Author Talk: Who Can Afford  Newsletter Providers?

Author Talk: Who Can Afford Newsletter Providers?

Listen, I understand as a small potato you may be intimidated by newsletter service providers and their fees. I also understand one of the many reasons newbies stick with those giant name brand services may be ease of use. But make no mistake…YOU NEED A NEWSLETTER!

Way back in October of 2019–I know it wasn’t that long ago but man the events of 2020 make it feel like 2019 was 10 years ago–I purchased a deal to buy newsletter hosting through SendFox. For the one time fee of $196.00 I was given a lifetime list of 20,000 subs. At the time of my switching, I was paying a major name brand service $15.00 a month to have 1,005 subscribers. Now, I’m not the best at math, but that’s a whole lot of money I didn’t have going out every month.

I was skeptical because sometimes these lifetime deals fizzle and then you are stuck with a company going under. BUT this company is part of AppSumo, who I trust, and their own CEO had been using the service for quite some time before I found the deal. I’d been getting e-mails created with SendFox for several months and I didn’t even know it.

The market’s answer to cries of “this costs too much” has been to have several “boot strap” types of services crop up. Some of them are easier to use than others. I’d looked at many, but found myself utterly lost in how to make it work. At that time, I had only learned what a “drip campaign” was and I struggled to wrap my head around HOW to make one.

Let’s fast forward to now. SendFox has grown by leaps and bounds. You can have a fancy landing page, automations are easy to set up, and being able to use Google Docs to lay out your newsletter makes up for not having all these HTML thingies built in. If I were a content creator, this would even be an even cooler tool b/c I could send out my blog posts and YouTube videos from an RSS feed via e-mail. However, one of the things I truly appreciate is my deliverability went waaaay up when I switched. Right before my total change over, I’d had trouble with Norton flagging ALL the links my provider made as SPAM and SUPSICIOUS. WTAF?!! My click rate went down and so did my deliverability. I don’t blame people not wanting to open a link that said WARNING if Norton looked at it. Also, I heard some horrible things about “shadow banning” readers from getting newsletters. I tried to Google a story about it, but all I got was a bunch of conspiracy theory websites and other things. I think the terms equates to electronic censorship of some kind. Anyway, I am glad I switched from “name brand” and to SendFox. I don’t send newsletters out very often, but when I do I always seem to sell some books.

Want to see how some e-mails look? Shoot over to sendfox.com/shannonmcroberts and click on the link that says “Let Me Read First”.

Check it out here SendFox* is available at AppSumo at a discounted price for a limited time.

(*Affiliate Link. Costs you nothing to use, but gets me credits to use to buy things from AppSumo.)

SHARE IT:

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.