How to grow your email list with newsletter swaps

(Cold open)

The thing that makes me really believe in this is Jamie from Minimalist Hustler. When we did our swap, we had a very similar list size, and now that dude is at like 8,000 subs. I've watched him from the sidelines and one of his main strategies has been to just swap like crazy. I think he did five newsletter swaps a week.

(Show intro)

Welcome to the Low Energy Leads Show. Over here we're talking about how we grow our audience and turn them into buyers faster with less effort. Today we're talking about email list swaps, the idea of newsletter cross-promotion where you trade promotion with someone else who has an email list. This is super popular in the newsletter creator space, but I've also seen it work really well for service providers. So today we're going to talk about why you might want to do a newsletter swap, how you do one and some pitfalls to avoid that I've come up with from personal experience. I'm Lex Roman, I help creatives make marketing bets you can win and you're tuned in to The Low Energy Leads Show.

What's a newsletter swap? You might ask a newsletter swap in its very basic premise is the idea that you're going to cross promote with someone else's newsletter. So you have an email list, other people have email lists, you're going to trade promotion in some capacity.

There's two ways I see this happen mainly when it comes to newsletter. The first is the idea of the creator network or the recommendation engine. So this became really popular with substack. We're now seeing ConvertKit and Beehiiv do this. When you sign up for a newsletter, you'll get a popup that's like you might also want to be on these lists. That's a recommendation.

The other popular way to do newsletter swaps is through in newsletter placement, so finding a spot in your newsletter where you promote someone else and vice versa. Those in newsletter placements can look a variety of ways.

That is totally up to your discretion. We're going to talk a little bit later on about how I recommend you do that because choosing a consistent spot for that newsletter promotion is going to make your life easier. The last thing that you can do when it comes to this idea of cross promotion is you can pay for spots in people's newsletters. I'm not going to cover that in this episode.

Those really fall more in the realm of ads, but platforms like Beehiiv now have this idea of boosts and it's really similar to a newsletter swap except you pay for it. I want to share a little bit about my experience with newsletter swaps. I've shared a little bit about this on episodes we've done about email experimentation. Last year I learned about a platform called Lettergrowth and Lettergrowth's whole premise is this idea of newsletter swaps.

So you put your newsletter on there and people can reach out to you or you can search for them by audience type, by newsletter size, by other stats by platform like people who are also using ConvertKit for example. You can look for them on letter growth and then you reach out and you pitch a co-promotion and so Jamie from Minimalist Hustler reached out to me. He was the first person reach out to me with this after I signed up for Lettergrowth, we did a newsletter swap and I can't remember how many subs I got from that.

It was very small because I botched that newsletter swap by sending people over to my podcast instead of directly to a subscribe. I corrected this. I did this newsletter swap again with a couple other people and that worked much better because I sent them straight to the subscribe rather than to a piece of content hoping that they would subscribe.

I mentioned in that other episode on email experiments that recommendations have been huge for me. So I have two recommendations on Beehiiv Soren's newsletter and The Sales Jam newsletter that those collectively have driven nearly 300 subscribers for me and I've done a couple collaborations with The Sales Jam within newsletter placement in addition to this Beehiiv recommendation.

So if you sign up for Low Energy Leads, you'll see both of those newsletters recommended to you and then vice versa on their newsletters. What's cool about Beehiiv is that I can see who's actively recommending me and I can see how many subs I've driven for them and how many they've driven. For me, it's really cool. It's one of the reasons to use Beehiiv and I haven't looked at it the way ConvertKit does this, but they have a very similar mechanism where you can recommend other newsletters and they can recommend you.

This can be one-sided. If there's a newsletter you love, you can absolutely recommend them or it can be mutual where you agree to recommend each other. The last thing I'll mention here, which makes me hopeful about newsletter swaps is that every time I get a mention in someone's newsletter, it drives a lot of people into my subscribers.

So Josh Spector runs a newsletter for creatives. His newsletter I want to say is at 30 or 40,000 subscribers and he gave me a free plug for one of my issues in his newsletter and it drove several subscribers over to Low Energy Leads. It's notable when this happens and it speaks to the power of cross-promotion with a really targeted audience. So even though intentional newsletter swaps have not been super successful for me, we're going to talk about why they're a little labor intensive. I do still believe in the strategy.

The other thing that makes me really believe in this is Jamie from Minimalist Hustler. When we did our swap, we had a very similar list size and now that dude is at like 8,000 subs. He's got a four figure MRR membership off of his newsletter. I've watched him from the sidelines and one of his main strategies has been to just swap like crazy. I think he did five newsletter swaps a week because he sends a daily newsletter and that has been one of his core growth strategies. So why might you want to do a newsletter swap? It sounds maybe a little cumbersome.

Why might you even want to bother with it? Lenny Rachitsky is a newsletter operator that I've known for a bit. I wrote one of his early issues and Lenny really took off in 2020. He's now at over 600,000 subscribers. He's definitely in the realm of newsletter entrepreneurship, so he runs a business that the newsletter's kind of the anchor of the business where monetization is heavily driven through the newsletter channel.

Take this with a grain of salt if newsletter operation is not a core business function of yours, but Lenny has credited recommendations from other newsletters with 78% of his new subscribers, 78%, and he'll post on social media the hockey stick chart that we all love to see of the subscriber growth and everyone will ask him, Lenny, what is responsible for that big uptick? And he'll say recommendations from other newsletters.

Now what he's talking about here is the Substack recommendations feature we spoke about earlier where other newsletters will recommend him on subscribe, but it's the same premise. Get in front of other newsletters and that audience will come to your newsletter. Matt McGarry who runs a newsletter, growth agency called Grow Letter and also a newsletter called Newsletter Operator talks about the idea of the newsletter growth playbook. There's all kinds of experiments that you can run, but in some channels they're so popular, so many of us are running tests in those channels that there starts to emerge this playbook that you can at least try on for size, you can fidget with it quite a bit, but when it comes to newsletters, it's pretty known how newsletters grow.

So zero to 100 subscribers is pretty much going to be people. It's going to be you telling people, so you're going to invite people, you're going to invite specifically clients, collaborators, and fans. A hundred to 200 subs, you're making it your primary call to action. It's on your website, it's in your social bios if you're giving talks, if you're on podcasts, you're plugging your newsletter as you move into the 200 sub range, you're teasing it in social media posts, so you're saying something like, if you want more on this, go to my newsletter.

You can do that, especially on LinkedIn and Twitter. It's less popular to do this on Instagram, but I see this all the time on LinkedIn. Tomorrow on my newsletter I'm covering blah, blah, blah. If you want to be notified, get on the list. That will drive subs your way on Twitter.

It's almost always a bumper in people's threads. Make sure you're on my list and you can decide, am I gating content to the list or not? Starting at 500 subs, that's when you're going to want to think about this Crow promotion with other newsletters. I wouldn't think about this below 500, we'll talk about that more in a second and then above a thousand subscribers, that's when you can start running paid ads if you want to and you can look at adding something like a referral program. So to boil this down for a bit, you want to make sure everyone knows you have a newsletter.

You want to make sure that you're plugging it on social media so it's clear what the unique value is of being on your newsletter versus following you somewhere else. Why get on the newsletter? And then you want to get the help of other people to get your newsletter out wider, whether it's the people on your list or adjacent partners. That's kind of the Newsletter playbook in a nutshell.

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Okay, so sounds good. Lex, I'm thinking about doing a newsletter swap. How do you do one great question. So glad you asked. This is a five-step process that I've created for you and if you're driving and you're like, I'm not writing this down, you are in luck because I put it in the newsletter, look at that.

A reason to join my newsletter, and you can pull up the guide anytime you want to. On the Low Energy Leads newsletter, it's at read.lowenergyleads.com. Also in the show notes, how do you do a newsletter swap? You're going to start by choosing the cross promotion spot. So where in your newsletter are you going to promote your partner? If you're using a tool that has a creator network type thing, so that would be ConvertKit or Beehiiv maybe Spark Loop. You can also set it up in there and I recommend that you choose a consistent spot for this.

This is going to make your life so much easier if you're like, it goes here, it's two lines. I need one sentence and a link from my partner. It just becomes a little bit more of a system for you so you're not having to scramble and figure out where you're going to fit it into every issue. So choose your cross promotion spot. The second thing you're going to do is you're going to look for good partners. You can use a platform like Lettergrowth. You can also check out inbox reads. Inbox reads kind of looks like it's getting stale to me, but it is a directory of newsletters.

There's a subreddit for newsletters, r/newsletters where you can find newsletters to cross promote with or you can just do some good old fashioned Googling. You can look for business owners or newsletters that are along the lines of the target that you're trying to reach, right?

You want to look for newsletters that are aiming at your same audience that maybe provide an adjacent value to them. You can also ask around asking your clients is a great tip here. What kind of newsletters are you reading? Ask your partners. You can even plug this cross promo idea inside your newsletter, so just put it somewhere near the bottom, offer it as a collaboration and see if people take you up on it.

The third thing you're going to do is you're going to write your how to swap instructions. This is going to save you the most time because you don't want to have to rethink this every time you're doing a newsletter swap, so this is what you're sending to your partner so that they don't have a million questions for you. Newsletter swaps are still pretty new-ish, so there's no define. Here's how we do it all over the place.

You're defining this on the go, so you want to write this down for yourself and you want to send it to them. You're going to include a screenshot of where their promo is going in your newsletter and you just want to write 'em a list of what they need to provide. Usually it's just copy and a link, like one sentence and a link, but if you need an image, you're going to want to ask for that and you're going to want to give 'em the specs, right? What size you need for that. You might ask what you're going to do with this. The main thing you're going to do with this is you're going to send it back to a partner, so someone's going to reach out to you or you reach out and you say, Hey, you want to do a swap? And they say, yes, you're going to send this back to them for ease.

You can save this as an email template. You can put it in a document somewhere or you can make this a page on your website. I went ahead and did this just to show y'all what I mean by this, and so if you go to the show notes, you'll find a link to my newsletter swap page where I laid this stuff out so it's very easy for me to just send this link to a partner.

The fourth thing you're going to do is you're going to draft your one-liner. This is going to be what you send to your partner that they're going to include in their newsletter. Usually this is one to two lines of text. This is going to depend a little bit about where the partner places your promotion, but you just want those blurbs ready to go one to two blurbs and the link that you're going to send people to.

If you're going to use a special landing page for cross-promotion, you're going to want to get that ready. I personally wouldn't bother. Instead, what I would do is I would make a UTM link, which is a tracking link that will show up in your site analytics for your newsletter.

Some newsletter platforms will do this, so you can check with yours to see if it does. Both my website and my newsletter have really good built-in tracking, so I don't really have to do that much here, but sometimes it'll get stripped out, so you might want to make a special tracking link to see how many people came in from this particular promotion, and then the last thing you're going to do is you're going to schedule and send the promotion. When you do your promotion with a newsletter partner, you want to make sure that you're checking your analytics and seeing how many subs that I get from this promotion, and if you like extra credit, you'll do the same for them, so you'll check your email clicks and you'll say, here's how many clicks I tracked to your link, because they might forget to check, and especially if someone's new to this kind of thing, you never know where these partnerships can land.

I had one of these newsletter swaps turn into a member joining Growthtrackers, so you never know where these can end up and I think partnerships are infinitely valuable, so be a good partner and think about sending analytics their way as well. You're in there anyway, checking it for yourself. Now, why would you not want to do a newsletter swap? You might ask, the first reason I can think of is that your list is sub 500 subscribers. Now, this is a soft metric.

People are definitely doing newsletter swaps, sub 500 subscribers, and if you're super jazzed after listening to this episode, I encourage you to try it out. The reason I say sub 500 is that if you think about your open rate and click through rate on a sub 500 list and how many people would be clicking through on the ad for this other newsletter partner and then reverse that, think about how many subs you're actually gaining and so the labor to pull this off, essentially you're picking up a couple subscribers.

It starts to not be that worth it time-wise. I think for that amount of subs it becomes a lot more worth it past 500 subscribers and then definitely pass a thousand subscribers. The second reason you might not want to do one is that you only want potential clients on your list. If you're only doing high ticket services or you have a very strong vetting process for your clients, you might not want to do a newsletter swap.

Now, I would challenge you to think about this because there's a lot of reasons why it would benefit you to have non-client on your list, even if you mainly monetize through services. One of those is shares and forwards. Another is if you're going to sell low cost products, and lastly, if you get really excited about content creation and you want to monetize your newsletter itself, having those people on your list can create a new revenue stream for you there in the form of sponsorships or paid subscribers.

And then the last reason you might want to not do a newsletter swap is that you'd rather pay to play. Some people would rather just pay for ads and that's totally fine. If you're extremely time poor, you might not want to create this space and create this program. You might just want to pay for placement in other people's newsletters. I've done that before in other newsletters and it can work really quite nicely. I mentioned before that email swaps can be a lot more work than they're worth sometimes, so here's a couple of hot tips that I've picked up along the way. Be picky so you don't lose your audience trust. This is the most important thing, and this is maybe the hardest thing about using a platform like letter growth, which is not to boil it down to basically for growth bros, lot of AI newsletters on letter growth.

You want to be picky about who you're going to partner with because not only are they promoting you but you're promoting them. You don't want to lose the trust with your audience, so what you're going to want to do is write down some vetting criteria. This is going to include their list size and audience target and maybe some list health metrics like open rate and click rate. I don't know that I would bother with that, but it's something that you could consider even just internally because list health can sometimes indicate list quality, right? Are they sending quality newsletter? If their open rate's like 30% and they have a thousand people on the list, probably the newsletter is bad. I would also make an internal list for you, which is how do I know that a newsletter is quality? What do I think a quality newsletter is for this?

You're going to want to put yourself in your audience's mindset. If your audience is going to this newsletter, why might they enjoy it? What kind of things might they be looking for? Are they looking for tactical content, they looking for story? Are they looking for humor? You might also put technical details like whether or not it's well designed, how strong the writing is, how fresh the content is, right? Does it feel new and different? You have to decide what this vetting criteria is. For me, it's like I go to someone's newsletter and it's like, is this something that I would want to read and is it relevant around the topics that I also cover? Right? Are we talking about marketing, sales, booking clients? Is it in that realm? And then another tip that I would give you is to try newsletter swaps in a bit of a concerted effort, so try to do a few of them back to back.

This is because I think it's really hard to gauge whether or not you like newsletter swaps off of one partnership here. I think you've got to do a couple to sort of get your feet wet and figure out, do I like doing this? Is it worth honing this? Is it driving anything for me? It's very hard to tell that off of one. You can do one and just see, do I even want to go down this road? But it's a little bit of a batch strategy. I think it requires maybe set aside a month, make it newsletter swap month. See if you can book four newsletter swaps if you send your every week. If you don't, if you send it monthly, you might want to do a quarter of newsletter swap theming where you do three newsletter swap partners and make it a concerted effort.

See if you can get those partners easily, see how easy the collaboration is and see if it drives quality subscribers to your list. I continue to think newsletter swaps are really cool. I wanted to do this episode because I talk about them quite frequently. Newsletter swaps have opened up a lot for me in terms of the ways that I promote other business owners. It's a pretty lightweight way to start a collaboration with someone that you're excited about working with.

So even if the goal doesn't actually end up being get more subscribers on my list, or I should say maybe if the outcome doesn't end up being that there's still maybe an interesting entry point here as I've learned and I think it could be worth exploring, I think it's worth adding to your test backlog at some point and saying, Hmm, let's see what this drives for my newsletter and for my business.

Of course, I want to remind you that you can get on the Low Energy Leads newsletter, find my newsletter at read.lowenergyleads.com, and if you want to do a newsletter swap with me, let's do it. Please reach out. As I mentioned before, I have a newsletter swap page where you can read the stats on low energy leads and what I need from you in order to do a swap next week is our 50th episode of the show. I want to take a beat here and thank some of you who have left reviews for the show. Brandy, Jana, Ben, Maya, I really appreciate you leaving reviews. It means a lot to me because I didn't really realize how important reviews are. I guess I should have realized that after hearing so many podcast hosts talk about it, it's hard to take your own medicine, so I appreciate that you took the time to leave reviews for this show.

Next week we're going to talk about what a low energy lead actually is, and I'm going to run down my cheat sheet on how lead generation becomes sustainable. This is like the summation of my lessons over the course of doing this podcast and also of course running my program Growthtrackers. If you liked this episode, you met also like the episode I did on email experiments. I talk about other ways that I've grown my email list in that episode, find that link in the show notes and until next time, keep your energy low until the value will be high.