Secrets to growing newsletter subscribers — Itay Paz // Morning Dough

Quotes

• “I would split it into two paths. One is paid, the second is free. But really, nothing is free. There’s two techniques to build your subscriber list to over 15,000 subscribers in three and a half months just by implementing three activities.” - Itay“The first is from your personal network. Say, you’re opening a physical store? Who are you inviting to come? Obviously these are your friends, colleagues, and neighbors and family. Most of them will never say no and they’ll be happy to be on your list.” - Itay “The second thing that we utilize a lot is social media. It is the biggest source for us for subscribers and we do it two ways. One, we publish everyday, like the top 7 of the bullet points of the newsletter. We have a video, we publish it on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. It’s very powerful and we see subscribers from there, everyday.” - Itay“We actually don’t tag anyone. Funny enough, we don’t do that. We just give them these five to eight bullets, then we give them the links into the Morning Dough. It’s either a video or a photo. Some of them are coming from contributors. In general, it’s clean and simple and we don’t tag anyone.” - Itay “We also use social media in what we call guerilla marketing. Everyone has connections in Facebook or LinkedIn and we actually message them over time not in one time because you’ll be shut down right away. We message them as a colleague and a friend to join the Morning Dough. We have found that it’s very effective to do that.” - Itay“We also use cross promotions. You find other emails in the industry that are similar to yours in terms of the verticals. Or it can be just people in the industry that have the value and can actually promote you. It’s cross-promoting and it sends traffic to each other, sending subscribers and it’s completely free and it’s quality because it comes from recommendations.” - Itay“One of the biggest things we learned about growing a podcast, and this is something that we kind of stumbled into last year, was the people you have as guests end up as a very powerful marketing channel.” - Ben“Now when you’re talking about a newsletter, you have the opportunity to have the people you’re talking about in the newsletter also be an advocate and share the content.” - Ben “First of all, just take all the resources you have and use it. You can have the employees and clients. This is probably the most important in the things we just discussed. Your clients already trust you and love you so they will be happy to be your subscribers and read your content.” - Itay“There’s definitely ROI but you need to figure it out. When we built the Morning Dough we decided to focus on the growth and the quality in building the model from A to Z before we start taking out the titles. We didn’t focus about getting sales, getting sponsors, getting money. If we look at paid advertising, we can never know what’s our ROI because we never really have any income from the newsletter.” - Itay“There is an ROI but you need to know your numbers. You need to know the lifetime value and usually you know it over twelve months. Then if you know the value, then you know how much you can actually pay per subscriber. Once you know that, you can compare prices.” - Itay“One of things I’ve focused on promoting the MarTech podcast is trying to find people who are already engaged in the medium. Promoting podcasts on other podcasts seems to be the best way to grow a podcast. I know that may sound simplistic but it makes sense that if you are looking for people who are going to subscribe to newsletters, you might wanna look for people that are already reading newsletters.” - Ben “The third one is a referral program. Basically, in a referral program you utilize your audience and you ask them to refer other subscribers and in return you have a gift scheme. The more subscribers you get to the newsletter, the greater the reward, from keychain to a free flight.” - Itay“You don’t just give a flight to Bali. You give a flight to MarTech podcast offices where you’ll meet us, we’ll talk about the market, we show you what we’re doing and you see behind the scenes. It’s more of a brand play than just gifts. It’s depending on your audience and it’s definitely valuable.” - Itay“SEO is something that you need to know. So either you learn how to do it right or you need to hire someone to do it. Or if you do it yourself and you have the knowledge, it takes time and in a way it’s paid.” - Itay“The thing is, when you have a newsletter that has 15 to 20 different topics, it’s very difficult to optimize it because Google is looking at a page and asks itself what this page is all about. So a newsletter isn't just about one topic. It’s a tricky thing.” - Itay“The way we tackle our strategy comes from two ways. One is, from the newsletter itself, we select one of the topics from the 15 to 20 bullet points, and this one we give extra content. You don’t see it in the newsletter but in the version in the website, it has more content. That’s how Google is relevant on that one and we do optimization on that page.” - Itay“What we actually do is we added multiple pages within the website around the industry. We give a lot of information which is evergreen information inside. That’s part of what we do. So people that search marketers looking for more information to understand more about the industry, we’re able to get more traffic there through the searches. So SEO traffic, and people read it and subscribe to the newsletter.” - Itay“Interesting. So you’re calling SEO a paid channel because you’re doing content production for things like definitions, and industry round ups, job boards, whatever it is that is evergreen content. So you’re basically paying for content production outside of the newsletters to drive traffic and knowing that you are looking for the definition of digital marketing may want a digital marketing newsletter.” - Ben “We started SEO only in mid-October. Google was sending us 5 visitors per day from SEO, which is nothing. Today, we are almost 500 visitors per day organically. Only three and half months later.” - Itay“At the end of the day, when you think about growing your newsletter. You’re growth hacking, you’re doing your outreach, you’re building your social profiles, you’re syndicating your content and maybe you’re paying for some content distribution, you’re doing some SEO. It’s not a silver bullet. You gotta work at this. Building a newsletter is something that requires regular maintenance.” - Ben