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  • The Marketing Memo #3: Stuck growing your email list? Try this pivot.

The Marketing Memo #3: Stuck growing your email list? Try this pivot.

Plus: a great read on how to block AI crawlers and a tool that can "correct" eye contact đź‘€

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The Marketing Memo Editors
December 04, 2023

Hey there marketers,

Welcome to the third issue of The Marketing Memo. Cyber Monday is over — thank goodness! — and now it’s time to settle in and relax for a slow holiday season ahem, get to work.

We’ve pulled in three resources for you to check out:

  1. A guide on how to stop losing email subscribers

  2. A tool to correct eye contact (no, this is not a Skynet moment! 🤖)

  3. A tip: block your content from AI crawlers

And here’s how our editor Zulie felt when she accidentally clicked on an Instagram sofa ad and then saw ads about that sofa on every single web page she browsed thereafter.

Retargeting ads truly are our modern-day ghosts.

Let’s jump in.

Email Marketing Longread: Stop Losing Email Subscribers and Reignite List Growth

“In 2022, my online business was treading on thin ice. My co-founder and I realized our email list was shrinking,” wrote author Alberto Cabas Vidani. “99% of our revenue came from our email subscribers. It’s true: you don’t need a huge email list to thrive. But you can’t keep squeezing the same people forever as well.

You need growth, not de-growth.

So, we started a painful but necessary inspection of our business and marketing. We made some changes, and they worked!”

We love tutorials and case studies driven by personal experience. Alberto’s article is a great example of:

  • How to actually use your email list as a way to grow revenue, even when you start losing growth

  • AND how to write a great story about those lessons

“A step-by-step case study filled with tons of screenshots, resources, personal anecdotes, and a cool Hero's Journey-style narrative, too.” — Zulie, in her note when submitting this for a Boost nomination (which was accepted!)

Read here:

👀 Tool: Correct eye contact with Veed.io 👀 

This week's tool recommendation is Veed.io, an eye contact corrector. But no worries - it sounds creepier than it actually is.

With Veed, you can record a video looking at your notes and later edit the video to make it look like you're looking directly at the camera.

No teleprompter? No problem. Keep your eyes on your notes, and Veed keeps your eyes on the screen.

Video testimonials are a powerful way to increase trust and engagement as a marketing tool. The problem we faced is that our customers typically stared at their notes while recording testimonials.

Instead of asking them to re-record, or using the less-than-ideal footage, we “corrected” their eye contact using Veed.

Sinem GĂĽnel

Today’s Tip: Block AI crawlers from your work

By now, it’s old news that AI crawlers like OpenAI feel no qualms about scraping your blog content and using it to train their large language models, with no credit, compensation, or traffic sent your way in thanks.

You may feel that you have no recourse to protect your work. But author Christian Häfner says otherwise.

If you want to … protect your content, there are two technical options available:

- Blocking AI bots via robots.txt

- Putting content behind a paywall

Häfner explains which option might be best for you, as well as how to do each option in his comprehensive article here:

Happy Monday, readers. If you loved this newsletter, why not forward it to a marketer you love in your life?

We’ll see you next Monday for the next Marketing Memo.

- Kati, Sinem, and Zulie

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