Why Crypto Companies Should Have an Email Newsletter | Ep. 33

Ty Smith0:04

Welcome to another episode of the Crypto Marketing Show. I'm Ty Daniel Smith.

Kylie Low0:06

And I'm Kylie Low.

Ty Smith0:07

Today we are discussing why crypto companies need to have an email newsletter. So we're going to walk through what a newsletter is, why it's especially important for cryptocurrency and blockchain companies, and helpful tips and tools for setting up and optimizing a newsletter.

Ty Smith0:15

So let's first start with what a newsletter is. Most people probably understand the basics of what an email newsletter is. You probably get a ton of them. It's an email blast that gets sent out to a list of people that have opted in to receive messages from a company. There's different types of newsletters. One being, there's actually companies that are just newsletters. If you think of companies like The Skimm and Morning Brew and things like that. We're not going to talk about those. We're going to talk about company newsletters. So newsletters that actually send updates to interested parties and customers.

Ty Smith0:36

So specifically crypto companies, why they need a newsletter. First of all, it's an owned channel. So I've spoken about owned channels on a few previous episodes. It's a kind of a recurring theme for industries that are sort of fringe industries. Marketers in our industry have to deal with a lot of roadblocks in terms of where you're allowed to market, and having a newsletter doesn't really require any approval from anyone. You could host it on a bunch of different things and they, in theory, can ban you, but you still have the list of emails and can still own that.

Ty Smith1:23

Another aspect is that it's really cost-effective, especially compared to other marketing channels. So on average, brands earn $42 in revenue for every dollar spent on email marketing. I forget where that stat comes from, but we've quoted that a couple times. That's from 2019. Is that from HubSpot? Okay, yeah. Yes, so that's on 2019. I'm curious where it is in 2020. I guess we're still too early for that.

Kylie Low1:36

I went on a on a HubSpot article about email marketing for 2020, and it was it was a similar stat. It might have been a couple dollars less, but it was basically the same exact thing.

Ty Smith2:13

Yeah, it's getting more cost-effective because I remember in 2018 it was I think $32 or $36, something like that. Yeah, I mean, so we'll go into more detail about exactly which tools to use and the pricing and cost of running a newsletter, but in general, just for like the basic version of hosting a newsletter, it's like $10 to $50 a month. It's not expensive at all. All right, next reason why a crypto company needs to have a newsletter, it's yet another channel to re-engage with your audience. So like we said, hosting a newsletter is pretty inexpensive, both from a time and money standpoint. So by not having one, you're really missing out on a great opportunity to re-engage with your audience and just remind them that you exist.

Kylie Low2:34

And also, millennials are the main demographic that use crypto, and 73% of millennials prefer communication from businesses to come from email.

Ty Smith3:07

Yeah. I mean, another HubSpot stat, but yeah, it's like, being the younger generations, they're not watching TV as much, they know how to ad block, things like that, so they want their communications to come from email because they can pick and choose, subscribe or unsubscribe to what they don't want to see. So it's the most effective way.

Ty Smith3:21

Yeah, so the next section I want to go over some helpful tips and tools for setting up and optimizing a newsletter. The first one, the first tip, which is related to what you just said about how easy it is to opt in and opt out, use double opt-in for setting up your newsletter. So what double opt-in means is that when someone submits their email to join the newsletter, it will immediately send them an email saying, 'Hey, did you actually subscribe to this? Are you interested? Can you confirm your subscription?' So that will prevent fake email addresses, it's going to prevent spam, it'll just make your newsletter list a lot cleaner and increase open rates and click-through rates, which is great. And in general, the two versions are single opt-in and double opt-in. Double opt-in is what I just explained. Single opt-in is when you just accept an email address and then that's it, you just start sending them emails. Newsletters with single opt-in grow 20 to 30% faster than double opt-in, but like I said, they have way worse open rates and you have to deal with potentially fake email IDs. A lot of the companies that you pay to host your newsletter on will charge you by the contacts, so if you have a lot of fake ones, you're going to be overpaying as well.

Kylie Low4:32

And something with digital marketing is it's not always about the big number, how many are subscribed, but how many are actually opening it and clicking. It's like social media engagement. Yeah, you can have a ton of followers, but if no one is liking and engaging on your posts, is it really resonating with anyone? So the bigger numbers to focus on are definitely open rate and click-through rate.

Ty Smith5:13

Yeah, exactly. Next tip is make it really easy to opt in. So don't ask users for too much information. We as an agency, we host a couple different newsletters and we help other people set up newsletters. My style is in general just to ask only for email. Some like to also ask for first name and last name or maybe phone number. In general, the more information that you ask for, the more friction you're adding to that whole process and you're going to grow slower, especially crypto.

Kylie Low5:34

Especially, yeah, because people don't want to give any information in crypto.

Ty Smith5:35

That said, the more information that you do collect, the more capability you have to personalize emails, which can sometimes help with open rates. For example, if you put their first name in a subject line, you're only able to do that if you collect that information. So there's a pro and con. My style is just make it really easy to opt in. Also, make any forms that you're going to use to collect subscribers really clean-looking and obvious on a webpage. Some people will hide it in like a footer. That's not necessarily a bad way to go, but I prefer to make it a little more obvious if it's something that I'm really going to use as a cornerstone of a marketing strategy. And just like how it's important to make it really easy to opt in, it has to be really easy to opt out.

Ty Smith6:27

So every email you send needs to have an unsubscribe button. Most hosting platforms force you to do that anyway. But it has to be really easy to opt out. So if you don't make it easy, the reason behind that, you might be thinking, 'Why? I don't want anyone to opt out of my email.' Well, if you don't make it easy to opt out, they're going to hit 'mark as spam', which is the worst thing they could do for an email newsletter because if enough people do that consistently, it's going to blacklist your domain and every email that you send, whether it's an email blast, whether it's just a personal email, is going to start being sent to spam. You can imagine how frustrating that is to have all your emails go to spam when you're trying to connect with people.

Ty Smith7:14

Next tip is to keep a consistent posting schedule for your newsletter. So email inboxes are very easily cluttered. So if someone's going to opt into a newsletter and let you occupy some of that space, it's a pretty big deal. And they really should understand what they can expect in terms of volume and how frequently they're going to get contacted by you. I prefer to do once a week. Some people do once a day. It's really just how much content you have to push out.

Ty Smith7:36

Next tip, and this is one that I'm pretty adamant about that some people disagree with me on, never buy a list of email addresses. So that's a major shortcut that people try to take. In general, taking shortcuts in marketing is always a bad idea. Occasionally, we'll talk to people and they're just getting started setting up a newsletter and they ask, 'Would it be a better idea if I just went out and spoke to an agency that does exactly this? They provide a big list of emails and use that.' Don't do that at all. It's not only is it illegal thanks to the CAN-SPAM Act, which was enacted I think almost 20 years ago now, it's also a really fast way to get your email sent to spam because all these people are going to mark as spam if they didn't opt into this.

Ty Smith8:30

All right, let's go over some tools, Kylie. So tools for email marketing, the big ones, the big platforms for hosting a newsletter is, let's see, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, which you just brought up, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, and Substack is one that's growing pretty fast. That's more for personal newsletters, but that's still one that should be on the list. It's important to know that Mailchimp and Constant Contact, and I believe Campaign Monitor recently, not so recently, I think it was about a year and a half ago, banned using their platforms for crypto purposes.

Ty Smith8:46

That said, I know a lot of people getting away with it on each, so it's kind of like just make sure your email list is backed up if you want to use one of those, and then realize that there's a possibility you'll be kicked off, but it's not that hard to migrate to a different platform, so it's not something that's...

Kylie Low9:24

Which is a shame because Mailchimp is very easy to use.

Ty Smith9:30

Yeah, of all the ones that, so we've used, let's see, we've used ActiveCampaign, I've used Mailchimp, and I've used HubSpot, used Substack a little bit, used Constant Contact. Of all of those, Mailchimp is definitely the most built exactly for hosting a newsletter. HubSpot does a million things and that's just like a kind of email marketing is like a add-on. Mailchimp is probably the easiest and it's cheap, too. I think the cheapest plan is like 10 bucks.

Kylie Low9:46

Yeah, and you can really personalize it extensively, which is what's so great about it. I mean, you can do whatever you want.

Ty Smith9:49

Yeah, you can build like landing pages as well. So if you, like for example, if you wanted to, if you wanted your business to be the newsletter, you know, there's some companies that just their whole business is the newsletter, you can actually build the website straight through Mailchimp and it will host the form, it'll do everything. It actually walks you through the entire process of like double opt-in, it does the automatic email follow-ups, it's really a good tool. Like I said, the cheapest, the cheaper side of that of those tools is like $10 a month. It goes somewhere up to like 50. It really goes beyond that if they're going to charge you on a number of users, which they start doing if you're going beyond just like, I think they give you an allotted amount for each plan. For $10, I think you get maybe 2,500 contacts. I don't know, it's different across each of them. But keep in mind, again, keep your list clean and you won't overpay. That is basically all that I have, Kylie. Do you have anything else to add?

Kylie Low10:47

No, that's pretty much it.

Ty Smith10:49

All right, so we are obviously really fond of email marketing. It's super high ROI, it's not that difficult to set up. So if you're going to do any kind of email marketing and setting up a newsletter, reach out to us if you if you're interested. We'll point you in the direction of some some good tools. You can email us at info@coinbound.io. And as always, if you found this episode valuable, please remember to rate, review, and recommend because it does help us a lot in in getting feedback and and creating more content. That will be it for us. Bye, guys.

Kylie Low11:34

Have a good day.