How Yvan Derogis attracted 100s of paid subscribers while saving time with automation

Searching for those businesses and then publishing a weekly newsletter alongside his full-time job is time-consuming, and converting subscribers from free to paid is notoriously difficult. 

But, thanks to MailerLite and Make, he’s generated hundreds of paid subscribers, earned thousands of dollars, and automated processes to save hours every week. We spoke to Yvan to discover how he did it!

Neoseed.io’s thesis is that replicating an already successful company in a new country is an effective and low-risk way to create a business. 

The newsletter is read by investors, funds, and entrepreneurs, as well as people from McKinsey, Visa, Google and Microsoft.

Yvan runs the entire business on MailerLite and tools connected via Make. This includes creating content, sending the newsletter, generating sales, managing subscriptions, and more.

The hardest part of running a paid newsletter is turning free subscribers into paid ones. Yvan has 2 strategies for this. 

First are his welcome emails. When someone joins Neoseed.io, they receive a series of emails, built with the MailerLite automation builder, containing essential information for getting started.

The first email introduces the project, tells people what to expect from the newsletter, and links to a page people can use to get a free trial of the paid version.

The sequence then uses the MailerLite condition block to check whether the subscriber is on a free or paid plan and sends different emails depending on their status. 

Free subscribers get taster content from the paid newsletter. Each email also includes links and calls to action asking them to sign up. 

These emails get an average of 60% open rate and 6% click rate. But more importantly, it’s a way to provide high-quality content by dividing it into several days instead of sending a very long email on day one. 

Paid subscribers receive emails with premium content. Getting this content via automation means they receive value from their subscription faster than if they had to wait for the weekly newsletter.

Yvan’s other strategy for converting subscribers is teasing premium content in his free weekly newsletter. 

The free newsletter contains 2 complete business ideas. This provides a lot of value and keeps free subscribers opening his messages. 

His free newsletters have high engagement and he consistently gets an open rate of over 40%. This is already high, although believes he could increase it even more by cleaning his list, which he hasn't done for a year.

These messages also include a taster of what people can expect from the paid newsletter. The content aims to get people interested in the idea without giving too much away so they sign up for a paid plan. 

The CTAs asking people to upgrade typically get around 40 to 50 clicks every send.

When people click on the upgrade button at the bottom of the email, they’re taken to a Stripe purchase page where they can subscribe to the newsletter. 

When they sign up, they’re automatically added to the paid subscriber segment in MailerLite, so they start to receive the paid version of the newsletter. 

Creating and sending a newsletter each week is time-consuming. Searching for new ideas also takes a lot of time since the process is manual.

Because of this, Yvan tries to automate as much as he can in the other areas of his business. He estimates that these automations save 4 hours per week. 

His biggest time saver is a Make automation that takes content from a Google Sheet, formats it with OpenAI, and uploads the content into his MailerLite newsletter. See the automation below.

Here's how it works:

1. Yvan first writes the text on a Google Sheet.

2. He clicks on a link to launch the scenario.

3. OpenAI will format the text, for example, by highlighting information.

4. The automation then sends the text to MailerLite.

5. He can now create and schedule the newsletter.

While it looks complicated, Make’s no-code automation guides you through the steps required to set the automation up. 

Yvan was able to set up this automation quickly. Now all he has to do to create his newsletter is add the content to the Google Sheet in the relevant fields. The automation takes the content and adds it to the newsletter.  

When a Neoseed.io subscriber upgrades to the paid subscription, they receive a PDF with the business ideas that Yvan previously shared in his newsletters. 

Delivering a PDF resource via email is typically a simple task: just create an email automation that sends the PDF to the person who requests it. 

Yvan’s challenge is that his list gets longer with every newsletter send. While he could manually add new ideas to the doc each week, doing so would require more of his free time.

He solved this problem with a Make automation that turns his business ideas Google Sheet into a PDF when someone clicks on the relevant link in his newsletter. The workflow then delivers the up-to-date PDF to the subscriber’s email address. 

The workflow means new paid subscribers instantly access the ideas spreadsheet without Yvan having to spend a second more on the content creation process. 

Thanks to the automation features of MailerLite and Make, Yvan can generate sales effectively and spend less time on manual tasks. He can spend more time finding great business ideas and analyzing them for his subscribers. 

Want to learn about business ideas working in the U.S. that you can replicate in your home country? Join Neoseed.io by dropping your email address into his sign-up form.