Paid newsletters are a key tool in generating recurring revenue from your audience – either as a standalone product or as a premium benefit for a broader membership with a website (eg, WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, Ghost, Carrd, Drupal, or Wix).
Offering paid newsletter(s) without a website
Using one of Pico’s pre-built landing pages (here's an example signup landing page), you can sell one or multiple paid newsletters separately or in a bundle. Pico hosts the landing page, so you don’t even need a website – just a Pico account, a Mailchimp account, and a Stripe account (which you can set up through the Pico dashboard).
(Psst… Not on Mailchimp? Not a problem! Pico has a Zapier integration, which would allow you to use any email provider that has a Zapier integration, like ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Mailerlite, Campaign Monitor, and more.)
Four example configurations:
No tiers
Free Newsletter(s) only (see example)
One tier
Free Newsletters + Premium Newsletters
Two tiers
Tier 1: Premium Newsletter A (+ Free Newsletters)
Tier 2: Premium Newsletter B (+ Free Newsletters)
Three tiers
Tier 1: Premium Newsletter A (+ Free Newsletter)
Tier 2: Premium Newsletter B (+ Free Newsletter)
Tier 3: Bundle of Premium Newsletters A & B
Combining paid newsletter(s) with premium website content
With Pico, subscription tiers exist as their own independent concept – they don’t have to be tied to a newsletter or even a website (eg, a standalone membership). So you could easily include premium content (in any configuration) with the tiers you’ve created above. With Pico, you can use our built-in metered paywall system or Pico Signals, which allows you to hide or show any HTML elements based on tier membership.
Because Pico’s built-in paywall system can be configured per tier (and is based on article post tags), you could build out tiers even deeper. For example, you could offer a premium sports newsletter with premium sports articles in Tier 1, a premium politics newsletter with premium politics articles in Tier 2, and a bundle in Tier 3.
Using website content as a premium newsletter marketing funnel
One of the most successful examples of premium newsletters we’ve seen is by The Colorado Sun, which offers them as the primary benefit of an upgraded membership. Since The Sun has no paywall, website articles serve as top-of-funnel marketing to attract first-time and repeat visitors to the site. Free newsletters drive email signups (aided by Pico’s smart signup popups) and free newsletters drive readers to keep reading and eventually become members (The Sun has a basic $5/month tier). But crucially, The Sun team realized there was strong demand among their readership for premium content around state politics and outdoor recreation, so they created premium newsletters for each available only at $20/month and above. Both the free newsletters and the basic membership serve as excellent pre-funnel steps for the premium newsletters they help tee up.
Read more from The Byline about developing an audience funnel and segmenting readers.
