A Simple Marketing Strategy Cheat Sheet

Insight: Of Marketing Strategies for Newsletter Publications

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“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” American Marketing Association

The 4Ps

If you have been reading the earlier cheat sheets, then this post will attempt to tie all of the previous strategy sheets into a cohesive marketing strategy. First, the definition that helps: a marketing strategy essentially encompasses a framework known as the 4Ps which is defined as follows:

1. Product - This is your publication and any associated products such as ebooks, and free giveaways of published books. The first step is to create a publication or product strategy and then set marketing goals that align with this strategy.

   Read the publication strategy cheat sheet for tips.

2. Price - Some writers may think that this needs to be decided later when you are ready to enable payment, but my recommendation is to set this at the start. This early decision helps anchor the perceived value of your publication in the market.

   Remember, you can still offer free posts when you publish.

   The pricing on most newsletters for Substack ranges from $5-$10 per month to $50-$150 annually. The higher the perceived value, the higher the price. Check other newsletters in your category, or prices of known publications to benchmark pricing.

   Read my pricing cheat sheet strategy for detailed strategic considerations.

3. Promotion - is a tool to convert existing users into paying customers. Plan promotions to transition users from first-time readers to loyal subscribers. Align these with your overall marketing goals and adjust based on the response to your offers.

   For paid publications, a good practice is to decide on a fixed price based on value and costs, and then offer promotions throughout the year based on the marketing strategy.

   For instance, if subscriber acquisition is the main intent, then you may wish to discount heavily upfront (80%) and then gradually reduce the discount when you reach a threshold number. This promotion cheat sheet offers additional strategies to consider.

4. Place - refers to where and how you sell your publication or its distribution channels. For example, if your publication is currently on Substack, then it is the main sales channel. But it is also any channel where you sell including your website. It also means the different methods through which customers can come across and engage with your product.

   For instance, within the Substack ecosystem, features like Notes, Guest Posts, and Chat serve as discovery and interaction points that can lead to purchases. Digital product marketplaces like Gumroad provide an avenue for selling related digital goods.

   Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn further broaden the scope of discovery and distribution, acting as supplementary channels that drive awareness and facilitate the purchase process for your audience.

   

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Go-to-market Strategy

Once you have the 4Ps defined, a go-to-market strategy intends to create awareness of the 4Ps, define the customers of interest, engage their attention, and drive conversion (i.e. from free to paid, or from follower to subscriber).

The conversion journey for each buyer is defined by the following 3 stages:

1. Awareness: this is the stage where the user becomes aware of you as a writer, person, brand, or profile, and learns of your product, and social credibility online. It's essential to facilitate recommendations on platforms like Substack because expanding the awareness funnel often leads to better conversion rates down the line.

   Users may already have an interest in topics similar to what you cover, or they might be following other writers discussing similar themes. For instance, fans of science fiction might come across your Sci-fi Substack while seeking reviews of sci-fi authors. Similarly, someone searching for mental health advice might discover your content while looking for articles on reducing anxiety.

   A non-substack example is of a reader interested in understanding how to reduce anxiety who may be seeking mental health articles in a Google search and discovers you.¹ Read my post on Recommendations to learn how to use it effectively.

2. Consideration: is a crucial step in the user journey, where individuals directly engage with your product by reading your posts on the app, web, or subscribing to receive your free content via email. Offering free posts is essential during this stage, as it allows users ample time to evaluate your content and decide whether to convert. While the average writer may have a long consideration cycle, for some of the celebrities with a substantial following, the consideration cycle is likely shorter. Their followers rely more on social credibility and endorsements within the reader's peer circles to decide the next step.

3. Decision: Once users have progressed through the awareness and consideration stages - viaNotes, follows, free posts - they are ready to decide their next step:

   1. Become a free subscriber.

   2. Become a paid subscriber.

   3. Become a founding member or ‘sponsor.’ See the Pricing cheat sheet above.

   At each of these decision points, buyers weigh various factors such as pricing, promotions, and social proof.

   For example, a reader who admires your writing but hasn't committed to a paid subscription might be persuaded by a 50% discount promotion. Another reader might choose to support you as a sponsor simply because they love your work. Social influence also plays a role; if a favorite writer praises your work, it could convince a reader to become a paid subscriber. On the other hand, someone persuaded by peer recommendations might still wait for a sale price before subscribing.

Thus, it is important to also define your reader.

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The Reader

Defining your target reader is vital for effectively utilizing the 4P's (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) in your marketing strategy. Consider a typical reader who is managing a stressful full-time job and seeking relaxation and productivity tips to balance various life roles. Content focusing on rituals, priorities, and productivity hacks is likely to resonate more with them. By compiling the best advice on these topics into an ebook, you can offer it as a bonus with your annual subscription or sell it as a standalone product, catering precisely to their needs and interests.

How do you dive deeper into understanding your average reader?

Start by asking them directly. Why do they follow your publication? Engage with them in the comments, conduct surveys, and analyze the data Substack provides on audience overlaps and how certain posts drive subscriptions.

Or, form a hypothesis based on their profiles (when available), their comments, or other engagement metrics from your posts. Test this hypothesis by launching targeted promotions to readers who engage most with specific content, and observe their response. This approach helps refine your understanding and tailor your content more effectively.

Photo by Darling Arias on Unsplash

Advanced: Success Metrics

What should you track to assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategy’s execution?

Think of metrics as ones you can control or influence, and others that are the outcome of those you control. Consider that you control the product, quality of the product, value creation, pricing, promotion, and distribution channels.

Based on whether you are creating awareness or not, you can track the growth of subscribers. For instance, on Substack, Notes is a channel that can lead to followers and subscribers. If you do not post on Notes, your rate of subscriber growth may be slower than someone who does.

See the Recommendations strategy post for more on creating funnels.

Here is a set of relevant metrics that you can track to measure progress with the overall caveat that it depends on the stage of your publication:

1. Subscription Growth: You can track the number of new subscribers over a specific period to measure the success of your product's market reach. Substack’s dashboard gives you this information easily but do not be influenced by this if you are new, except to increase your ‘awareness’ activities.

2. Conversion Rate: This metric zeroes in on the share of readers who step up from mere browsing to taking a desired action—like upgrading from a free to a paid subscription, or hopping onto your email list as a subscriber. Picture this: You start the month with 100 subscribers. By month's end, 4 of these have opted for a paid subscription. That puts your conversion rate at a neat 4%. From what I've seen around Substack, the norm hovers between 1-4%, though some standout publications are hitting impressive 6-8% rates.

3. Engagement Metrics: These are available from the Susbtack dashboard, on a per post basis, and at a macro level. Check open rates², click-through rates, and engagement on posts. High engagement typically indicates content relevancy and audience interest. Substack shares engagement as ‘Activity’ under the Subscriber tab.

4. Social Proof and Reader Feedback: The number of positive reviews, testimonials, or user-generated content can indicate the perceived value of your product. Until you have a significant number of paid subscribers or grown your subscribers to sizeable numbers, this is a better metric to keep track of and to register positive reviews as wins. Consider how many publications are recommending you. Qualitative data from surveys or comments can provide insights into reader satisfaction and areas for improvement.

5. Promotion Effectiveness: Evaluate the performance of promotional campaigns by tracking how many users apply promo codes or sign up during a sales event. If you offered 20% off to your most engaged readers, how many took it and became paid subscribers?

6. Retention Rates: Measure how many subscribers continue their subscription after the first payment. High retention rates can signal subscriber satisfaction. Anything above 80% is a good number to maintain, especially with a high volume of subscribers. This applies mainly for publications with higher number of subscribers.

7. Churn Rates: The churn rate is the percentage of your subscribers who cancel their subscriptions within a specific period such as in a month. I would not advise worrying about this number daily. I notice that some writers post Notes worried about someone unsubscribing - so it is worth adding these points:

   1. Usually, churn rate is seen as a critical metric for understanding the longevity and satisfaction of your subscriber base. But for publications that are just starting, it may be just an advisory metric. As you grow your readership and base, this number will fluctuate. Especially, if the target profile of your readers is still getting established, you may find that many join to check it out or by accident, and unsubscribe later.

   2. If the target readership is set already, then a lower churn rate means you’re maintaining your subscriber base effectively. Anything under 10% is an average churn rate for small bases, and under 20% is for high subscriber bases. The lower, the better.

   3. Standard ways to reduce churn start by understanding what prompted the cancelation. Substack does not give you tools yet to request reasons for cancelation. So, an option is to check for trends, offer promotions when they choose to unsubscribe (free months?), etc.

By the way, there is always going to be churn!

Remember, the goal is to ensure your readership is in the right customer segment for your publication (e.g. gardening enthusiasts for a gardening publication) before worrying about churn rates.

Conclusion

Wrapping this up, think of the 4Ps, the buyer's journey, audience personas, and those success metrics as your toolbox for executing an effective marketing strategy.

Marketing strategies while anchored by some fundamental building blocks like the above, are highly customized to your brand, your category, and your audience.

So, create a custom strategy, tweak it, and review the results. Rinse. Repeat. Experiment until you land a winning formula.

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1. This is rather a simplistic point, as the discovery hinges on a whole range of factors, not least of which is how many articles appear on results ahead of yours. It requires search engine optimization techniques which are a whole other ballgame. ;-)

2. Caveat: Open rates on Substack are not always clean rates, as the app opens are not counted, and these are only for email opens. But in general, check views and trends.