7 Underrated Growth Strategies
and how to apply them
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Today’s issue was originally published in Email Advice in Your Inbox by Des Brown.
Des Brown is and email expert with 12 years of experience and the founder of Email Expert Africa, a community of email enthusiasts. I always find great pieces of advice in his newsletter and love his thoughtful posts on his LinkedIn. You should definitely check out both.
I’m thrilled to collaborate with him, not only because he’s good at what he does but also because of his kindness, which truly sets him apart.
Ok, back to the issue, let’s dive in!
7 Underrated Growth Strategies
I interviewed over 60 successful newsletter creators within Newsletter Circle to uncover the secret recipe for healthy newsletter growth.
They all use well-known strategies, such as collaborating with other creators, repurposing newsletter content on social media and creating lead magnets. However, I also discovered that they reached great results by experimenting with unconventional strategies.
Steal from the best: here are 7 proven underrated growth strategies you can apply to grow your newsletter business.
1. Write guest posts for other newsletters - (Free)
A great way to reach untapped territories is to write guest posts for other newsletters.
This collaboration strategy works well with creators:
whose audience is a great fit for your newsletter content
who is familiar with your work so that they can trust you to give a full issue
I wrote my first guest post on newsletter growth for Newsletter Operator and a second one for Newsletter Business. We have been following each other’s work for a while and writing for the same audience, which is newsletter creators.
Those two guest articles brought approximately 150 subscribers in total. Considering I had around 1,000 subscribers back then, this was a crucial subscriber influx. I still observe high engagement and a low unsubscribe rate among this group.
Besides, I published those two articles in my newsletter after they were published as guest posts. So, they serve as additional content.
What’s in it for the creators I write a piece for?
I gave them a break for one week when they were busy with other work
I provided a fresh take for their audience. Surprising your readers is sometimes good.
I included a shoutout to their newsletters while publishing those pieces in my newsletter, so I sent some new subscribers.
2. Make paid collaboration with writers in your niche - (Paid)
Hanna Raskin is a successful food journalist and the mastermind behind the multiple-award-winning publication “The Food Section”, aiming to serve eaters across the American South by providing them with the news they need to enhance their food and drink experiences.
She launched The Food Section in Sep’21 and grew it to thousands of subscribers with over 70% open rate and hundreds of paid subscribers.
Unique and high-value content delivered through good journalism is the biggest reason behind her success.
But, there is another important contributor to the growth.
She collaborates with talented freelance writers regularly:
Once a month, she publishes a freelance contribution.
She pays $1/word to the journalists who reported them, in line with the fair compensation principle of The Food Section.
This way, she opened space for talented writers with a broad spectrum of voices.
In return,
Those writers created some most-read pieces
The Food Section reached untapped territories through those writers’ audiences and communities, leading to an increase in awareness and subscription growth.
“Supporting fellow food writers yielded better results than buying ads.”
Hanna Raskin
Source: LinkedIn post
» Read the full interview with Hanna Raskin here.
3. Collaborate with influencers - (Free/Paid)
If you approach your newsletter as a product/brand, there is no reason not to work with social media influencers.
Choose a social media platform/platforms where your audience hangs out the most
Decide on the budget you can allocate
Make a list of influencers & accounts targeting a similar audience to you
If you’re short on budget
Focus on growing/promising accounts and become their initial partners.
Find accounts with similar audience with you and propose a mutual collaboration
If you have some budget, make paid collaborations.
The Water Coolest is a daily investing and markets newsletter that was started, sold, and reacquired by Tyler Morin.
What started as a blog turned into a successful newsletter business with Tyler’s smart growth strategies. It takes a lot of experimenting with a diverse set of growth strategies, including Facebook and IG ads, giveaways with other brands, cutting co-reg, a college ambassador program, a referral program, etc.
However, they were specifically successful in collaborating with social media influencers.
“After the initial friends and family subscribers, we had some early success with some finance influencers on Twitter and Instagram.
We did some work with @GSElevator, which was a hugely popular account on Twitter at the time.
And then, we worked with some of the Instagram Finance Meme accounts before they got massive, like Liquidity and High Yield Harry.
I think we were some of the first advertisers on some of the accounts. We were getting hundreds of high-quality subscribers from them per day at one point.”
» Read the full interview with Tyler Morin here.
4. AMA post on Indie Hackers - (Free)
Social media is one of the most preferred channels to support newsletter growth.
Some creators think outside the box and find a way to reach their target audience on different platforms, such as Reddit, Hacker News and Indie Hackers.
During the pandemic, Ryan Gilbert started Workspaces.xyz, a twice-weekly newsletter where he features the workspaces of entrepreneurs, designers, and developers around the world.
After two years and 167 issues, this side project reached over 6,500 subscribers, >50% open rate and $2,000 monthly sponsorship revenue.
Surprisingly, during the first 117 issues, Ryan didn’t accept any sponsors intentionally to focus on growth. But, once he started, he reached a meaningful revenue in a short time.
He shared his unique newsletter success with the Indie Hackers community and made a post explaining his journey in the Newsletter Crew community. Moreover, he made a smart move to publish it as an “Ask Me Anything” post which received over 100 comments.
» Read the full interview with Ryan Gilbert here.
5. Set up cold email campaigns - (Paid)
When it comes to newsletter growth, targeted cold outreach is still an underrated opportunity.
Here is how you can do it:
Buy a separate domain and set up an e-mail linked to it.
Make sure that you apply a proper warm-up to your new e-mail address.
You can use tools like Instantly.ai to warm up on autopilot. It generally takes two weeks to prepare a new address for sending emails.
Scrape a list of confirmed e-mails of your target audience. You can get a list from Crunchbase, buy directories or use Apollo to find relevant people on LinkedIn based on job title, company, location etc. and find their emails.
Write a killer copy that doesn’t sound spammy and set up the cold outreach campaign.
Track the results. Iterate with the copy.
Nic Conley from The Followup is running a B2B Sales newsletter that reaches over 12K subscribers. He’s building it as a one-person team, and one of the hats he wears proudly is his salesperson hat. He's great at doing outreaches.
“Like most people say, my first 100 or so subscribers were directly from hand-to-hand combat.
I texted my family, friends, and old co-workers and asked if I could add them to the newsletter.
From there, I actually used cold email (in true B2B sales fashion). I learned this from my friend Alex Breen, who cold-emailed a ton of real estate investors to grow one of his email lists to 1000’s of subscribers.
I’d go on Apollo.io, scrape a bunch of emails for Business Development Reps, and basically ask them to subscribe (or if I could subscribe to them).
This probably got me to 500+, but I had also experimented with FB ads for another newsletter, so I started using them pretty quickly.”
» Read the full interview with Nic Conley here.
6. Send strategic DMs - (Free)
We tend to overcomplicate newsletter growth. But most of the time, the biggest opportunity lies right in front of us. Here is a great example of how Des Brown from Email Expert Africa uses strategic DMs to convert his social following.
If he sees someone interested in what he shares, he sends a quick DM or connection request with a short intro to say hi, let them know he'd love to share his knowledge directly to their inbox, and drops a link to sign up.
He says:
"This allows me to target my audience in a far more controlled manner and select who I want to speak to in the newsletter."
This approach also helps him build and nurture an authentic and solid connection with his audience.
If you have a bigger audience, there are also tools to auto-DM new followers, such as PhantomBuster for LinkedIn or Tweethunter for X.
Long story short:
Think simple and focus on low-hanging fruits first
Prioritize subscriber quality over quantity
Don't hesitate to do things that don't scale, as Paul Graham suggests
» Read the full interview with Des Brown here.
7. Sponsor other newsletters - (Paid)
During The Newsletter Conference that took place in May’24 in New York, Erika Burghardt from 1440 reminded us a great way of paid growth.
They observed 2-2.5x more engagement among subscribers who come from other newsletters compared to those acquired via Meta ads.
While it’s an important channel for reaching a specific target audience, newsletter ads should be just part of the paid growth mix since they are more difficult to scale than other paid ads.
» Read the full interview with Tim Huelskamp here.
Bonus: Be Honest with yourself
Regardless of which growth strategies you apply, don’t compromise the health of your email list.
Don’t grow just for the sake of growing.
Don’t take engagement for granted.
Instead:
Build a performance tracking system.
Segment your subscribers based on acquisition resources and track the engagement rates. This will show you which strategies bring sustainable growth.
Do regular win-back campaigns and list cleanings.
Emanuel Cinca built Stacked Marketer to over 100,000 subscribers with over $700K in revenue in 2023. His biggest message to newsletter creators is about the importance of being honest with growth performance:
“Clean your list! Properly.
Don’t fool yourself with Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens and bot clicks.
Make sure that with every send, you update your disengaged segments, try to re-engage them, and ultimately purge them from your sends.
The amount of misleading information out there about “active subscribers” and “list cleaning” is insane.
So many people say they “clean their list,” but when asked, you realize they’re doing this.
In the end, they are building on a faulty foundation and are lying to themselves.
If your newsletter business is something you want to do in the long term, don’t lie to yourself.
And if you’re looking to sell in a couple of years, any educated buyer knows what you’re doing and will lower the valuation.
Focus on the truth when it comes to your readership, build a healthy business, and you’ll have all the options and leverage for the future.”
» Read the full interview with Emanuel Cinca here.
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That’s all for today. Thanks for reading.
See you next week.
Ciler
📌 P.S. I’ve switched from Substack over to Beehiiv (here). But don’t worry; you don’t need to do anything; I will manually add you to my Beehiiv list if you subscribe here. This is just for you to know :)
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