← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
30 Top Creators Sharing Their Best Newsletter Growth Tactics, for Free
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Before we get into today's episode, I wanted to let you know that on Monday, April 20th, we are launching round two of 30 Days of Growth. This is a 30 day daily newsletter where you're going to get one newsletter growth tactic from a different creator. These are real strategies they've used to grow and optimize their email list and they're sharing the results as well. You can go sign up before we launch at 30 Days of Growth Co and grab your spot. It's completely free, there's no upsell or anything. I wanted to make sure you didn't miss it. So head over to 30daysofgrowth co and sign up. Hello and welcome back to the Growth in Reverse podcast. I'm Chanel Basilio and today I'm doing something a little different. It's part announcement, part strategy. The short version of this is that 30 days of growth is back for round two. Last year I ran 30 cross promotions in 30 days with 30 different creators. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. And I packaged the whole thing up as a pop up newsletter where every day you got one tactical, actionable strategy to grow or optimize your email list. And it kind of blew up in a really good way. So we're doing it again. But before I tell you about this year's, I want to break down why Cross promotions are one of the most underrated strategies out there and some real numbers from what happened last year. Because there, I think there are lessons here. Whether you have 500 subscribers, 50,000 or more, there's something here for you. So a cross promotion is basically, I share your newsletter with my audience, you share mine with yours. It's a swap kind of. And on the surface it sounds pretty simple, almost too simple maybe. But here's where I think they're so powerful. When someone recommends your newsletter to their audience, it comes with some built in trust, right? It's not necessarily a sponsorship placement or an ad. It's not a random pop up. This creator has an audience and those people already know that creator. So by them sharing your work, it's almost like a warm intro. And those subscribers tend to stick around way longer than people who come in through paid ads or giveaways or those kinds of things. I think the other thing people get wrong about Cross promotions is that they think you need to find someone with the exact same audience size. And that's just not true. Last year I intentionally worked with creators of all different sizes, some with huge lists, some with smaller ones. And a lot of the Smaller to mid sized creators drove more subscribers than the bigger ones. So engagement matters more than size. The challenge with Cross Promotions, though, is that if you're sending a weekly newsletter, you really only get four or five opportunities a month to actually send these out, right? You can't add multiples of these to one edition of the newsletter. I mean, you could technically, but it's not going to be very effective. The more you do, your readers are going to tune them out if all of your issues are just recommendations for other newsletters. So you want to be a little bit cautious here and make sure you're not doing it too often. But having only four or five opportunities a month is kind of. It's not a ton of space, right? And this is actually how 30 days of growth was born in the Growth and Reverse Pro community. We were doing a challenge around Cross Promotions, trying to do them better, get more results, learn what actually helps move the needle. And I realized that with my weekly send schedule, I could really only get those four or five data points over the whole challenge. And I didn't feel like it was enough to really help other people do these well. So I wanted to get more data and I was thinking, like, how do I do that? And I came up with this crazy idea to, you know, what if I did 30 cross promotions in 30 days? It'll be like a pop up newsletter and each one is a cross promotion with a different creator. So each day a different creator will share one growth tactic that actually worked for them, which is valuable content for my audience. And I would feature their newsletter. In return, they would share 30 days of growth with their audience so that I could grow this thing as well. And it became kind of like this little flywheel. Now at the time I thought this would be simple, right? How hard is it to work with 30 different people to get this out in 30 days? I put the whole thing together in like two and a half weeks. And it was not simple. It was probably one of the hardest things I've done. So many logistics, so many emails, following up, making sure I have everything. But it was also one of the most rewarding. I want to share some numbers with you because I think it paints a picture that's pretty interesting. So the first edition of 30 Days of Growth went out to 1440 people. By the end of the 30 days, over 3700 people had signed up in all. And about 2000 of those were completely new subscribers to me. People who had never heard of Growth in Reverse before in just 30 days, which is kind of wild. Honestly, you might be wondering, okay, how did you get 3,700 people and only 2,000 were new? And that's because I was sharing this out to my wider growth and reverse audience. But I didn't send the daily newsletter to everyone. And I think I'm going to change that this year because I think it's valuable enough people will get useful information out of it and they can always, you know, hit the pause button and I will stop sending them now. One of the craziest things that I did was I set up this tool called Viral Loops. And it's a software tool. I have a lifetime subscription to it that I bought years and years ago, which is why I'm choosing this tool. If you refer one person to 30 Days of Growth, you got access to a private podcast feed. So I was recording an audio version of each day's growth tactic and then shipping that out via a private podcast feed. So 102 people ended up sharing 30 days of growth with at least one person. So they had access to that podcast feed. The referrals themselves brought in over 356 subscribers. So that's a good chunk of new subscribers. Just coming from word of mouth, I think it was around 9% that ended up coming that way. And then there's one crazy example that I kind of forgot about until I was looking back at these numbers. One person who referred another person, so like person A referred person B, person B went on to share it with 15 people. And then one of those 15 people went on and referred 21 more people on their own. So that single original share turned into like 36 new subscribers, which is just super cool to see. So it's fun stuff like that where you're like, you don't expect people to share, but you set it up in a way that makes it kind of exciting for them to do so. And it kind of just works. But it's not just the number of subscribers I got. The engagement was really strong. So open rate on day one was 77%, which I haven't seen that open rate in a long time. And even on the final day it was still at 62%. For a daily pop up newsletter for 30 days, I think that's pretty solid numbers. And people were sticking around. I think only 170 people unsubscribed, which is kind of a low number when you think of like almost 4000 total. I also asked people in the welcome email to reply with their biggest challenge with newsletter growth. And I got over 200 replies in that first week alone. And these weren't like one word answers either. They were like paragraphs of people telling me exactly what they were struggling with. And I think that's one of the most valuable things that came out of this whole thing. Okay, so what did I learn and what am I doing differently this time around? Well, first up, give yourself more time. I put this together in two and a half weeks, the first go around, and only had about the first week of content ready when I launched. I was writing some of these the morning they went out after day, like 15 or 16. I totally was writing them every morning. I would not recommend it this year. I'm trying to give myself more prep time. Second, not every creator's schedule is going to align with yours. So out of the 29 creators I worked with, about seven of them couldn't share during the timeframe we planned. And I think that's something you just have to kind of be okay with and account for. Honestly, I didn't mind at all because they were still giving me useful content for me to send out to my readers, which is the point anyway. So I think you just have to kind of understand that it's not always going to work out the way you want it to if you're running a content series or event like this. Third, the referral incentive matters. But keep it simple. The private podcast feed was, I think, the biggest single driver of referrals. It was low barrier. You just had to share it with one person and the reward was immediate. People loved having an audio version they could listen to on the go, and I got a lot of good feedback on that. Sadly, I didn't give myself enough time like I mentioned. And so I only put out like 19 of those episodes, which I still feel bad about to this day, but I'm working on finishing those up finally. And lastly, this kind of project builds relationships in a way that nothing really else does. I got to collaborate with 29 different creators. Those relationships have continued to pay off throughout the year, and some of them have come into the Growth and Reverse Pro community to do deeper workshops. And it just created this, like, level of excitement around the work I'm doing that I can't really explain or put into words, but it was really, really impactful. So I do recommend it. Okay, so what's new this year? Well, 30 days of growth is back. I'm launching it again. After having that much good success with the first one, I just couldn't not do it. It's back on April 20, which is a Monday. And it's the same concept, right? 30 growth and optimization strategies from 30 creators in 30 days. Each one is a short tactical tip that you can implement pretty quickly. Some of them are part of a grander strategy, but the idea is that most of them can be implemented pretty fast. You'll get one email every day, and on Sundays I will just send out a recap of the past six or seven editions so that you can kind of see that as well. And if daily becomes overwhelming, you can always opt in for us, the weekly roundup on Sundays. We've got some incredible creators lined up so far. Dave Gerhardt from Exit 5, Caitlin Burgoyne from why We Buy, Justin Welsh, Sam Vanderwielen, Daniel Bustamante. Tons of amazing email marketers and creators who have built incredible businesses. This year the prizes are a little different. If you share 30 days of growth, you can get a shout out in the Growth in Reverse newsletter, which reaches tens of thousands of readers, or even win a newsletter audit speed round that I'm calling it. I will run through your newsletter on a loom video for about five minutes, give you growth ideas, optimization tips. I'm seeing all kinds of stuff, so that's pretty cool. You could also win a 30 minute coaching call with me where we'll just help you get unstuck with whatever you're stuck on right now at different milestones is where you'll win these different prizes. So the first one, just one referral, gets you the private podcast feed. At 10 you get listed in the Growth in Reverse newsletter and so on and so forth and I will explain those in the welcome email. But you'll just have to go to 30 days of growth Co to sign up. And again, even if the daily format isn't your thing, I'd encourage you to sign up anyway. You can switch it to the weekly Digest or just listen to the podcast episodes. The content is going to be really, really good. And I can say that without feeling weird about it, because it's not my content. It's other people's tried and proven tactics that they've used to grow and optimize their email list. So I think you should sign up 30 days of growth co. If you have any questions, you can always reach me at chanel growth in reverse.com or just reply to any email I send you. All right, that's it. I'm super excited about this. Last year was a wild ride and this year is going to be even better. Go sign up 30 Days of Growth Co and I'll see you on April 20th. Let's go. You're still listening to this podcast, which means you kind of like newsletter growth. That's why I think you should sign up for 30 days of growth. Here's how it works. Starting April 20, every day for 30 days, you're going to get one short newsletter from me with a tip on how to grow or optimize your email list. These come from creators who have built successful audiences. And the cool thing is, since you're obviously a podcast listener, if you share it with one person, you will get the private podcast for free. I will add you to the feed and you can listen to all of these as a podcast versus reading them on a daily basis. On top of that, if you share it with more than one person, you're going to win some really cool prizes. Like maybe getting Shout out in the Growth in Reverse News newsletter. We can jump on a coaching call together or even do a mini newsletter audit for you. I ran this last year and the feedback was wild and people really, really appreciated it, so I wanted to do it again even though it's a ton of work. So go to 30 Days of Growth Co and sign up. Share it with one friend and you'll get the private podcast feed for free and I'll see you on April 20th.