Email list experiments to get from 100 to 1000 subscribers

Before we kick off this episode, I want to let you know I'm planning a series on networking for introverts. Y'all have been asking for this both inside growth trackers and here on the podcast I share your frustration that people are too vague when they talk about networking or word of mouth. So I'm excited to dive in with this series. It'll be coming up in September. Send me your best tip on networking as an introvert. Find all the info in the show notes.

Everyone has an email list [00:00:30] or so I like to say because you have several emails in your possession, I always recommend service providers start their email list with clients and supporters rather than bother too much with forms and flows. If you're just getting started with your email list, I covered a lot of tips on this in episode two of the show, but you can kind of see how getting from zero to 100 is fairly straightforward if you've been emailing people at all in your business. I'm in the middle of making a pivot away from being a service provider and towards more of a creator [00:01:00] monetization model, and this has repositioned how I see my newsletter. In the past, I really wanted that list to be a highly qualified group of past clients of amplifiers, of connectors, of partners and of prospects for the things that I offered.

Now I'm seeing my newsletter as more of a product in itself and I'm looking at ways to monetize that in the future, and so it's less important to me if the people who read my newsletter buy something from me. I just need them to be interested opening it and clicking on issues. And that brings me to today's [00:01:30] topic. I've found a lot of growing pains between 100 and a thousand subscribers, and for context, my list is right now around 800 subs. In this episode, I'm going to share some of the things that I've been trying to get the list to grow in a healthy way in hopes that it will inspire ideas as you run email experiments or get you thinking about how your email list growth is really a set of experiments. I'm Lex Roman. I'm here to help you make smarter marketing betts so you can spend less energy booking your best [00:02:00] clients. Welcome to the Low Energy Leads Show.

So I read a lot of newsletters about newsletter growth. I read Matt McGarry's newsletter operator. I read Chanel Basilio's Growth in Reverse and there's definitely some gem ideas when I get those issues. I'm digging for those, but a lot of the case studies read the same to me. Someone grew a Twitter or LinkedIn and sometimes a Reddit account [00:02:30] and then they spam the crap out of everyone until they grew their list to about a thousand subs and then they started doing paid acquisition. I don't know about you, but this does not sound like a fun plan to me. If you've been listening to this podcast and I've been divesting from social media and the idea of leveraging social in this way is really unappealing to me. While I acknowledge that a lot of newsletters are growing through specifically Twitter and LinkedIn, I don't really want to take that path.

I also don't think this is a good approach for service-based businesses. It really is an approach that works specifically for creators. You're not [00:03:00] qualifying an audience on social media very much when it comes to marketing. You have to choose things that are not just going to be effective but are going to be things that you're going to be willing to continue doing, which in my case, I'm divesting from social media. I don't want to be forced to show up there, and so I'm okay with slower growth as long as I can do that work somewhere else. As I mentioned at the top of this episode, I started my email list with existing clients and partners, so I didn't start from scratch. I didn't just launch a newsletter at zero subscribers and put a form out there and sort of hope for the best. [00:03:30] I emailed people who already knew me, invited them onto the list and started emailing them regularly before I even bothered with subscribe forms and having any kind of automation around email.

So I was starting from a place of probably around 50 clients and supporters when I started doing email experiments. And with that said, let's get into some of the email experiments that I've tried. The first thing that I tried to get the list to grow faster was lead magnets and summits. Now I put those two together because for me, the lead magnet was really [00:04:00] promoted through summits and the whole reason I created my first lead magnet was because I was about to do a summit last October. I spoke at Square Summit hosted by Galen Mooney, and that was really the first time that I had a reason to use a lead magnet. My talk for that summit was about referrals and how to drive word of mouth. So I made a lead magnet sort of tailored around that called the referral toolkit or How to start your referral program.

Lead Magnets and summits are responsible for about 30% of my list growth, and that sounds like a lot, and you might be like Lex, remember when you did that episode about [00:04:30] why not to create a lead magnet? Why are you telling us that if it was 30% of your list growth? I'm telling you that because I don't think it was a great use of my time in exchange for those emails, and I think I could have done that in easier ways. And when I created that lead magnet, it wasn't just for email list growth, it was for client growth. And so a lot of my goals have changed and now I find myself looking back at that lead magnet and thinking it doesn't quite ladder up to the things I offer now the way that it may be. Once did I go into this in the episode about why I don't think you should create a lead magnet and it just adds [00:05:00] a lot of complexity.

If you want to shift something in your business, you now have to go back and fix five things as opposed to one. In my case, it was also paired with a summit strategy. So I spoke at several summits and that's how the lead magnet mainly got out there and that was a huge time suck. I am actually pretty opposed to summits now. As someone who used to do a lot of paid public speaking, it's really hard to swallow the idea of speaking for free in exchange for email addresses. I can honestly pay for email addresses [00:05:30] for much cheaper than the time it takes for me to put together a talk. So I've just become not a fan of the lead magnet or summit strategies. And so even though this is responsible for a big part of my list growth, it's a strategy that I have fully retired at this point.

Experiment two, when it comes to growing my list is where the subscribe forms go. When I started my email list, as I mentioned, I didn't really bother that much with subscribe forms and then when I did the lead magnet, I mainly promoted the lead magnet than a general subscribe form. I have since [00:06:00] shifted that and over the course of probably the last six to eight months have explored where should that subscribe form go. And so if you go to my website, you'll notice that it's everywhere. It's on the podcast, it's in my footer, it's throughout the blogs, it's at the header. It's my main call to action on the homepage. And because I use the subscribe form in so many places, having high quality embed forms look really nice has become really important to me and that has dictated my choice of tool when it comes to my email newsletter list.

So I had an issue with flow desks [00:06:30] early on where I could only put it one time in my blogs and I was just like, this is not going to cut it for me. I need it to be more than one place. I want to have a general subscribe higher up. I want to have a growth trackers wait list, lower down. Both of those are going to flow desks. They couldn't figure out how to load that twice, so I ditched them a long time ago and moved over to Mailer light and now I'm also using Beehive, which I'll talk about in a second. Now, the subscribe forms themselves are not necessarily a list growth mechanism in the way that they don't drive anything themselves, however [00:07:00] they capture interest on the site, right? So if people are coming to the website before, they might have been missing the fact that I had a newsletter at all and now no one is missing that.

If you are coming to my website, you're aware that I have a newsletter and I am making that the main call to action everywhere. We interrupt this episode to bring you an important message from our sponsor. If you're a web designer or want to be, give a listen to the somewhat useful podcast with hosts. Will Myers and Christie Price these Squarespace experts explore the world [00:07:30] of digital entrepreneurship and web design. Will and Christie provide actionable tips for helping your business run smoothly, navigating the client process and working smarter not harder, all combined with hot takes on the advantages and pitfalls of solopreneur life. Check it out@somewhatusefulpodcast.com or on your favorite podcast app.

Experiment three is newsletter swaps, and this is something [00:08:00] I just learned about this year. I wish that I had known about this with past newsletters, but I learned about a platform called Letter Growth and Letter Growth is a marketplace for newsletters to swap promotion. Newsletter swaps is something that comes up in a lot of the creator spaces and in the newsletters on newsletter growth. And it is something that when I learned about it, I was super compelled by and in practice it's been a little bit messier than presented. I think it might be an easier sell once you have hit a certain amount of subscribers, like the larger your list is, [00:08:30] the larger your partner's list, the more worth it. These are for smaller creators. I'm on the fence about these. So the way that a newsletter swap works is you find a related newsletter where you both reach the same audience hopefully in a different way, and you swap promotion letter growth on other platforms like that don't necessarily dictate how you collaborate.

So it's up to you to come up with how you want to partner with other newsletters, and this is a part that's gotten kind of messy for me. What that C T A is, how I write the message, who those partners are, how [00:09:00] I track that information, all of that has just gotten to be more work than it's worth. And then in the metrics I've seen that it has driven traffic but not necessarily subscribers. I just feel like I need a little bit more clarity on who those newsletter partners are and what exactly that C T A should say. So it becomes a little bit more of a system. So far, those experiments have not paid off that much, and so I'm actually sort of downplaying this strategy myself. My partners, however, have had good R O I on my newsletter audience reporting back something between 10 to 50 subscribers, [00:09:30] which is great for my newsletter list size, and I hear from my audience when I talk with them that they have subscribed to different newsletters and discovered different people through me.

So that's really great. And overall, I'm supportive of the partnership collaborative ecosystem even though these experiments haven't paid off for me per se. It's been an important learning that I think will bring me to my next tier of collaboration strategies. I would encourage you to try this one out because I think it can really open your mind up to the ways that you can work with other businesses, even if newsletter [00:10:00] swaps aren't the answer for you. Experiment four is a newsletter referral program. I've learned that a lot of people are using a referral program within the newsletter to drive additional subscribers. I'm a big proponent of referral programs in general, so when I learned about the ways that people were using referral programs specifically in their newsletter, I was really intrigued. I googled around and found that people were recommending Spark Loop as a newsletter referral program plugin, so I signed up for Spark Loop and installed it in Mailer Light.

I had a lot [00:10:30] of technical issues using SparkLoop. They weren't that friendly with MailerLite integration. Overall, I found it to be not that user-friendly of a platform and they weren't that interested in supporting small creators, which was evident by the way the product is designed. While a lot of larger creators were saying that SparkLoop was effective for them, I found that as a smaller creator, it was not that effective for me and it was way more costly than it was worth the amount of subscribers that I got from it. Instead, I moved over to Beehiiv. I've been much happier there and I'm going to talk more about why I love Beehiiv in a second experiment. Five is beehive recommendations. [00:11:00] Now I learned about beehive through letter growth. Paul in there has set up a way for you to see newsletters by platform choice and Beehiiv was one of the most popular platforms for newsletter operators, which gave me the curiosity to find out what's so great about Beehiiv and when I looked into it, it's really feature rich when it comes to growing your newsletter.

Beehiiv has a recommendation Engine, they have a referral program built in. They have paid acquisition built in. There's a lot of analytics inside Beehive, and it comes with a built-in archive of your newsletter that is fully searchable [00:11:30] and is easy for people to access past issues. I signed up for Beehive and immediately started recommending other newsletters to my audience to try to build some partnerships that were a little bit more passive than the way I had approached them before. So what's cool about beehive recommendations is that when you subscribe to my newsletter, you'll see my recommended newsletters and that is something that took me just a few seconds. Those are people that I know or have read their newsletter and all I had to do was write one line about why I like their newsletter and why I think you will too. And then it just shows in a [00:12:00] popup, I don't have to talk to those people.

I don't have to negotiate any kind of partnership. It just pops up and it'll show them that I'm recommending them. And so in turn, they often recommend me. I've now gotten about 12% of my current email list from Beehive recommendations that has worked so well and I want to give a particular shout out to Soren Iversson who has sent me a lot of those subscribers. Soren's newsletter is taking off, and so he's kindly recommending me through Beehive, and that has been a huge driver of list growth there. I've had a couple [00:12:30] other beehive creators pinging me to say that they've already been recommending my newsletter and that has been working really great. It's a little bit more passive than the newsletter swap strategy, so I'm a huge fan of beehive for that and for many other reasons, which I'm not going to go into here, but I might do a separate episode on Beehive.

Let me know if you're interested in that. Experiment. Six is making my newsletter my main call to action. I think of calls to action as a menu. So I have different calls to action based on the channel or audience that I'm reaching, and depending on how long you've known me and [00:13:00] where you're finding me, I'm going to give you a different call to action. But I have simplified this quite a bit by making the newsletter my default go to call to action because I know that if you're on my newsletter, you're going to hear about all the other things that I'm doing. So I just stopped worrying about giving buy ready calls to action and B, browser calls to action, and instead I just give the newsletter call to action. So whether I'm at a meetup or I'm at an event or I'm speaking in a video like this one, I'm always going to give the newsletter call to action.

You'll find this call to action in my [00:13:30] LinkedIn profile. You'll find it in my email signature. It's everywhere. And that has also made newsletter growth a little bit easier. This is a bit untrackable because all of these channels lead to the subscribe forms, and I can't necessarily tell what the original source was, but I would estimate that this is accounting for about 50% of my list growth just because I'm putting the email list everywhere, and it's really likely that as soon as you hear about me, the next thing you're doing is joining my email list. So this experiment is less [00:14:00] about lead generation or newsletter subscriber generation and more about capturing interest, which I wasn't doing before. I was allowing for a lot more people to come to my website or to come to a social profile or to come to a talk or to come to a meetup and not get on my email list.

And now more of those people are getting on my email list, so it's more of a fixing a leak and less of a generating activity. Experiment seven is adding reviews to my newsletter signup page. I've been using reviews a lot more in my business ever since I discovered Sanja. I don't use [00:14:30] reviews everywhere I could be. They're on the beehive landing page and they're on some of my website landing pages, and it's kind of hard to tell the specific impact of reviews, especially for a newsletter, but I really like the idea of treating the newsletter more like a product and the reviews help me understand what people like about the newsletter, and it helps my new subscribers understand that which encourages the right kind of people join the list who are actually going to find it valuable. So I like it more as a retention play, as an engagement play because if people are joining my list and they're getting something different than what they [00:15:00] thought, then that's not helpful.

They're going to unsubscribe. They're not going to open or click the emails, and I don't want that either. In my mind, the reviews aren't as much for acquisition as they are for quality list growth, and so I'm excited about continuing to explore this. If you don't follow Wilson and Ollie on social media, I follow them on LinkedIn. I get tons of tips about how to use reviews all over my product, and they're always covering newsletters because it's a major way that people are using cja. Again, this is kind of an untrackable activity. I can't tell you how many subscribers have subscribed because [00:15:30] they saw some of the reviews, but it's pretty light effort on my side and it helps my business in other ways, so it's something that I'm going to continue to experiment with. Experiment eight is social media promotion. As I mentioned, I'm not a big fan of social media, so I don't do a lot of this anymore.

I was promoting my email list a lot on Instagram stories. Anytime I would give some information that was coming up, I would say join the email list, stay updated. So I did get some list growth from that, but it was really piecemeal on LinkedIn. I usually don't even bother because [00:16:00] of the trend towards zero click marketing, which is a term that I've been hearing from Rand Fishkin and Amanda Nado of Spark Toro. So I'm leaning away from social as a way to promote the email list. I'm leaning away from social entirely, but I do think if you're showing up there, making it a central call to action, there can be a great way to move that audience off. This is not new news, but I think a lot of times we give too many calls to action in too many places, and the newsletter is a great one because it's not controlled by any one company.

When I was pulling data for this episode, [00:16:30] I couldn't go back and see how many people subscribed from Instagram or LinkedIn, but I would estimate that it's maybe five to 10% of the list. However, as I mentioned before, a lot of those people heard about me from somewhere else. So really, the social media platform was kind of cementing them as a subscriber rather than bringing in a new lead. If you've been following the math on this episode, you'll see that I accounted for around 92% of my email list growth through all the experiments that I mentioned. The remaining 8% includes people who have purchased my stay book roadmap or have become a growth [00:17:00] tracker. There's an additional layer here of the visibility activities that I do that just leads people into my orbit, which then they find out about the newsletter from, and I've covered that in other episodes.

If you're interested to hear more about my overall growth model, as for you, I think you have to decide and maybe try these things out for yourself and decide how easy is it for you to do them? Do they feel low energy or high energy to you? Are you getting the kind of return that you want out of them? It's really a personal choice, and this is why experimentation is so key, because when you experiment and you approach things like [00:17:30] an experiment, you can recognize, yes, this worked. I want to continue, or No, this didn't. I'm going to sunset it.

If you're experimenting with how to find your best clients, I invite you to join me in the Growth Gym. I've been hosting a live stream every Friday on YouTube and LinkedIn to talk about how you can make Smarter Marketing Betts get on the Low Leads newsletter to get notified about upcoming sessions. If you like this episode, you might also like five reasons not to create a lead magnet. In that video, I talk more about why I think lead magnets are a complex [00:18:00] marketing choice, and if you're looking for leads, some other faster paths to doing that. So check that out and until next time, keep that energy low until the value will be high.