Email Marketing May Not be Sexy But it Works: Ashley Guttuso

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: You're listening to Marketing Spark, a podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 25 minutes or less. In some respects, newsletters are the Rodney Dangerfield of the digital marketing world. They get no respect. They're widely used by B2B companies to engage and convert customers, but they're not seen as sexy. To get some insight into the world of newsletters, I'm talking to Ashley Guttuso, director of marketing at Simple Focus and the author of the Opt In Weekly newsletter. Welcome to Marketing Spark. It's great to have you, and we've been going back and forth on LinkedIn for a while, and it's, I've yet to actually talk to someone on my podcast about newsletters. So, I'm really excited about the opportunity to get into it.

Ashley Guttuso: I'm excited too. I think this is a fun topic because so many people like to proclaim that email is dead. Then they realize that email is responsible for a high percentage of conversions. And something that's almost more important is nurturing relationships. So I've had a lot of interesting conversations in the past, six, eight months with different newsletter editors, a percentage of whom are marketers who have had a lot of success with their newsletters, but it's because they are doing it in a different way than, like, a lot of times there's a best practice. Right? Send a weekly newsletter or send a monthly newsletter. And then that best practice gets, like, twisted and soiled and, like, right. It turns into something less savory than it once was. So the newsletter actually takes on this new definition and it's email asking someone to convert. So you do the opposite of that with Marketing Spark, and I think that's how we connected in the first place. But the marketers who are doing this well are treating their newsletter like it is an editorial style newsletter, which I love because my background is in journalism. And we've seen this shift or the beginnings of a shift that will just become more prevalent from marketing teams embracing content marketing, like making sure that you have content up there that engages, to reengineering your mindset or your team's structure to perform the way a newsroom or a media group performs. And so the focus then becomes on providing content, whether you're writing it or curating it, that its sole intention is to support your audience and their success. So the marketers who do this best, I think, are the ones who are putting informative educational content in front of their readership and then sprinkling in, like, almost, like, an 80/20 or 90/10% ratio of editorial to promotional. So that's the trend that I'm seeing.

Mark Evans: So I know you're gonna give me the

Ashley Guttuso: Ask it.

Mark Evans: opposite answer. But are newsletters unglamorous, or are they simply understated, or are they misunderstood? Because I think the reality is that newsletters have been around for a long time. As marketers, we probably take them for granted because they're part of our arsenals, just like a blog or a website or social media. Maybe we start to dismiss the effectiveness of the newsletter or the fact that newsletters can be sexy. They can be compelling and engaging.

Ashley Guttuso: They have this stigma, I suppose you could call it, of being kind of old hat because they're not a new tactic. But if you think about marketing and its primary goal is to create awareness and then take that awareness and form a relationship, a connection between the brand and the consumer, then it's a wonderful vehicle to deliver that intimate message because email takes one-to-one, me to you. I'm sending this, excuse me, this email to you and scales it as a one-to-many as long as you don't treat it like it's one-to-many. You kind of have to use the content in a way where I'm sending this specifically to you, my target ICP. Yes. They don't seem to be as sexy. Every 5 or 10 years, they have another resurgence, and they're the new great thing to do. And I think that you would find that that's why HubSpot just bought The Hustle or why Business Insider thought Morning Brew was a great acquisition. Those newsletters, their editors had created an audience and a relationship with that audience that they hope to take advantage of.

Mark Evans: Glad you mentioned that because when HubSpot bought The Hustle, my first impression was that it was more like, what? Like, why would a software company buy a popular newsletter? And I didn't really see the connection between the two because HubSpot is enterprise software, and The Hustle is all over the place. Their content is compelling and engaging and really interesting. I mean, in fact, it's really good journalism when you think about it. So, why do you think HubSpot made the move? And then more important, what does that suggest as a trend in terms of future acquisitions or software companies B2B software companies buying newsletters? Are we, is this the tip of the iceberg as far as you're concerned?

Ashley Guttuso: Their approach is the fast-paced way to reach an audience that has already been nurtured into its existing state. Their challenge will be to keep the content the same as it is, but to work the HubSpot brand into it. Right? Because The Hustle has a community. It's built around a mindset. And so it's what it's also doing is fueling a lot of business ideas and keeping people tuned in to the state of an industry they're interested in. So HubSpot's challenge and any challenge to a marketing team that is trying to act like a media company is to not twist what a media company does into promo, promo, promo. They have to deliver information in the way that the audience wants to receive it. So you can do that from scratch. Or if you're funded, you can go buy the exact newsletter that has been growing for years and has the audience you want to reach. But the trick is not to, like, we one time, we bought a house that was built in 1823, and it had, like, a servant staircase off the kitchen that was a winder staircase, and we wanted it on the National Historic Register. Right? But the second you go in, if you were contemplating, like, 'Hey, we should get rid of that staircase to make the kitchen bigger,' you start to hurt the architectural integrity. And then you are no longer eligible for the tax benefits of being on the National Register because you have now harmed the architectural integrity. If you take that metaphor and you adapt it to editorial newsletter that a SaaS company has acquired, that's their challenge, is not to disrupt or harm the integrity of the publication.

Mark Evans: I have two schools of thought when it comes to HubSpot. One is that it's gonna be very hard for HubSpot to keep its hands off The Hustle because you know that they're gonna want to somehow imprint their brand and their brand message into that media entity. But then on the other hand, HubSpot has a reputation of creating reams of value-added, insightful content that they don't even expect a lot of the readers to even buy HubSpot going down the road. So, it's sort of a two-headed beast when you think about how HubSpot operates. But I think you're right. I think it's gonna be extremely tempting for HubSpot to try to insert itself into The Hustle conversation. My advice to HubSpot would be to back off. Let The Hustle stay The Hustle. Use a really light touch as you go forward, and then you'll be able to reap the benefits and then start to win over the community. Because if they go too fast or they make too big moves, then the community will

Ashley Guttuso: push back. Right. So the intention would be to serve the existing audience, not change things in a way that makes them no longer want to be in that audience because that's newsletter subscriptions. Right? It hits your inbox too many times with messaging that you don't like. There's this magic unsubscribe, and poof, it's no longer part of your daily or weekly reading session. So I liked that from the press release, they expressed an intention to preserve that integrity and that delivery methodology. I am going to watch and see. I think we all are, and see how they treat that. And then theirs can be lessons learned for the rest of us as we watch things unfold. Right?

Mark Evans: Now you mentioned something earlier about email going in sort of waves, maybe every 5 years or every 10 years, something gets new and interesting. So I'm interested given what's happened with The Hustle on HubSpot and given what we've seen last year as far as sort of this new digital marketing landscape, the fact that we're not going to conferences, what's the state of the newsletters within this marketing landscape? Do you see changes? Do you see trends happening? Do you see the way that companies B2B companies are using newsletters changing?

Ashley Guttuso: Okay. So I wanna bring up two things. Number one, I think a lot of marketing teams are looking at their newsletter that they have just been a cycle of sending because they've always sent and starting to think, oh, how can I overhaul this to be more user-centric? Right? Like, how can what I send really help the recipient and earn me that next contract renewal in the process. Like, so it becomes a part of a success strategy with, especially with SaaS, if you're subscribed to their newsletter and you're subscribed to their software. But then another thing that I have seen is independent newsletters like Morning Brew, like The Hustle. A lot of these smaller independent newsletters that are really niched down to a topic or industry that a company would be interested in advertising to, those newsletters are getting advertisements from big companies. So it's a two-sided play. I've seen Ahrefs like advertising in small SEO niche newsletters. So there's kind of a myriad of opportunities, and I think we will see a lot of affiliate things going on and that we will see marketing teams upgrading their newsletter or rethinking the content strategy and trying to figure out how to make it different. I think you and I talked about a long time ago, and this is applicable probably with The Hustle as well as any other niche industry newsletter is that if your marketing team is let's say you don't have the bandwidth even to write a blog a week or a blog a day about industry best practices or trends or things that are going on in your ICP's world. But if you are daily immersing in that ICP's world by collecting links and reading the stories they should be reading, you are more even if you don't publish that as a newsletter, you are more in tune with who you are trying to sell to.

Mark Evans: One of the things I wanted to talk to about is just an editorial approach to the editorial approach to newsletters. So there are some newsletters that are opinion pieces or insight, and there are others that are simply curated content. Do you have a preference? Is it depending on the audience? I'm just curious about how companies and individuals should, well, how B2B companies should approach a newsletter because you wanna serve your audience. You wanna give them relevant content, but you also want to engage, attract, convert. So, how do you, what's the balancing act in terms of the best editorial approach?

Ashley Guttuso: So I think you could be successful with many models. Right? You could have a pure curation model. You could have a pure, 'this is the message from the CEO' once a week, once a month, fortnightly, whatever. Or you could have a hybrid model that uses original content, a lot of context for the links you're bringing in. I think that's kind of what you do. I would call that a hybrid. But

Mark Evans: I guess I was wondering whether companies should simply provide insight and their own opinions and their own views of the world or whether they should also bring in curated content, third-party content that serves the needs and interests of their customers. And then how do you fit in that whole conversion

Ashley Guttuso: exercise that you wanna have? I think the mix is my favorite approach. But I think before I say go do both, what I should really say is go research your ICP. What do they read? What do they like to read? And then figure out how to not just copycat that. Because if I already get a curated newsletter about content strategy or SEO, I don't want 5 of those. And so, I feel like it's appropriate right now to mention that I just finished, Marcus Andrews' narrative design course over on Product Marketing Alliance, and it's phenomenal. I'll give him that plug. But what the message that he drives home is that there's so much noise. There is so much noise in the world. And your ICP can only consume so much.

Mark Evans: So

Ashley Guttuso: you need to figure out how to define what it means to win in their industry and then to give that game a name. And then for that new game, that new playbook to be a part of your marketing, and I think it's a part of your newsletter. Right? And so I wrote just today or I published just today that, like, you can't be one of 40 newsletters that is sending out the same links and expect to win. You've got to carve out a spot for yourself and figure out, like, not just how to be like what they like, but how to deliver a way for them to win and give that parentheses or context or bookends. Like, own that and then bring that into your newsletter so that it's not just another newsletter that's like other newsletters, but it is the one I can't live without because I depend on it to win in my workplace or in my life. Like

Mark Evans: I can totally see where you're coming from because when I look at my own consumption of newsletters, and, like you, I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, Morning Brew, Marketing Brew are the ones that I look forward to. The Click is another one that I really like. As a marketer, I want you to bring me unique, interesting, compelling content that I wouldn't find elsewhere, and you bring it all to me, and that's what makes the value of a newsletter. So we've talked about good practices, best practices for newsletters, but maybe we can flip things on their head and talk about the mistakes that companies make with newsletters.

Ashley Guttuso: Yes.

Mark Evans: You know, I would suspect that the biggest culprit is they try to be too conversion-focused or product-focused. So from your perspective, and you look at a lot of newsletters and talk to a lot of newsletter creators, what are the big mistakes that B2B companies should

Ashley Guttuso: avoid? Too much promotional content, not enough editorial. And the reason I say flip this and make this, like, 90/10 or at the worst 80/20 is that you use the editorial content to earn the right to be promotional. And you are likely not just sending a newsletter. You might also be sending promotional, like, only newsletter. I mean, not newsletters, but emails. Right? Like, so you may have an e blast or a series when you're launching a product or something that you're doing. So if you are doing that in addition to your newsletter, the newsletter and it's on repeat quality delivery of things they always want is the thing that will keep them less annoyed by the promotional blasts. Right? When you start, like, launching or you have a course or something and you're gonna start the week before the course sending those reminders to convert on the course. Like, maybe it's a minimal part of your newsletter, but you've got a sales sequence. Right? We all do things like this. It helps if when I get those promotional emails and I'm not going to convert, it helps that I don't subscribe. Like, the newsletter keeps me hanging on. So maybe at some point, of course, I do convert on. Right? So you haven't lost me completely. Another worst practice that I see is assuming that the audience cares a lot about your company and what's happening in your company. And so we just hired so and so. Here's his CV. Like, no. Maybe a Q&A with this guy. Like, maybe, like, if there's some reason that his knowledge is going to help me win in life, like, maybe I would read a Q&A, but I don't want and then I don't want to have to feel guilty that I don't want to read the bio or the thing. Right? So attempting to publish all their own content, that's not a hard thing for a large team, but small teams have trouble. And so they tend to reduce the number of times they send their newsletter out based on the fact that they only publish 4 blogs a month or less than that. And so they want to have plenty of stuff to use in that newsletter, and they're not bringing in third-party curated links to supplement that. I think bringing in links is a great way to test whether a topic resonates with your audience. Like, hey, let's curate the story about this, see if it gets any action, then we can know if we might wanna pursue that further from our own brand perspective in the blog. So that's another thing is not having like a strong point of view or perspective, just being kind of like, we're for everyone. We don't just, like, we don't have a strong opinion about this. Like a brand with a strong opinion is more memorable and relatable. And then another practice that I kind of, it just gives me like the chalkboard screech kind of sound when I see it. Like, I have that feeling like this. Right? Your spine, like when you see it, is this super formal language. Email is like a letter. Like, you send your friends emails. Right? Like, 'Hey. Thought you would like this. How you doing? Whatever.' It's somehow, especially if you're not sending it from a person, you're sending it from a brand. People, like, get in this weird mindset where they write, like, super corporate. Like, 'Dearest Mark,' or, you know, 'we hope you've been well,' or, you know, 'dear valued customer,' and, like, elevate and formalize the language. Right? And once you do that, you have kind of, like, what you have done is you have built distance between the brand and the recipient. So the closer you can get to them, the better. So, use 'you.' Write like you talk. Like, have a tone and a personality in the newsletter. So, those are some of the big ones. And then I think one really awful one is when people, they forget that email is like a mobile app. And they write everything and design everything to look great on desktop

Mark Evans: Right.

Ashley Guttuso: But not to be consumed in an email on your phone. Excuse me. And so, like, I know it's kind of feels wrong and my CEO and I go back and forth on this because I told him, like, he did a LinkedIn post the other day, and I was like, 'It's one paragraph.' Like, you got to break this thing up. And so he created a post that made fun of how we write for different channels or whatever. And if your copy block is longer than the screen on the phone, like, you need to break that up. Like, one- and two-sentence paragraphs are okay in emails. They're right. They are easier to digest in that way. And that kind of takes us back to a story brand mindset of how many reading calories, how many mental calories is my audience willing to burn when they get this? Like, what can I ask from them? And the easier it is and the better the formatting. And then I think one last thing would be, like, not testing deliverability and not testing, like, if it's clipped in Gmail. Because there's a lot of under-the-iceberg kind of stuff going on in some builders that you don't even realize are keeping you clipped in Gmail, which I never do, by the way. I never get clipped. What that does is that hides your unsubscribe. So you have now made it harder for people who, like, there are people who don't understand how to see the rest of your email. They exist. And then they mark you as spam because they cannot figure out how to unsubscribe from it. It's a thing. I think those are some of the worst of the worst.

Mark Evans: So one final question. Where can people learn more about you?

Ashley Guttuso: If you wanna find me specifically, go to LinkedIn or Opt In Weekly. If you wanna learn more about Simple Focus, the links to some of those brands are in my LinkedIn bio.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks, Ashley, for all your insight about newsletters and email marketing. It's, as I said, it doesn't probably get a lot of attention as being sexy and glamorous, but it is sort of one of the workhorses of the digital marketing landscape. So I really appreciate your tips and your advice. And if anybody's looking for advice on how to write a better newsletter, subscribe to Opt In Weekly. Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Ashley, visit marketingspark.co/blog. If you'd like information about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to Mark@MarketingSpark.co. I'll talk to you next time.