Owned Audience Playbook: Why It Matters and How To Grow Yours Quickly

Instagram recently updated its algorithm to remove unoriginal, reposted content. Over on Pinterest, accounts are suspended without any clear explanation, and, if that isn't enough, TikTok was banned overnight in India and is now on the verge of being banned in the U.S.

Every day, social media algorithms change, accounts are suspended, and discussions rise about banning social media platforms.

The uncertainty of building an audience on social media is becoming more apparent.

Spending 10 hours a week creating content  that only some of your audience sees can be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to keep going, but there's a better way to ensure that you always have a direct line of communication and a close-knit community.

What Is an Owned Audience?

An owned audience is a segment of loyal followers you control through your platforms. Examples include newsletters, online communities and forums, websites, and e-learning platforms.

Unlike social media followers, who can vanish in a moment due to algorithm changes or account suspensions, an owned audience is reliable and stable.

As a content creator, while I have a total audience of over 130,000 across various platforms, what truly matters to me is my owned audience of 35,000.

My larger audience is borrowed, and the only way to engage with them is on the platform they're on. But as you can see, platforms shut down.

The Power of Ownership

When you own the platform, you can build and nurture a raving fan base on your terms. And when it costs five times more to acquire new customers than to nurture an existing relationship, customer loyalty becomes more important than ever.

For example, Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of Making Sense of Cents used her website's audience, blog community, and email list to promote her affiliate marketing course. With this strategy, Michelle generated over a million dollars in course sales.

Owning your audience also gives you control of content distribution and data. This means while email providers like beehiiv deliver your content, you can improve its deliverability by following best practices such as using no or few images in your emails and avoiding spammy words in your email subject lines.

You also have first-party data from owning your audience that no third-party platform or competitor will have.

Data collected from surveys, polls, customer feedback, website visits, and lead generation campaigns can help tailor your content, segment your audience, and determine how to grow your brand.

To start this process, direct your social media audience to platforms you control by shifting their attention to your brand.

Getting People To Build a Community

One way to tap into your social media audience is to share free community-building content that encourages interaction, engagement, and conversation.

Some ways to entice your social media audience to free resources are through:

• Podcasts

• A YouTube channel

• A lead incentive such as a planner

• eBooks

Schroeder-Gardner uses her eBook, 80+ Ways to Make Extra Money, to grow her audience and income. In her eBook, she mentions her course and adds links whenever she discusses the course content, which is affiliate marketing.

Choosing the Right Platform To Build an Email List

Selecting the right email service provider provides a home base for growing and managing your owned audience.

Twenty-five thousand members of my audience are email subscribers, and the rest are course students.

When choosing the right platform to build your email list, focus on these core areas:

• Features: Find an email service provider with automation, segmentation, personalization, and analytic capabilities.

• Deliverability: Ensure that emails land in subscribers' inboxes rather than their spam folders, improving your overall reach.

• Integration: Look for platforms that connect to third-party tools you use, like WordPress, Shopify, or Zapier.

• Pricing: Figure out what you want to pay for and check the initial free plans, the price amount for each option, and whether you can recoup payment via referrals or sponsorship options within the platform.

Once you've chosen the best email platform for your needs, the next step is to get people to sign up for your email to grow your audience.

How To Get Those People To Sign Up for Your Email

The simplest way to get people to sign up for your email list is to create a free resource called a lead magnet or incentive.

Your free resource should answer a challenge or problem your audience has with tactics they can use immediately. We’ve found simple, short, and valuable lead magnets often work best.

Use polls or surveys to determine the main challenge they're currently facing. Once you have an idea, use a tool like Canva to create a guide, planner, or video to promote it.

Here are some ideas to promote your offer:

• Share your incentive on social media: Since you have a strong social media audience, give them a link to your free resource in your bio.

• Offer more than one incentive: Capture a larger audience by tapping into different interests and formats for your lead magnet. eBooks are the most popular format, while webinars come in at a close second.

• Update your social media banner image: Add an image of your free incentive in your social media banner for Facebook, X, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

• Include an email sign-up form within your blog content: If you have a website or blog, embed an email sign-up form in your content. Readers can add their email addresses and continue reading your content while their free resource is emailed to them.

If you check out Schroeder-Gardner's Instagram profile, you'll see that she uses a link in her bio to direct her social audience to her eBook and other resources.

She also uses email embed forms within her blog content and has multiple incentives to capture more subscribers.

What Your Emails Need To Be Like To Sustain That Community

What happens once your lead magnet works to collect emails? Well, it's time to put your new subscribers into an automated email sequence.

For example, a welcome series is a group of several onboarding emails to help new subscribers learn about your brand, your products, and where to find you on social media.

Once your welcome series is finished, most content creators and businesses move their subscribers to a weekly or monthly newsletter.

Each email typically focuses on news updates, resources, and a specific action that's valuable, relevant, and helpful to your audience.

Pollen, a membership community for self-employed individuals, sends out weekly newsletters. It balances marketing and helpful news with line breaks, emojis, and subheaders.

Along with providing helpful and relevant information, your emails need to be:

• Engaging: Use compelling subject lines and preview text to entice opens. Once your audience opens your email, encourage interaction by asking questions and inviting replies.

• Personal: Make your emails feel like a one-on-one conversation. Address subscribers by name and consider sharing behind-the-scenes stories or personal anecdotes to foster a deeper connection.

• Feed-back driven: Listen to your audience. Use surveys, feedback forms, and direct responses to understand their likes and dislikes. Adapt your content based on their input to keep them satisfied and engaged.

• Compliant: Emails must comply with relevant regulations, like GDPR and CAN-SPAM. Include clear unsubscribe options and respect privacy preferences to build trust.

Content Strategy and Planning

Create a constant flow of email content ideas to keep the engagement up in your email list.

When planning each day or week, it's best to develop a consistent cadence for sending out your newsletter. If your list is under 2,000 subscribers, 4-8 emails per month is sufficient.

The type of emails can also dictate how many emails you want to send out. If you have a new product or service, the emails from that sales campaign will go out more frequently than once a week.

For example, I sell a course; and in my sales funnel, emails are delivered every day and then every two days for a month. But if you're sending resources like a YouTube video, a blog post, or an interview you did, an email once a week is typical.

Once subscribers finish my sales funnel and want to continue hearing from me, they are put into my weekly newsletter.

Segmentation, Personalization, and Automation (the Sweet Spot)

Schroeder-Gardner uses email sequences to help her make $50,000 every month.

“I regularly earn around $50,000 a month through affiliate marketing, and it’s all done fairly passively through blog posts and email sequences.” According to Schroeder-Gardner, this is an entirely automated process in turning email subscribers into buyers.

Segmentation helps increase engagement by dividing your lists into different categories based on a variety of criteria:

By segmenting your email list, you can send tailored content that speaks to your subscribers.

For example, if a fitness influencer has two incentives such as a 30-day raw food challenge and a 30-day meal plan guide, they can use segmentation to speak to raw food enthusiasts or meal-planning fans.

Part of segmenting is personalization or customizing each email based on subscriber data.

One way to personalize content is in subject lines. Zenni, an eCommerce eyeglass company, often uses my name and emojis in its subject lines.

Automation streamlines your email marketing efforts to work passively, as it does for Schroeder-Gardner.

The welcome series is an automated process, whereby emails are triggered and sent on a certain day and time.

Instead of manually sending each email in your welcome series, automation frees up time to focus on growing your audience.

Other ways to use automation are through list management activities like removing cold subscribers or adding new subscribers to different segments.

Build More Owned Platforms 

When directing your social media audience to your email list, continue to offer them the opportunity to use other owned platforms where your core offers are marketed.

Some examples of popular owned media include:

• Websites

• Digital courses

• Summits you host

• Slack community

• Memberships

• Paid subscriptions, like a newsletter

For example, Kaitlyn Alford provides a free beehiiv newsletter sharing freelance jobs and other resources, but she also offers a paid subscription for exclusive listings and, in her free newsletters, works to convert her subscribers to a monthly subscription model.

If those steps seem like a lot, we'll go through how to engage your audience and help them transfer platforms, making this process streamlined and doable.

Moving an audience to where you control the relationship comes from how you engage with them, leverage their data, and manage future migration.

The Art of Engagement

You can foster relationship-building by having meaningful conversations with your audience.

The goal is not to push out content; it's to engage your audience and make them feel valued.

Fostering Meaningful Connections

Positively connecting with your audience helps grow your influence or sell your products.

When businesses consistently provide personalized experiences, 80% of customers will likely spend more money with them. With my audience, I reply to anyone taking my free email course with customized information.

I can make this new subscriber feel valued and appreciated by helping her feel heard in the following ways:

• Providing free resources like an article I wrote detailing tips to combat doubt

• Putting myself in her shoes and feeling all the feels she has about doubt

• Relating her story with similar personal experiences I've had with doubt

• Making a Loom video to make it more personal – if I have time

You can also showcase user-generated content and share behind-the-scenes insights in your emails. Follow up with past interactions to show your audience that you value their input.

Community-Building Tactics

Not all of your social media audience will be your core fans. The average click-through rate (CTR) for social media campaigns across industries is 0.98%. The CTR for beehiiv's emails, however, is 1.8%, meaning that it's best to move your social audience to your email list.

To ensure that your CTR hits close to this rate every time, nurture your email subscribers by creating community-centric engagement.

Here are some examples of community-centric actions that I've seen:

• Hosting live Q&A sessions: Ask your subscribers to give you questions and, then, create a stream on a platform like YouTube or in a podcast. While this is for your own audience, you can attract new subscribers by sharing it publicly.

• Starting a private group or Slack channel: This will be a place where your core audience can connect with you and each other.

• Providing exclusive content for subscribers: Share eBooks, videos, templates, or swipe files as free resources to foster trust and engagement.

By engaging with your community, you create a space where they feel involved and invested in your brand, leading them to follow you to other owned media platforms.

Leveraging Data for Personalization

To truly connect with your audience, you must tap into data insights to meet their interests and needs with personalized content.

Personalization Strategies

You can check user data by looking at your platform analytics. Check open rates for segments, CTRs, and subscriber data to better understand the type of information your subscribers enjoy.

With that information, you can follow these tips to add personalization to your emails:

• Add subscribers' names to the email.

• Share personal stories to relate to your subscribers within segments.

• Include your subscribers in emails by calling them out.

• Add more segments and triggered emails.

You can also add gamification if you find low engagement levels. In beehiiv, try their newsletter referral system to run a referral contest using your email list. This is a surefire way to boost engagement by creating a sense of excitement and competition among your subscribers.

Privacy and Transparency

You can build trust with your audience by collecting and storing their data on secured email marketing platforms that comply with GDPR and CAN-SPAM laws.

Below are some other ways to comply with privacy and transparency:

• Let subscribers know what data you’re collecting, why you’re collecting it, and how it'll be used.

• Before collecting any personal data, obtain explicit consent from subscribers.

• Offer straightforward options for subscribing, unsubscribing, and adjusting subscribers’ preferences.

• Make it easy for subscribers to opt-out of special offers if they choose and ensure that you promptly honor these requests.

Navigating Platform Transitions

You need to shift your social media audience to your offerings to create a lasting relationship with them. 

Embracing New Technologies

Assess the platforms you're using and check to see how their tools can help manage your audience more effectively. For example, beehiiv integrates with many tools, like Shopify, Webflow, and Zapier, to help manage your audience.

When looking at new technologies, find ones that offer the following robust features:

• Automation

• Segmentation

• Analytics

• Integrations

• Monetization options

Migrating Audiences

To start the migration process, invite your social media audience to join you on another platform, such as a private community, email list, or website.

Show value in different ways on different platforms for your audience. This could mean joining your email list, listening to your podcast, or signing up for a webinar you're hosting.

To understand why an owned audience matters, let’s examine real-life examples of creators who have nailed this transition.

Case Study: Arnold’s Pump Club

Arnold Schwezzenegar is a star example of how much he values his owned audience, as shown in his Pump Club newsletter. He often reposts his subscribers' fitness success on X and leaves a link to his newsletter to encourage sign-ups.

But Arnold doesn't stop there. He builds immense trust and a hard-core loyal audience by nurturing his email list with physical products to incite commitment to his brand.

As a content creator, you can build a raving fan base like Schwarzenegger with strategic actions.

• Encourage email subscribers to tag you on social media. You can repost their success with your program or service.

• Ask for a commitment like Schwarzenegger does with his Be Useful Medallion. It doesn't have to be physical; create a challenge like Robin Arzon does with her 31-day fitness challenge.

• Motivate your audience with powerful sayings or taglines like Schwarzenegger does with, "I'm proud of you." This offers a sense of validation and encouragement.

Case Study: Josh Richards’s TikTok Domination

Social media influencer Josh Richards wears many hats: entrepreneur, TikToker, podcaster, and YouTuber.

Richards earns 1 million dollars for high-end sponsored content, podcast deals, and his own entrepreneurial products.

If you check out Richards’s TikTok page, you might see tons of random entertainment videos, TikTok challenges, or popular filter videos, but what his audience doesn't realize is that this is all carefully crafted.

Richards creates relatable and entertaining videos for the Gen Z crowd, and this resonates because he treats TikTok and social media like a business with these actions:

• Setting follower goals early on: For example, his first goal was to get 10,000 followers by summer.

• Signing up his sister for a 15% commission salary to help grow his brand

• Partnering: Richards partnered with other entrepreneurs to scale his business.

• Valuing his newsletter and making it a prominent link in his bio

If influencer status is your end goal, follow Richards’s advice on treating it like a business.

Set goals and have a plan in place before you build your audience and consider partnering with others to help you grow quicker.

Case Study: How Victoria Kurichenko Grew Without Social Media

Both Schwarzenegger and Richards focused on social media to create an owned audience, but that isn't the only way to have an owned audience. 

Victoria Kurichenko is an SEO strategist and affiliate marketer. Although she created a website and did affiliate marketing like Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of Making Sense of Cents, her audience-building methods differed.

Kurichenko went against what other successful entrepreneurs did with being on social media and, instead, went with Medium, a blogging platform.

Kurichenko used Medium to write behind-the-scenes content about her business and website.

Medium audiences thrive on personal content, and Kurichenko knows this. Over the years, she has cultivated a fairly large audience on Medium and promotes her email incentive or eBook for sale in every Medium post.

Every time Kurichenko posts on Medium, she continues to grow her owned audience.

If social media seems like an enigma, find a platform more suitable for your process.

• Medium caters to writers.

• Mastadon is the anti-social media platform that prides itself on microblogging.

• beehiiv  is a newsletter system where you can create free and paid newsletters.

• Discord is an online community platform.

• WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace are content management systems for blogging.

Give yourself 30-90 days to try the platform out and see if using the strategies in this article will help in building a core audience that you control and nurture.

Building your audience with beehiiv is a smart move if you want to create and maintain an owned audience.

While you'll need social media—or a blogging platform—to grow a following, beehive makes it easy to migrate your followers to your beehiiv landing page to collect emails.

• You can showcase past juicy newsletters on your landing page, enticing followers to sign up.

• It's a one-step process, making it quick and easy to opt-in.

• You can gate individual newsletters to encourage sign-ups.

These measures ensure that the people who sign up are the audience that wants the information or resources you have.

With detailed analytics and a user-friendly interface, beehiiv makes it easy to understand and engage with your subscribers.

The dashboard was one of the reasons why Kurichenko  moved her Convertkit subscribers to beehiiv. beehiv's all-in-one system provides comprehensive user data to help creators direct their next move.

Try beehiiv for free for 30 days and see where it'll take you.