Every marketer knows that email ROI is hardly beatable – $40 per every dollar spent. Retention, continuous nurturing, upsells, all contribute to the value of building a list or acquiring a newsletter as a starting base.
In fact, I was just exploring a newsletter for sale sent by a peer the very moment I received the product announcement.
If you have lived under the rock in the 2020s:
1. The Hustle sold to HubSpot for $25M
2. Morning Brew exited to Business Insider for $75M
3. Axios, a newsletter-driven media company, closed a $525M exit deal
When Emanuel Cinca announced a seed round for Stacked Marketer last year, I subscribed within 24 hours. This is an undervalued industry that was thriving 20 years ago and is on the rise again.
I spoke with Blake Hutchison in July and discussed some category omissions that are more prominent in smaller marketplaces. Then Tony Xu got back to me with some roadmap additions down the line, including 3 categories I was waiting for in the meantime.
Newsletters were one of the segments I’ve been tracking down actively (along with WordPress plugins, business blogs, Shopify apps, and micro SaaS), and it’s now officially available on the market.
As an old-school entrepreneur, I see that what has been working since 2022-2023 has been the norm a decade or more ago, namely:
1. Privacy issues affect existing channels and impact revenue opportunities – from ads through memberships and more.
2. Removing 3rd party cookies means that 1st party data is mandatory. Everyone who has access to an email or a text number wins.
3. Traditional paid media is flawed for B2B. I’ll write a separate post on that later this week.
4. Branding and SEO are back on the rise. We’ve closed an extra half a million in ARR from SEO services alone in H2 2023.
5. Demand generation tactics and paywalls are getting ever so obnoxious. The HubSpot core principles of educating via inbound marketing are back in the game.
Therefore, newsletters fall in the correct category of freemium educational content, accessible everywhere, first-party data – and even the ability to tap into SEO (I cross-post my newsletter on LinkedIn and in a separate category in my blog).
Newsletter submissions on Flippa include industry-specific details like subscriber count, open rate, CTR, and churn. This would soon allow for filtering and finding high-performing newsletters on the market.
If your brand hasn’t been investing in a newsletter heavily, acquire one and integrate it into your B2B brand similarly to HubSpot or Business Insider. It’s the fastest way to obtain loyal subscribers and receive continued feedback from week one.
