I've learned a lot about newsletter marketing recently

The pre-launch research took 50 hours. I spent another 100 hours on branding, design, and setup on the new newsletter platform. and it takes me ca 10 hours every week to write & send another newsletter.

Has it been worth my time? – Yes.

Social media platforms' reach keeps falling, and SEO is getting ever more competitive... The most reliable way to build an audience is with an email newsletter.

As a marketer, you may have managed a branded newsletter. Or set up entire automated email flows.

I bet you have also wondered: How to get more people to subscribe and open my newsletter?

Keep reading for the strange truths of the email marketing world – and improve your results.

P.S. While I write about growing a marketing newsletter, you can adapt most of the strategies to any kind of brand and product.

🍪🍪🍪 Scroll down for my TOP 5 newsletter growth channels & hacks.

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#1 The 20% open rate rule is out

In 2024, a good open rate isn't 20%, it's 40% and higher. (My last week's newsletter open rate was 68%.)

You've got two options:

• You can either send marketing emails to a broad cold audience that doesn't care about your brand...
• ... or you can clean up your email marketing list + set up custom automated flows.

And this leads us to the next point...

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#2 Set your inactive users free

When launching this newsletter on a new platform, I could have imported 12,000+ mostly inactive contacts from my past email marketing tool. Instead, I chose to build my subscriber list from 0. Yes, literally zero.

I sent the old list of 12k people an email to notify them about my new newsletter, and some of them re-subscribed. But I didn't want to bring over inactive followers.

... So I set them free.

Why?

Because sending a newsletter or marketing email to a lot of people who don't care lowers your open rates.

And low engagement rates make your emails to interested subscribers end up in the Spam folder, too.

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#3 It's not a Mailchimp world anymore

If you'd asked me three years ago "What is the best marketing email tool?" I'd replied: "Mailchimp."

However, the marketing email landscape has developed a lot since then. Now, you should pick your email toolset based on advanced requirements.

If you're looking for a complex, multi-channel (emails, SMS, etc.) email automation tool, you might go with Klaviyo or the like.

When launching my weekly newsletter, I was looking for a tool that:

• Helps to manage and segment my audience
• Allows me to easily create subscriber landing pages and popups
• Sends well-designed simple emails with high deliverability rates
• Has an audience referral program or an integration for this
• Has features to monetise the newsletter and courses in a later stage

I compared Beehiiv, Substack, and ConvertKit. This newsletter and all its landing pages are running on ConvertKit.

It took quite a lot of time to set everything up: landing pages, welcome email sequences, lead magnets, and blog popups. But now that it's up and running, it's all working smoothly and without any issues.

When choosing an email marketing tool, I recommend looking for holistic products that have everything you need: landing pages, popups, automated flows, audience segmentation, a great email builder, etc.

ConvertKit costs more upfront but it will save me a lot of $$$ in the long run: I could give up my old popup tool, and I got lots of features I didn't have on MailChimp. And I can trust that my newsletters end up in my audience's Inbox.

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My TOP 5 Channels for growing email marketing audience in 2024

There are tons of listicles on "X ideas to get newsletter subscribers." Like this one with 35 ideas by ConvertKit.

But not all growth opportunities are created equal.

Here are the TOP 5 channels that have helped me most to grow this marketing newsletter's

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🍯 #1 Personal social media profiles

Post about launching a newsletter and people following you will subscribe.

P.S. You should create a newsletter landing page first, so that you have something to share in the announcement.

I only posted about my marketing newsletter on LinkedIn, not Instagram – I don't want to bother my friends and family with work stuff.

If you don't have many followers on LinkedIn, well... It's time to start building it up. It is still possible to grow fast on LinkedIn in 2024.

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🍯 #2 Lead magnets

I built my past marketing newsletter's audience 90% on gated content: an e-book with Meta ad examples. Here's another example by Ben Meer.

When creating the lead magnet, think about how you're going to promote it. I promote my e-book on LinkedIn, as well as to all my blog visitors in a popup.

If you don't have such audiences ready at hand, you can consider paid ads on Meta or LinkedIn (the latter is expensive, I recommend Meta).

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🍯 #3 Pre-newsletter teasers

Newsletters and marketing emails aren't a one-off thing that you write and send to your subscriber list.

Look at each newsletter like a small marketing campaign with a full lifecycle of pre-launch, launch, and post-launch activities.

For example, before sending my last newsletter on 2024 marketing trends, I shared a teaser on LinkedIn.

I even created a special landing page for people to join the waitlist. (Thx ConvertKit for making it so easy – it took me 15 minutes.)

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🍯 #4 Post-newsletter sharing

As I said, your newsletter isn't dead after you publish it. You just spent hours compiling it – you should get that content in front of more people.

I sent the 2024 trends newsletter to my followers on a Friday. And the next Monday, I posted a LinkedIn carousel post on the same subject.

It got looots of traction.

It is a carousel post listing all the 5 key trends. On the last slide of the post, I promoted a CTA to subscribe to my newsletter for more pro-level marketing advice. And I got 20+ new subscribers out of this one post.

Here's another truth: All your marketing newsletters should be so good that they can be shared on social media and that people actually want to engage with the content.

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🍯 #5 Paid referrals

This is a popular new channel that I'm personally not yet using. I believe in organic growth (or simply don't want to pay for subscribers.)

But some newsletters are adding hundreds of new subscribers with tools like Sparkloop. I just discovered that even Tim Ferriss is trying this out!

Here's how subscriber referrals work:

• You create a Sparkloop account.
• You set the pricehow much you're willing to pay for a new subscriber.
• Other newsletters and creators start referring new users to you.

I think I might try this at some point. Especially because you can set conditions for when you consider someone a subscriber to protect against fraud. E.g. you only pay when someone subscribes and remains subscribed for X days.

Et voilà, these were my newly learned newsletter growth hacks.

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In case you missed it

Last week, I published my 2024 marketing trend predictions.

✅ ✅ ⮕ Read the full-length article in my blog ⬅ ✅ ✅​
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2024 Update: I'm open to 1-2 new projects

I’ll be wrapping up a couple of projects soon, and am open to 1-2 new projects from February 2024.

We can collaborate in three different ways:

1. Hire me as a visiting CMO / hands-on marketing consultant for the next 3-6 months. I’ll help you create a marketing strategy as well as implement it for you.
2. Hire me to conduct a 20h marketing audit for your company. Read more about my auditing service and philosophy here.
3. Hire me to create a marketing workshop/training for your team.

If you’d like to collaborate, reach out at marketing@karolakarlson.com or via LinkedIn. We’ll book a 30-minute intro call and take it from there.

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Coming up next week: How I'd spend the first €10k as a B2C brand

In next Friday's newsletter, I'll share a hypothetical use case for marketing a new B2C brand. I'll let you know which marketing channels I'd go for and how I'd use a €10,000 budget to max out on new customers.

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Merci! 🐿️

This is the 5th Marketing Things newsletter and I appreciate all of you who have subscribed. Support this newsletter by forwarding it to a fellow marketer who might like it.

Thanks for reading!
Karola