Interview Date: December 13, 2024
Table of Content
- Meet Brennan Dunn
- Newsletter Identity Card
- Tool Stack
- How he started Create and Sell
- Growth guideline to over 9,000 subscribers
- His insights on email segmentation
- How he created a course funnel to earn up to $10K a month
- Personal & professional impact of running a newsletter
- Biggest advice to newsletter creators
MEET THE CREATOR
Brennan Dunn is the founder of RightMessage which offers personalized marketing and email segmentation services.
He also has a newsletter called Create & Sell where he shares his personal thoughts and insights about email marketing and business.
He reaches 9,000 subscribers and even published a book called This is Personal, thanks to his newsletter. Through his courses and software, he generates $10K monthly revenue and his newsletter plays an important role in reaching his target audience.
In this interview, we talked about:
- How he started his newsletter while he is running his own business
- His monetization strategies through course funnel
- His biggest learnings and insights on segmentation
- His advice to other newsletter operators
Enjoy!
NEWSLETTER IDENTITY CARD
TOOL STACK
- ESP: Kit (Formerly ConvertKit)
- Design: Palladio
- Digital Products: Custom courseware
- Payments: ThriveCart
- Personalization and Segmentation: RightMessage
- Growth: Sparkloop*
START
Welcome Brennan. Let’s start with getting to know you.
Hey there! My name is Brennan Dunn. I’m a “personalized marketing” geek and have spent the last decade helping online businesses better understand their audience and convert more customers by sending better, more targeted content.
How and why did you start Create and Sell in the first place?
My main business is a software company I founded called RightMessage. I wanted a personal newsletter where I could share my thoughts about email marketing and business.
You are the founder of RightMessage where you offer personalized marketing and email segmentation services. It’s relevant to your newsletter topic. How do you position your newsletter in your professional life?
RightMessage is a tool that I’ve built that helps make segmenting your email list and personalising your marketing easy. However, to use RightMessage effectively you need to first know that you should be personalising.
“My goal with Create & Sell, along with my book, podcast interviews, etc., is to educate companies about why they should take segmentation and personalisation seriously. Then, once someone becomes convinced that they’re losing out on sales by not personalising, they’ll then be the ideal customer for RightMessage.”
GROWTH
What are the most effective growth strategies for different stages of Create and Sell?
0 – 1,000 subscribers
To get the first 1,000 customers of Create & Sell, I made the most of my personal network. I emailed everyone who’d ever asked me for advice.
I heavily pushed what I was writing about on social media. I teased out every new post I was planning online, and made it clear that if you wanted to hear more that you’d want to make sure you were on my email list.
1,000 – 5,000 subscribers
Once I had a solid base of subscribers, I started using SparkLoop* to partner with other creators with similar audiences. I quantified the value of the subscribers on my email list, and knew that I could safely spend up to $3 per subscriber without cutting too heavily into my profits.
This helped me rapidly expand my subscriber count, albeit the quality wasn’t nearly as good as people who found me and opted-in to my list directly.
5,000 subscribers – today
These days I’m mostly focused on growing RightMessage (since I launched Create & Sell, I’ve bought out my former business partner at RightMessage which means it’s pretty much consumed all of my time.)
This means that, unfortunately, Create & Sell isn’t the priority it used to be for me. However, we’re still growing, but I’m not spending a lot of time or attention (or money!) on growing the list.
These days, a lot of my new readers find me by reading my book (This Is Personal), or as a result of hearing me present at a conference or because of a podcast interview.
While I’m not actively trying to make Create & Sell a massive business any longer, it is doing a pretty good job at funneling people over to RightMessage.
Regarding growth efforts, what would you do differently if you had a chance to start over?
“I’d invest a lot more in relationships. By this I mean partnering with people who have already done the hard work of building a complementary audience, and then finding a way to offer a win-win to them.”
For example, a few years ago I used to run a company called Double Your Freelancing, and we helped freelancers better understand the business behind their business.
Early on, I partnered with other companies who served freelancers – proposal tools like BidSketch, theme companies like WooThemes, and others – and offered to teach their audience about how to be better freelancers. This gave their audience something of value, while also getting myself in front of a lot of freelancers.
SEGMENTATION
In your own company, you are offering segmentation services. You also sell courses on segmentation. Let’s talk about this.
Why is it so crucial to segment our subscribers based on the relationship?
People are different. And people need to be sold to differently. Despite how niche your business might be, the people in your audience have diverse goals and identities.
“Personalising your messaging allows you to present a clear case for why what you have to offer can help them, but you can’t personalise unless you have segmentation data to work with.”
How do you segment your own email list? Which metrics & information should we look into to create different segments?
I segment all new subscribers. I ask them what they’re primarily looking for my help with, what email platform they use, how big their list is, and more. About 84% of all new subscribers share this information.
The main data points you’ll to capture are:
- What does someone primarily need from you now?
- Why is this important?
- What, if anything, have they tried so far to achieve this?
- Who are they? (i.e. industry, job role, list size, email platform, etc… This will change depending on your audience!)
MONETIZATION
When did you start monetizing your newsletter audience with courses and how did you decide that it was the right time? How did you build your own course funnel? (see here)
I used a combination of segmenting new subscribers and then asking for “raw” Voice of Customer feedback about what someone was looking for my help with to help establish what courses I had to create.
I started doing this pretty early on, because I knew I had to justify spending time away from RightMessage.
What are your key strategies to increase sales of your courses?
Personalisation. How I pitch my courses, how I describe the benefits of my courses, the case studies I show, and more are all dependent on what someone’s shared with me.
What are your biggest learnings when creating a successful and effective course for your subscribers?
“Don’t ever create in a vacuum. All of my courses initially began as live, one-off workshops. After I knew what people actually wanted me to teach, then and only then would I turn it into a self-serve video course.”
IMPACT & LEARNINGS
How did building Create and Sell newsletter contribute to your life professionally and personally?
It got me a book deal. I released This Is Personal last October, and it’s been instrumental and attracting a new type of follower.
Additionally, it’s let me have an outlet outside of RightMessage to share my unbiased thoughts about email marketing, running an online business, and more.
What would you do differently if you had a chance to start over Create and Sell?
Personally, I would have been a lot more calculated about how exactly Create & Sell would play into RightMessage. Right now, I sort of just expect that longterm readers of C&S will eventually become customers of RightMessage.
What would it be if you had the right to give one piece of advice to aspiring newsletter creators?
Newsletters are a fantastic way to do internal market research. Ask your audience what they need from you. Keep your ear to the ground. Listen to what they’re sharing. Take what they say and create products or services that fix those problems.
A great newsletter is a two-way conversation done at scale.
3 Popular Create and Sell Issues
- What I learned from James Clear on list building
- Choice kills conversion
- How to always have something to write about
Where to find Brennan Dunn
*indicates affiliate links
