The Top 10 Ways to Get Your 1st 10,000 Subscribers Including One Thing People Get Wrong
Email, love it or hate it refuses to die and that’s a good thing. If you are you still trying to beat the algorithm on LinkedIn and Facebook with no results to show for it, it is time to move on. You need to own your marketing assets and destiny.
If you are reading this you are already moving in the right direction. You get that email is important but how to get more subscribers remains elusive. If you have done any research on the topic of how to get more subscribers you will notice that a lot of the research is rather similar: add subscribe boxes throughout your website, have the right call to action, add sign up forms on Facebook, the list goes on and on. While you should do those things, those actions are like putting the cart before the horse. They are not going to get you to the next 10,000 or even your first 1,000 subscribers.
To build a powerful email list that grows and endures over time you have to provide something of value to the person who’s email address you are trying to collect. Receiving an email is an exchange. It’s an exchange of value. You value the person’s email very highly and so do they. But they are wondering, what’s in it for me? What value are you going to offer me? Does the person actually want what you are serving up? That’s what most people get wrong when they try to build their list. They get caught up with easy activities like adding a link to an email signup in their email signature instead of spending serious time thinking about how they are going to add value in someone’s life. If you don’t have the right value equation you won’t get very far.
1. Value and what it looks like
Value looks different to everyone. What I value is different from what you value. You have to understand what your customers value. If you haven’t figured this out yet then stop reading this and work on your business’ reason for being. The more value your product generates the more likely people are to hand over their personal information.
For example, I subscribe to the New York Times. The New York Times makes it easy for you to subscribe to their newsletter. They have subscribe buttons on the individual pages of articles but the fact that it is easy to provide my email address is not the reason why I subscribe to them. I subscribed to them after reading their articles for many, many months and loving the content. Not only did I subscribe I became a paid subscriber because I couldn’t handle the freebie offer of only having access to a few articles here and there. The lesson is that if you really want subscribers then start by creating something they really need.
Many direct to consumer brands do a very good job of getting customers to provide their email addresses. They have to be good at this because they are online businesses without sales associates in stores to ask you to sign up. One of the clever and innocuous ways many of these brands collect meaningful customer data is through online quizzes customers take to use the company’s services. For example, customers shopping at ThirdLove, an online bra and underwear retailer, start the company’s “try before you buy” shopping process by taking a Fit Finder quiz. Customers have to answer questions such as what their current bra size is and if they have any fit issues (i.e. the cups gape a lot). In exchange for sharing intimate information, customers receive a bra recommendation in as little as 60 seconds. To receive that data customers submit their email address and a recommendation is emailed to them. 12 million women have used ThirdLove’s Fit Finder quiz. That means, you guessed it, ThirdLove has 12 million email addresses.
You may not have a business where you can set up a fit finder quiz but the idea is to think of ways outside of the norm for how you can get people to provide their personal data by focusing on value.
Once you have the value equation down, here are more tactics you can use to get email addresses.
2. Get your hands dirty and make it personal
Your best asset is you. It is not your website and it is not your content. It’s who you are what and you stand for and how you can help others. The more people get to know you the more likely they are to hand over their information. One of the best ways to do this is to reach out to people directly and ask for what you want.
Take the example of entrepreneur Marie Forleo. On a podcast with Business Insider’s This is Success she discusses how she grew her email list to thousands of people. Forleo says: “I used to carry a yellow legal pad with me to the bar. So I would go on my bartending shifts and inevitably, most people when they sit at a bar in a restaurant would be like, ‘So what else do you do?’ They would always assume that I was an actress. I was like nope. I have a coaching business. And they’re like, ‘what does that mean? And so I’d tell them what it meant and I said, ‘well, I also have this weekly newsletter and I write it every week and it’s just tips to help you have a better life. Do you want to join?’”
“And of course, at that time, no one had really heard of email newsletters. So I would collect those names and email addresses” “I remember doing Toastmasters. I would go to networking events. When I started kind of getting more active in the health and fitness world, every time I would teach a hip-hop class, every time I would teach a fitness class, I would have this yellow legal pad. And I would tell people at the end of every class about what I did. So I was doing everything I possibly could. It was like hand-to-hand combat to build those names. I didn’t have money for advertising. I wouldn’t have even known how to do it. I was a one-woman show. So it was completely built through me with that yellow legal pad and every single place I went.”
From Marie’s story you can see that a personal touch can go a long way. Don’t underestimate the power of building your email list one person at a time.
If you aren’t a bartender or don’t like teaching hip hop classes here are a few things to try:
Attend conferences, meet people and see if you can get sign ups
Volunteer at organizations in your community where you might meet interested parties
Go to your local university or college and ask the professors if they can share details of your email list offer to their class
If you are retailer ask customers at the cash register. Many retailers don’t even provide an offer they just ask for your email address
According to best-selling author Jonah Berger, "word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20% to 50% of all purchasing decisions." Berger also writes that only 7% of word of mouth happens online. If you want to increase your subscribers ask people IRL (in real life).
When thinking about who to contact first Rand Fishkin the Co-Founder of SEO company Moz, provides a useful framework for deciding who to reach out to and in what order:
While in person outreach is effective, if you haven’t tried reaching out to people that follow and you like your content on social media then try direct messaging them. I have done this and have been pleased by the number of people that have provided their email address to me in exchange for me providing them with my retail trends newsletter.
3. Build your list by leveraging someone else’s. Business partnerships have existed forever. When it comes to building your list partnerships with more well-known brands can be a great way to help you go from unknown to known. There are many different ways to partner with someone else. Podcast hosts are always looking for people to interview. Is there a podcast that you think would be a good fit for prospective customers? Or try to get a gig writing articles for a media outlet with an audience similar to the one that you are already serving.
Best-selling author Ryan Holiday says he received more sales for his book The Daily Stoic when author and podcaster Tim Ferriss made an Instagram post about it, than after he received a New York Times profile of his book.
The Morning Brew, a business and finance newsletter with a million subscribers said that between April 2018 and November 2018 its newsletter subscribers grew from 180,000 to 700,000. They did it by: “leveraging cross-promotional partnerships with other newsletters they saw having similar audiences, such as a newsletter published by CB Insights and Next Draft, a newsletter written by angel investor Dave Pell.”
4. Give something away
Is there something you can give away to people in exchange for receiving an email address? Popular lead magnets include:
Books
White papers or reports
eBooks
Blog posts
A course
Videos
Templates
A how to guide
An eBook, white paper or even a course does not have to be long it has to be relevant. Provide an offer that helps solve a genuine problem. If you are struggling with this, one way to find out what problems people are trying to solve is to do keyword research.
You can try using Google’s Keyword planner or an inexpensive tool like KwFinder which is what I use. Using these tools you can get a sense of what people are searching for online and thus what types of problems they are trying to solve. You can also use a keyword research tool to see how much competition there is for a keyword. For example, if you are a consultant you might want to have a free offer to download a guide about how to sell on Amazon. But once you do keyword research you will see that while that is a highly searched topic the level of competition is high. Therefore, you may want to develop a lead magnet in an area that is less competitive.
5. Hold a contest
Try holding a contest where participants provide their email address in exchange for the chance of receiving a gift card, a book, a sample of your product or any item that will resonate with the type of person you are targeting.
Percentage discounts off the product you are selling is another way companies entice people to subscribe. You could offer something like “sign up for our mailing list for a chance to win a $100 American Express gift card ” or “enter to get a chance to receive 15% off your first purchase.”
6. Advertise
If you have the budget try social media advertising. You could, for example, offer a white paper, eBook or blog post for download in exchange for an email address. You can reach a fair number of people through Facebook advertising at a decent cost. But what you are offering has to be compelling to have a decent conversion rate.
How often do you click on online ads? What moves you to click? What was the last ad that compelled you enough to provide your email address? Answering these types of questions can help you to have a more critical eye on the offer you are crafting. You should also continually test different offers and ad copy to see what works best.
7. Make collecting email addresses an ongoing activity
Your email list will not build itself. It is important to build time into your schedule on a weekly basis to actively gather new emails. You could spend that time creating or refining your lead magnet or hosting an event or working on getting media attention. How much time are you willing to allocate to this task, each week, starting now?
8. Grab the low hanging fruit
Once you have the more substantive pieces complete like identifying a compelling value proposition you can do the following:
Add a sign up form on Facebook
Include a sign up url in your email signature
Create an engaging welcome email that people receive after they sign up
Put signup boxes on your homepage including a box that popups when a person lands on a page on your website
Create a specific url that links to your email campaign or subscriber database and promote signing up using that url on social media
Add subscribe to boxes like the one below within your blog posts
Subscribe to our newsletter and get the latest retail insights & trends delivered straight to your inbox
Make it easy to sign up. The less information you ask for (i.e. just the email address) the more likely people will part with it
9. Never stop testing until you get it right
What has worked really well to build someone else’s list is not going to be the same thing that works well for you. The only way to determine your answer is by continually testing different things, evaluating the results and refining your strategy over time.
10. Be patient
Most email lists worth drooling over are not built over night. This is difficult to see as many of the stories talk about how a company like the Morning Brew added over half a million subscribers in a little over six months. Very little media coverage is given to the stories where someone added less than a hundred subscribers in one year. Who wants to hear about that story? I do and maybe you should too because often the person who starts out slow wins the race.
Take YouTuber Marques Brownlee. He is known as the best tech reviewer in the world and has close to 10 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. But he started posting videos, not one but 11 years ago! Guess how many subscribers he had after his first 100 posts? 74! From 74 to 10 million. What an amazing success story that happened overnight…I mean over a decade. If you want to see for yourself where he was when he got started watch this video.
Be in it for the long term. Over time if you keep chipping away at it and improving the quality of your work whether it be your product or your email offer in time you will see results.
I wish you the best of luck in your pursuit of more subscribers! I am confident that you can do it I hope you are too.