🍿This 1 Email And 50 Words. Generated $30,000+ in ad-sales ....

PLUS: How Sparkloop will pay $10M to Newsletters this year

Author

Wouter Teunissen
August 11, 2023

Welcome to this week in newsletters! Written by me, Wouter.

Seems like you liked last weeks edition enough to not unsubscribe? Nice

You made the right choice.

Today i got some JUICE for ya!

Alright, popcorn time 🍿let's get into it…

👀 In today's email we cover:

  • How one-email I wrote generated $30,000 in ad-sales

  • Everything you missed this week in the industry

  • The Formula Sparkloop has used to make millions

Let’s get into it…

📝Quick Hits

This newsletter is making a million a month?

Here are the quick hits of newsletter sales,growth and operational dopamine to fill your needs. This is what ya missed this week:

Now before i get into the strategy I used to generate $30k from one email.

Here’s the crazy story of how Sparkloop went from an idea to facilitating millions in newsletter creator payouts…

📈Newsletter Insights

The Crazy story of Sparkloop: From Idea, to paying newsletters over $10M in 2023.

This is the story of how Louis Nicols and Manuel Frigerio, went from an idea in 2019 to paying newsletters millions of dollars.

The Origin

You may know as Sparkloop (link) as the newsletter referral program, and that would be right. But did you know that they're on track to pay out more than $10,000,000 in 2023?

Founded in 2019 (before all the hype) Louis and Manuel identified a lack of effective email referral tools. Naturally, they solved a problem they themselves had and decided to find out what that would look like:

They built Sparkloop as an email referral tool. It aims to create win-win situations for both newsletters involved. Paid reccomendations was only launched in October of 2022. Since then it's already paid more than 10,000 indivdiual newsletters millions. (link).

Big bois like The Hustle, Morning Brew and The Pour Over have used Sparkloop to grow grow grow.

The way Sparkloop is works, is that:

  • If you're a creator: You select a bunch of newsletters to promote, and get paid per sign up

  • If you're looking to grow: You set up a budget, a cost per subscriber and certain terms (e.g. opens first 5 emails and clicks on one link) and you grow

But until a few months ago, Sparkloop was mainly under the radar. Until recently where they were bought for (probably) tens of millions by another big player....

Introducing Mr ConvertKit

You definitely know about Convertkit the email marketing platform. It's used by Arnold Schwarzenegger (yes really) and creators like Jack Butcher and James Clear . Convertkit facilitates over 2B emails to 669M readers every month!

Founded by Nathan Barry (a blogger/writer with a background in software) in 2013 the initial vision was to build a SaaS company. 

Now Convertkit has two main goals. Pay $1b out to creators and to reach $100M ARR. (pst they're already at 30M ARR and you can see all of the exact stats right here: https://convertkit.baremetrics.com/)

How does this relate to Sparkloop? Well that's because of the....

Acquisition

Two months ago Sparkloop was acquired by Convertkit. After seeing how helpful Sparkloop was to grow newsletters, Convertkit got giddy about integrating Sparkloop into Convertkit. And so integrate they did.

Unfortunately the terms of the deal weren't disclosed but you can bet it was for some big bucks.

Before we move on to the email that generated $30k, here's what Nathan Barry said about the acquisition:

With this acquisition we see an enormous opportunity to build the #1 advertising marketplace used by newsletter creators to grow their audience

Nathan Barry

The Dark Side of Sparkloop, are all subs bad quality?

On Monday i'm going to tweet out an intersting question. Newsletter co-reg's and referrals are either hated upon or loved dearly, i wanna hear what you have to say. Follow me here to engage in that debate

NOW onto the email, the 500 characters, that generated $30,000

💰Sales Lessons of the day;

How one-email I wrote generated $30,000+ in ad-sales

The best type of lead, is an inbound lead. An inbound lead indeed.

No cold calls where you plead and beg in need.

For these leads come on their own, drawn by your newsletter feed, their interest, you heed!

Alright Shakes-pear, shutup. So firstly, to identify how my one email generated a $30k++ deal. It's important to know the context.

The best type of person to 'sell' is someone who already believes the value of your content. And no one believes it more than the subscriber with a 60% open rate. No one.

So, a really valuable and easy tactic is to engage with your readers. Whether that's on twitter, replying to their email replies, or on another platform.

But by creating a community feeling you start to become familiar with readers. This makes asking for an introduction to one of your-subscribers companies' marketing teams really easy.

So simple. Talk to your most active subscribers, be authentically active with them.

That's the exact strategy I used and is how one-email generated $30k worth of ad-spend with us. A simple introduction email to the marketing-lead of a major company. Helped unlock some major-ad spend with us.

So, engage with your readers. Give wholly. Then ask for the smallest possible favour, an email-introduction (very low lift). And turn your subscribers into warm-referrals.

That’s all for today! This is the start of hopefully a very insightful and helpful newsletter that’ll be sent every week. So tell me what you think!

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Preview of next weeks edition!

  • How **** got to $4,000,000 in ARR

  • The playbook *** used to grow big

  • My LinkedIn Outreach strategy detailled

  • And more…

Meme of the day