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26 Proven Ways To Grow Your Newsletter Right Now
Crack the Newsletter Growth Code With These Proven Methods
Brandon Storey
September 27th, 2024
Trying to earn thousands with an email newsletter?
There’s never been a better time to start.
Naysayers continue to shout, “Email is dead,” but do you know what’s louder than naysayers? Data.
In 2024, there are an estimated 4.48 billion email users — over 50% of the world’s population. By 2026, there will be an estimated 4.73 billion global email users.
Email’s on the rise, and you can tap into the growing market.
But there’s one downside: There’s more competition than ever. To earn thousands from your newsletter, you need to know how to stand out and grow your list.
In this guide, I’ll break down the 26 evergreen newsletter growth strategies you can tap into to fuel list growth.
Whether you’ve just started your email newsletters or you’re looking for new growth methods, you’ve come to the right place.
You’ll learn several new tactics you’ve never heard of and see real examples of successful newsletter operators who are leveraging them to grow their lists fast.
Ready to tap into exponential growth?
Let’s dive in!
Master the Essentials First
Newsletters are the greatest tool you can use to earn thousands online from an owned audience.
By using the right growth tactics, you can get the most out of your newsletter. Below, we’ve compiled an in-depth list of the top growth tactics and strategies you can use to fuel newsletter growth.
But here’s the thing…
You can use all of the growth tools as much as you want. But if the quality of your newsletter isn’t there, you’re going to be running in that hamster wheel until you eventually burn out.
Sure, you can convince people to join your list, but they’ll unsubscribe just as fast as they subscribed if your content sucks.
Before you grow a successful email list, you need to first understand how to create a successful email newsletter.
Setting up the right foundation is the best path to tap into significant growth.
Here’s how:
Getting Started With Your Newsletter
You need to be intentional with your newsletter.
What kind of content are you creating?
What problem are you solving?
Why should people read it?
If you aren’t able to answer these questions immediately, you need to understand your audience more.
Knowing Your Audience
Your newsletter starts and ends with your subscribers. You need to think of your newsletter as a product because it is one. It’s an information product. If your information is boring, dull, and unhelpful, then people won’t consume it. It’s that plain and simple.
To make the best newsletter content possible, you need to understand everything there is to know about your audience:
Their pain points
Their needs
Their wants
Their desires
What scares them
What excites them
What they fear
What they do daily
What they consume
What problems they’re trying to solve
Their worldview
If you don’t know this information, then you need to do more research.
You can use beehiiv’s poll feature to gain subscriber feedback within your newsletters.
For example, you can ask your audience what kind of content they want to learn about.
Once you have the foundational research done on your audience, it’s time to plan your newsletter content.
You can create a newsletter that’s filled with:
The latest industry news
Helpful, actionable tips
Entertaining and educational storytelling
Or a combination of the three
Your newsletter content is the most important aspect of a successful newsletter. You want to make sure you get it right.
As mentioned above, you can use beehiiv to run polls to gain subscriber feedback to directly ask them what kind of content they want to read. You can also use it to ask your readers to rate your individual newsletters to ensure that you keep your quality up. This is something Jack Raines does well in his newsletter, Young Money (as seen below):
26 Ways To Grow Your List
Now that you have the foundation of your newsletter built, you’re ready to start growing.
Whether you’re starting from 0, 1,000, or 10,000 subscribers, the growth tactics below will help you get where you need to go.
First, we’ll cover tactics you can use to get quick wins, followed by some that will take a moderate amount of time, and finally long-term growth channels and strategies.
Ready?
Let’s go.
Here are some quick wins that you can get within days (and even hours) to grow your list:
If you’re starting from scratch, do you want to know the fastest way to get to 100 subscribers?
Tell your friends, family, and co-workers about your newsletter.
This is shockingly simple… and also the easiest way to get your first 50-100 readers.
Go through your contact list on your smartphone, and tell them that you just launched a newsletter and that you’d love their support. Then, send them a link to your newsletter signup page.
Once you’ve spoken to your friends, family, and co-workers, it’s time to hit up social media.
Make a social media post on Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or wherever you’re active. Heck, make a TikTok dance to promote your newsletter, if you have the courage.
Then, DM your internet friends and tell them to subscribe. If you’re remotely active on any social media, this will easily get another 20-50 subscribers. And if you want to get even more, tell them to spread the word to their friends.
2. Add a subscribe landing page.
Now that you have your initial 100+ subscribers, it’s time to get serious.
Now, you’re going to turn internet strangers into newsletter subscribers.
The best place to start is by creating a custom subscribe landing page or newsletter signup page.
Publish Press, by Colin and Samir, has a solid subscribe landing page.
On your landing page, you should have a headline that shows the benefit or promise of signing up with a simple tagline.
Publish Press uses the tagline, “Where creators get their news.” You can even use their formula as a starting point: “Where [your target audience] gets [news/tips/etc.].”
Then, make sure that there’s a clear embed signup form.
Let your readers know how often they’ll get your newsletter and show off a sample newsletter like they do on the right side, as shown in the image above. You can use Canva to create a mockup on a smartphone, which works well.
Want an easy way to get subscribers?
You can create what’s known as a “content gate” to prompt your newsletter readers to subscribe.
You’ve likely had this happen before when you’ve visited a major digital news publication like Harvard Business Review, Medium, Washington Post, New York Times, and more: You click on an article link, start reading, and, then, part-way down, a form appears that tells you to subscribe to keep reading.
While these publications typically ask for a paid subscription to keep reading, you can set up a content gate that simply requires someone to subscribe.
The B-Side is a local Gen-Z newsletter that covers news around the Boston area. They recently began content-gating their visitors to drive more email signups.
Since The B-Side is leveraging a beehiiv website (free for all users), they can tease their newsletter to hook site visitors in and, then, ask them to subscribe to capture their email and tap into further growth.
Another way to draw in email subscribers taps into a different kind of tease – the social media tease.
One of the best audiences to target is social media users. Tease your newsletter issues to draw followers off of the platform and into your newsletter.
Harry Beadle, a copywriter and founder of The Beadle newsletter, grows his email list by posting a sneak peek of his newsletter on X (Twitter).
How?
Beadle simply screenshots his newsletter issues and turns them into a post on X.
Beadle does an excellent job with his hooks, teasing just enough of his newsletter to get people interested. Then, he adds a comment below his main post with a call to action to read the rest.
5. Set up lead magnet pop-ups.
Subscribers aren’t just subscribers. They’re leads, and one proven strategy you can use to attract more leads is to create a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is anything you can give to your audience in exchange for their email address:
PDF Guide
Video
Trial
Demo
Consultation
Discount
And more
Arnold Schwarzenegger uses lead magnets for his beehiiv newsletter, Arnold’s Pump Club.
If the Terminator is using them, you probably should, too.
For his lead magnet, Schwarzenegger compiled 30 free workouts to give to his audience. All they have to do is enter their email address, and they get the workouts.
The key to building a great lead magnet is giving your audience something that’s valuable to them.
If your newsletter is about cats, then giving a workout checklist may not be the right fit, but giving them a list of resources and tools that you can use to take better care of your cat’s fur might be a good option.
6. Leverage recommendations.
Want another quick win?
Team up with other newsletter operators.
If you have a beehiiv newsletter, then you can tap into beehiiv’s Recommendations feature to grow with complementary newsletters. Here’s how it works:
When someone subscribes to a beehiiv newsletter, the newsletter operator can choose to recommend other newsletters. Then, the new subscriber can also sign up to a recommended newsletter with one click.
One powerful success story with beehiiv Recommendations is Jack Raines and his newsletter, Young Money.
He partnered up with a few other beehiiv newsletter operators like World Builders to recommend each other’s newsletter.
So when someone subscribes to World Builders, they’ll see recommended newsletters, including Young Money by Jack Raines.
Over the past 18 months, Raines has gotten over 8,000 subscribers from Recommendations alone:
7. Use beehiiv Boosts.
If you want to fast-track beehiiv’s Recommendations even more, you have another option: paid recommendations, otherwise known as beehiiv Boosts.
Newsletter operators can earn money through sponsored recommendations. They will pay to have their newsletter recommended in this post-subscribe flow.
We mentioned in #6 that World Builders recommends Young Money by Jack Raines once someone signs up to his list, but look at the recommendations on the top of his list:
You’ll see that Raines recommends One Thing Better and Modern Chaos at the top, and both have the “Sponsored” tag. These two publications are paying World Builders to boost their newsletters.
If you’re looking to grow your list fast, you can pay a set fee to have your newsletter as the top recommendation to capture subscribers on autopilot.
One beehiiv user who has taken full advantage of Boosts to tap into rapid growth is Rowan Cheung, owner of The Rundown AI.
Cheung has grown his list by over 10,000 subscribers using Boosts, paying only $2.00 per subscriber.
The best part? beehiiv has a strict verification process to ensure quality subscribers, so Cheung only pays for verified subscribers. His boosted subscribers give him:
37% open rate
9.8% click rate
1.9% unsubscribe rate
For a daily newsletter, those are some incredible stats.
To grow your newsletter, you can invest your time or money.
Another effective way to supercharge your newsletter growth is running sponsored ads.
With the beehiiv Ad Network, you can promote your newsletter directly within other beehiiv newsletters to tap into rapid growth.
It’s a streamlined advertising channel that empowers newsletter operators and brands to sponsor hundreds of premium newsletters.
The Ad Network is the simplest way to grow your newsletter by leveraging the power of thousands of other highly engaged newsletter audiences.
Marketing Max recently began placing sponsored ads for his newsletter, Growth Daily, within other beehiiv newsletters through beehiiv’s Ad Network.
Max’s goal was to grow his newsletter list. The result? His customer acquisition cost (CAC) decreased by 30%.
Max shared in a recent interview, “...this marketing channel has been our second best across all 15+ of our acquisition channels. From a CAC and quality perspective, it's a no-brainer once you crack your landing page!”
Considering that Max’s entire expertise revolves around marketing growth, his feedback means a lot.
Another way you can tap into paid growth and fast-track your newsletter list size is with paid social media advertising.
While social media ads are typically used to promote paid products via ecommerce, they’re also a brilliant tool to fuel newsletter growth.
Sahil Bloom uses paid ads to promote his newsletter, Curiosity Chronicle, which is a twice-a-week newsletter about how to “build a high-performing, heathy, wealthy life.”
Bloom runs ads on Facebook and Instagram, promoting his newsletter directly.
While some people run ads for a lead magnet, Bloom simply shows off the newsletter itself in his ads. And, with a list of over 700,000 (which was started only 4 years ago), it’s safe to say that he knows how to grow a newsletter.
Moderate Growth (Results Will Take Some Time)
Now that you’ve got the quick newsletter growth wins in place, it’s time to move onto moderate newsletter growth tactics.
While some of these methods won’t necessarily bring you subscribers instantly, they’re crucial tactics that you should use to generate sustainable growth:
One of the best ways to tap into sustainable newsletter growth is by leveraging a social media audience.
In section one, we mentioned how paid social advertising is a powerful way to fast-track your newsletter list size, but paid ads are just one piece of the social media puzzle. The other is organic social media growth.
The reality is that the entire world is on social media, so building and growing your own social media account as a way to introduce your newsletter to the world is an effective strategy.
Brandon Storey, the owner of the Storey Time newsletter, launched his X (Twitter) account in November 2023. In about 4.5 months, he’s grown to just over 2,000 X followers organically.
Not only has Storey grown his X audience in that time; he’s also grown his newsletter to over 1,000 subscribers. That’s 50% of his social media audience.
How did Storey do it? He regularly promotes his newsletter with a call to action under his social media posts:
You can use social media as a way to reach a greater audience, warm them up to your brand, and then draw them into your newsletter.
While you can gain a steady subscriber base by promoting your newsletter in your organic social media posts, you can also get bursts of subscribers by promoting lead magnets as giveaways.
One way Storey has gained a 50% subscriber-to-follower ratio is by launching a new lead magnet on X about once a month.
In the giveaway, Storey asked people to like, comment, and follow to get the free guide.
The result was about 300 new followers in a few days (from 1,561 to 1,877), and he gained 227 subscribers in that same time frame.
You can see the breakdown in beehiiv’s 3D analytics:
The best way to do a giveaway launch is to think of it as a product launch and try to capture both social media followers and email subscribers.
With beehiiv, you can create a custom landing page to capture those subscribers from your giveaway like Storeydid:
12. Host a challenge.
Another way to fuel subscriber growth is by hosting a challenge.
Similar to a giveaway, a challenge is an exciting, time-sensitive promotion that you can offer your audience in exchange for their email.
But instead of giving your audience a product, service, or guide, you’re giving them an experience.
You’re giving your audience a chance to be part of something that will help transform their lives.
Robin Arzón is a world-renowned fitness instructor and author, who runs the beehiiv newsletter, The Pivot.
One way that Arzón is driving newsletter growth is by offering fitness challenges to her social media audience. Recently, she hosted the #3for31 challenge, which asks her audience to walk, jog, or run for 3 miles every day for 31 days straight.
Arzón also incorporates giveaways into her challenges to take her readers to the next level. In the #3for31 challenge, she gave everyone who entered the challenge a chance to win free access to her exclusive paid community, Swagger Society.
To enter the challenge (and the giveaway), Arzón’s audience has to sign up to her email list, work out every day, and post about it on Instagram with specific hashtags.
Running a challenge isn’t just a great way to grow your newsletter, but it’s also a brilliant way to get your audience engaged and involved.
Most newsletters treat the experience like a one-way street, but newsletter operators like Arzón understand that the best way to succeed with their newsletter is by creating an active, two-way relationship that gets your readers to move – and in her case, she’s literally getting them to move.
13. Engage in online communities.
There are millions of ways to promote your newsletter.
One tried and true method is to become active in different communities. While most people will flock to social platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram, there are other communities that you can use to find new subscribers.
For example, you could grow your list by getting involved in:
Reddit
Quora
Sunday Money is an active member of beehiiv’s Slack community, the hiiv, which is accessible to users on any paid beehiiv plan.
Not only is he able to learn more about building and scaling a successful newsletter, but he also leverages the community to promote his own newsletter as seen in the screenshot above.
14. Host webinars To collect emails.
Want to know an extremely effective, yet underrated, growth strategy? Webinars.
Webinars are live (or pre-recorded) video seminars that typically include an in-depth teaching on a niche topic.
You can use webinars as a way to provide a ton of value to your audience – and, in exchange, you can get a bunch of emails in the process.
Miss Excel uses webinars all the time to grow her list and sell more products. She does this well by promoting her webinars on Instagram. Then, she’ll send people a link to a signup page for the event, where they have to enter their email address to be able to attend, get more information, and receive reminders about the upcoming event.
What’s another way to grow your newsletter? Get your subscribers to spread the news. There are dozens of ways you can do this, but one of the easiest wins is to make your content shareable.
With beehiiv, you can include social share buttons at the top of your newsletter template.
That way, every time you send a newsletter, you give your readers the option to share the newsletter with their friends and network with the click of a button.
16. Place an email capture in your newsletter template.
When your audience shares your newsletter with a friend, you’ve got yourself a new reader.
But… the problem is: They’re going to stay a one-time reader unless you ask them to subscribe. One way to combat this is by adding a lead capture button directly into your newsletter template.
Jack Raines started to notice that his readers were sharing his newsletter with their friends, so he added a section at the top of his newsletter asking newcomers to subscribe.
That way, whenever his subscribers share an issue with their friends, Raines can turn the one-time readers into long-term subscribers.
17. Create web-based, embed signup forms.
With beehiiv, you can also add a newsletter signup button to your web-based newsletter.
Since you get a free beehiiv website when you sign up, you can also capture email subscribers while people read the web page version of your newsletter.
Houck’s Newsletter is a newsletter that is all about startup growth strategies. In each edition of the newsletter, Michael Houck adds a simple embedded email capture at the top of each newsletter. This way, when someone new visits his beehiiv site to read a new issue, they can easily subscribe while reading the post.
18. Create mid-content pop-up forms.
Embedded email signup forms aren’t the only way to ensure that you’re getting first-time visitors to subscribe.
Another handy tool that beehiiv offers to newsletter operators is a pop-up form that appears to visitors when they’re part-way through a newsletter.
Dakota Robertson, from Full-Stack Creators leverages this nifty beehiiv feature to turn a percentage of his one-off newsletter readers into subscribers.
Rather than sticking to the default capture, Robertson gets a bit creative with his copy and leans into his humor by using the headline, “I See You Stalking My Posts,” which is a creative way to hook his readers in.
19. Include a subscribe link in your email signature.
Some growth tactics are extremely effective, but they take a ton of effort to implement.
Some growth tactics are more passive and can be fully implemented in minutes.
One simple way to get more subscribers while on autopilot is by promoting it in your email signature.
Daniel Roman from The Newsie casually promotes his newsletter in his signature alongside his social handles. While this won’t get you a ton of subscribers, it can be a nice way to gain readers automatically without doing a ton of extra work.
Now that we’ve covered the quick wins and moderate growth techniques, it’s time to look at the big picture.
While we all want fast growth to start seeing results quickly, the reality is that the most successful newsletters have a long-term vision for their publication.
Here are the best long-term growth strategies that you can implement now that will pay you dividends for years to come:
20. Implement SEO strategies.
In section two, you learned about one of the best organic growth methods –social media, but there’s another powerful organic channel that you can use to bring growth for years – search engines.
Every day, Google receives over 8.5 billion search queries. That’s more than one Google search for every person on Earth, every single day.
If you want to grow your newsletter long-term, then you’ll want to make search engine optimization (SEO) part of your growth strategy.
Starter Story is a newsletter by Pat Walls packed with interviews and case studies of successful 7-figure entrepreneurs.
One of the main strategies that Walls used to grow his newsletter is SEO.
Walls leverages what he calls a “Lean SEO framework”:
1. Research to find content opportunities.
2. Create minimum viable content to test if your site can rank with it.
3. Don’t touch the content for 30 days.
4. Optimize your content based on its performance.
5. Scale to make that content more in-depth.
The result? Walls is bringing in 1.6 million visits per month to his website, many of which he captures as email subscribers
21. Write guest blog posts.
What’s another way you can tap into SEO? Instead of posting on your own website, post on someone else’s.
With guest posting, you get to leverage another person’s audience and SEO rankings to capture attention and draw in newsletter subscribers.
Lenny Rachitsky of Lenny’s Newsletter began leveraging guest posts on other websites to grow his email list. He was approached by his friend, Andrew Chen, to publish a blog on Chen’s site.
And, guess what, Lenny did it. Then, he guest posted on another site.
Those first two guest blog posts brought Lenny his first 1,000 subscribers.
While most people promote their newsletters on their website through SEO or through social media like Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn, there’s another option most people overlook: YouTube.
What makes YouTube so effective for growing your newsletter? It’s a social media platform and search engine, all in one.
Two guys who use their YouTube channels to promote their newsletter are Henry Belcaster and Dylan Jardon.
In less than one year, Belcaster and Jardon have grown to over 60,000 newsletter subscribers.
23. Launch a referral program.
Want to know one of the best ways you can bring in sustainable organic newsletter growth? A referral program.
The reality is that if you have a decent newsletter, a percentage of your subscribers are already telling their friends about it, so why not incentivize them to spread the word even more?
Milk Road is one of the greatest newsletter success stories in history. They came on the scene in 2021 and, within one year, grew to 250,000 subscribers and were acquired for 7 figures.
How did the daily crypto newsletter do it?
One of the major factors was leveraging beehiiv’s integrated referral program.
With beehiiv, Milk Road was able to set up a simple referral system in minutes:
One referral = one reward.
Whenever a reader referred someone else to their newsletter, they’d receive a digital info product through beehiiv’s fully automated referral system.
To share the newsletter, Milk Road’s subscribers simply have to copy and paste their unique referral link right from the Milk Road newsletter in their inbox; or they can click the “Click to Share” button, and it will take them to their unique referral hub.
In the unique referral hub, subscribers can see their rewards, potential rewards, and total referred subscribers, and they can access their unique link to share with their friends. Once their friend subscribes to Milk Road using their unique referral link, they get this email with the reward:
What part do Shaan Puri and Ben Levy from Milk Road loved the most?
The entire referral process is fully automated.
The referral link is placed directly within the newsletter template in beehiiv, so it appears in every newsletter sent. Then, once someone shares it with a friend, the fulfillment process is automated.
24. Network with others and build genuine relationships.
Earlier, you learned about the power of growing a social media account.
Posting regularly and plugging your newsletter on social media can help you turn your followers into subscribers, but there’s another way to leverage social media to grow your newsletter: partnering with other business owners and newsletter operators.
Chenell Basilio of Growth in Reverse credits most of her first 2,000 subscribers to networking.
Strategic partnerships, collaborations, and cross-promoting are powerful ways to leverage other people’s audiences to grow your newsletter.
25. Develop business partnerships.
Speaking of strategic partnerships, have you ever heard of Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush? They’re the Ship 30 For 30 guys.
Nicolas Cole had been writing online for years as a freelancer.
Dickie Bush was working at a hedge fund and started going viral on X (Twitter).
The two came together to form a business partnership.
Bush has an X following of 385,000, while Cole has 179,000. Together, they have over half a million in their audience. And with it, they’ve built a newsletter of over 100,000 subscribers, taught over 10,000 students in their Ship 30 For 30 cohort, and have generated millions in revenue.
26. Collaborate on podcasts.
Many people launch a newsletter to chase after the 4-Hour Work Week.
What is one of the keys to achieving that kind of lifestyle of money, time, and location independence? Collaboration. No one knows this better than Mr. 4-Hour himself, Tim Ferriss.
Ferriss is one of the most successful networkers in the business world. Just look at two of his most popular books: Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. They’re built upon interviews and Q&As that he conducted with successful entrepreneurs, athletes, and thought leaders from around the world.
Ferriss brings that same level of collaboration into his newsletter growth strategy. He leverages his podcast to bring on leaders from different realms to expand his network and audience.
Interview podcasts are great because they allow you to attract someone’s audience to your audience and convert some of them into email subscribers for the long haul.
How beehiiv Can Fast-Track Your Newsletter Growth
There you have it – 26 proven strategies to grow your newsletter.
If you’re brand new to the newsletter world, these techniques will help you get off the ground.
And if you already have a newsletter but want to scale, these techniques will help you reach the next level.
Just remember, no one’s going to grow your list for you.
Although building a newsletter is an incredible opportunity to earn a substantial income, if you’re not growing, you’ll struggle to monetize.
To get started on the right path, you need to ensure that you have the right technology that supports your growth goals.
beehiiv is the newsletter platform built for growth.
Built by the same team that built and scaled the Morning Brew newsletter to millions of subscribers, beehiiv is the only growth-focused email newsletter platform.
With beehiiv, you get access to:
Integrated referral program to tap into organic growth
Recommendations network to leverage partnerships to scale
Boosts that allow you to fast-track recommendations for rapid growth
Are you ready to accelerate your newsletter growth, so you can build a cash-flowing publication?
