Category: Email

LEAVING MORE OF SUBSTACK BEHIND

When I saw how fragile social media was, I knew I needed to exit. It was terrifying to see people lose access to their accounts. I can’t imagine how isolating it would feel to wake up and be unable to reach your fans or readers.

When I saw Lucy Werner’s Substack experience, how an inadvertent click destroyed most of her work, including her paid subscriber base, and being told there’s no way to fix it? No way.

I used to believe in having everything under one roof. One website for everything. Now I’m not so sure.

I signed up for Transistor to host my interviews. You can’t embed Substack podcasts on your site. That makes sense to drive people to Substack to increase subscriptions, but what about my own site?

I moved all my paid subscribers to Memberful, which I’ve used before. They’re owned by a solid company (Patreon) and do memberships. I pay them monthly, so if anything goes wrong, I have one company with a dedicated support team to contact.

Next is my email list. Linking to Memberful violates Substack’s terms of service.

“You may not circumvent your payment obligations to us by soliciting payment from a Reader outside of Substack or by using any alternative method to collect subscription payments. This includes receiving payments for your publication through links to PayPal or a separate Patreon page.”

True, I don’t “charge a subscription fee for your publication,” but I could wake up one morning to find my account suspended for linking to an “alternative method to collect subscription payments.”

This means I can’t promote my weekly Zoom calls to the 6,500 people on my email list.

In early 2024, I wrote “maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.” Putting all our marketing eggs into the social media basket wasn’t a great idea, and I’m beginning to think the same of Substack.

GET OUT OF THE WAY

Noah Kalina from “Newsletter #178 – The Chicken Camera.”

“Sometimes the best thing we can do as artists is simply create the conditions for interesting things to happen and then just get out of the way.”

Creating the conditions for interesting things to happen. Yes. That’s why I started my newsletter back in 2021 (here’s the first post). Write about the stuff I want to write about. Maybe other people will enjoy it.

From that, interesting things have happened from Social Media Escape Club.

BETTER VS MORE

On a group call today we got talking about an influx of subscribers, and instead of trying to replicate that to get more more more, we talked about ways to get closer to those subscribers. One at a time if needed.

What brought them in? What resonated? How can you meet them?

Can you take 100 new subscribers and find people willing to dive in? Hop on Zoom call?

Maybe it’s “just” 20 people, but those 20 (or 10 or 5 or one) can change your life.

Making more content isn’t always the answer, like Scott says here. Seek more (and better) conversations, and see what happens.

THE RIGHT PEOPLE

A client who has worked with some big names wanted to build their email list, and I gave them this idea:

Think of the amazing people you worked with throughout the years, and think of all those stories you shared, and the memories you’ve made. They’ve got to have dozens of those stories to write, right?

So write that post, with that one person in mind. Then email that person a link to the piece.

This gets you around sending a boring email to “all your contacts” saying, “hey, I have a newsletter now, you should subscribe.”

Write a post that will resonate with the person you’re emailing. Yes, even if it’s just that one person. Email the person the link. Maybe they subscribe, or at least reply and you two catch up, and who knows where that leads?

It’s not always about striking it rich and getting 100 new sign ups. Sometimes the right message to the right person at the right time is all you need.

DIRECT CONTENT WINS

This from Matthew Ferrara:

Imagine if you produced direct content as frequently as you produce social media content. But rather than 1% or 10% of people seeing it, it gets received by 100% of your audience. Got your attention?

Keep making Reels that 95% of your audience won’t see?

Or just email 10 people and reach all 10 of them?

Emailing 10 people means we might get rejected 10 times.

Making Reels is safer, knowing it’ll largely go unnoticed, but we still did “the right thing” according to mass marketing gurus.

HOLIDAY SELLING

Photo by Seth Werkheiser

Recently I did a Klaviyo “check-up” for a record label and found they had two abandoned cart flows going at the same time (which meant every user got TWO emails to remind them of items in their cart – ooops).

I’ve been using Klaviyo since 2020 for music labels (including Death Row Records).

The holidays are coming up – if you need a second set of eyes on your email marketing setup (Klaviyo mainly, but I work in Mailchimp a bit, too), let’s connect: hey@sethw.xyz

COMFORT SHOES

I don’t know how I got on this email list, but I can’t look away. It’s atrocious in every way. All images. It’s a train wreck.

I can’t unsubscribe from this nightmare.

THIS WEEK IN BURGER WORLD

I see a lot of bad marketing emails from Square, but the marketing emails I get from Bad Luck Burger Club are fucking great.

It’s bold. It’s bright. The logo screams in your face. Love that.

The copy-writing matches their brand so well, too:

✅ The Intergalactic Rolling Church of the Burg (aka our food truck)

✅ Also, when you park at the market, don’t park in the dang bike lane!

✅ Party on, Burger out.

Most marketing emails are just square blocks of things for sale, but Bad Luck gets away with it because the top half was written by people – you can’t get an intern or AI to write that well.

Like, there’s a difference between greeting your customer with a hearty “hello, how ya doing today?!” and “so how many burgers ya want?”

I’ve eaten several of their burgers, all in one week at Furnce Fest in 2023, and they’re fucking amazing.

SHOW DON’T TELL

I’d imagine one reason people don’t sign up for email newsletters is because if they can’t see your email newsletter, they’re going to assume it looks like all the other shit newsletters out there, so why sign up?

This is why something like Substack works so well. It’s literally the secret sauce. You see what you’re going to get before you sign up.

Not so with Mailchimp or the countless other shit newsletters we sign up for from artists we like.

We blindly sign up and get tossed a product catalog every few weeks.

Meanwhile, the same artist shovels 19 posts a week up on social media, filled with jokes, rants, photos, and stories.

Email subscribers are only worth sales, apparently.