🧠 The Psychology of Marketing

Today you'll learn how 20-year-old Abhi Shah is building a newsletter empire:

• What makes Abhi an effective growth marketer

• 6 tactics Abhi uses to increase his open rate

• 3 subscriber acquisition strategies you can use

Estimated reading time = 4 minutes

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🧠 The Psychology of Marketing

Abhishek Shah is the 20-year-old founder of The Psychology of Marketing newsletter, a high-signal newsletter that's grown to 18,000+ subscribers in under six months.

He's also an undergraduate Psychology major at Northwestern University.

What's remarkable about Abhi is that he's ALL-IN on newsletters, and his approach is both exceptional and instructive.

When I see someone executing and generating outsized growth, naturally I want to understand what's driving it.

So I sat down with Abhi to get an inside look at his process, tactics and long-term strategy.

Before we get into his specific growth strategies, let's start with the person himself.

What Makes a Great Growth Marketer

When talking to Abhi, it's clear that his personality and daily habits are what's behind his success.

He is operating at the intersection of curiosity, knowledge and ambition. He has a knack for figuring stuff out. He moves quickly to test new ideas and see what happens.

Most importantly, Abhi has set up a virtuous flywheel that compounds his daily efforts:

• Obsessively learning about the business of newsletters

• Building 4 (FOUR!) newsletters in public

• Has a community around him who share learnings with him

• Tests new ideas each week in his sends

• Shares learnings with his community

• Gets more feedback from peers and newsletter performance

• Rinse and repeat

These quick feedback loops give him a steady stream of new learnings to tweak his craft and improve quickly.

Over time, these small improvements add up to large gains.

Which is how Psychology of Marketing has managed to amass over 18,000 subscribers in less than six months.

How to Increase Your Email Open Rate

Psychology of Marketing has managed to get a 50%+ open rate.

When he started, opens were coming in at 30%.

Here are 6 ways Abhi increased his email open rate from 30% to 50%+:

• Break through the inbox noise with an emoji 🧠 in the subject line

• Capitalize the first letter of each word in the subject line

• Use 5-7 words in the subject line

• Experiment with send times

• A/B test subject lines for each send (Abhi uses Beehiiv's native feature)

• Earn trust of your readers through consistent, high quality content

How to Use a Lead Magnet to Get Newsletter Subscribers

One of Abhi's growth tactics is to produce high quality content related to marketing psychology and then require folks to subscribe for access.

Here's a step-by-step look at how he's able to combine his Twitter presence with an automated Direct Message tool like Hypefury to turn tweets into subscribers.

Here's the flow:

Step 1: publish a tweet enticing users to engage in exchange for a valuable piece of content (in this example, a swipe file of high quality marketing psychology threads). The engagement on the tweet tells the Twitter algorithm to distribute the tweet to a wide audience.

Step 2: people who engage with the tweet automatically receive a direct message from Abhi with a link:

Step 3: the link takes users to a gated page on Beehiiv, Abhi's newsletter platform, where they must subscribe to his newsletter to access the swipe file:

Step 4: new subscribers can now access the swipe file link, which is a Notion database:

Newsletter Referral Engine

Choosing a great newsletter platform is a key part of Abhi's strategy.

Beehiiv comes with an integrated referral engine. It's a near-frictionless way for newsletters to acquire new subs by partnering with other newsletters.

How it works: The Psychology of Marketing appears as a recommendation in the user flow when a user subscribes to one of the partnering newsletters - including Unicorn Growth Strategies:

Paid Acquisition for Newsletter Subscribers

Acquiring new subs via paid ads is commonplace for big newsletters. The top sources these days are Facebook lead ads, TikTok, and buying ads in other newsletters.

Abhi has had luck negotiating CPA deals with other newsletters. The way it works is you agree on a price per new subscriber. He did a few deals with a CPA around $1.80, which is a healthy CPA. Newsletter subscribers are known to be high quality, because they have a high affinity for newsletters to begin with and are therefore likely to engage with your content and stick around for a while.

6 Links to Make You Smarter or More Successful

🧠 The Psychology of Marketing. Subscribe and watch your marketing improve.

Here's a 51-slide deck from Trends on how 7-figure newsletters make money. Epic.

Beehiiv, the platform Abhi and I both use to grow our newsletters. The recommendation engine alone has generated 16% of my total subscribers with zero effort.

This YouTube video is a masterclass in how to acquire newsletter subscribers with paid ads.

Newsletters 101, Abhi's weekly curation of what he's learning to build his newsletter empire.

Hypefury, the tool I recommend for running automated lead magnet campaigns on Twitter.

**All italicized links are sponsored, get yours here**

That's it for today.

I hope these insights help you get more subs and scale your business.

If you're not finding this valuable, please consider unsubscribing - no hard feelings!

But if you're enjoying this newsletter, the best compliment you could pay me would be to share it with one person.

See you again next week,

-Brian 🦄