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How we grew a newsletter to 2,500 subs in 10 weeks

How we grew a newsletter to 2,500 subs in 10 weeks

A breakdown of everything we learned from sending a newsletter for all of Q1 and how you can apply it to your business.

Marketing Qualified
March 31, 2023

Happy Friday! Today we call it a wrap on Q1. We hope you hit your numbers and got the year off to a great start!

Since it's almost the beginning of a new quarter, we have a different type of newsletter for you — A breakdown of our Q1 marketing experiment. This quarter we did a deep dive into email newsletters.

Does that make this newsletter inception?

We sent 10 newsletters in 10 weeks and grew to 2,500 subscribers. In this week's edition, we're breaking down

How we did it
What we learned
The benefits
How you can apply this to your business

Anyway, hope you enjoy…

✉️ How we grew a newsletter to 2,500 subscribers in 10 weeks.

Each quarter, we run an experiment. We pick a marketing idea or tactic and then spend 3 months doing a deep dive into it and sandboxing various things. At the end, we reflect on what we learned and find ways to apply it.

This quarter we focused on email newsletters.

You didn’t know it, but for the last few months, you’ve been seeing our experiment play out live in these weekly emails.

We’ve sent 10 newsletters in 10 weeks and have discovered a ton along the way. Today, we’re doing a full breakdown of everything we learned and sharing it with you.

But before we dive into that, we want to explain why we chose newsletters for your Q1 experiment…

Newsletters are underrated.

We’ve had a theory for a couple of years now: newsletters are a criminally underrated B2B marketing tactic.

Why did we think this? For a few reasons:

#1 — In the B2C space, newsletters are money-printing machines. Huge businesses are being built and sold solely off of sending our email newsletters. A few examples are Morning Brew sold to Business Insider for $75 million. The Hustle sold to HubSpot for a reported $27M. And earlier this year, The Milk Road sold for a reported 8-figure amount just 10 months after launching.

We know that B2B tends to lag 3-5 years behind B2C when it comes to marketing tactics (if you want to know why, we wrote a whole newsletter on it). So we predicted it was only a matter of time before B2B companies started to take notice and get curious about how to leverage newsletters for their businesses.

#2 — Email marketing is still king. For the past 10 years, email marketing yielded the highest ROI compared to other channels. It also has the highest conversion rate for promotional messages at 66%. And our favorite stat, for every $1 spent on email marketing, you can earn up to $44 back on average.

With numbers like that, we’d be dumb not to take email marketing seriously!

#3 — Thought leadership content is becoming more important than ever. With AI tools and other software tools, content creation has never been easier. There’s a lot of noise out in the market now. The only way to compete is to create truly valuable content that has a clear point of view and unique voice.

Given these three reasons, we decided now was the perfect time to focus some energy on newsletters as a marketing tactic. So we decided to start sending our own.

But before we could do that, we needed to define success…

Setting our goals.

Most experiments start with a research phase and this experiment was no different. We’ve been studying newsletters closely for the past 2 years, so we already had a lot of information to leverage.

Based on what we knew and what we we’ve seen work out in the market, we landed on 4 goals for our newsletter:

#1 - Create something people look forward to reading each week.

When our emails hit a subscriber's inbox, we wanted them to be excited to open it and read it. Our team subscribes to newsletters that make us feel this way, so we knew it was possible if our content was good enough.

#2 - Make it unique. Offer something readers can’t get anywhere else.

Most B2B companies don’t have a newsletter at all. But those that do, typically follow the same structure. They’re just a curation of the most recent blogs, webinars, or products that the company is promoting that month.

We wanted our newsletter to stand out by giving it a unique voice and point of view, must more importantly completely original content. This was how we’d break through the noise in our subscribers’ inboxes.

#3 - Make it interactive & sharable.

Word of mouth is very powerful. We wanted to create a newsletter so good that our subscribers would forward it to their coworkers and friends.

#4 - Provide value, don’t sell.

Our newsletter was never going to be a sales tool. It’s a thought leadership tool. We know a lot about marketing and we wanted a scaleable way to share that knowledge with our audience. We’re interested in teaching our readers something, not selling them something.

We knew if we achieved these 4 goals, then the newsletter would be a success. So with these goals in mind, we made a plan...

Making our plan.

We believe in taking an agile marketing approach. The first version of anything is usually bad. You have to make a lot of assumptions but have no data to back them up yet.

So, your goal should be to get a first draft live as soon as possible. That way you start getting real feedback and metrics that you can learn from and iterate on. We decided to take this approach with our newsletter.

We set one constraint for ourselves: no matter what, we had to send out a newsletter once a week.

Beyond that, we had total freedom.

We decided to focus on what was most important: the content. Achieving the 4 goals above could only happen if we wrote an awesome newsletter. Only the ideas and words mattered.

Given that, we ignored everything else. We didn’t spend time on a cool design. We didn’t bother coming up with a catchy name. We didn’t build out a newsletter landing page. We just wrote and sent out the first newsletter.

We got back the metrics from newsletter #1 and then used those to write newsletter #2. Then rinsed and repeated until here we are today sending newsletter #11.

Inside each newsletter issue, we tested multiple new things to see what worked. Some examples:

Level of informality in the tone of voice
Day of the week sent
Time of day sent
Text-to-image ratio
Asking for feedback at the bottom of the email
Including a summary at the top of the email
One long section vs. multiple smaller sections
Using emojis
Subject line style

The list goes on, but we’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say, we tested dozens of things.

Each week, we looked at what was working and what wasn’t. We kept things that worked and ditched things that didn’t.

What we learned by sending our newsletter.

We learned a lot by sending our first 10 newsletters. Too many things to list here. So we’ve boiled them down to the top 5 that will be the most actionable for you.

Even if you don’t send a newsletter now or never plan to, these will still be helpful for your other email marketing and campaigns at large.

1) Spend a lot of time on the subject line (more than you think you need).

You can write the most amazing newsletter in the world, but if no one opens it and reads it, then it doesn’t matter. This is why the open rate is the most important metric for your newsletter.

The way to increase your open rate is to write a stellar subject line. Don’t slave away writing your content then just slap on any old subject line. Dedicate the time to it that it deserves.

Each week, we draft about 15-20 subject line options before we pick one.

If you have an email tool that lets you A/B test subject lines use it! Oftentimes, the line you think will perform the best doesn’t. So letting the split test decide for you is a good idea.

Over time, you’ll hone in on the type of subject line that your subscribers respond to best. Then just keep writing subject lines in that style.

2) Ask for feedback, but make it low friction.

When we started asking for feedback at the bottom of our newsletters we were blown away by the response rate!

Getting direct feedback from readers has been extremely helpful as we’ve tested different newsletter styles and content. It gives us a direct and short feedback loop that has been key to our agile approach.

We recommend you ask for feedback too. But be sure it’s easy and quick for your readers.

Come up with your own style or feel free to steal ours.

We use links at the end of our emails. All someone needs to do is click one and boom we have their feedback.

We take it one step further by also redirecting them to a survey. If they want to leave more detailed feedback they can, but we don’t require it. This gives us two chances to collect feedback that we can use to make decisions.

3) Hone in on a tone of voice and style.

Your newsletter must be authentic to your business and your brand.

We chose to use an informal tone of voice with our writing because that is how we actually speak. We want our newsletter to feel like a friend or coworker teaching you about marketing.

But what works for us might not work for you. Spend time trying out different tones and styles in your writing until you find one that feels natural to your brand and resonates with your readers.

4) Include summary snippets at the top.

Not every topic will be interesting to every reader. And that’s ok! But, you don’t want someone to exit out of the email just because section #1 isn’t up their alley.

We found that including summary bullet points at the beginning of our newsletters, increased the amount of time people spent reading them. This summary lays out the sections included in the newsletter and gives people a teaser about what’s included in each one. That way people can pick and choose which sections to scroll to.

5) Provide REAL value!

This is the most important one. If you’re not providing your reader value, then everything else is for nothing.

There are 2 key questions you can ask yourself to help with this:

1) Why would somebody want to read this?

2) Would I be excited to read this?

If you can’t quickly give a clear answer to #1 and give an emphatic ”yes!” to #2, then you need to go back to the drawing board.

Always remember, the purpose of a newsletter is to give you a platform to be a thought leader. Your goal should be to educate, inspire, engage, or entertain. The goal should not be to hock products or directly sell.

Your newsletter should never feel like a billboard.

5 benefits of sending a newsletter.

Sending a newsletter gives you a great thought leadership platform, but there are several other benefits too. Here are a few:

1) Clean up your database and keep it clean.

Most companies’ CRMs are a complete mess. A newsletter is a great tool to help clean up your contact database and then keep it clean.

Chances are, a lot of the contacts in your database are outdated. Either the email address is bad or they no longer work at the company. When you email all your contacts on a weekly or monthly basis with a newsletter, you quickly see which addresses are no longer valid and you can remove them from the CRM.

You also get insights into your unengaged contacts. If a contact hasn’t so much as opened an email in months or years, then it’s highly unlikely they’re going to buy from you. Remove them from your database or at least migrate them to a dormant list.

On a more positive note, a newsletter lets you see who your most engaged contacts are. If someone is opening, reading, and clicking links in your newsletter every week, they're highly engaged. Maybe it’s time for the sales team to give them a call or for you to target them with some more aggressive marketing tactics.

2) Stay in front of contacts consistently.

Keeping in touch with prospects and customers is one of the main functions of marketing. A newsletter gives you chance to stay in touch with and provide value to your audience consistently.

At any point in time, only 2% of your target market is interested in making a purchase. The real value lies in the other 98%. You need to stay top of mind with them so that when they are ready to buy, you're the first company they think of.

Being in their inbox every week and providing them value is one of the best ways to do this.

3) Makes other content creation easier.

A newsletter is a great foundational piece of content. Each week you can take it and also publish it as a blog post and cut it up to create social media content.

4) A simple way to pilot content.

Marketing assets like ebooks, videos, or webinars can be expensive and time-consuming to create. Because of this, you want to be sure this content will hit the mark before you create it.

A newsletter helps make this happen. Look at your newsletter metric and analyze which sections and topics perform the best. Then create marketing assets that expand on those.

For example, we took our most popular newsletter about how to write great cold emails and turned it into an ebook guide.

We know the time we spent creating it was a good investment because we already had data showing that our audience was interested in and engaged with the topic.