Here's today's expert email advice!

Hey there, friend!

It's again time to learn from a friend of Email Expert Africa.

Our advice today comes from Anatoly Zaslaver, an expert who helps email senders in the finance and business space make the most out of their email strategy.

Anatoly has a wealth of knowledge in systems, processes and digital communication, and he's put together something practical that you can use to analyse your emails and something exciting he has launching soon!

PS: Anatoly's insights are also a great framework to analyse the email strategy of your competitors or email senders you admire in your inbox.
 

Let's join Anatoly as he guides us through his 4-pillar framework in today's bit of email knowledge 📩

4-Pillars to Email Analysis Success

What comes to mind when the word 'trend' is uttered?
 

Perhaps it's thoughts around an appetite for something new and exciting?

Financial market changes or emerging technology?

May enthusiasm or hype about something?
 

The word trend can mean many things to many people, but it's something that the team behind the Exploding Topics Newsletter illustrate really well in their email strategy.

Why?

Simple: They follow a great framework for their emails. 

Today, we're going to break down how you can use this framework to analyse your emails (and how I have something to help you with this, but more on that later 😉)

The 4-pillar framework

In a nutshell, we use the following 4-pillar system to analyse the Exploding Topics newsletter and show you how we apply these principles to help you analyse your strategy:
 

• Pillar 1 – Content
• Pillar 2 – Deliverability
• Pillar 3 - Growth
• Pillar 4 - Monetization

Let’s dive into how this works. 
 

Pillar 1 - Content Analysis

In pillar one of our process, the content analysis step assesses the main intention, message and topics driving a newsletter or email.
 

In this case, the Idea behind Exploding Topics is that the newsletter is a product featuring emerging trends.

The company has earned an impressive 4.86 out of 5 in its feedback and ratings and its slogan is “We help companies find exploding trends before they take off".

In this stage of the analysis, details matter to help understand why their newsletter is either succeeding or failing. We look at the overarching plan:
 

• A free weekly newsletter is delivered every Tuesday at 9:11 AM EST. They use curiosity about trends to generate engagement while keeping things consistent and familiar.
   
• Simplistic, standardised design, consisting of four different emerging trends. This is used consistently to build familiarity with their audience with each mail they send.
   
• Bite-size chunks of content allow their readers to skim the newsletter quickly, with a deep-dive link leading to their website for each trend. This tells us that website dwell time and traffic are a big part of their strategy.
   
• Lastly,  the continued use of their standardised template seems to simplify their process, optimising creation time and remaining consistent in email length, structure and familiarity.

Though their template and layout remain the same, they're pulling in readers and subscribers due to varying trends under their broad topic foundation.
 

You don't have to change things up every time to remain successful. Build trust through consistent value and familiarity. That is the lesson here.
 

Pillar 2 - Deliverability Analysis

What's the point of sending an email if it's not going to hit the inbox?
 

That's where deliverability comes in. 

As part of this pillar, you want to assess what is being done by the email sender to hit the inbox over time.
 

The best way to ensure you do so?

Besides the technical stuff, it's actually pretty simple(in theory): Get your subscribers to take the right action.

This will let the email inboxes know where to send your emails and keep them out of junk to begin with.
 

There are two great levers you can pull in the beginning to get this right:

• Your opt-in process
• Your welcome email sequence

Here's how the team behind Exploding Topics did this, starting with their landing page and the actions elicited once someone has signed up:
 

The intention of this page is to thank the subscriber for signing up and to prompt action.

In this case, Exploding Topics chose to send folks over to X (fka Twitter), to follow them.

We believe that letting people know there's an email to confirm their subscription is best practice and encouraged.
 

Here's what that email looks like:
 

We refer to this as a CD Welcome Email, which stands for Confirmation & Deliverability.


The purpose of the email is:

1. To confirm to the reader that they've opted in for your emails, and what to expect. If they open and click this, it's a good sign to their inbox provider that your content is trusted.

2. To bolster your reputation in the inbox by enticing the reader to take action, such as replying to your welcome email, which is a great sign to their inbox provider to allow future emails into the mailbox.

3. Create an avenue for engagement with your reader, by enticing action and showing that you're putting their needs first, not merely that you want to send them irrelevant content.

You can see why having a strategy behind your welcome email can be crucial to your future email success.

Pillar 3 - Growth Analysis

Subscriber growth is the lifeblood of your newsletter, sustaining its vitality and impact.

Even without immediate monetization plans in place, a large email list holds substantial value over time.

We still encourage a quality database over simply focusing on quantity, but it doesn't hurt to keep growing your audience!
 

Exploding Topics grew organically to over 90K subscribers...That's a phenomenal level of growth!

They wouldn't, however, be able to achieve this without focusing on the channels feeding into their email environment and this is something you can use in future email analysis to learn from.
 

If we look at Exploding Topics' founders, Josh Howarth and Brian Dean, you'll see their efforts are focused on 3 areas to grow their newsletter audience:
 

1. Leveraging multiple social media platforms

    a. YouTube: Here they've amassed over 550K subscribers

    b. LinkedIn: They've generated over 89K followers here

    c. X (Twitter): And another 127K followers here
 

This equates to over half a million potential newsletter subscribers that they can entice to sign up.
 

2. Consistently posting newsletter-related content to drive subscriber growth.

Brian and Josh's posts cover topics relevant to the newsletter and tie in the newsletter well into their inbound-subscriber process.
 

3. Building the website around the newsletter

This way, Exploding Topics has helped with their search engine rankings and email audience, having the two channels constantly feeding off of one another.

Getting to the inbox requires consistent monitoring as well. Just because you are getting into Gmail inboxes, does not necessarily mean you're getting into Office 365, Apple Mail or Yahoo. 
 

Pillar 4 - Monetization Analysis

The final pillar in our analysis is asking the question:

"How does this make money?"
 

Each email sender is going to be different, but let's analyse the example of Exploding Topics and how they create revenue for their business.
 

If we look at the overarching strategy, Exploding Topics' primary goal is to drive paid subscriptions to Exploding Topics Pro, which they promote organically via the newsletter.

They offer a 14-day trial for just $1, providing potential subscribers with a low-risk entry point.
 

They also have three subscription packages tailored to different audiences, namely Entrepreneurs, Investors and Businesses.

While specific annual revenue data is not publicly available, the company boasts an impressive 6,000 paid subscribers.

To effectively challenge or adopt a monetisation strategy, you need to understand what drives it and who it is focused on.

That's what this final pillar is for.
 

Building on these 4 Pillars

Exploding Topics stands out as a great example of applying the 4-pillar analysis framework.

If you tie all of that together, you're provided with the following summary: 
 

1. It has a pretty consistent email growth strategy that's working.

2. Remarkable organic subscriber growth, exceeding 90K.

3. Consistently high open rates, surpassing 50%.

4. Content that is easy to consume.

5. Simplified content creation.

6. 6,000 paid members.

7. Great ratings.
 

Give this framework a go, starting with your email strategy! 💪
 

If you found this analysis framework helpful, I invite you to join me in further exploration into more of these in my upcoming newsletter!

My goal is to help you build a robust brand and establish a sustainable income stream via your emails.
 

The worst that can happen is that it may not meet your expectations, and you can simply unsubscribe.

I can, however, guarantee that you'll receive clear instructions on how to build and grow your newsletter, drawing inspiration from those who have already achieved success in theirs.
 

Anatoly 😎

This is a great framework that we'll be trying in our next analysis!

If you're looking for that link to sign up for Anatoly's insights, hit the button below to join his community.
 

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