Hello Hello, 
Wassup, How are you?

Last week, I started listening to Books, rather than reading and now I am completing a book every 3 days. Though my retention on the topic and understanding of the book has decreased phenomenally, I am rationalizing it by octupling the quantity and retaining my read time.

Now, I listen to the books during my workout session and while on the road.

I will now listen to 8 books a month and read 1 book (usual).
This should have a delta positive. 🥹😅

Now, to today’s main food for thought.

Emails are inevitable

Everyone by now, should be aware of the fact that I am a strong supporter of great email newsletters and emails in general as a form of communication.

Why do I think so?

Building an email newsletter is difficult on multiple levels.

1. Getting people to subscribe is difficult. Because newsletters in themselves don’t have a discoverability function built in. So, we need to redirect subscribers from somewhere to your landing page in hopes of them subscribing.

2. Writing content for emails is hard, very hard. It takes us nearly 6-8 hrs to write a case study for Product Monk and Marketing Monk. You cannot just send anything in an email. You need to research, write, and then rewrite again and again to ensure that value has been delivered to the user.

3. Managing Subscribers and Engagement is chaotic. We have automation running on our newsletters wherein we remove inactive and unengaged folks every day. Sure, Beehiiv, the ESP we use makes it easy with the plethora of tools but still to track it daily is a monumental task. But, one wrong email and all your emails further on will end up in promotions and worst in spam.

4. It is costly in the short term. Even to launch a newsletter, you need an Email Service Provider (ESP), and the cheapest plan on Beehiiv is $49/month. You can surely find cheaper tools, but you need the right balance of tools and features to make building a newsletter a breeze. And, any ESP in the market will cost you some money even to start a newsletter.

5. Setting up a newsletter needs some technical knowledge. You need a domain name, then you need to connect it to the ESP, Then a Landing Page and it gets complicated when you want to do a lead magnet and other integrations with other platforms.

But, then why do I think email newsletters are so good?

1. Emails are a form of direct communication. When you received this email, you received it and clicked the email to read the content. That means you did not find my content through dumb scrolling but through an intentional action. That is a huge plus. There is a high probability that you will read some bit of content and will like to read it again. And the most amazing part is when you reply to this email, we are talking. 🥹

2. Building Relationships. Some of our readers of Product Monk and Marketing Monk have sent us sugar notes, that they regularly consume our emails while traveling to the office in Auto, Cab, Metro, etc. Consistency and predictability make readers want more and in return, we end up building a relationship with our readers.

3. Cost Effective in the long run. Because you are building a relationship with the audience, it ensures a high probability of the readers turning into customers when you sell something. Justin Welsh sells most of his courses through his newsletters. We made almost $1200 in January running ads in our newsletters. Your effort will only be writing one email but the revenue will multiply with every new subscriber added.

4. Feedback and Engagement. As soon as you see a dip in Open Rate or CTR, you know you are doing something wrong. People can give feedback through polls, through replies. Because your readers are connected to you, they will tell you when you do something wrong.

5. You own your audience. The other day, I was wondering that I building everything on Beehiiv and what if, someday they decide to block me from the platform. Luckily, with emails, you can still take subscribers and your data to any other platform and start sending emails, like nothing happened.

6. Most Importantly, Premium Audience. People reading an email, your readers, the audience is always premium. They know English, they use Email, and they are either reading it on a smartphone or laptop. Unlike, all the other social media platforms, people reading your emails are very premium.

For reference, Morning Brew was sold for 75 Million Dollars → Read Here, by just writing emails. Ain’t it crazy?

If you want to launch your newsletter, I have created a free 7-email course with relevant resources and guides. Go out there and tell your story.

PS: Use a different email id than the one you are receiving the email on. Duplicate emails ain’t working with automation - some stupid technical glitch that we are unable to resolve.

What are we up to at Moonshot Media?

• We are preparing to launch a bunch of Newsletters by June. We are very near to launching 1 more by 1st week of Feb. We are very excited about this. A completely underserved niche but amongst the most premium and high net-worth citizens of India. More info to come in upcoming emails.

• We are looking for someone with expertise in the Media Buying space as we are setting up a team to bring out ads for our newsletters.

• I also signed up for this course. It is bomb costly but hopes to be worth it.

• The Open Rates of all our emails are off the roof. Thanks to quality and consistency. 🎉🎊🥳

If you are someone who controls marketing budget and decisions and find an alignment with the audience of Marketing Monk, Product Monk, and Adventures of India; do consider sponsoring the newsletter.

We have run some ads in January and have seen great results for our clients. Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] to explore a partnership.

If you find this interesting, please do two things:

1. Reply to this email with your story. Let’s become friends?

2. Share this with someone who would find this interesting.

If you feel like, my emails are not for you. Feel free to unsubscribe, I do not want to clutter your inboxes further. No hard feelings! Total Love ❤️