Email marketing for every Ecosystem
In the sales and marketing game, the email list is king. Learn how to optimize for your SCALE path Ecosystem.
Hi,
Before you read this, it’s would be very helpful to learn about your SCALE path and your base Ecosystem.
They are similar, interrelated concepts with lots of overlap, but they are distinct. Since this topic deals more with how you operate your business than how you grow your business, it falls more into the Ecosystems methodology.
We’ve all heard the expression “email is king”. When it comes to marketing, there is no better investment than building your email list.
However, ecosystem should approach email marketing differently based on their strengths and challenges, but we’re all told there is only one way to do email marketing.
There is not a one-size-fits-all strategy to anything, especially email. I’m going to break down an email strategy for each ecosystem that will hopefully make you fall in love with email marketing.
Grassland
Advantages: While the above strategy can work really well to build up a sizeable email list quickly, Grasslands are more focused on being seen as thought leaders moving the industry forward. A big list is good, but what they’re really looking for is influencing the movers and shakers of the industry and causing seismic shifts over a long time horizon.
For this reason, you should consider creating a newsletter that is almost purely value-based and lives on a platform on Substack or your own blog. That way, it has the longevity to keep “putting pennies in the bank” for years.
The main problem with sending a normal promotions email for a Grassland is that you can’t disseminate it widely. Once you send it, the value drops to zero, which isn’t ideal for a Grassland marketing strategy. Instead, their goal is to make something once and keep extracting value from it forever.
Whereas, if you can create a more content-focused newsletter, it allows you to syndicate it widely and get maximum value out of your work for the longest time.
For instance, this article lives on Substack, but it also gets disseminated over email, and then is cached on Google and other search engines. I could also syndicate it out to Medium and other platforms, though Substack doesn’t have that functionality natively.
If I did my job right, then people will be able to search it for years, bringing people into our ecosystem long after it gets emailed out to subscribers.
This is the ideal situation for most Grasslands. A round-up strategy is perfect for Deserts who are trying to tap into the zeitgeist now, but you are more likely trying to tap into where the industry is going in a couple of years.
My main publication offers a new article every week and a roundup of my favorite articles from the past week, so I try to have my cake and eat it, too.
One thing you might want to consider to bring in more income is to offer sponsorships like Simon Owens and most mainstream publications do.
You can also use the Paved or Sparkloop network, but you will probably see more success with a deeper partnership you can vet for your audience.
Then, you can put ads in your newsletter or do an advertorial for an advertiser you believe in to share with your audience.
You are probably already covering the industry closely, so it would make sense for advertisers to work with you. If you have a stellar reputation you can probably charge top dollar for a spot in your publication.
The advantage of an advertising strategy is that when you have something to promote, you can pop it inside the ad spot and use it for your own promotion.
If that doesn’t work for you, then you can offer a membership like Jane Friedman does with the Hot Sheet. Or, you can use it as a launching pad for consulting and courses, like Writers at Work with Sarah Fay or Marlee Grace.
Challenges: Having a value-based newsletter is not the easiest thing to monetize during a launch. Because you are not sending sales emails often, you have not developed the sales habit in your customers. This is why having advertising in your newsletter could be an effective strategy. Not only are you building revenue, but you are also training your subscribers to click and buy.
Aquatic
Advantages: Aquatics are almost the perfect marketing chameleon who can get a lot of value from integrating anything I’ve talked about so far into their email practice.
Because they are building one overriding fan experience across many formats, they can create a huge audience through advertising and digests or create unique fan experiences like a Forest. They will probably be launching often, so having a rolling promotion strategy of a Tundra would work for them, too.
The question for an Aquatic is where to start, and that’s kind of always their problem with just about anything. They want to do everything all the time and are most prone to shiny object syndrome.
The key for an Aquatic is to figure out which strategy to try first and that’s going to depend on where you are in your career.
If you are “pre-launch”, you probably want to start building up an audience either like a Desert or like a Tundra, depending on which strategy feels right to you. The further you are away from launch, the more you should probably build like a Desert.
Why not a Grassland? Because nobody knows your universe yet, and so you’ll get the most value at building a “look-alike” audience filled with a ton of people you think would like your universe, but since there’s nothing out about it yet, you also have no hype. Instead, you could build on the hype other universes already have going for them while you build up your own.
Once you have an audience, keeping them engaged like a Forest makes a lot of sense. I would probably say that the last thing you should build is your Grassland-ed-ness, which seems to go against the true power of a Grassland, but people aren’t going to be interested in doing a deep dive into your universe until after you have a fandom, and you’ll probably get the least from content marketing than a Grassland because your universe will likely be quite niche for a long while.
Challenges: An Aquatic’s biggest challenge is F.O.C.U.S. They have a ton of trouble focusing on one challenge until they have success with it. They have big plans and huge ambitions. Because they have a thousand options of what to do next, they end up flitting between them, which is a really bad way to have success. You can have success in any one of these areas, but you have to pick one and stick with it until you either break through or you’re sure it won’t work for you.
By the way, it’s fine to give up on something. Just know why you’re doing it and make sure it’s a good reason. Don’t just give up because another pretty thing came up that you’re dying to try.
Desert
Advantages: Since Deserts are great at finding and riding trends, I would recommend Deserts implement something akin to what Morning Brew, Tim Ferris, Feed Me, or 1440 used to grow their list to 100,000+ without investing a ton of time into any individual newsletter.
Namely, a daily/weekly/monthly digest or roundup where you are gathering the most important news about an industry and disseminating it into short news bites.
You can also provide information on an industry, a trend, or just about anything that has a large audience, which is something you are uniquely qualified to analyze.
One of the reasons I love this strategy is that it doesn’t have to be about you or your brand. Deserts usually want to work in the background anyway and let their products do the talking. This strategy allows you to create a brand around your newsletter that has nothing to do with you while still collecting an audience of fans and funneling them to your work.
The best part of this strategy is that it’s almost infinitely scalable with advertising. Companies like Beehiiv and Sparkloop have created recommendation engines like Substack, but they are powered by ads. For instance, Beehiiv has a program called Boosts. Sparkloop has Upscribe and their Partner Network.
What’s nice is that you can both make money from the platforms and also spend money to grow with them.
Challenges: The challenge here is scaling the right audience to buy your products and services, especially when you’re changing your offerings so much and often drastically. Hopefully, you’re creating an environment where this whole enterprise is profitable by itself, but you should remember that you’re looking for people to buy from you at the end of the day…unless you aren’t.
It’s not impossible to build a big email list for a random project, and then sell it through a company like Duuce or Flippa. Then, you can rinse and repeat, or move on to something else.
Tundra
Advantages: The hype train is strong with you, so you’re going to get a lot of value out of building up an audience and then monetizing them with launch events.
It’s best to think of your email strategy in three stages: Building, Launching, and Recovery. I try to think of my release calendar in seasons, with every launch being the crescendo of the wave I’m building up to or recovering from. Knowing that, I set my launches based on when I know I can crescendo effectively.
There are three parts to a launch: Prep, Launch, and Recovery. In prep, I build up to my next launch. Then, there is the launch itself. Finally, in recovery, I give both myself and my fans a chance to relax and catch their breath before we do it again.
Once that is set, I know I need to spend a month building up to that launch, which means the lowest point on the release wave will occur every year in December, February, May, and August… My biggest launches last 31 days, and my shortest can be as short as five days. It all depends on the project and how much I think people can stand me talking about it.
In the building phase, you’re using building up a big mailing list, along with organic traffic and advertising. The goal here is really to give value with a free lead magnet or other piece of content. Then, use an automated email sequence to get them excited about your work.
An email sequence is a series of marketing messages targeting your audience on a set schedule.
If you already use email sequence software, you know there are several types of automation that can be used to reach your audience. With email sequencing, you use marketing automation software to set up and publish these campaigns depending on the actions they’ve taken on your website.
Email sequences are also known as lifecycle emails and email marketing automation because they allow you to schedule specific content to be sent out.
These new emails should be segmented out from your main list so they don’t get your main emails. However, that doesn’t mean that your main list doesn’t get love during the building phase, too.
During this phase, you are delivering value weekly by sharing valuable insights, behind-the-scenes processes, and generally getting people to know you, like you, and trust you. More importantly, you are using this time to get them excited for your next big project.
It’s really important that you focus on sending emails with one call-to-action, or “thing you want somebody to do”.
Ideally, you want them to do one thing with every email. The emails you write in any of these phases, but especially this one, should be short and fun.
Our goal is to crescendo our building phase to maximize excitement at the launch of our next product or project. The whole of our marketing should be about cresting and receding like waves so that we can maximize our launches. I call this a rolling launch strategy because they rise and fall a bit like a series of rolling hills or rolling waves.
During the launch phase, you’ll be sending way more launch emails than any of the other ecosystems. I recommend daily emails during a launch, each one highlighting a different part of your exciting new project.
This can get very exhausting, which is why we need so much recovery time after a launch, for both ourselves and our audiences to settle from the excitement and reset.
Challenges: The challenge of a Tundra is they always want to launch the next thing, and they don’t take into account the building or recovery phase. If you don’t have ways to build up your audience between launches, then you will see your success dwindle.
You also have to contend with the fact that launch emails lose all value the minute after you send them.
Most importantly, if you’re not delivering a ton of value to your audience between launches, they will think you are just withdrawing from the goodwill bank instead of making deposits into it.
Think about your goodwill like it’s a bank. We’ll call it The First Bank of Goodwill. This bank works like any other bank, except that it runs on your goodwill instead of money.
When you do something nice for somebody, you make a deposit into this bank. Whether it’s writing a blog post, speaking on a panel, providing advice over coffee, or even just retweeting an interesting article, everything you do for your audience is a deposit in the goodwill bank.
By contrast, everything you ask of your audience is a withdrawal from the goodwill bank. Every time you ask somebody to buy your product, every time you pitch them something, and every single time you ask them to share your posts, you are withdrawing from your goodwill account.
If you have been depositing into the goodwill bank over and over again, you can make these withdrawals without overdrafting your account; however, if you haven’t been making these deposits, then you can’t afford to make an ask of your audience. Imagine trying to buy a $50,000 boat in cash when your checking account only has $3.27 in it. You can’t do that.
The same is true with your goodwill.
You absolutely must focus equally on all three phases to make the most out of this strategy. Unlike some other ecosystems that can supplement their income with advertising, you probably don’t need that kind of stuff because you’re constantly in a launch cycle.
Forest
Advantages: I think a lot about RJ Blain and her Sneaky Kitty Critic email list “written by her cats”. Even after knowing her for years, I have no idea what she’s doing with her email. It’s chaotic, but I love it. She knows how to engage her perfect people and make them feel special.
That’s what really matters. Forests know their audience so well they can send just about anything and their audience will eat it up.
Because Forests have such devoted audiences, they are also the only ones who should be even thinking about monthly emails over weekly ones, and only then because they probably have a Circle community, a Facebook group, a Discord channel, or somewhere else where they interact with their customers all the time. If you have that kind of interaction with people, you don’t need to send them a lot of emails.
Even if you send monthly emails, you might also want to consider doing a weekly digest of comments from your group, or something similar.
This is something you can set up automatically on some services, but you might have to do it by hand, or have an assistant do it.
Challenges: Forests are incredible at making their own people feel special, but an email list is also a great way to find new people. Everything I mentioned above is great fan service, but you also have to develop a good autoresponder to bring people into your ecosystem and make sure they are set up for success.
Don’t assume everyone on your list knows what you’re talking about, especially if they are new. I suggest you segment out new people and run them through an extensive email sequence to make sure they are well-educated on your space before you show them maximum weirdness.
The key to a Forest succeeding with email is consistency. If they can develop consistently, then they can send just about anything to their audience.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing isn’t easy, especially when you’re first getting started, but it’s considerably easier once you have a process in place that works for you. Like any good flywheel, it gets easier the more you do it.
For years when I was getting started, I did something called 7 Cool Things, which was modeled on Tim Ferris’s Five Bullet Friday. It was easy. It was fun. It gave my audience something of me when I didn’t have anything to talk about with my own work.
Then, I started to launch more often and fell into the rhythm of build, launch, recover. In the past year, I’ve focused heavily on Substack and building like a Grassland.
There is no wrong answer, and if you see a strategy above that resonates with you outside of your ecosystem, try it.
The biggest thing that determines a successful email strategy is consistency. That said, the goal of each strategy I’ve outlined above is different. Only the Tundra is really set up to maximize money from the launch itself, which is why I showed other ecosystems different ways to generate income that might work better depending on your ecosystem.
The goal of email is often less about making money from a launch than keeping yourself at the top of people’s minds so that when you’re ready to launch they can find your work and make space for it.
At The Author Stack, we have a Grassland strategy on Substack while having a Tundra strategy on Kit. We have both a promotions email list and a value-based email list, and each has a different purpose. One helps us continuously grow, while the other helps us monetize to stay in business.
