In episode #558, Eric and Neil explain why newsletters are dying out and how chatbots are the next big thing. Tune in to hear how to leverage your chatbots for better results.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: How Newsletters Are Dead: You Should Do this Instead
- [00:45] Eric and Neil still have newsletters, but engagement is dropping.
- [01:01] It’s harder to get results because it can get filtered out or lost in the shuffle with the tons of emails everyone gets everyday.
- [01:26] You need to come up with new ways to connect.
- [01:38] Build up communities via social media and other outlets.
- [01:54] YouTube and chatbots have been great outlets for Eric and his clients.
- [02:11] Alex Becker does email a lot, but he is focused on building up his messenger subscribership.
- [02:36] Though newsletters are unpopular, they are still effective.
- [02:45] Eric and Neil have been moving towards shifting this message to chatbots.
- [03:15] Growth Everywhere added the Facebook Messenger App and they have seen great results from that.
- [03:38] ManyChat has growth tools that are helpful.
- [03:54] One of Eric’s most profitable campaign is shifting to chatbots.
- [04:15] Collect emails through things like content upgrades.
- [05:05] Always collect emails, because you don’t know when Facebook will change their algorithm and traffic will drop.
- [05:15] Zapier can work with ManyChat.
- [05:30] The bot will collect the email and it will be sent to your CRM and your webinar provider.
- [05:54] That’s all for today!
- [05:56] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special edition of Crazy Egg, the heat mapping tool.
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The post How Newsletters Are Dead: You Should Do this Instead | Ep. #558 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
Full Transcript of The Episode
Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: Today, we are going to talk about how newsletters are dead. You should do this instead.
Neil Patel: With newsletters, Eric, do you have a newsletter on Single Grain anymore?
Eric Siu: What do you mean by newsletter? I think we should qualify that.
Neil Patel: An opt-in for people to get updates to your blog posts. You may give them a eBook or a course.
Eric Siu: Yes.
Neil Patel: I do, too. What's happening as you collect more and more emails, and you send out these emails over time?
Eric Siu: The engagement is dropping.
Neil Patel: What do you mean by "engagement is dropping?"
Eric Siu: Open rates, click rates, reply rates.
Neil Patel: Yes. It's also dropping because it's harder to get results from Gmail, getting into the inbox, they're spamming a lot, people get used to them, they're getting bombarded by so many news, they don't open them.
How many news's are you subscribed to?
Eric Siu: Too many.
Neil Patel: How many of them do you read?
Eric Siu: Not many.
Neil Patel: Not many. So, what do you do with most of them that are sitting in your inbox?
Eric Siu: I ignore them.
Neil Patel: Exactly. Newsletters don't work as well as they used to. If you want to end up succeeding, you got to come up with other ways to connect with people.
One way that we've been doing that's worked out really well, and I know Eric's been a big ...
Eric Siu: Proponent?
Neil Patel: There you go. I was trying to figure out the word. Thank you.
... Of this is, building up communities, VA like chatbot, building up communities on social media. What are you doing instead to get more traffic that's not emails?
Eric Siu: Yeah, right now we are ... Let's see. Well, YouTube's a community. I look at it that way. Chatbot is certainly another one. We've started to put more emphasis on that. It's working really well for one of our clients right now because the engagement rates, what Neil and I just talked about, the open rates are still maintaining 80 to 95% or so, which is much higher than email.
A good example is a guy names Alex Becker. He does email a lot but he's also very focused on building his messenger subscriber list because that's almost like secondary email list to him. That's how he balances it out.
Neil Patel: Yeah and what we found is, although chatbots aren't really talked about heavily anymore, they're not popular. We know they're not that popular because anytime Eric and I do blog posts or talk about them, the view count on them, those articles or episodes, go down.
But what we found is, they're still really effective. It is something that all of you guys should be doing. We're really heavy on trying to figure out how to do more chatbot related stuff instead of emails.
So, instead of having people subscribe to your email list, Eric and I have been definitely moving to getting people to subscribe to one of our chatbots, especially on Facebook, because the open rates are ridiculous, and some of these guys are getting 90 plus percent open rates, and the click rates are somewhere like 30 plus percent. The numbers are just ridiculous overall.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and from a sales and marketing perspective, it just depends on what you're using. You can certainly ... Facebook recently just added the ability where you can add Facebook messenger on your site, bottom right corner. I actually put it on growtheverywhere.com, and there's people trying to chat with it.
We're getting anywhere from 5 or 10 subscribers a day. It's not like a clear call to action but, what you can do to build your chat subscriber list ... And I don't think either of us are saying completely eliminate your email, because you have full control of that. The messenger subscriber at Facebook can take it away at any time, and Facebook is just one example of a chatbot.
Use ManyChat. You're able to use their one of many growth tools where you can have a pop up, maybe an exit pop up, some kind of take over, those kinds of things, to get your subscriber list up.
I could tell you, again, one of our most profitable campaigns for one of our clients that was focused on email, they're a market research company. The chatbots have strongly overtaken their email. We're dropping a lot more money into the chatbots now because they're just trying to get consumers to fill out surveys.
Neil Patel: You also want to make sure that when you're doing all of this, like Eric mentioned, you still collect the emails, but you don't collect the emails through newsletters, you collect them instead doing things like content upgrade.
So, if someone's reading a blog post on your site and it talks about ten ways to double your search engine traffic, you can have a checklist or a bonus of ten more ways to double your search engine traffic checklist.
When people put in their info, they'll get the PDF. It's short, to the point, they're happy, your conversions go up. It's way more effective to collect emails offering eBooks, courses ... But ideally, ones related to the blog post that they're on in that moment, and the content upgrade is within the blog post.
You can use a plugin called Thrive Plugins to create this. You don't want to end up creating just a cyber opt-in that says, "Subscribe to my newsletter." You're going to get very few people to subscribe.
As we mentioned, focus on chatbots more than email newsletters subscribers, but still collect emails at the same time because you don't know if Facebook's going to do something to their algorithm, which, they've had in the past and they have a track record of doing so, in which your traffic just plummets.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and you can use a tool like Zapier. What Zapier does, you can use it to integrate with ManyChat, for example.
Let's say Neil is running a webinar and he wants to drive more webinar sign ups. People can actually message the bot first. The bot will collect the email and not only will you get a ManyChat subscriber ... So on Facebook, now you have a subscriber to market to.
But at the same time, when they out in their email, it can send to your CRM, or your email service provider, and it can also send to your webinar provider too, at the same time.
So, you have all these integrations where one thing becomes three instead, and you're able to really leverage the power of a chatbot.
Neil Patel: So, that's pretty much it from our end. For our daily giveaway, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of.
And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: Today, we are going to talk about how newsletters are dead. You should do this instead.
Neil Patel: With newsletters, Eric, do you have a newsletter on Single Grain anymore?
Eric Siu: What do you mean by newsletter? I think we should qualify that.
Neil Patel: An opt-in for people to get updates to your blog posts. You may give them a eBook or a course.
Eric Siu: Yes.
Neil Patel: I do, too. What's happening as you collect more and more emails, and you send out these emails over time?
Eric Siu: The engagement is dropping.
Neil Patel: What do you mean by "engagement is dropping?"
Eric Siu: Open rates, click rates, reply rates.
Neil Patel: Yes. It's also dropping because it's harder to get results from Gmail, getting into the inbox, they're spamming a lot, people get used to them, they're getting bombarded by so many news, they don't open them.
How many news's are you subscribed to?
Eric Siu: Too many.
Neil Patel: How many of them do you read?
Eric Siu: Not many.
Neil Patel: Not many. So, what do you do with most of them that are sitting in your inbox?
Eric Siu: I ignore them.
Neil Patel: Exactly. Newsletters don't work as well as they used to. If you want to end up succeeding, you got to come up with other ways to connect with people.
One way that we've been doing that's worked out really well, and I know Eric's been a big ...
Eric Siu: Proponent?
Neil Patel: There you go. I was trying to figure out the word. Thank you.
... Of this is, building up communities, VA like chatbot, building up communities on social media. What are you doing instead to get more traffic that's not emails?
Eric Siu: Yeah, right now we are ... Let's see. Well, YouTube's a community. I look at it that way. Chatbot is certainly another one. We've started to put more emphasis on that. It's working really well for one of our clients right now because the engagement rates, what Neil and I just talked about, the open rates are still maintaining 80 to 95% or so, which is much higher than email.
A good example is a guy names Alex Becker. He does email a lot but he's also very focused on building his messenger subscriber list because that's almost like secondary email list to him. That's how he balances it out.
Neil Patel: Yeah and what we found is, although chatbots aren't really talked about heavily anymore, they're not popular. We know they're not that popular because anytime Eric and I do blog posts or talk about them, the view count on them, those articles or episodes, go down.
But what we found is, they're still really effective. It is something that all of you guys should be doing. We're really heavy on trying to figure out how to do more chatbot related stuff instead of emails.
So, instead of having people subscribe to your email list, Eric and I have been definitely moving to getting people to subscribe to one of our chatbots, especially on Facebook, because the open rates are ridiculous, and some of these guys are getting 90 plus percent open rates, and the click rates are somewhere like 30 plus percent. The numbers are just ridiculous overall.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and from a sales and marketing perspective, it just depends on what you're using. You can certainly ... Facebook recently just added the ability where you can add Facebook messenger on your site, bottom right corner. I actually put it on growtheverywhere.com, and there's people trying to chat with it.
We're getting anywhere from 5 or 10 subscribers a day. It's not like a clear call to action but, what you can do to build your chat subscriber list ... And I don't think either of us are saying completely eliminate your email, because you have full control of that. The messenger subscriber at Facebook can take it away at any time, and Facebook is just one example of a chatbot.
Use ManyChat. You're able to use their one of many growth tools where you can have a pop up, maybe an exit pop up, some kind of take over, those kinds of things, to get your subscriber list up.
I could tell you, again, one of our most profitable campaigns for one of our clients that was focused on email, they're a market research company. The chatbots have strongly overtaken their email. We're dropping a lot more money into the chatbots now because they're just trying to get consumers to fill out surveys.
Neil Patel: You also want to make sure that when you're doing all of this, like Eric mentioned, you still collect the emails, but you don't collect the emails through newsletters, you collect them instead doing things like content upgrade.
So, if someone's reading a blog post on your site and it talks about ten ways to double your search engine traffic, you can have a checklist or a bonus of ten more ways to double your search engine traffic checklist.
When people put in their info, they'll get the PDF. It's short, to the point, they're happy, your conversions go up. It's way more effective to collect emails offering eBooks, courses ... But ideally, ones related to the blog post that they're on in that moment, and the content upgrade is within the blog post.
You can use a plugin called Thrive Plugins to create this. You don't want to end up creating just a cyber opt-in that says, "Subscribe to my newsletter." You're going to get very few people to subscribe.
As we mentioned, focus on chatbots more than email newsletters subscribers, but still collect emails at the same time because you don't know if Facebook's going to do something to their algorithm, which, they've had in the past and they have a track record of doing so, in which your traffic just plummets.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and you can use a tool like Zapier. What Zapier does, you can use it to integrate with ManyChat, for example.
Let's say Neil is running a webinar and he wants to drive more webinar sign ups. People can actually message the bot first. The bot will collect the email and not only will you get a ManyChat subscriber ... So on Facebook, now you have a subscriber to market to.
But at the same time, when they out in their email, it can send to your CRM, or your email service provider, and it can also send to your webinar provider too, at the same time.
So, you have all these integrations where one thing becomes three instead, and you're able to really leverage the power of a chatbot.
Neil Patel: So, that's pretty much it from our end. For our daily giveaway, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of.
And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.
