(Swipe, Thought, Uplifting, Picture, Interesting, Drawing)

This is a fun email for Friday April 22nd, 2022. Hope you like it 🙂

 🎤 Listen to this email here:

Swipe:

This seems so stupidly old school, but the whole world used to run on these things called "pagers" or "beepers."

Circa 1997 it was common for people to carry around these big fat chunky plastic devices that would display a phone number on it:

You would then find a landline phone to call back that number.

However people got clever and started making codes they could send using roughly 12 characters or less.

Checkout this LA Times article from 1997 showing how teenagers would use these codes to communicate:

It's funny to think how "high tech" this was ~20 years ago. Compare this simple one-way communication device showing 12 characters compared to a regular modern day iPhone!

Thought:

My favorite things to re-vamp in our members area is software products. The reason is you can:

Show, Don't Tell

Basically this means you can show an image or video of the software in action and people understand it right away. No need to explain with tons of text.

Here's an example of Show, Don't Tell for a workout app:

Here's an example of Show, Don't Tell for a podcast editing feature on Descript:

Here's an example of Show, Don't Tell for a "social landing page" app:

Each of these examples conveys what the product does with very little text, as just "showing it" does most of the work.

Uplifting:

This is a cool feature of Apple TV I rarely seen talked about:

Try watching your Apple TV using AirPods and they do this thing called "Spatial Audio."

It means even if your head turns away from the screen, it will still sound in your head like the audio is coming directly out the TV...as if you were watching with speakers.

It works amazingly well on Hulu and NetFlix (not really YouTube).

This sounds so realistic I had to triple-check my speakers were off!

To test the different settings, try watching YouTube or turning off the Spatial Audio, and you'll see how different "normal" mode sounds.

This is a cool feature if you don't want to disturb other people in the house, but still want to crank a movie loud, or if you don't have great speakers on your TV.

Try it!

Picture:

This is a funny sign, but super accurate and to the point! You can't help but run this horrible scenario in your head when you look at the machinery.

This is as direct as copywriting can be!

Interesting:

This whimsically bad homepage is still the homepage of CopywritingCourse.com:

The reason it stays like this:
I've NEVER been able to beat the conversion rate of it....specifically this version with the stick figure guy.

This month a 1,000+ conversion test showed this page did:
• Unique Visitors 7,619
• Conversions 1,200 (people who entered their name and email)
• Conversion Rate 15.75%

Nearly a 16% conversion rate!

That means of every 100 people that see that page, 16 of them signup to receive my emails. That's pretty good for an old stick figure!

Drawing:

10 years ago I acquired most of my knowledge through books.... Now I acquire it mostly through podcasts and YouTube and Social Media:

It's been fun to watch this shift happen as better forms of consumption become digital, easier and cheaper.

Next stop: VR and AR experiences! 😎

In 20 years we'll look back on the era of big fat chunky facemasks for VR like we look back at the comical technology of pagers 

Hope you enjoyed these little tidbits, have a happy Friday!
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora - CopywritingCourse.com | @NevMed

I was recently interviewed on the My First Million Podcast, you can listen here:

We talked about a bunch of things:

• When copywriting started to click for me.
• Biggest mistakes in copywriting that people make.
• Are people born creative or is it learned? (Hint: A bit of both)
• My decision to die at 85 on Nov 17th, 2067
• Living next door to your best friend

This is a gigantic podcast run by my friend (and Copywriting Course member) @Sam Parr. This podcast is consistently one of the top 10 business podcasts out there, and I'm always surprised by the sheer number of people who tell me they listen to it! 

• Listen on Apple here
• Watch on YouTube here
• Read show notes here

🎤 Listen to this email here:

Hi I'm Neville, I run a company called Copywriting Course, and every week I send out a weekly newsletter on Friday's called "The S.T.U.P.I.D. Email."

It's an email with 5 sections and looks like this:

This email keeps our subscribers engaged, and we occasionally sell products through it. Here's some stats:

⇨ 50,000 people have opted in.
⇨ 28% to 32% open rates.
⇨ 600 to 3,000 clicks per email.
⇨ 30 min to 2 hours creation time per week.
⇨ 7am on Friday's send time.

I'm going to show you how I make it every week using an email sending service called ConvertKit.

Whether you're TheHustle, The Skimm, or AppSumo....this is how you will create and send a newsletter.
Here's the whole process in a nutshell:

Step 1.) I Collect & Create Content

If you want to send out a weekly newsletter full of tips and tricks and cool stuff for your audiences, you're going to constantly be on the lookout for stuff to send.

I have tons of sources I compile this information from:
⇨ My personal Swipe File of ideas
⇨ While scrolling social media
⇨ Creating my own drawings or content
⇨ My personal photo roll on my phone
⇨ While watching YouTube
⇨ Browsing Instagram
⇨ Cool things I read in books
⇨ Reddit, Digg, Twitter
⇨ My blog archives

These are all sources I'll peruse on the regular, and if I spot something interesting I'll jot it down in Apple Notes or take a screenshot. 

For example, here's a bunch of raw screenshots and ideas that I had collected in my phone and notes over the week: 

Out of all this raw information I'll pick & choose which to put into the newsletter in the next step...

Step 2.) I compile the newsletter

Since I send out my S.T.U.P.I.D. Email on Friday mornings, my job for Thursday is to fill out a template I have loaded up in ConvertKit that looks like this:

Swipe: A "swipe file" from my archive.
Thought: A fun thought or something I discovered.
Uplifting: Something uplifting.
Interesting: Something interesting I found.
Drawing: A drawing from my archives.

Now all I have to do is sift through my notes, social media, and screenshots to fill in each section! 

If I do a great job during the week searching & saving cool stuff, this process goes by very quickly. 

If I have very little to put in the email, this can take hours.

My newsletters are usually very image heavy, but thankfully ConvertKit has extremely easy image editing and markup. 
Let's say I have an old ad like this I want to share with my newsletter audience:

...I can quickly highlight specific parts of the ad right from the ConvertKit Editor, like drawing attention to a headline. Without ever leaving ConvertKit for a photo editing program I can do callouts like this:

As a person who includes up to 20 images per email, I can’t tell you how much time this saves!

In fact it makes my emails BETTER because I can spend more time marking up images for the audience, and less time boringly copy/pasting files back-n-forth from different photo editing programs.

Step 3.) I schedule it for Friday

I auto-schedule my Friday S.T.U.P.I.D. Email for around 7am. So when I finish the email on Thursday evening, I go into ConvertKit and schedule it for the next morning:

I hate waking up early....so while I'm fast asleep at 7am on Friday morning....

….ConvertKit is diligently sending out my email to 50,000 people!

Here’s the results from weekly emails:

Recipients: ~50,000
Open Rate: Between 28% and 32% every week
Clicks: .5% to 2% (sometimes not many links to click on)
Unsubscribes: 60 to 95 per email

A HUGE benefit of doing a weekly email is getting sponsorships and making sales of your own products. 

I've accepted sponsorship money in exchange for a blurb about a company in the email, and also have sold my own products through there. 

Growing the email list:

So before you can send out your newsletter you have to have an audience.

The way I've built The S.T.U.P.I.D. Email newsletter is by attaching a ConvertKit email signup at the bottom of my blog posts, like this:

When someone enters their email address it automatically signs them up for the weekly newsletter.

I also have a page called CopywritingCourse.com/newsletter where people can signup for my full email list.
That page looks like this:

It's just an embedded ConvertKit signup form, and it even has this cool GIF graphic on it 😂

Creating an email newsletter steps:

Here's the quick breakdown of how a weekly newsletter is created every single week:

Create A Newsletter Q&A:

Q: Patricia - @Shewrites
Please include a sneak peek into the research process for newsletter + The content breakdown strategy

A: Basically I try to post to Twitter throughout the week, and use Reddit, Digg, Twitter, SwipeFile.com, our members area and more as places to look for cool things. Also if I see a cool billboard out on the street I'll snap a pic, or get an interesting piece of mail.

Q: Bastian W. Harbo - @autotrader87
Say you have 10 ideas for your next weekly edition.

How do you select which to include, and how, if ever, do you portion out the ones that didn't make this week, over the next editions.

A: Knowing this is my job as a content curator. Sometimes I will drop 10 items into the newsletter, and just start scratching off items that are "Ok but not great."

Q: Nick Moussoulis - @nikmoussou
How do you hold yourself accountable every on doing it every week? That's my biggest struggle 🙂

A: This is a huge problem! I mention to someone at my company to make sure I have the STUPID email ready by Thursday evening, and that helps keep me accountable. There's been more than a few times I'll get a Slack message at 10pm on Thursday saying "is it done?" and I'll realized I've totally forgot to write it!

Q: Div Sharma - @itsdivsharma
How do you grow your list when you’re just starting out? What’s the best way?

A: This part will take some time and dedication:
0-100 members: Post on your own social media to friends/fam, and also any groups you're part of.
100 - 1,000 members: Consistently pushing our great emails and promoting snippets of content on social. Being part of groups.
1,000 - 10,000 members: Posting on your own website. Have an email signup form.

Q: Rohit Kumar - @rohitkumar_co
Why choose a weekly newsletter and not bi-weekly or monthly?

A: Weekly newsletters are the most popular and easy to understand "Oh every Friday I'll look for it!" However you must be able to fill a full newsletter every week. I chose weekly because in a week I generally find enough cool stuff on the internet or post enough on social media to fill an entire newsletter. Some weeks are harder than others for sure, but generally once a week I can find around 5 cool things to send out. So weekly is my email cadence!

Q: Mauro Paravano - @maurorpv
I wonder, have you done any research on paid/subscription based newsletters? Are they still a thing? I guess is kinda weird since it’s also hard to prevent someone from forwarding that content; anyway just figured to ask you.

A: Yes! Stuff like Trends.co is a paid newsletter, but generally you must first have an audience to create a paid newsletter. SubStack is exactly this, and many of the people who start a newsletter quit after 3 months, realizing creating extremely good content consistently that people will pay for is difficult.

Q: Matthew Q. Nguyen - @Mqnguyen004
Do you recommend starting through things like MailChimp? Or would you suggest someone going all in and hopefully get enough to monetize a little?

A: Any email service is fine to start off with, they all have their quirks, but by far the easiest to use with the fewest quirks is ConvertKit. I would start off small with a free trial on ConvertKit, then move up the pricing scale if your newsletter takes off.

Q: Jesse Brede - @jessebrede
What’s your preferred ESP and why? If you could go back and do it all over, what’s something you would change? Was there any inflection points? Is it week by week or do you do batches? How long does it generally take you?

A: ConvertKit! I've been through every damn email service out there, and was on InfusionSoft for years, but have never been happier with one than ConvertKit. Sometimes things that should be simple on mail services like creating an autoresponder are unnecessarily hard...ConvertKit just makes it dead simple and that's what I like.

Q: Shreya Sparkles - @shreyabadonia
Would like to know how much time you spend on planning, writing and in drawing.

A: I basically screw around reading the internet, posting on social media, and browsing my own interests all week, then spend between 30 minutes and 2 hours creating the STUPID email.

Q: John Small Mountain - @johnsmallmtn
How do I remove the feeling of feeling like I need a format to start?

A: Take your last 10 social media posts, dump them into an email or blog posts, and see if you can find a certain trend or common thread through them. Mine interests happen to be old ads, marketing tactics, copy etc....so that became the format for my emails.

Q: Topher Hammond - @topher_hammond
What are some of the systems that you have in place now that have exponentially released the amount of time you need to invest in putting the newsletter together each week?

A: Having a template and format help big time! Since I know the format is:
Swipe
Thought
Uplifting
Interesting
Drawing
....I can work backwards throughout the week to look for content that fits that template.

Q: Matt Boyce - @Boyceterous40
Do you do any segmentation or personalization? Or just 1 big newsletter to everyone? Also, I would love your tech stack.

A: 1 big newsletter. Unless you have 100,000+ people on your list you generally don't need to segment much (obviously some exceptions). But if you start segmenting, you are now managing multiple lists. A better method is to tag people as necessary, then if you need to target specific people, you can email by their tags, not a whole different list.

Sincerely, 
Neville Medhora

P.S. What are the newsletters that you regularly read??
Lemme know in the comments!

🎤 Listen to this email here:

Swipe:

This is a cool ad for a “Genuine Bell” phone from 1983.

It uses “text and arrow markup” to showcase the features and benefits of their phone.

If I were copywriter of this ad I would’ve added stuff like:
• Lasts 3x longer than other phones
• Clearest sound of any phone
• Withstands heavy use

Thought:

I was about to drink one of those 5 Hour Energy things this morning and thought I’d make it more fun by serving it cocktail style!

I used:
• 1 Five Hour Energy
• Angostura bitters
• Lime juice
• Mint
Then shook it up in a shaker with ice and garnished with mint leaves.

To be honest it wasn’t all that great, but I thought this was funny 🙂

Uplifting:

This was a fun project that took several hours but was totally worth it:

Laying down gym mats in my garage!

When I workout in the garage I have to be EXTREMELY GENTLE when setting weights down because steel on concrete is no bueno.

My buddy Sam put gym mats down and it made the garage so much more useable as a gym:

So I ordered from the same company (American Floor Mats) some industrial gym mats to cover the floor:

For some reason “gym mats” seem like they’d just be yoga mats or foam….but they weighed in at 700 lbs 😳

You have to fine-tune the mats by cutting them to length with a utility knife:

The end result looked great!

The garage is normally a place to store random crap and cars, but this has started to turn into another room I use all the time.

P.S. All the furniture in there got a second life since being banished from the main house 😂
 
 

Picture:

This Liquid Death (water brand) coffin was setup at a conference, and had Liquid Death water cans inside of a coffin with the quote “Murder Your Thirst” on it 😂

h/t @kevinleeme for spotting this.

The product is called “Liquid Death” so the whole coffin motif worked well and DEFINITELY stood out amongst all the booths.

Love the cleverness of this!
 
 

Interesting:

This was a cool Tweet I saw:

This is a great Tweet commenting on Good Copy vs Bad Copy:

Bad Marketing Copy:
– This is what I do
– This is what it does
– This is why it’s cool

Good Marketing Copy:
– This is what you’re facing
– This is how I can help you solve that
– This is what differentiates me
– This is why this product is right for you
– This is my promise

Credit: @alexgarcia_atx

If you notice the difference between the good and bad copy, it’s that the good copy gives more information about how a product/service would help the end user more.

Drawing:

This drawing for a mens coat and gloves looks very elegant and clean. It looks extremely real, but ultimately is a drawing.

This is from the Spiegel Holiday Catalog in 1943, and I love the simplicity of the picture and the easy pricing.

These mailed catalogs were basically the 1940’s version of internet shopping.

 
 
Hope you enjoyed these little tidbits, have a happy Friday!
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora – CopywritingCourse.com | @NevMed