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UltraUpdate Week 19 - Escaping the Promo Tab: Newsletter Growth Strategies

UltraUpdate Week 19 - Escaping the Promo Tab: Newsletter Growth Strategies

Tackling email deliverability, subscriber segmentation, and the pursuit of $5k/month.

Vaibhav Thakur
December 06, 2024

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👋 Hey Ultrapeople, it’s Vaibhav.

In the last Ultraupdate, I told you about:

Winning is winning
‘Bee’ stings

In Today’s Issue:

Happy Thanksgiving (unreliability)
segmentations & automations
BGW Progress Contemplation and Goals

Finally back from my 15 days trip. Ready with laser focus on work again.

(Oh btw congrats $100k BTC)

a dramatic ‘the Redeemer’ pose

🐘 Happy Thanksgiving (unreliability)

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room.

Did you get this email in the promos tab?

I have observed that my emails are landing up in the promos tab for myself (testing) and other close friends who told me about this issue.

I went to my promos tab and found something interesting. Verygoodcopy a newsletter with 75k subscribers, great domain authority in my promos tab too.

I found verygoodcopy and ben’s bytes landing up in my promos tab

I checked the DA was decent and also spam score was 0, compared to milkroad.com and thehustle.co both of them have 1-2%

When I compared to Matt McGarry who is not even using his own domain but beehiiv’s mailing subdomain (same as me) he’s landing up in the inboxes all the time.

This is true that Matt’s emails are very simple compared to Ben’s or Eddie’s.

Email Classification Gmail’s algorithm categorizes emails based on several elements that typically send beehiiv emails to promotions:

HTML-to-text ratio
Number of links
Use of promotional language
Email formatting and structure

As I continue the investigation, I highly doubt the HTML-to-Text ratio could be something.

As I was chatting with Ryan from Beehiiv’s team he mentioned:

“First off, just a general reminder that we're in the midst of the busiest email sending season of the year, globally. Email marketing efforts across the board began ramping up last week and will remain high until the end of the year due to holiday shopping and end of year sales. This is an especially difficult time to do a migration because all of your subscribers inboxes are being slammed with additional emails, and Mailbox Providers are filtering much more heavily during this time of year.”

So I’m just reconsidering a full blown migration might just add few hundred subscribers.

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Segmentation and automations

I realised something important.

Running a newsletter isn’t just about growing subscribers numbers and content. It’s about caring and nurturing your subscribers. Understanding what their needs are. Unless I do this, people will leave and not be engaged anymore.

This is why I’ve been learning segmentation and setting up different automations.

The goal is to collect the data, what the subscribers like and want. Then deliver it to them. I cannot be force feeding content that I want to write about. I sound cliché but it’s true. I’ll be honest, beehiiv’s automations has bit of a learning curve as I can automate stuff with code and also with no code like make and zapier but this was something new and honestly little immature.

So I’m setting up welcome automations, nurture automations, unsubscribe surveys and segmenting loyal subscribers and surveys to understand what people want.

BGW Progress Contemplation and Goals

As I continue embarking on this journey to build this EFFICIENTLY taking this project to 4 hour work week, I’ve realised I’m getting closer to the goal one step at a time.

$5k/mo is just one client or few sponsorships (2-3k each) and then I could start with my SaaS. I’ve started getting beehiiv ads sponsorships as well as some people reaching out complimenting the content.

Smaller wins like these help me move forward and stay motivated. Also, I’ve decided now to reduce my travels and focus on this with full heart if I want to see the 4HWW anytime next year.

I’ve also done new logo and branding for BGW and also changed the newsletter days from Saturday to Friday, as I read that Saturday is the worst day to send the newsletter.

I’m not changing this one for now, since it’s a very small family.

📚 New Blog Posts:

a full recap of all the tools and strategies we’ve covered till now

Nov Recap - 80% Opens & Billion-View Strategies

How We Cracked the Code on Viral Growth & Insane Open Rates

read.botsgonewild.co/p/marketing-hacks-leaked-80-opens-billion-view-strategies

2 Marketing Tools & 2 Growth hacks #6

2025 social media predictions and 13 hard to swallow SEO pills plus:cloning!

read.botsgonewild.co/p/2-marketing-tools-2-growth-hacks-6

📊 This Week in Numbers

PnL	-$290 ( +$6.4 ads yet to come)
Blogs Posted	2
Ultrapreneurs Subscribers	41 Subscribers (+1)
BotsGoneWild Subscribers	Total: 15,620 beehiiv : 2,162 (-138) Sub2 US: 6,979 (-537) Sub3 UK: 6,479 (-114) (Total of 789 subs lost, but in a way it’s good that I keep only interested subs)

PnL

-$290 ( +$6.4 ads yet to come)

Blogs Posted

Ultrapreneurs Subscribers

41 Subscribers (+1)

BotsGoneWild Subscribers

Total: 15,620

beehiiv : 2,162 (-138)

Sub2 US: 6,979 (-537)

Sub3 UK: 6,479 (-114)

(Total of 789 subs lost, but in a way it’s good that I keep only interested subs)

7+ reels and shorts posted

📚 What I'm Consuming:

What I’m Reading: N/A
Course I’m learning from: N/A
Podcast I loved: $22,381 Worth of Marketing Advice in 63 Minutes
Post I loved: The rise of AI: half of LinkedIn posts aren’t real anymore

🎯 Next Week's Focus:

Setup Sponsorship pages Passionfruit,Paved etc
Start paid ads on Reddit, Twitter, Linkedin and Meta
Cross promotions

🤯 Brainfart

Every new AI breakthrough brings us closer to a future we imagined, but further from the one we planned

Thanks for joining me on this Ultrapreneur journey! Let's build something extraordinary, exposing vulnerabilities and the obstacles we face.

To your unconventional success,

Vaibhav

P.S. Got ideas to make this community even more badass? Hit reply. I would really love to talk.

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