Create and Sell by Brennan Dunn

"Newsletters are a fantastic way to do internal market research."

Dec 18, 2024

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Revenews is one of the newsletters that I read every week and is written by Dan Barry, the ex-Partnerships Director of The Daily Upside.

Dan also saw Finimize to a 9-figure exit as a Sales Manager.

Now, he spends his time writing THE newsletter ad sales newsletter: Revenews.

Plus, running an ad sales agency Ad Sales as a Service.

If you want to stop striking out in ad sales, subscribe to Revenews.

👋 MEET THE CREATOR

Brennan Dunn is the founder of RightMessage, which offers personalized marketing and email segmentation services.

He also has a newsletter called Create & Sell, where he shares his personal thoughts and insights about email marketing and business.

He reaches 9,000 subscribers and even published a book called This is Personal, thanks to his newsletter. Through his courses and software, he generates $10K monthly revenue and his newsletter plays an important role in reaching his target audience.

In our interview, we talked about:

How he started his newsletter while he is running his own business
His monetization strategies through course funnel
His biggest learnings and insights on segmentation
His advice to other newsletter operators

Enjoy!

Read the full interview ↗︎

🏷 NEWSLETTER IDENTITY CARD

TOOL STACK

ESP: Kit (Formerly ConvertKit)
Design: Palladio
Digital Products: Custom courseware
Payments: ThriveCart
Personalization and Segmentation: RightMessage
Growth: Sparkloop*

3 GOLDEN TAKEAWAYS FROM TODAY’S INTERVIEW

1. Invest a lot more in relationships

Brennan runs his newsletter solo and uses it as a promotion channel for his business, RightMessage.

Three main growth strategies he used to reach over 9,000 subscribers are:

E-mailing everyone who’d ever asked his advice
Announcing on social media about his work
Using SparkLoop to partner with other creators with similar audiences when he got enough base of audience

But, aside from all the efforts he made, there is one thing he’d wanted to do differently if he had a chance to start over:

“I’d invest a lot more in relationships.
By this I mean partnering with people who have already done the hard work of building a complementary audience, and then finding a way to offer a win-win to them.”
Brennan Dunn, Create & Sell

“A few years ago I used to run a company called Double Your Freelancing, and we helped freelancers better understand the business behind their business.
Early on, I partnered with other companies who served freelancers - proposal tools like BidSketch, theme companies like WooThemes, and others - and offered to teach their audience about how to be better freelancers.
This gave their audience something of value, while also getting myself in front of a lot of freelancers.”
Brennan Dunn, Create & Sell

2. Segment your lists

Brennan highlights the importance of segmentation since all people need to be sold differently.

Regardless of the niche of your business, you should be aware that everyone has unique goals and identities.

“Personalising your messaging allows you to present a clear case for why what you have to offer can help them, but you can’t personalise unless you have segmentation data to work with.”
Brennan Dunn, Create & Sell

To build a more personalized newsletter experience for his subscribers, Brennan asks his new subscribers:

What they’re primarily looking for his help with
What email platform they use
How big their list is

84% of his new subscribers share the above information with him.

He also suggests some crucial data points that you need to capture:

What does someone primarily need from you now?
Why is this important?
What, if anything, have they tried so far to achieve this?
Who are they? (i.e. industry, job role, list size, email platform, etc… This will change depending on your audience!)

3. Understand the need and build your product accordingly

Brennan’s strategy to sell his courses is a combination of segmentation and personalization.

For segmentation, he collects key information from new subscribers and raw “Voice of Feedback” to understand what someone was looking for in his help. He listens to their needs.

Then, based on different needs, he personalizes how he describes the benefits of his courses and shows the case studies. The whole focus is sharing the right message with the right audience.

Here is a great example of how Brennan gathers feedback first to build his courses:

"Don’t ever create in a vacuum.
All of my courses initially began as live, one-off workshops.
After I knew what people actually wanted me to teach, then and only then would I turn it into a self-serve video course."
Brennan Dunn, Create & Sell

These are just a few key highlights. Visit Newsletter Circle to dive deep into detailed insights and learn behind the scenes how Brennan successfully built his newsletter business.

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