Imagine you’re a marketer trying to pitch VMware expertise to someone who debugs Oracle applications in their sleep.
(If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s basically the equivalent of a fourth grader pitching their baking soda volcano expertise to NASA.)
Experts Exchange (EE), a community for IT professionals, felt this firsthand when their newsletter lasted exactly one edition. Their techie readers’ response was swift and merciless: "That's not true. Who's writing this? They don't know VMware." Which was true. The newsletter was written by marketers, not IT experts.
In fact, five separate members reached out to correct technical inaccuracies, exposing the newsletter team’s lack of domain expertise to a community of 6 million IT professionals who could smell marketing BS from a mile away.
But a few years later, they got back up on that horse.
The major challenge that Chief Revenue Officer Thomas Bernal faced when EE decided to try again was: How do you create engaging content for tech pros who...
- actively despise being marketed to,
- fact check everything in real-time,
- and possess expertise that dwarfs most marketing teams?
So Thomas decided to stop trying to out-geek the geeks—and instead became the informed curator EE’s audience actually wanted.
This shift turned a previous newsletter disaster into ByteSize, a 47% open rate powerhouse that today rakes in revenue from newsletter sponsorships across multiple sections. Here’s how they did it.
Marketing to people who hate marketing
Experts Exchange’s audience is a marketer’s final boss: highly skeptical technicians who can spot inauthentic content faster than they can identify a coding bug.
The company operates a 25-year-old tech community where IT pros pay subscription fees to access expert knowledge for solving complex technical problems. Think of it as Stack Overflow's older, more sophisticated cousin—who charges a premium for premium advice.
These aren't your typical LinkedIn scrollers, who might smile and nod as they skim past questionable claims. These are people who literally get paid to spot errors and correct them. Thomas explains,
These tech people do not like to be pitched or sold to. They want real peer review stuff.
He adds, "You can't tell them your half-baked opinion on Microsoft when they’re in the weeds dealing with Oracle applications stacked with AWS and their backend code."
The expertise gap is big, because the tech community’s “bullshit detectors” are off the charts—making traditional promotional tactics about as effective as using Internet Explorer to browse the modern web. Previous attempts to position Expert Exchange as the ”tech expert” failed, because they were essentially walking into a room full of PhDs and announcing they were there to teach them algebra.
But the technical knowledge wasn’t even the main challenge. The bigger issue was the fundamental disconnect between how marketers communicate and how tech pros evaluate information. Marketers lean toward simplicity and accessibility, while technical experts want to be fed information on their (more advanced) level.
The curation approach to writing for expert audiences
EE de-bugged their own marketing code when they realized they needed to stop trying to be the smartest person in the room, and become the most helpful instead.
"The biggest thing for us was making sure that we're presenting something in a way that our audience doesn’t leap to fact check,” Thomas explains.
“We’re saying, ‘Hey, we aren't the experts. We're giving you a stream of content that you guys can dig into on your own.’”
This meant curating relevant tech stories for their audience, rather than sharing their own opinion.
When EE made the switch, they found that tech audiences will engage with content that acknowledges their expertise—while providing valuable curation, great storytelling, witty humor...and a few dank memes.
Think of it as the friend who reads every marketing book so you don’t waste three weeks learning what could’ve been a Medium article. Except the friend admits they’re not the author, they’re the human TL;DR, complete with sarcastic jokes.
This positioned EE between dry technical documentation (informative but about as exciting as reading server logs) and typical marketing fluff (insulting to anyone who's ever written code).
As a result, they became the clever and witty translators who could take complex technical stories, make them accessible—and link out to deep technical resources for people who wanted the full details.
4 steps to turn your newsletter audience from skeptics to subscribers
Step 1: Choose your fighter
To stand out as a distinct voice in a sea of newsletters, the team took a page from Street Fighter: choose your character.
Or in other words, pick a pop culture persona or fictional character, then write like them.
Thomas and team thought through pop culture references that would resonate with their audience, ultimately deciding to run with a “Tony Stark vibe.” Witty, smart, confident, technically sophisticated—but not condescending.
That simple rubric helps EE write every ByteSize issue in a unique, entertaining, and consistent voice. After all, it's infinitely easier to “channel Tony Stark” than to vaguely try to “sound compelling.” (It also keeps things simple—no 47-page brand guidelines doc required.)
Step 2: Level up through trial and error
The team started by throwing spaghetti at the wall, sharing 10 different news stories in every issue to see what would stick.
Most of it slid right off.
Over time, they refined their strategy from curating 10 different stories to hone in on the top 3 that their audience was most interested in. Each iteration was based on actual newsletter performance data, not just guesswork about what their audience might want.
When they strategically eliminated sections that generated about as much engagement as a Xanga page, Experts Exchange was able to condense their newsletter to fewer, meatier pieces that actually clicked with readers.
Step 3: Kick idle users off your server
Experts Exchange also decided to do something that would make most marketers break out in a cold sweat: They deliberately made their list smaller. Much smaller.
By implementing 45-day re-engagement campaigns, EE cut their sending list from 400,000 casuals to 206,000 engaged subscribers.
It’s the Marie Kondo approach to list management: If subscribers don't spark engagement, thank them for their service and let them go.
As a result, open rates jumped from 30% to 47%. Turns out, 200,000 people who actually want to read your content beats 400,000 people who treat your emails like chain mail from Aunt Betty.
Step 4: Leverage success to unlock sponsorship opportunities
With engagement rates that would make most newsletters weep with envy, Experts Exchange created discrete sponsorship opportunities across their 5 newsletter sections:
- News Roundups (curated stories for IT pro readers)
- Tool Time (featured tech product tools and solutions)
- Job Opportunities (IT job listings)
- Industry Moves (tech industry updates)
- Chip's Bit (EE community forum highlights)
They found themselves selling premium real estate in a neighborhood where everyone actually wants to live.
"We’re steadily getting advertisers across sections, and soon we’re planning to offer sponsorship opportunities for the job section of our newsletter," Thomas shares.
⚒️ Sponsor evaluation tool
How can you find the right sponsor for you? Download our process doc for identifying and evaluating potential partnerships, including an LLM prompt to copy-paste for partner ideation and our scorecard for force ranking potential opportunities.
Skyrocketing open rates + a new revenue stream, in under 12 months
The results speak for themselves. Today, Thomas’s team is looking at:
- 206K subscribers
- 47% open rate
- 2.13% click-through rate
While the metrics tell some of the story, the deeper victory was successfully engaging their tech reader community outside their traditional "my server is on fire and I need help now" context.
The newsletter became what Thomas now calls "the easiest revenue stream that we've ever created."
Experts will engage with content that acknowledges their expertise while providing genuine value. Even the most marketing-resistant audiences can become engaged subscribers when you stop trying to be the smartest person in the room and start being the most helpful curator instead.
Turns out, the best way to win over skeptics isn't to prove you're smarter than them. It's to prove you respect how much smarter they are than you.
