Guide: Build a newsletter product to support small businesses during COVID-19
Support your favourite shops and retailers
Every week I send a step-by-step guide on how to start a side business during COVID-19.
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💼what are we building today
A weekly deals newsletter to support small businesses during COVID-19
Here's what I built: https://shoptoronto.carrd.co/
problem
It's no secret that small businesses are struggling. Without brick & mortar locations, many of our favourite shops and restaurants quickly discovered how poorly prepared they are to operate online. Now, they need to get online, and they need to do it fast. That’s where this week's One Week Startup fits in.
solution
To support small businesses during COVID-19, we're going to create a weekly local deals newsletter that collects and sends online-only discounts from neighbourhood small businesses to subscribers.
Our newsletter helps local businesses by promoting their products to an audience that may not be familiar with them, or may not be aware of their online offering. This creates value for the subscriber (receive deals to local businesses), and the stores (free promotion to potential customers). As noted above, many small businesses don't have email lists or strong social followings so access to new online audiences is invaluable.
You might be asking, what's the business? As quarantine continues, use this period to build your audience under the 'support local' pitch and help small businesses by promoting their products for free.
Once we return to normal, leverage that engaged 'shop local' subscriber base you built and sell ads to local businesses who want to continue to grow their e-commerce business.
💸why I like this business
positive contribution: During COVID-19, you'll help small businesses access new audiences to sell their online products/services to. For the businesses that don't have large email or social audiences, this could be a huge support for them during this difficult time.
easy to start: Email newsletter businesses are great because you can star them quickly and without any prior technical knowledge.
staying power: Once COVID-19 is over, small businesses will see e-commerce as more important than ever and will look to services like ours to help them grow their online offerings longer term. When the situation is better for businesses, we can begin to sell ads in our newsletter.
easy acquisition: As you'll see in this week's guide, customers want to support local businesses and are happy to support any initiative that facilitates this. The timing during COVID-19 makes acquiring emails way easier.
what you need
Project Management Sheet
Carrd
Email Octopus
Facebook
time for action
What follows is a detailed guide to:
💻 Setup your newsletter and landing page
👨👩👧👧Promote the page to potential subscribers
🛍Reach out to small businesses to promote their products/services
📈How to continue to grow your audience
day 1 – setting up your newsletter and landing page
naming
The first step is to come up with a name for your newsletter. I live in Toronto and the point of the newsletter is to support local businesses so I went with ShopTO. As I always say, don't spend too much time on the name. The goal here is to get the business up and running as quickly as possible.
logo and colours
Next, you need to come up with a logo and colours for your brand.
A quick logo tip: the fastest way to design a logo is to use vector images. Vector images are illustrations that can be easily edited in Photoshop, Sketch or Illustrator. To download a vector, Google the type of image you're looking for and 'vector'. For example, I wanted a CN Tower logo so I Googled 'CN Tower vector image' and a number of vector aggregator sites came up. I downloaded the vector image, added a circle background, and changed the colour in Sketch to match my brand. Logos made easy.
For colours, I just played around with a few I like. Here's what I went with:
landing page
Now that you have the brand done, you need to build a landing page. I've experimented with a number of easy-to-use landing page tools and haven't been able to find anything as effective and simple as Carrd.
So I went on my Carrd account and looked through templates. I ended up using the same one we used for our trivia business. Here's what I came up with for ShopTO:
I made minor modifications to the template and drafted some simple copy. Main focus of the copy was to emphasize that this was intended to support our community's small businesses.
Creating a website may seem intimidating, but I promise that Carrd makes it easy. You can edit all of the copy inside your browser and easily modify text sizes, fonts, colours and styles.
For email capture, add a form button to your landing page. You'll notice in the settings for your form that you can modify the fields of the form and sync the backend with a email marketing service.
Finally, you can publish the site using Carrd and they’ll create a .carrd domain which will host your site. At least for now, there’s no need to purchase a custom domain but you have the option to do that in the future if it makes sense.
mail provider
Great job on the landing page – that's probably the most time consuming part. With that done, you'll need to select a mail provider to use. If you built your page on Carrd, you'll notice that it's compatible with a number of services. For my newsletter I went with Mailchimp because I have an existing account but normally I'd encourage people to use Email Octopus.
I like Email Octopus, because like Carrd, it's fast to setup and easy to use. To get started, make an account on Email Octopus and create a list. Once you do that go back to your Carrd form. You'll notice that Carrd needs some information to sync with Email Octopus. Specifically it needs an API key. Here's instructions on how to access your API key from Email Octopus.
The other piece of info you'll need is your List ID. This will be the list that all of the Carrd signups are automatically added to. Below the Carrd field for your List ID, you'll see instructions on how to access it.
Once you sync Email Octopus with your Carrd landing page, test it out by signing up yourself and make sure your email is recorded by Email Octopus.
day 2 – promotion
Now that your newsletter offering is set-up, here’s how I got subscribers.
facebook Groups
We've talked before about the value of Facebook Groups, but these groups are a particularly effective marketing channel for this project. Why? Because community Facebook groups are some of the most active groups on the entire platform.
First, you need to go out there and find these groups. I started by creating a simple spreadsheet with a list of them. I'm already in a few groups for my neighbourhood (here's one) so I added those first.
Then, I just searched in Facebook a few other neighbourhoods around me. You'll usually see a few 'residents associations' or 'community groups'. Apply to join them, you'll generally get accepted within a few hours.
Once you're in, post about your newsletter. Most of these groups have rules against self-promotion so be clear that you're promoting a community initiative. Here's the copy I used:
🚨Here's a way to help our awesome local businesses🚨 I started ShopToronto a weekly newsletter with five online deals from Toronto small businesses. Goal is to connect our communities with the local businesses that need our support. Sign-up to get access to great deals and support local entrepreneurs:
By posting on four Facebook groups, I acquired 30 emails. You can expect a similar return, so if you post on 12-13 groups, you should get to 100 emails.
day 3 – outreach to merchants + sending your first newsletter
This is the fun part. With your newly acquired audience, you can now reach out to merchants and offer them the chance to get some free promotion.
merchant outreach
What you're going to want to do here is find great local stores and pitch them on the opportunity. To stay organized, I'd create a spreadsheet of your target stores with their contact info. Most stores have a general purpose email address that you can use to get in touch. I'd reach out to 6-10 per week since not everyone will get back to you in time for your next newsletter.
Here's a sample outreach email:
Hey [Name], my name is Brett and I'm the founder of Shop Toronto. We're a weekly newsletter that shares five local online deals with residents who want to support small businesses, like yourself.
We're huge fans of [store name] and would love to feature you in our next newsletter. Here's how it works:
You offer an online only deal (most of our partners create a promo code for a discount off a certain item)
We send it to our list of engaged consumers who are keen to support small businesses
And we help you increase sales
Like you, we're concerned about the impact that COVID-19 will have on local businesses. This is our way of trying to support you during this time. We do not charge to promote your business.
If you're interested in participating, feel free to respond to this email and we'll send over some more details to get you set-up.
If they agree, great! Ask them for a picture of the product or service they want to discount, a description of it and a promo code.
setting up your email
Once you get the five deals for the week, you're going to need to set-up your first newsletter. The good news is that this first newsletter will serve as a template for all the other weeks.
I used the Template feature in Email Octopus and designed it using for the drag and drop editor. Their new editor makes it really easy to piece together emails. As you can see in the screenshot below, your newsletter doesn't have to be beautiful. It just needs to have the key parts: your brand, room for product pictures, a product title, description, and promo code offer.
When your email is ready to go, hit send!
day 4 – growing your list
Amazing job getting your first list out! In this section, I'm going to propose a few simple post-send ideas to help you continue to grow your audience. Remember, the name of the game is to do anything that increases traffic to your newsletters/landing page.
facebook groups
First thing you should do is return to the same Facebook groups that you first posted in. Email Octopus will provide you with a link to the web version of the newsletter you just sent. Copy that link and post it in the groups. In your message, encourage group members to subscribe if they found value in the newsletter.
collaborate with merchants
Reach out to the merchants you featured in the newsletter and ask them to share the deals on their social channels. Make it really easy by writing the content for them so they can just copy and paste. Remind them that this is a great way for them to connect with their existing audience.
reflection
How did that go? Here are a few questions to ask yourself to determine if you have a real business:
Were you able to acquire subscribers?
Did you sign-up merchants to participate?
What were the read rates on your first email? If they were above 50% and the click-through rates on your links were high, you're probably in a good place.
Did you see additional growth after your partner merchants posted to their socials? Did more members of the neighbourhood Facebook groups sign-up?
Did your merchants see a boost in sales? Are your merchants happy? This is the most important question to ask. If your merchants saw an increase in sales because of your newsletter, you’re likely really on to something that you can turn into a great long-term business.
next steps
Once COVID-19 has subsided, you should reach out to the merchants you worked with the in the past and ask if they'd like to purchase an affordable ad spot on your newsletter. By this point, they will have seen the value of the service, and you'll have built a relationship with them. Your goal with the next step of the business is to continue to grow your audience to increase the value of your list and regularly sell ad spots to merchants who are looking to grow their e-commerce sales.
Even if you only charge $50 per spot a week, for 5 spots that’s $250 on a weekly basis and $1,000 a month in revenue.