.
Repositioning Substack for Personal Brand Expansion Beyond Podcast Promotion
But I have an allergic reaction to adding new platforms and channels to my business unless they absolutely need to exist, because otherwise we end up spreading ourselves really, really thin. And so I already have an email list and I already have a blog. So I couldn't really figure out the role that Substack would play. And initially I ran a little experiment where I made my Substack all about this podcast got marketing. But recently I've decided to give myself a little bit more room to move. And so I have repositioned my substack to being more about Mia Fileman and my ramblings and Things that have my attention rather than make it specifically about this podcast. Because I already talk about this podcast considerably on my email list and on my blog. And so from today, my substack is called File under M M. And I want to thank one of my customers, Nell Casey from Fake Creative, for helping me come up with that name. It is so perfect. It's a play on my, my name, Mia Feilman. And with file under M, um, I've got so much more scope to write about everything that's happening in my world, not just my business. So I can talk about chemistry, read. I can talk about parenting, I can talk about multi level marketing. I can talk about politics and culture and society and the Greek diaspora. I really whatever I want to talk about because it sits under the Mia Farman brand.
Peachopoly Campaign: A Fun and Serialized Approach to B2B Marketing Strategy
Anyway, if that's of interest to you, I'll drop it in the show notes. The big swing. A brand new small business campaign has launched today and it is very exciting. It is Peachopoly by Peach Business and my good friend Fiona Johnston.
>> Speaker B: Welcome to the game of small business where I help you to make strategic moves by focusing on money psychology, money management, impact making and actually making money.
>> Mia Feilman: Now, when this episode comes out, this campaign will already have been in the market for a few weeks. And I've had a little bit of a behind the scenes view of this campaign because I helped Fee with the scripts. So I just want to share top line, what I absolutely love about the Peachopoly campaign. So Fi is a business strategist and financial coach for women. These are serious things, okay? We're not mucking around. We're talking about money, finances, business. But that doesn't mean that we have to take ourselves too seriously. And the thing that stands out to me immediately and will stand out to you about Peachopolis, how much fun this campaign is. And I think that that is so refreshing because business to business marketing, which is, you know, where Fee operates and financial strategy marketing, usually very serious and very boring.
Longevity in Digital Campaigns: Creating Serialized Content for Sustained Engagement
And Pete Ropoly is the antidote to this. It is absolutely opposite to this. You can see Fee having so much fun and trusting her, uh, creative director, Steph Hansen to really bring the fun. Because this campaign is being shared across digital and social channels. And those channels, they exist because people want to go there to be social and to have fun and to have a good time. And so I find that really refreshing. The other thing that's really well done with the Peachopoly campaign is that it's realised and I've spoken about this before, but we used to in advertising, make one 30 second ad which we would play on TV for three weeks and it was the same creative repeated over and over and over again. We don't do that on digital and social channels anymore. Right. We don't replay the same video 20 times, ad nauseam. So when we're creating campaigns, we need to think about the longevity of them. If Fi's campaign is four weeks long, she needs four weeks worth of content. And so by creating serialised content, episodic content, it gives her campaign so much more longevity. And she can use her five or six video episodes and some behind the scenes and some teasers and some static imagery. And now we've gone from having one piece of hero content to having 30, uh, pieces of content that sustain your entire campaign.
Peachopoly Campaign Success: Repositioning a Business Strategist for Larger Clients
I think the peachopoly campaign is a home run for Fee and for Peach Business. The goal of the campaign is to reposition her. She, like many of us, has kind of got stuck in this positioning of working with really micro and small businesses, whereas Fee Fee works with some really big and impressive businesses turning over multimillion dollars of revenue. And this campaign highlights that for the first time. And we start to see Fee in a different light. And it is absolutely so much fun and so beautifully put together. That's a wrap on this episode of Got Marketing. If you've got any questions about newsletters, then my DMs are open.
Conclusion and Call to Action: Subscribe and Connect for More Marketing Insights
Thank you. You listened all the way to the end. If you're enjoying GoT marketing, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's next. Podcast reviews are like warm hugs and one of the best ways to support a small business. You can connect with me, mia Feilman on LinkedIn and Instagram, and I always welcome your feedback and questions for future episodes.
