What is it?
If you've got a passionate community, they might identify with your brand so much that want to show the world day-to-day.
You can try the universal offerings (shirts, mugs, and stickers), but it's best if you can get specific with something likely to resonate with your niche. For instance, a guitar player newsletter might offer branded plectrums, while a creative writer would prioritize pens and notebooks.
The Good and the Bad
- Dealing with shipping and product quality is a headache
Examples to Steal
Merch does not represent a huge percentage of Morning Brew's ridiculous revenue, but they have emphasized it a fair amount over the past few years.
It makes sense that it would be popular. Their market is the savvy, switched-on university graduate, and these types are often keen to pick up some of Morning Brew's "cool factor" by association.
But rather than a direct monetization strategy, MB uses their tantalizing merch as a way of offsetting growth costs. By making merch an unlockable referral reward, they're able to grow their audience cheaply and have someone walking around promoting their brand. Win-win.
The cost per acquisition via Meta ads is $4-5 per subscriber. But if we take a sticker referral, for example, that CPA drops to roughly 25 cents.
You can read more about that model here.
If you combined this strategy with Sparkloop Upscribe, you could probably even make a profit on these subscriptions.
Physical merch might make sense for local newsletters because you can produce super-targeted designs that are likely to resonate with your niche audience.
Every Christmas time, Naptown Scoop produces cute mugs and decorations with iconic local landmarks that are a hit with their audience.
Apparently, these generate a small profit every year. Not a life-changing amount, but enough to make it worthwhile.
Other forms of merch are not used to make a profit - it's more about driving free subscribers is in the community.
Whenever Ryan is out and about, he's wearing Naptown Scoop merch to spark curiosity in people he meets.
He says "If your newsletter’s small and unknown, it’s a conversation starter that gets you new subscribers".
