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👋 Hi {{first_name}},
If you have been here for a while, you know that I have shouted forever from the rooftops about owning your email list.
Now owning an email list is just one of the levels of getting completely independent of a social audience and an algorithmic feed.
The levels that you and I should be aware of:
Level 1: Build an audience
Level 2: Own your audience (with an email list)
Level 3: Own your content (building it on an independent site)
Level 4: If you can afford it, own the rails behind reaching that audience through your content.
Beehiiv and Workweek have just unlocked Level 4.
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Building the infrastructure behind email
In August, I talked about Workweek raising $17 million to open up its platform to more practitioner creators. Most of the funds were geared towards building the infrastructure to support all the new practitioner creators onboarding on the Workweek platform.
Why is that relevant? Because of the open secret you and I may not know.
The ESPs we know today might have their own platforms to create beautiful emails and host digital products. But when it comes to the core product i.e. sending emails, they all depend on the same 2-3 providers:
Sendgrid, Mailgun, or SES.
As ESPs get bigger and bolder to become a creator-first platform, they decided that it's better to build and own their email delivery infrastructure.
Beehiiv announced that they built their own, called Beehiiv Hex. As a creator who’s growing an email list, you realize that the ability to capture your audience depends largely on your ability to reach them, and that's where email delivery infrastructure comes into play. Beehiiv knows it, which is why they put serious thought by building the infrastructure over the last two years.
Glad you asked.
As a newsletter creator, if you are evaluating an ESP right now or already re-evaluating wherever you are, the questions usually are not about whether your platform is running its own sending infrastructure.
What would matter to you are these two questions:
As you scale from a few subscribers to tens of thousands, do you suffer in email deliverability, just because you are hosted on a shared infrastructure?
Do you get dinged because of deliverability issues with other email senders in that infrastructure pool, or are you shielded from their performance issues?
It may not be a bone of contention when you are building out your audience with a few hundred subscribers, but it's worth paying attention to as you grow into a sizeable audience. Having dedicated support for email deliverability allows you to reach out to your subscribers reliably, without guessing whether an email that you send out this week can actually hit 100% of your subscribers or not.
Are you at that stage in your email list growth and looking for answers? I would be happy to be your sounding board.
Let me know by hitting ‘Reply’ on this email, or send a note to [email protected].
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Cheers,
Renga from LetterStack
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