📰 ‘Lets touch base’ (+ 6 other phrases to NEVER say in emails)

Studies made up by me have shown the average entrepreneur spends 90% of their lifetime writing emails; with so much time spent writing emails, entrepreneurs should know how to write good ones without overused words and phrases… right?

crickets

That’s fine, because in this post I’m going to show you the absolute worst, cliche things you should avoid at all costs when writing emails (AND alternate phrases that make people not hate getting emails from you.)

Most deals are lost to “no decision” rather than to competition, i.e. it’s not that the customer didn’t buy your software because they wanted to go with someone else’s; it’s that they didn’t buy any at all, despite genuinely exploring the opportunity.

Dialing up the FOMO backfires 87% of the time by actually increasing the odds your customer will be lost to no decision. Contrary to common belief, customers’ fear of messing up (FOMU) outweighs their fear of missing out on benefits (FOMO).

A key thing to understand is that you don't need to go after an extensive market when launching new products.

Tackling a large market requires economies of scale.

And achieving economies of scale requires a foundational product that has been iterated many times over at various scales of production.

This process takes years to build up.

Thus, it would be best to look for small opportunities that create options when launching a whole new product to scale.

This means you can always decide - once the product works on a small scale - to try to make it work on a larger scale.

The opposite is not true!

When you try to make a product work on a large scale, failure is almost guaranteed.

There is one exception to the rule, and that is Apple's iPhone. The rest is mainly guaranteed failure.

This Australian skincare brand was inspired by its co-founder's struggles with acne. tbh skincare products help its customers fight acne and, in turn, increase their confidence. Naturally, it made sense for the brand to target the demographic that suffers from acne the most: Gen Z.

Acne can also lead to mental health issues such as severe depression and anxiety — something that co-founder Rachael Wilde knows all too well.

The brand crafted its marketing strategies and awareness programs with Gen Z as the primary focus. For instance, tbh is big on TikTok, mainly because its audience is active on the platform.

According to eMarketer, more than 44% of TikTok's user base in the US is young adults and teens between the ages of 12 and 27.

tbh Skincare chose TikTok as its primary marketing channel to reach out to and serve Gen Z. Tbh skincare tracks their brand with Tracksuit, have a look at their dashboard below — It clearly shows that its efforts paid off, with a huge increase in brand awareness by over 121K Australians in 12 months

Although there are hundreds or even thousands of personal finance blogs, Budgets Are Sexy stood out, and readers connected with J. Money. “Financial stuff is pretty boring,” he said, “so I wanted to create a more vibrant and chill place to talk about this stuff like we were two friends just hanging out at a coffee shop or bar.”

It worked. In a niche with a lot of content written for search engines, Budgets Are Sexy felt highly personal. Readers appreciated the content and kept coming back.

Not only was the blog helping readers, but J. Money also benefitted from it. Sharing his net worth and financial details publicly forced him to look at money differently. “You forget sometimes how small actions add up,” he said, “but being able to see a chart of your compounding moves month after month, year after year, really helps instill some good confidence in you.”

When I asked J. Money about the keys to success with Budgets Are Sexy, he pointed out three things:

Being as real and raw as possible, including “sharing as many of my downfalls as successes.” Showing real numbers and not just theories. Making it fun and using “as many dad jokes as possible.” Clearly, J. Money’s approach helped the blog to stand out. Readers followed along with his financial journey, looking forward to each monthly net worth update. The blog grew and became a leader in a very crowded niche.

Why use paid ads to grow a newsletter?

1/ The most successful newsletters use paid as their primary growth source:

Milk Road - Grew to 250k subscribers and was acquired for 7 figures in 10 months. 85%+ of all subs from paid marketing. Over 150k subscribers from FB ads alone.

The Hustle - Grew to 2M+ subscribers and was acquired for ~$27M in 4 years. Most growth from paid marketing. Over 1M subscribers from FB ads alone.

1440 Media - 2.3M subscribers. Majority of growth from social ads.

TLDR Tech - 1M+ subscribers. Most growth from social ads.

MorningBrew, IndustryDive, WorkWeek, and many more top newsletters also get the majority of their subscribers from paid acquisition.

2/ If your subscriber LTV is over $10-$20, why not pay $2-$3 (or less) per subscriber from ads and grow your business faster?

With paid ads done well, you can invest 1 dollar and get 2, 3, or more dollars back over time. This is how most businesses grow. However, media companies often don’t think about paid marketing this way.

3/ It’s very hard to scale to hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers without paid marketing.

Organic growth channels get saturated. People get burnt out on content creation. The growth methods that got you to 10k or 100k subscribers may not take you to the next level.