Generating SEO traffic from newsletters — Itay Paz // Morning Dough

Quotes

• “When we look at KPIs before we even talk about money, were looking at analyzing operations. When youre building an operation, you want to make it work perfectly and as smoothly as possible and get the results that it should be making.” - Itay

• “It starts with the simplest one, you send traffic to your page of registration to subscribe to your newsletter and the first KPI is sign-up. So how many sign-ups was the conversion rate of people subscribing to the page to the people who are actually putting their email address and hitting the subscription rate.” - Itay

• “This is the page where you have the great message saying whats the value for them.” - Itay

• “If you bring a cold audience, its pretty much Wild, Wild West. No one really knows. But when you bring a targeted audience, if youre getting less than 30% to 40%, something is wrong with your messaging.” - Itay

• “Even at Morning Dough, its all about testing and tweaking. Im not saying youll get it the right way. Because when we built our first message we looked at different options and we decided how to deliver the message of why they should subscribe to the Morning Dough. Then we went with that message that brought 55% to opt-in to the newsletter.” - Itay

• “The next phase is, whats the open rate. How many people did you send the newsletter and then whats the percentage of the people who actually opened the email out of the numbers you sent. Usually, open rates are going between 25% to 50%. Usually it starts lower and as you keep on giving your subscribers value, they will keep opening your email again and again.” - Itay

• “The main engagement metrics we know are the click-through rates. So, they open the email and you want to know how many people are clicking, how many clicks are generated, on which links of course.” - Itay

• “So when you think about your engagement rates, this depends on what your model is. If you are doing thought leadership and distributing it with your email newsletter, you might not actually be consuming to click.” - Ben

• “If youre trying to do direct response marketing with your newsletters trying to derive products and service sales, obviously that click is important to continue the conversation to understand if people are interested in your products or services.” - Ben

• “Using your engagement metrics honestly depends on what your model is and what your goals are.” - Ben

• “Theres two more. One is the opt-in rate. How many people are leaving the subscription for every email that you actually sent that you need to measure over time to make sure it connects to the quality of your audience, the setting up of the expectations, the engagement, and you deliver the right content for them.” - Itay

• “You should expect at some point eventually some kind of plateau because some people leave the list for sure.” - Itay

• “The last metric that we look into the operational side is the email deliverability. Thats actually hitting the inbox and thats the most complicated one in the industry to hit but if you have the right infrastructure, theres no issue with that.” - Itay

• “Theres few things you need to do. One you have to have a clean list. Clean list means double opt-in is always welcome because you know for sure that the email is correct and not bouncing back.” - Itay

• “Second thing is to set expectations. This way, people will more often open the email and if they open the email, you get more deliverability. Its connected. For example in Gmail, the bigger the ratio that people are actually opening your email, the better it is that Google looks at your email. Thats why we utilize list cleaning once a month.” - Itay

• “Google rewards you and your deliverability gets higher. What we do with people that didnt open at least one time is we put them in a process where we actually approach them and say, do you still want to be a subscriber? How do we know emails get opened? There's technology for that now.” - Itay

• “I love the deliverability tip and I think it makes a lot of sense. Moving the people that are not engaging and opening your content with a separate list partially because Im assuming that Google is looking at what list is actually sending content and you can basically separate out your list from active engagers to those not unsubscribed but not engaging with content and youre really protecting the valuable list.” - Ben

• “Play with your strength. Dont build something you cant really handle. Its a commitment.” - Itay

• “The second thing is build systems. We already built a system. It's amazing and the biggest one is curation. We never started SEO until we had a system which is having a newsletter built up really quickly. Be focused and use any resources you have.” - Itay