5 Ways to Grow Your Email List
Whether you recently started a newsletter or have been writing for years, there’s always one question that remains: “How do I grow my email list?”
Whether you recently started a newsletter or have been writing for years, there’s always one question that remains: “How do I grow my email list?”
After studying the many newsletters on our platform and talking to the creators behind publications like The Milk Road and World Builders, we came up with this list of 5 effective hacks to grow your email list quickly:
1. Cross-Promotions
Look for comparable newsletters, in a similar industry and stage as yours, and reach out with a simple proposal - “I’ll give you a shoutout in my newsletter if you can do the same!”
Why this would be especially helpful?
- Given that both newsletters are in related industries, the audience will be more than interested in your content - leading to higher conversions from the cross-promotion
- You will provide value to and connect with other newsletter writers in your space
For instance, here’s an interesting collaboration between World Builders & Young Money that did wonders for both publications (screenshot from World Builders introduction):
At beehiiv, we’re always looking for win-win solutions, and this one is hard to beat.
2. Repurpose it as a blog post
Repurposing content has the obvious benefit of saving you time and introducing your content to a fresh set of eyes.
But doing it as a blog post has a specific value add - it will give you a search engine optimization (SEO) boost, helping you rank higher in searches for relevant keywords.
For that, you can always just copy-paste your content and post it to Medium, but with beehiiv’s in-built blog feature you’ll never have to worry about SEO again.
Here is an exemplary blog, built automatically by beehiiv, for the Exec Sum publication:
3. Giveaways on Twitter
Everyone loves a free giveaway, especially if it’s targeted specifically toward your audience.
For instance, I ran a giveaway on Twitter for an Email Marketing Guide and managed to increase the subscriber count of The Water Cooler, a marketing newsletter, by 14% in just 1 day.
Here is how you can do it too:
- Build a digital guide or document that will resound with your audience
- Post it on Gumroad, or any platform, that will capture emails in exchange for the guide
- Post about it on Twitter & use a tool like Tweethunter to set up auto DMs for everyone who sends in a response to your tweet
An example of the tweet:
4. Referral Program
One of our biggest publications, The Milk Road, attributes 5-10% of its growth to beehiiv’s in-built referral program. Given that the publication has 100,000+ readers, that is a big deal!
Plus, the readers that come from referrals generally have a higher-than-average open rate.
So, here is a referral program from the Morning Brew newsletter that is responsible for approximately 33% of its current readers:
Pro tip: Given the constraints of shipping physical products, digital guides will do just as well.
P.S. Many members of the beehiiv team lead growth at Morning Brew, and we’re excited to bring that same technology to you with our in-built referral program. So let’s start scaling!
5. Write Threads on Twitter
I know that’s the second time I am mentioning Twitter but trust me, it’s worth a shot.
By simply summarizing your newsletter post in the form of a Twitter thread, and adding a subscribe button as a call-to-action at the end, you can gain several new subscribers.
Nathan Baugh of World Builders has been doing just that for a month now and has already hit 10,000+ subscribers. Here is what your thread and CTA might look like:
