List-Building Masterclass Webinar

Proven Tactics to Grow Your Subscriber List

AuthorAuthor

EJ White & TG
September 19th, 2024

Table of Contents

Resources in the Webinar 📚

List-Building Masterclass Presentation17.47 MB • PDF File

Timestamps

Getting Started 👇

00:00 - Introduction
00:38 - What we'll be covering
01:12 - Guest Introductions
01:57 - Laying the Groundwork

How to Grow Your Email List 📧

Pop-Ups and Opt-In Forms 

03:08 - Pop-Ups and Opt-In Forms
03:52 - Design Matters
06:53 - Strategic Placement
08:29 - Messaging & Copy
10:39 - Minimize Friction
12:41 - Testing and Iteration

Lead Magnets

13:41 - Leveraging Lead Magnets
13:58 - What is a Lead Magnet?
18:31 - Types of Lead Magnets
19:40 - Lead Magnet Best Practices
20:37 - Optimizing for Conversion

Social Proof and Testimonials

25:43 - Social Proof and Testimonials
26:09 - Why Social Proof Works
27:10 - Types of Social Proof
30:09 - Placement
30:21 - Collaborations For List-Building

31:28 - Paid Ads for List Growth

Q&A Session 🙋‍♂️

32:52 - How do you build an email list from zero?
36:36 - What are the best social platforms for newsletter growth?
39:17 - Should you buy or scrape an email list?
44:30 - Join the exclusive publisher Slack community
46:09 - Closing Remarks

Summary

Growing an email list takes work.

But being able to build a loyal community around your brand that eagerly awaits your content, and having them pay for your products or services can be extremely rewarding.

This is why we recently hosted a webinar with some of the best in the business, 

Nathan May, founder of The Feed Media, Tyler Gillespie Head of Partnerships and SEO at beehiiv, and, Edward White, Head of Growth at beehiiv, to go over proven tactics and the foundation to growing your subscriber list.

Before we move into the juicy bits, let’s go through some basics.

Laying the groundwork

Setting and establishing a strong baseline for performance is critical to growing your email list. Without measuring your starting point, it can be hard to set goals for improvement. Here are some steps to take before you start growing your list:

  • Know your audience; Where they live, how they consume content, what interests them, and what excites them. This way you already have 80% of the work done for you, plus it makes writing and publishing your newsletter a thousand times easier.

  • Choosing the right tech can make all the difference. Understanding the capabilities of the tool that you're using whether it's beehiiv or another Email Service Provider (ESP), and the different tools and features that facilitate growth is essential.

  • What’s your newsletter goal? Do you plan on promoting the newsletter as a subscription offer? Selling a product with it? Perhaps using it as an advertisement channel? Your goal determines how you position the newsletter to your audience.

  • Create a content plan and decide on your communication frequency, are you sending emails weekly, daily, or bi-weekly? Decide, stick to it and craft emails that drive engagement, and subscribers like consistency, so having a stable frequency that you can commit to builds trust.

How To Grow Your Email List

Building your subscriber list is one of the best ways to nurture relationships with your audience.

It's also a great way to have full autonomy over your audience without external intervention, unlike social media apps, where you can get suspended for the simplest things. The downside to building a subscriber list is that it can be labor-intensive.

We’ve made things easier for you, by providing 5 proven expert strategies and actionable steps to growing your newsletter.

  1. Popups and opt-in forms

  2. Lead magnets 

  3. Social Proof and Testimonials 

  4. Collaborations 

  5. Paid Advertisement

  1. Pop-ups and Opt-in Forms

Popups are overlay windows that appear on top of your website, and prompt readers to take action, like subscribing to your newsletter by filling in an opt-in form.

To get higher conversions with your pop-ups, you need to give readers a reason to input their information in your opt-in form.

A good opt-in popup must meet these criteria,

  • Design

  • Strategic Placement

  • Messaging and copy

  • Minimal Friction

  • Test and Iteration

Design

The design structure of an opt-in popup should look similar to this, 

  • Brand logo to showcase your brand

  • Heading, to position what you're offering the user in return for their email or what they should expect to receive 

  • Subheading, to add more context

  • Email input field, to acquire their email or extra information

  • CTA button, to allow the user to give consent to taking the action stated in the prompt

Strategic Placement 

To get this right, check the average time readers spend on your site using Google Analytics, then display the popup 5-10 seconds earlier than the average time or after they've gotten something valuable from your website.

Messaging and copy

Adding something special and engaging in your copy is a great way to interrupt the reader while surprising them in a way that will make them want to give you their details.

Here’s an example of a popup that interrupts the reader, is engaging, and has a clear value proposition/offer.

Screenshot of the copy on Justin Welsh’s newsletter sign-up page.

Minimizing friction

Just like the image above, structure your opt-in fields in the simplest way possible. Most opt-ins have only 2 fields; name and email. This is the only important information you need for your newsletter; any other info can be obtained after they've subscribed.

Testing and innovation 

A/B testing various offers, headlines, triggers, and more is an effective strategy for identifying which elements create the greatest impact on:

  • Signup conversion rate 

  • Quality of the subscribers from a certain type of popup 

  • Number of people or the proportion of people that complete the popup

  • Email open rate

This is how you find a winner. It can be as simple as looking at who’s signing up for which pop-up, or looking at advanced metrics that are moving the needle for you in your publication to understand which versions may be leading to the most success. 

  1. Lead magnets

Lead Magnets are an incredibly valuable concept that has proven successful for a while now. But, despite their success, they are underutilized. 

What is a lead magnet? 

A lead magnet is essentially an incentive you offer to your audience or readers to encourage them to take an action. This is going to be a free resource that provides them value in return for their email. 

Screenshot of a lead magnet offer from Dakota Johnson's newsletter sign-up page on beehiiv.

Most of your site visitors are people who aren't familiar with you or your brand yet and are clueless about your expertise, offering some sort of resource in the form of a lead magnet can be that incentive that pushes them to subscribe to your newsletter.

Types of lead magnets

There are various types of lead magnets, including but not limited to:

  • Downloadable guides/ebooks

  • Exclusive content 

  • Quizzes 

  • Surveys 

  • Free trials 

  • Discounts 

  • Webinars 

  • Case studies 

  • Calculators 

  • Checklists 

If you're already running a business you have lead magnets, you just don't realize you have them. - Nathan May, Founder Feed Media 

A lead magnet should solve a pain for your audience, and give them a very quick win, this works well in conversion - Tyler Gillespie Head of Partnerships and SEO at beehiiv

Best practices

  • Make it relevant to your audience 

  • Solve a specific problem 

  • Keep it simple and valuable 

  • A/B test to find which variation of lead magnets resonates better with your audience 

  1. Social Proof and Testimonials

Social proof is more or less just other people giving you credibility to whatever it is that you're doing, whether it's a newsletter or an e-commerce business.

Have you ever seen a movie ad, but didn't think much of it? Until you went online and saw a bunch of people giving it high ratings which in turn made you want to watch it? This is social proof.

Types of social proof

  • Subscriber Counts: One of the simplest yet most effective strategies is showcasing your subscriber count. For example, using specific phrases like "Join over 10,537 subscribers" will resonate well with potential subscribers and create a sense of authenticity and urgency.

Screenshot of subscriber count added to the CTA of Justin Welsh’s newsletter sign-up page.

 

  • Testimonials: Collecting quotes about your expertise or newsletter value from places like X or taking emails that users have sent back to you praising your newsletter and then displaying them will help conversion. 

If you go to beehiiv.com/love there's a tool called testimonial that we've integrated into our onboarding flow, to help collect feedback from subscribers - Tyler Gillespie Head of Partnerships and SEO at beehiiv

screenshot of testimonials from Dakota Johnson's newsletter sign-up page on beehiiv 

  • User-generated Content: When someone voluntarily shares their favorite newsletters on TikTok and includes yours, that single video can generate significant views and potentially lead to a substantial increase in your newsletter subscriptions. Here's an example - Embed [https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMhBfas9v/]

  • Awards and accolades: There are various awards programs available that you can use to showcase expertise such as the Webby Awards or marketing accolades offered by organizations like Muse, and next year, beehiiv will introduce an award program specifically to honor top newsletters. 

  1. Collaborations

You can build your newsletter by partnering with other businesses, colleagues, or influencers in your niche and in turn, bring in new subscribers to your newsletter.

Here are ways to leverage collaborations 

  • Partnering with other creators: Collaborating with creators in your niche by doing email swaps and recommendations.

For example, make a deal with a creator who has an engaged newsletter in your niche where you write a guest post in their newsletter, and they do the same in yours.

  • Co-organizing webinar events: Organizing webinar events with colleagues in your niche exposes your brand to their audience.

This creates an opportunity for you to share your expertise and sell yourself through the webinar, you can also offer a limited and exclusive lead magnet to the webinar attendees if they sign up for your newsletter 

  • Organizing Affiliate and referral programs within your newsletter by giving an incentive to your subscribers so they promote or refer your newsletter to their audience and friends.

  1. Paid ads

This is the most expensive way to build your newsletter, and a lot of steps go into place before it’s successfully done or your ad budget will keep going down the drain, to prevent that, you have to

  • Choose the right platform: This has a lot to do with where your audience lives and spends their time online, if your target audience is spending all their day on X then advertising heavily on TikTok wouldn't perform better than going full send on X.

  • Budget allocation: Determining how much to spend per lead and what your initial budget should be largely depends on the economics of your newsletter. Whether you're running a free newsletter, an ad-supported model, a premium subscription, or generating leads as a coach, each of these factors will influence your spending strategy.

beehiiv has a tool where you can calculate your subscriber value to understand how much you should pay for a subscriber 

  • Tracking ROI: When you pay for a subscriber, understand how the investment amount tracks against the lifetime value of that subscriber, i.e. What’s the potential amount you can gain from each subscriber throughout their subscription on your newsletter compared to the amount it took you to acquire them?

{Roi graph illustration - an example is linked}

Questions from Webinar

  • Question 1: How do you build an email list from zero?

Nathan May: I would use paid ads, but if you have a tight budget, you can go on LinkedIn, search for your ideal customer profile, send a personalized DM to them, and use your newsletter as a lead magnet, then accumulate people that way.

For more information on growing your list, check the growth sequence webinar with Matt McGary as well for some good tips.

  • Question 2: What are the best social platforms for newsletter growth? 

Edward White: It comes down to understanding your audience. If there’s a social media platform your audience spends the majority of their time on, that’s where you should be posting.

  • Question 3: Should I buy or scrape an email list? 

Edward White: Buying a list or scraping a list can be very tempting, but it may lead to negative outcomes. Reaching out to people who have not opted into your email list themselves may increase the number of spam complaints you get.

Key Takeaways

  • Utilize social media as a tool to grow your email list by testing different content styles across various platforms to help you understand what resonates with your target audience the most, this helps refine your newsletter's voice, tone, and figure out topics that'll drive engagement. 

  • When setting up your pop-up form, make sure to include less friction to avoid low conversion.

  • If you can't afford paid advertisement, posting on social media, even without being an expert, can be a tremendous channel for newsletter growth.

  • Tailoring your social media presence to where your target audience spends time can significantly impact engagement.

  • Avoid cold emailing and email scraping as a means for newsletter growth, because sending newsletters to people who have not opted into your email list can lead to spam complaints and negative outcomes. 

  • Offering users the opportunity to opt in even when reaching out cold can lead to higher engagement and prevent spam.

Next Steps

  • Review your current social media analytics to identify your most engaging content and platforms. 

  • Refine your content strategy based on audience insights and experiment with different formats (e.g., videos, infographics, quizzes) to increase engagement and drive leads to your newsletter opt-ins.

  • Sign up to beehiiv to create a fully optimized newsletter with diverse features and options. 

  • Reach out to creators in the same niche and following range as you to collaborate on social media posts, and swap emails to attract new audiences.

  • Cross-check your website, landing pages, and social media profiles for clear opt-in options to reduce friction for subscribers.

  • Continuously monitor your newsletter performance and make necessary adjustments to improve open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement.

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