The Playpen

Weekly newsletter for busy parents of toddlers

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My wife and I have 2-year-old twins and find it challenging to stay current with useful content, tips, and ideas to entertain the kids and ensure we're hitting the right milestones, so we decided to launch The Playpen.

October 3, 2020 75 Subs

Well, it's been a month since we launched the newsletter so I think it's about time I gave an update!

Today we hit 75 subscribers. It's nothing crazy - and frankly, I would've hoped for more by this point, but the positive feedback from new subscribers is what's really keeping us going.

We have a Typeform set up on the thank you page, which a lot of people have been filling in. It's exciting to see real demand for the content, and such enthusiasm too!

To get to this stage, we've spent around $150 on ads so far. I posted the newsletter on all the directories I could find, InboxReads being the most fruitful in terms of organic conversions, so I actually posted an ad on there for 1 month ($80). It seems to be driving some decent traffic to the landing page.

I want to phase out the ads soon and switch over to a referral program using SparkLoop. I think 75 subscribers is a good "base" to introduce this.

The only issue right now is we're using SendFox for our ESP and it's a little rigid. First of all, the editor is nice but you can't have table layouts or anything slightly complex going on unless you're happy to write in HTML mode. But the main limitation for us right now is that they push you into using their own referral system, which is not very customizable. They don't have an integration with SparkLoop so I am considering moving everything over to ConvertKit, which I like also because of the ability to tag contacts based on the links they click.

In terms of content, we're using the great feedback we're getting to mold the editorial. I share this with our writers periodically and we use it to inform ideas for new articles, which we drop into a Trello board.

Overall I think it's working well (although don't have much to benchmark against) - our open rate is 48% and the click rate is 12%.

That's about it for now - will check back soon once we launch the referral program!

September 4, 2020 Sent out the first newsletter

Today we sent out our first weekly newsletter. Over the last couple of weeks, we've hired 4 great copywriters via Upwork and now feel that we have enough momentum to confidently commit to sending 1 content-packed email each week.

We're going to start driving targeted traffic this week, probably via Reddit and Quora at first. We've set up some A/B tests on the landing page and I'm interested to see which variants work best!

About

My wife and I have 2-year-old twins and find it challenging to stay current with useful content, tips, and ideas to entertain the kids and ensure we're hitting the right milestones, so we decided to launch The Playpen.