Writers love to obsess about certain elements of writing that will magically bring big-name publishers or magazines to their door. All the advice goes like this: Get up at 3 AM, meditate for hours, stir your coffee three times counterclockwise, and then write your masterpiece.
Yeah… that’s totally how it goes. That’s why novelists, screenwriters, and journalists alike turn to author and writing coach Becca Syme.
Becca founded Better-Faster Academy six years ago to help writers build systems and processes that help them get out of their heads and get words onto the page. “My primary business is coaching writers, which I run on Kit,” says Becca. “We work specifically on success, alignment, and productivity systems to help you get what you want out of your writing career.”
Author and writing coach Becca Syme runs Better-Faster Academy.
Since then, she’s coached more than 10,000 people and expanded her team to include six more coaches.
Better-Faster Academy offers individual courses and 1:1 coaching on marketing, work-life balance, and playing to your strengths. “One of the most important things to me, and that I coach often, is on alignment,” says Becca. “Working with Kit is all about alignment for me. We switched to Kit from another provider specifically because I wanted to work with a company that values individual people and creativity and works hard to ensure that creatives have the tools they need. We are extremely pleased with it.”
Becca and her team use Kit in a variety of ways, from 30-day to 180-day automated follow-ups for course attendees to welcoming new subscribers. But one of her most successful campaigns is her weekly newsletter.
A weekly newsletter that breaks all the rules
Most of the email marketing advice out there (including advice you can read here on Kit) follows a few themes. Keep your emails short and sweet. Use automations wherever you can. And promote your newsletter everywhere.
Becca’s weekly newsletter does none of those things. And it’s become wildly successful.
“We call the newsletter the Dear Becca Letters,” says Becca. “When we do so much coaching, we get a lot of follow-up questions, which often overlap. I collect those questions into case studies, and each week I share one letter someone has written asking for help and answer it to the email list.”
The Dear Becca letters show firsthand how questioning your assumptions about what is “right” in email marketing can lead to success. With an average open rate of 91.96% and often more than 100 replies to a given newsletter, it’s obvious Becca’s audience looks forward to reading her messages each week.
Kit’s analytics provides insights into individual emails or aggregate performance.
Here’s how she puts it together:
1. Making the newsletter exclusive
Most creatives spend time and energy working to grow their list. But the Dear Becca newsletters are exclusive.
“I don’t advertise the newsletter, and I don’t do any cold leads,” she says. “You have to want to be there. We have 2,600 people on this list because we keep it heavily curated.”
The only feeder to the email list that’s not an existing course is the Better-Faster Academy YouTube channel, where each video is more than 45 minutes long. Either way, if you’ve opted-in to one of their channels, you want to go deep and detailed.
Within that 2,600-person list, Becca segments it based on topic. The team also experiments with topics and letters to see what resonates the most with their audience using Kit’s A/B testing feature:
A snapshot of a recent A/B test on the Dear Becca Newsletter.
Keeping the newsletter tight means that anyone signed up for the list is more likely to engage with the material. Says Becca, “You can find plenty of other people advertising the easy way to do things. My way is the hard way. And so I’m going to make it hard for people to follow me because I want them to be there, and I want them to listen while I talk and engage with me.”
2. Long, in-depth answers to audience questions
A typical Dear Becca newsletter clocks in somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 words—the same length as an in-depth blog post or article—and includes the letter, the response, and the latest YouTube video from the Better Faster Academy channel.
Becca goes deep for these answers, approaching them the same way she would if working 1:1 with the letter writer. “What typically happens is someone will write in with what’s happening in their writing life. Maybe they’re burned out, maybe they’re not seeing the sales they want,” she says. “And what I do is answer back to them as though we were actually in a coaching session, which often starts with questioning the premise of their problem.”
An example letter from a recent newsletter.
A key tenet of Becca’s coaching style is focusing on individual needs rather than general best practices and deconstructing what we assume is the “right” way to grow your writing business.
“I’ve coached a lot of extremely successful people, and there’s so much we need to re-teach ourselves,” says Becca. “Alignment to the way your brain works and how your creativity manifests itself is the key to success, not what we were taught by industry experts. So almost every single letter I do is basically an analysis of the thought process that led to the problem in the first place, and questioning whether or not that underlying assumption is true.”
It goes to show that you can’t assume that shorter emails are always better. For Becca’s audience—who have already shown that they want to dive into the details with in-depth writing coursework that doesn’t take shortcuts—it makes sense that this long-form method would be more successful than quick hits.
What’s more, you can’t find these answers anywhere else. “We’ve experimented with publishing a couple of them on our social media channels, but it just doesn’t work,” she says. “People want that back-and-forth engagement.”
3. You can’t automate everything
Part of what has made the Dear Becca letters successful is the old-school approach. Becca writes the email brand new each week. (Automations can be a great tool, but it has its place. Becca and her team use them with follow-ups, transactional emails, and scheduled promotions.)
“It’s brand new content each week, based on what I’m hearing while I’m coaching,” she says. “When I coach, I always see patterns. I’m going to individualize the response, but I know that there’s a group of people on our list that will see themselves in that response.”
Today’s audiences can spot automation a mile away. While it may not be sustainable in your business to take a bespoke approach to every marketing campaign, think about where you can slow down your efforts to deliver something higher quality or more of the moment.
This is the same approach Becca takes with her coursework, which is brand new for each cohort. “Everyone always says to run evergreen classes, and I say screw that,” she laughs. “Every single class we teach has individual coaching. It’s deep, it takes a long time, it’s not easy, but my goal is to help. 95% of the people who start our courses finish them because we engage with them, and we make it a community.”
Don’t be afraid to go against the crowd
If you’re feeling lost trying to grow your business or be more productive, you’re not alone. But rather than look for the quick fix that “everybody is doing,” think about what resonates the most with you as a person.
“So many of us fail because we apply the metrics of someone else who is not like us to our business,” says Becca. “If everybody is telling me to do one thing, I do the exact opposite. Alignment to me and how I think and work is the most important thing.”
This individual approach is exactly how we do things at Kit. “Connecting with a company who actually cares about your work as an individual creator is something you’re not going to get anywhere else,” says Becca. “You can tell that they actually listen to creators and are trying to do well by them. It’s absolutely visible in the product. I guarantee this tool is going to be better than anything else out there.”
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