How to grow your email list? đ
Carmen Jiménez
35 replies
What do you think is the best way to make your newsletter subscribers grow?
Maybe offering some kind of free resource?
Or by advertisement?
What worked better for you?
Replies
Nick Frost@thinker
Dropbox DocSend
There are some great responses in this thread!
Getting your newsletter (if that's the email list you're building) organic growth is a matter of being discoverable by readers in your niche, but also more broadly.
I recommend submitting your newsletter to www.inboxstash.com and www.newsletters.co, so you can get subscribers organically. The two backlinks for SEO are a plus!
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What To Sell Online
We got our first 100 subscribers from Facebook ads, Facebook groups, and Reddit. Check out this article we wrote on IndieHackers with a detailed explanation of our experience, how much we spent etc. https://www.indiehackers.com/pos...
Facebook Ads: Weâd heard a few other people say they were crushing it using Facebook Ads to grow their newsletter and we figured weâd give it a shot as well. For context, we didnât have a large advertising budget, so the idea of spending money for subscribers wasnât our favorite idea. We figured weâd spend $50 and see what happened.
Hereâs what we did:
We created a lead magnet. Weâd heard from multiple people that you should promote lead magnet rather than just the newsletter itself.
We used interests as our primary parameter for Facebook to find relevant people, creating some short ad copy, and our CTA sent them to the signup page on our website.
Results: We got 50 signups at about $.50/per sign up. We were stoked with these results. Unfortunately, when we looked at where all the traffic came from, it was clear these were low-quality emails, as our open rates were practically non-existent. đ
Facebook Ads Attempt #2: The lesson here is that we shouldnât have kept our targeting to âworldwideâ.
Hereâs what we did with the remained $25.00:
We ran the same test, except this time only targeted tier 1 countries (USA, Canada, Australia, UK, etc..) and used the same interest targeting that we did previously.
Results: We saw about a $3.00/per sign up. Which was more than we were willing to spend for free subscribers. Ultimately, we decided to stop running Facebook Ads.
Reddit - This is one of the hardest channels to make work and not for the faint of heart. My first tip with Reddit is to keep the promotion to a minimum⊠like, an absolute bare minimum. Secondly, always lead with value. That said, some Subreddits are so anti-advertisement that even if you lead with value and add your link in a subtle way, youâll still get your post removed or worse⊠shadow-banned đ± all while getting flamed in the process. But, donât stress it, itâs just part of using Reddit.
Hereâs what we did:
Found 3-5 relevant subreddits
Looked at the top posts of all time and emulated their headlines and content
Created a valuable post (this was typically just repurposing our free content in a different format) w/ a clickbaity title (yep - this tactic still works!)
What To Sell Online
@mbenchi10 @alex_papageorge Whats your take with Reddit?
CEO Short List
@mbenchi10 @alex_papageorge I think you're pretty spot on. The viral effects of the platform are amazing but the trickiness of selling what you're trying to sell without being flagged is challenging to put it lightly (as I'm sure we're both experienced)
Hi @copybycarmen! We've found that creating rich and authoritative, problem-solving content that targets our niche audience was best for ROI. We only boost content on social media or create a lead magnet (like we did here: https://buff.ly/2FkK61N) around topics or content that's already proven to perform. Cheap and fast gimmicks to get email list subs up seem to always come at the cost of lower open rates and decreasing your inbox reputation.
For me Linkedin worked pretty well. However you need to work a lot on connecting with relevant people first, and then just a couple of good posts bring a lot of traction/signups/optins.
Nack AI
Initial 100 via Twitter and LinkedIn
After that, directories, other media channels, forums, and encouraging word of mouth.
Additionally, I would @ people I reference/quote on social media which was potentially an excellent way for influencers to pick it up.
I would also make sure it was visible on my social platform bio, mostly where I was present discussing things related to the topics in my newsletter.
Influencers.club
Scraped my Insta followers emails with influencers.club. Then moved on to target competitors followers via cold email (free ebooks mostly) and custom audiences on FB (again, ebooks).
From my experience ebooks or case study, pdf downloads have worked the most.
Right now the most popular method is promoting a webinar on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to capture email ids of prospects, then follow them up with weekly free content.
Many also scrap their existing LinkedIn network to kickstart their newsletter and slowly filter them out. Compared to other social networks, on LinkedIn eBooks are quite popular than webinars.
LogicLike
We have the following exp:
- give users the option to try the product at 1 click (no email needed)
- after the first 5-10 min of experience we ask about saving his progress (if the user liked the service). Also we've added buttons inside UI
- as a result - low spam level, good engagement level
Try that case. Maybe it will work for you.
@matvey_olevinsky I love this approach! Wouldn't work with our product but in general I love the idea!
Zipcan
#1 by far is offering a product that is free or low entry point. Ideally it hints at your value proposition quickly.
Archbee
I know that offering some sort of free resource that provides a lot of value works pretty good, but depends on what kind of people you want in your email list and what resource are you providing.
LinkedIn and Lead411 my dear. Work pretty well
Offer for FREE a product/service to your prospect and you ask them to leave their address. It works a lot for me. Mix the free product and the ad.
After that, I built an emails campaign to speak every week or month about my company and my goals to involve my potential customer in the project. Your prospects will speak about your company to their family/friends... Because the human love to be a part of a great mission and they need to share it !
Speak about a brand and a mission, not a product
CEO Short List
@mathildeodel Love this. Follow up question - To your first point (free product) - Do you feel the "free product" needs to be correlated (or at least in the same wheelhouse) as the product/newsletter your selling? Or does the fact that it's valuable and free serve it's purpose enough, although there's not much synergy between the two products? Curious to hear thoughts
@alex_papageorge Hello Alex, of course it needs to be correlated ! If you offer something for free that is different from your product/business, how can it works ?
If you sell Nike shoes you can't offer for free a book about Bitcoin.
Subscribed.FYI
I got my first 100 from a Facebook ad. CPAs are high these days so it's not the most scalable. Currently trying to build out a referral program
be yourself
A valuable bait works.
I do not want this anymore