How I Grew My Newsletter to 90,000 Subscribers Without Paid Ads

in this video I'm going to show you how I grew my email newsletter to over 90 000 subscribers without using paid ads but more important than the list size alone our email newsletter gets a 50 open rate to 90 000 people every single week which is definitely above the industry average and not to brag but this isn't the first time that I grew a newsletter to tens of thousands of people my last company backlinko we grew

that newsletter to over 200 000 subscribers also without running any paid ads you probably already know how valuable having a newsletter can be I mean look at companies like morning brew and the hustle they sold for tens of millions of dollars because those companies that bought them knew how valuable that email-based audience can be and in the case of exploring topics our newsletter is one of the biggest growth channels for us basically for two reasons first

people that open our newsletter on a weekly basis it's basically like free retargeting we're reminding them every week that we exist and we're providing a little bit of value now we don't really sell too much in the newsletter we just basically have a little pitch for our Pro product but the real benefit is that every week people are opening it and getting value and remembering that we exist so when someone wants some sort of trend spotting

tool or Trend spotting solution we're top of Mind in fact most Enterprise customers that reach out to us that end up closing say that they found us via the newsletter or they signed up for the newsletter and really enjoyed reading it every week and then when they want some sort of trend spotting tool for their team they don't have to Google Trend spotting tool they just come right to us because they're familiar with us and also

just because you have a newsletter doesn't mean you just have to send the newsletter you can also send promotions I mean we do product launches two or three times a year to the exploding topics email list and those are some of our biggest growth months and because we're providing value between those launches via the newsletter our open rates are still like 40 or 50 during the launch and we close a lot of people and convert a

lot of people during those launches because we built up so much Goodwill over the weeks and months of delivering value with the newsletter all right enough fluff let's get right into the steps on how you can actually grow your newsletter and get the most out of it so your first step is when someone signs up for your newsletter is to send them what's known as a CD welcome message so the C stands for confirmation and the

d stands for deliverability and basically the idea behind this welcome message is two things first you want to confirm that they made the right decision by signing up so imagine someone lands on your website and they go to your newsletter page and it sounds interesting and they sign up if you don't send a message for a few days which is possible if you only send a Weekly Newsletter they're kind of gonna forget you exist so it's

important to confirm that they made a good decision and remind them already upon sign up about why they signed up so in our case we just kind of remind them you know we're going to send Trends every week and such and such a number of people have signed up so if you don't have a big email list that's totally fine you don't need to use social proof you can just say every week you're going to get

X to really confirm that they made the right decision the next step is to use your welcome message to increase deliverability in the future two things that have really made a huge difference for us is one when someone signs up for our newsletter in the welcome email we literally tell them to move the message from the the promotions tab in Gmail to primary now at this point with a 50 open rate we'll obviously get into primary

most of the time in Gmail but it still doesn't hurt to put that in there because if you ever get into promotions again the act of someone moving the message from promotions to primary sends a strong signal not just for that subscriber but just in general that your messages should be in primary because most people when they see something in the promotions tab they leave it there because usually it's a promotion and they don't want to

do anything about it if a lot of subscribers are literally moving your message and dragging it from promotions to primary that sends a really strong message to Gmail that your stuff should be in primary the other thing we do to improve deliverability for Gmail or any other email platform that people might be using is ask them to reply to the message you know reply and say why did you sign up for this newsletter this is huge

because most emails that get sent out are basically transactional emails that people open they click they interact with some way and all that stuff is good for deliverability people interacting with your message but a reply is especially important because it actually shows that people are engaging with your email and it's not just a one-way message it's sort of a conversation if enough people do that it tells Google that these messages are things that are going to

be replied to by subscribers so they should end up in your primary tab so the goal is really at the end of the day is to get engagement early on from new people that signed up to show Google and Gmail I should say that your message should go into the primary Tab and we found that the primary to the promotions tab is huge like basically the promotions tab is the new spam folder you do get some

opens there but to give you some context when we send a message and it goes to Promotions our open rate is usually like 30 something percent when it goes to primary it's 50 plus it's almost double just based on going from promotions to primary now if you go to spam that's a totally different story but I'm just talking about how to get deliverability in terms of going from promotions to primary it makes a huge difference in

this welcome email sort of a passive way to increase the odds that your messages land in primary in the future the next step is what do you actually send these people and in my experience the best way to to get people to open your newsletter to share your newsletter to subscribe to your newsletter is to have what's known as a branded newsletter so you know a lot of newsletters that people create and send out are sort

of people's musings on this and that or a list of links think of substack for example every time you get an email from a sub stack you kind of don't know what you're gonna get most of them are kind of essays or long rambling stories that someone might have and that's fine there's nothing wrong with that but if you want to really build a huge newsletter following that you might even be able to sell or just

something like in our case designed to grow your business you want to have a branded newsletter so a branded newsletter is just like it sounds it's a newsletter that has its own brand unless your company is the newsletter like morning Brew Your newsletter should have its own separate unique brand from your actual brand so for example Tim Ferriss has five bullet Friday right that's his branded newsletter that has its own brand separate from him and the

reason for that it's just easier to share the newsletter as a separate branded thing so if I told you oh sign up for Tim ferriss's newsletter it's easy to forget but if I told you sign up for five bullet Friday it's much easier to remember it also kind of encompasses what the newsletter is as opposed to Tim ferriss's newsletter which could be anything you kind of know okay it's five bullets and it comes on Friday just

from the name alone so the brand is really important now not just the name but you also want to have a unique template inside of every message every message should be more or less the same with the fields change so in the case of exploding topics or as we call it exploding topics Tuesday that's our brand newsletter we send out four Trends every week and the four Trends are all over the place some are about e-commerce

some are about technology some are Concepts but either way the the format is exactly the same someone knows what they're going to get they're going to get four new trends every single week they don't know what the trends are they don't know what spaces they're going to be in but they at least have some idea of what they're going to get and this is the benefit for you and your subscriber it helps your subscriber because they're

gonna open because they know hey I know what I'm gonna get pretty much I'm just curious about what the details are this combination of familiarity and the unknown is a really powerful motivator when it comes to someone opening your message in fact we don't even have to use any fancy subject lines like our subject line is the most boring thing ever it's just E.T colon the date as opposed to having to think of one every week

we just use ET and the date and we still get a 50 open rate because people want to know what's inside the message the subject line doesn't really matter that much in our case because people know what they're going to get but they don't know exactly what they're going to get having a template also helps you because you don't need to reinvent the wheel every week or every day when you send out your newsletter like you

just fill in the blanks and send it out our newsletter because we used content from our Pro platform basically it only takes us about five minutes to put together it's really easy because you just fill in the blanks send it out and you're pretty much done as opposed to having like an editorial process where you're like what subject line should we use what should we cover you could just basically fill in the blanks and you're done

it's super easy and it's a win-win for you and your subscribers so while you're sort of developing this template and it's okay to test out different templates to see what works I'd really focus on providing bite size value make it so someone can skim your newsletter and get something out of it this is the Brilliance of news letters like morning brew and the hustle is that they were able to take the day's news basically and encapsulate

it into easy digestible little nuggets now in your case you might not have a news newsletter you might have something about technology or about Fitness and that's totally fine but the idea is that you want to have bite size value that someone can just skim it and get something out of it so in the case of five bullet Friday Tim has some links to things interested in and then usually a quote of some kind within 30

seconds you can get some value out of it and if you want to click on the links and learn more you can get even more value so it's bite size value across the board there with literally five bullets every week in our case in exploding topics Tuesday we provide four Trends so you can just skim the trends if you want and just see what they are or we provide some insight and Analysis if you want to

read about them and learn more either way it's all about providing bite-sized value in your newsletter so as you develop your template try to think of a way that you could just help people just quickly get some value out of your newsletter without needing to click on any links or read a bunch of content the next step is to never miss an issue of your newsletter whether it's Christmas or your birthday or your mom's birthday you

gotta send that newsletter every week or every day depending on the time frame that you choose in the case of exploring topics we've sent out 150 newsletters at this point and we've never missed one it's really important for people to build up that habit of opening so that's one of the reasons besides what I already mentioned of why people open up our newsletters at such a high rate yes it's because we provide bite-size value we're providing

value overall but we're sending at a consistent day and time so people know Tuesday at 9am Eastern they're going to get their exploding topics Tuesday to open and learn about new trends like that habit forming part of it is huge and in fact those newsletters that I mentioned like morning brew and the hustle they have literally a million plus subscribers and I know from talking to people like who are involved in that company that they have

a 40 open rate on a million subscribers and they send every day how is that possible well it's because that becomes the daily routine of their subscribers just opening that newsletter like they get up in the morning they check their phone and they open morning Brew to learn about what happened yesterday like that's the habit forming potential so if you miss even one issue you can break that habit it's important to send at the same time

at the same day of the week every single week every single day depending on your schedule in fact this is a mistake that I made with the backlinko newsletter I will just send out messages sort of when I felt like it when I had a blog post to share when I had a video to share when I had something to rant about when I learned about something new that I wanted to share I wasn't consistent like

every week or even every month you get a newsletter sometimes you would get three in a month sometimes you would get one per month sometimes you would get none for a while like six weeks so there was no consistency there and that's one of the reasons that the open rate on the backlinko newsletter was like 30 something percent I'm exploring topics it's about 50. in fact many of our subscribers tell us that they actually look forward

to reading our email on Tuesday like they know when it's coming and they look forward to it and that's only possible if you stand really consistently last up if you're serious about growing a newsletter you need a dedicated page on your website for people to sign up to your newsletter if you rely 100 on pop-ups it's gonna be hard to build your list yes pop-ups can bring in some subscribers but nothing beats a dedicated newsletter page

so in the case of exploring topics in our main navigation we actually have a link to our newsletter page and most people that sign up for a newsletter sign up through that page as you can see this page is really simple so it's not about the page itself it's more about funneling traffic to that page as opposed to having people have to hunt around sign up for a newsletter or happen to see some sort of pop-up

you have a dedicated section of your site just to get email subscribers so to quickly recap the most important takeaways that you can use to grow your newsletter first of all you definitely want a branded newsletter of some kind make sure your newsletter is a brand that is separate from your actual brand unless of course you're building a newsletter focused business which if that's the case you're probably not watching this video to learn newsletter tips for

me hopefully you're learning from morning Brew or those guys that just do that the other thing to remember is your welcome message try a CD welcome message your welcome message is really important for getting people who just signed up your newsletter off on the right foot you want to send a really strong first impression that tells people look you signed up for an awesome newsletter you're gonna get all this stuff and also nudges them to do

do some things that can help with your deliverability and also make sure that your newsletter is a template that can provide bite size value that combination is really powerful when someone knows that I can open this skim it and get some value from it they're more likely to open it in the future because they know it's not a huge time suck and also you definitely want a dedicated newsletter page on your website and ideally you'd link

from that from your site's navigation so I know that real estate in your site navigation is really you know important and that's actually why I put the newsletter link there because for us building our email list and growing newsletter is really important so it's worthwhile so now I'd like to hear from you have you built a newsletter are you building a newsletter now what's working for you or maybe you have some questions about something you saw

in this video either way let me know in the comment section below thank you