The Traffic Channel You’re Not Leveraging 📧

I spent last Thursday and Friday in Austin at the Newsletter Marketing Summit—and it was two days well spent. 💡

We can debate whether Google will lose 20% of its traffic (or more, or less)…

But one thing is certain: AI is forcing all marketers to rethink traffic diversification.

This is a deep dive into what some of the brightest minds in the newsletter industry shared—and how it can give you an edge.

Newsletters = Distribution YOU Own 👀 

📌 Content is hard.
📌 Product is hard.
📌 Growing a business is hard.

But where most marketers fail? 

Distribution 🚚

Newsletters are one of the few channels where you OWN your audience.

I went to Austin with two key questions in mind:

❓ Does the math of newsletter marketing actually work?
❓ Are everyday marketers (like my students) successfully growing & monetizing newsletters?

I came back to New Hampshire with a resounding YES. 

Here’s why.👇🏼

Major Takeaways from Austin 🏆

📝 Your Newsletter Will Live or Die on Content Quality.
The best-performing newsletters have exceptional content. Almost always, it’s created by someone deeply passionate about the topic.

Example:
I tried outsourcing the MarketingAlec Newsletter to a ghostwriter in the early days—it was horrible. Lesson learned.

Chanel Basilio from Growth in Reverse ran the data, and it takes on avg 31 Months for a newsletter to get to 50,000 subscribers. With 50,000 true fans, you can do a lot.

Ads work from 1440 Newsletter to Morning Brew (they started grassroots) but the real growth came as they used paid media to accelerate. 1440 is growing 300,000+ subscribers a month over month. 👀 

And the part that melted my mind… they stick around… to the tune of a 8x - 23x Ad spend multiple. 

🔥 If you're not acquiring emails at $2–$4 per subscriber, revisit your ad formats.

And many brands are actually successfully scaling Ad Spend.  

And if you're not in a $2-$4 per email acquired take a look at your Ads and Ad formats.

And a Lot of AI Creative…using ArcAds…

To create hundreds of creatives to test.

Most Impactful Takeaway: Own Your Distribution 🤝

The most impactful presentation came from @jayclouse of Creator Science, who compellingly argued for minimizing our dependence on social media and taking ownership of our content distribution.

He had a great slide on how to use each platform, and I agree that we often pick too many and don’t really master any of them to serve our business objectives. 

MA has done this  😭

Our Facebook was cringeworthy…

📅 Upcoming ‘Ask Alec’: How To Set Up Your Second Brain

What Is It?: A Live Session with Alec: “How I Build My Second Brain on Notion to Stay Organized.”
When: Tuesday, March 19 at 12-1 PM EST
Where: [Reserve Your Spot] (Spots are Limited!)

Join me live & get tactical productivity strategies. No-fluff guarantee.

What’s Next? 🤔

I’ll be taking some long walks this weekend thinking about Ease vs. Value.👇

Your Feedback Matters 💬

I go to and/or speak at 5-10 conferences a year. If you found this conference summary useful and want more of them. Reply with > More Conf. 

Would you like more insight into some tests we run on alternate channels to The Big 2: Google and Meta? If so Reply with > More Tests. 

Thanks…I deeply appreciate your input. It's how I get better.

Cheers,

Alec

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