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The Truth About Growing Your Email List
Let’s cut the 💩 and get down to brass tacks.
Hola amigos,
I’ve been thinking a lot about newsletter list growth recently. I had an ambitious goal to reach 500 subscribers by year’s end — I currently sit well behind that goal at 150.
(If you’re reading this and not subscribed, would you mind helping a brother out?)
My original intention for this post was to write a listicle: The 6 Things You Need To Know About Growing An Email List.
YUCK.
That’s been done a thousand times this year alone.
Don’t get me wrong, a well-timed listicle can be a valuable piece of content.
But my goal each week is to provide you with something of value…something with substance.
Luckily for me, Dan Oshinsky’s Not a Newsletter dropped this week and in it, he provided a brilliant tidbit of advice for those who are trying to grow a newsletter.
“This [article] is a wonderful example of something I often tell my clients: It’s rarely a single tactic that drives growth. Over time, if you do a lot of little things — creating good sign-up pages, making it easy for readers to share newsletters with friends, testing out both on- and off-site acquisition tactics, etc. — you’ll have a good chance to grow a big, engaged newsletter list.”
That’s the truth. Newsletter growth — or any organic content growth for that matter — isn’t about any one thing. It’s about doing a lot of little things correctly and sustaining that effort over time.
The article Dan was referring to is called, “From 0 to 3,000: Six tactics we used to build a newsletter list from scratch”.
The author, Sydney Lewis, uses a case study from the NOLA newsletter to provide readers with 6 really, REALLY good tips for growing an email list. It was better than anything I’d have written…once again affirming why I am glad I didn’t go ahead and write a click-bait for you to read.
But Andrew, that strategy takes way too long
Okay, I hear you.
If you want growth quickly, have you considered giving away $1,000?
That’s what one start-up, RocaNews, did.
They took to social media to tell their followers that they were giving away $1,000 to people grocery shopping in poor neighbourhoods if they could grow their email list to 1,000 in one day.
It worked.
Now, RocaNews has over 16,000 subscribers thanks to this ingenious campaign.
HOWEVER!
I caution against this strategy for one simple reason: the people signing up may not be signing up because they care about RocaNews, they may only be signing up because they like the virtue that comes with the subscription.
This could lead to poor engagement from this segment.
If I had a client do this, I’d consider segmenting organic subscribers from “paid” subscribers and seeing which segment performed better.
Some food for thought.
Have a great week!
Does your business need someone to turn subscribers into customers? Let’s book a 15-minute meeting to talk more about it.
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