[00:00:00 ] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how WordPress can be the backbone of a profitable newsletter.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to share on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you all your idea featured on the show. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the contact form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Laura Nelson.

Laura is a content marketer at WooCommerce, where she’s responsible for creating and planning engaging content for their users. Prior to WooCommerce she worked at MailPoet, an email marketing plugin for WordPress, and before that she worked at Pragmatic, a UK based WordPress agency.

She’s on the show to explore her experience of how you can, and while you might want to set up a paid email newsletter.

When I hear the word newsletter, I’m typically thinking about the information which drops into your inbox on a daily basis. We’ve all surrendered our email addresses in return for some product or service. We agree to receive emails on the understanding that we can unsubscribe at some point.

Perhaps a few of these emails really resonate with you, but it’s likely that you unsubscribed from many as the content was no longer wanted. This kind of email marketing is not always viewed favorably, and it’s not the kind of technique that Laura is talking about on the podcast today. Her pitch is that email newsletters can themselves be a product? That people will pay to receive your emails, and she’s got data and examples to back it up.

I suppose that the closest analogy would be people who create an online course. You have an area of expertise. You do the hard work of creating the course and people will pay for a membership to have the benefit of learning from your expertise.

Laura is describing something similar to that. The only difference being that instead of a course, people will pay to receive your emails, knowing that you’re going to bring value to them regularly. I know that this can be done because as you will hear, I’m a ,subscriber to some of the emails which Laura mentioned.

This is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s hard work and you’ve got to cultivate your audience and give them something of value, repeatedly.

Typically when we record the podcast, there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case with these WordCamp Europe interviews. We were competing against crowds and the air conditioning. And whilst the podcasts are more than listenable, I hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world were a play.

One last thing to mention is that I’ll be attending WordCamp US next week. And as a result there won’t be a podcast episode. If you’re going to be there. I do hope that our paths cross.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the podcast, you can find all the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. And you’ll find all the other episodes of there as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Laura Nelson.

I am joined on the podcast by Laura Nelson. Hello.

[00:04:19 ] Laura Nelson: Hello.

[00:04:20 ] Nathan Wrigley: Laura did a talk yesterday?

[00:04:23 ] Laura Nelson: Yesterday afternoon. Yep. So I’m feeling pretty good today.

[00:04:27 ] Nathan Wrigley: You’re feeling happy. Yeah, she did a talk at WordCamp Europe, 2022. What was it entitled? What was it about?

[00:04:32 ] Laura Nelson: It was how to create a paid newsletter subscription in WordPress.

[00:04:35 ] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, and did it go well?

[00:04:38 ] Laura Nelson: I think so.

[00:04:39 ] Nathan Wrigley: So we’re gonna be talking today about newsletters. Obviously newsletters, they do seem to be all the rage.

[00:04:45 ] Laura Nelson: Yeah, every so often you hear like, email is dead, it’s all about TikTok and in fairness it is all about TikTok at the moment. But email marketing is amazing way to speak to your customers or your audience.

[00:04:57 ] Nathan Wrigley: Does the data back that up then? Reliably over the last 20 years, we can say email still works?

[00:05:02 ] Laura Nelson: Yeah, yeah. And conversion rates are far higher from email marketing than they are from like, if you tweet about your product or your services. Email marketing is golden in terms of conversion rates.

[00:05:13 ] Nathan Wrigley: That’s interesting. Just the interface is a little bit more, how to describe it? TikTok’s a bit more ephemeral. There’s a lot going on, and there’s a lot making you wish to scroll past all of the things. I think it’s the only thing that’s been with me for 20 years.

[00:05:26 ] Laura Nelson: Exactly. People are familiar with it. They know how it works, they know what to expect from an email. I think you’re capturing people at a good time, because generally they’re not gonna open their emails unless they have time to read your email. Whereas if you are like on Twitter and you’re like idly scrolling or you’ve got like two minutes, it forces them to stop, but they might not have time to take that information in. So email, it’s nice. It sits there. If you don’t have time to read it properly when you first open it, you can come back to it.

[00:05:53 ] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a good point. I was just thinking about that. And if I don’t log into Twitter for a few days, there’s almost no chance that I’m gonna see the things from three days ago, because I’m gonna start at the top. Yeah, that’s a really good point.

So, when you’re talking about newsletters, presumably we’re talking about a piece where people have subscribed to a newsletter, and you are then offering content to them. Is that basically the model?

[00:06:16 ] Laura Nelson: That’s right, yeah.

[00:06:17 ] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, and you are talking about getting paid and generating revenue, and it almost sounds like it’s too good to be true. You throw together a newsletter and suddenly, you become incredibly wealthy. Of course that’s not the case. There’s probably a lot of hard work. There’s probably a lot of expertise required. Is that true?

[00:06:33 ] Laura Nelson: Yes. I’d say the hardest part of this is building your list. So if you don’t already have people in your community or your audience available, you probably have to put a bit more effort into marketing. But in terms of expertise, you can write a newsletter about anything you want.