Breaking down a $6/sub course launch

👋 Hi friends -

Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. Twice a month, I share short reflections with my newsletter clients + other operators.

Zero formality, ads, or affiliate links - just a guy sharing learnings from working with media operators doing $25k-$2M+ / month with newsletters.

New reader highlights: Sam, Founder @ SOFX | Katrin, Co-founder & CEO @ Frich | Jay, President @ WEHCO Media | Kevin, Senior Writer @ Stocktwits

I have a few simple pleasures in life:

Today I wanted to do a deeper dive into #3 (if you’re in NYC, email me and we can discuss #1).

For Black Friday, I launched a self-paced course on paid ads for newsletters, the Meta Ads Academy (now closed).

I had the idea 8 weeks ago when beehiiv told me they were moving into digital products.

It was BIG news. Many more newsletter operators will launch self-paced digital products, including my clients.

So it follows I need to have ‘been there, done that’ if I'm going to be useful.

Here's how the launch went and what I would recommend you do differently if/when you create your own product.

A $6 ARPU is great. A few comparisons:

But it wasn’t perfect!

As I’ll discuss below, I experimented with my email nurture here and drove a lower email CTR than I should have.

This was made up for by a sales page CVR that was much higher than a typical $350 launch.

Onto the lessons!

I have to be extremely careful about who I email.

We’ve got Sean Griffey, Tyler Denk, and hundreds of multi-millionaire founders and media executives on this little email list of mine.

So I manually tag priority readers - those folks only received only 4 emails over 7 days.

Very educational stuff, light on sales. I wanted to protect the experience for them.

I also made it EXTREMELY easy to opt out of the sales emails with a banner at the top of every send.

The TLDR… don’t be annoying!

Before the sales sequence, I sent three "pillar" emails.

Pillar #1 was about creative - I shared everything I know about winning ad creative, including the insight that 70% of our best-performing ads are "ugly ads" (authentic, unpolished content that outperforms fancy design work).

Pillar #2 covered media buying - the biggest campaign mistakes newsletters make when they scale.

Pillar #3 was about measurement - why CPL is the worst metric on earth and what you should track instead.

These emails were 95% tactical lessons I genuinely thought people would find useful.

I got tons of positive replies like this. People loved them.

But the click-through rate? Abysmal. Like 1.5% or less.

It brought down the entire sale’s average CTR to 2.5% from 2.9% (3% is what we aim for).

Looking back, I'm not sure I'd do them again for a launch.

Maybe they made people feel better about buying later.

But I can't measure that.

I spent $3,000 and 3 weeks building the sales page.

We had a 14% conversion rate, 2-3x what I typically see on products at this price.

Thankfully, that made up for a lower than expected click-through rate on the sales emails.

First, write a headline focused on outcomes, not features:

"Grow your newsletter with subscribers who buy from you and your sponsors"

Followed by a sub-headline that counters objections:

And then just below that extremely real (direct screenshots, Slack DMs) social proof of results.

People must see huge, obvious wins on cost per lead and reader quality to understand this course will work.

I’ve shut down the checkout but left the sales page up so you can reference it here.

When you launch a product, you must add a constraint on time or seats/units.

Urgency will be the single greatest driver of conversion.

Over 30% of our sales occurred in the last 12 HOURS of the launch.

I sent 1 email with 13 hours left and another with 3.5 hours left.

This was straight from Alex Hormozi's playbook and it worked great.

I divided the course into six modules that mirror the actual workflow of running Meta ads.

Getting Started → Conversion Events → Creative → Media Buying → Measurement → Roadblocks.

A few lessons…

Meet beginners where they are. I included a full Getting Started module even though most of my audience aren’t total beginners.

Build a roadblocks module. I have an entire section dedicated to common errors - what to do when Meta and your ESP disagree on lead counts, when to scale vs. turn off an ad, etc. Don't just teach the happy path.

Give shortcuts / the quick path: The entire course is 6 hours if you watch everything on 1x speed. But each section starts with an introduction that tells you the need-to-know modules… in total, there are 2.5 hours of ‘core’ content.

This (I hope) will make it accessible for total beginners while also allowing me to give advanced operators all the nerdy LTV / ad ops stuff I know they’ll want.

A few things I'd change…

I didn’t pre-build testimonials: I had dinner with Faris from The Deep View in October who wanted to insta-buy and I should’ve asked him to go through / give a public review. I also gave away 10 courses to members of the newsletter accelerator. I should've done that 4 weeks earlier so I could collect testimonials before launch.

Social push: I didn't push it hard on social. My audience skews advanced - I don't reach that many beginners or intermediate folks on this newsletter.

Why paid ads: The biggest objection to paid growth will be “I want to grow for free” even though that doesn't always scale. I only covered this objection in one email - likely a mistake!

To counter that objection, I plan to add a module on organic growth in Q1 and give it away for free to existing buyers as a thank-you.

When I bring back the Meta Ads Academy I’ll include it as a bonus and raise the price from $350 to $700.

We now have a done-for-you paid growth offer (The Feed, my agency), a done-with-you (The Newsletter Accelerator), and a do-it-yourself offer, which means we can be helpful to anyone on growth regardless of their stage.

Value ladder complete!

That's the letter.

- Nathan