Are you having luck promoting your newsletter with ads?
I launched my newsletter on personal finance (http://moneytalk.substack.com/) a little under a month ago and I'm exploring ways to promote it beyond my network.
I was offered some free advertising credits on LinkedIn and I thought I'd give it a try - after I launched, LinkedIn was where I got most of my paying subscribers. But so far, nothing. Not even free subscribers.
Have you tried advertising to promote your newsletter? What's worked and what hasn't?
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Your best bet for converting ad clicks into subscribers is to design your ad around a lead magnet that your target audience would find interesting. This works better than designing your ads to directly promote your newsletter.
Good lead magnets help lure people in by giving them something they want in exchange for their email address. You can keep it short and easy to digest - as long as it provides value, it'll be effective.
That's essentially what @AndrewKamphey is suggesting when he said his Facebook ad campaign promoted a free PDF of stats his target audience would find interesting.
That's really helpful. Thanks for explaining.
yes that's what I meant. thanks for jumpping in @cohoist and saying it better then I could!
Don't bother promoting it on social. You'll lose a bunch of money.
If you want a huge flood of subscribers for a cheap cost, advertise your newsletter in another newsletter. best way to do it.
Thanks. I haven't found a similar newsletter in the UK that I can partner up with yet. But also thinking I should have, say, three months' of content and see.
Yeah I'm getting good results with Reddit Ads. I wrote about my experience here.
Since then, I managed to bring my CPL down to $1, although I'm going to stop my experiment in the next few days since I don't want to spend money on a side project.
That was really interesting. I'm imagining the case studies are like the posts here on IH? What you did and what your takeaway is?
You can read an example of a case study on my homepage.
thanks, will check it out.
We just finished an experimental paid ad campaign for a local news startup that uses Pico (https://trypico.com)
The big difference is that even though newsletters is a big 'product' of theirs, they also have a website, which I've come to believe is essential for creating signup and payment conversion moments.
We spent $10k on Facebook using a service called Keywee. They decided to promote articles with highly topical headlines.
Those ads brought people back to the site and got them to encounter email signup popups as well as paywall prompts. We have to finish crunching attribution numbers but it looks like we signed up 1000-1500 paid subscribers via paid ads at a very economical CPA.
We tried doing paid acq just for email signups for another site and it didn't work nearly as well.
Bottom line: More info soon, but our initial results show that paid acq works but to drive traffic to a website where folks are moved further down the funnel VERSUS simply getting an email address.
Hey @jasonwbade would love to see a breakdown comparison between the two. Are you able to share what the subscription fee is?
Mine is designed to barely dent into the spending of an average household (£3.65 a month), which I think represents tremendous value. But if the conversion rate is about $10 (£8.07) - $6.66 (£5.38) per person for ads then that would be a loss-leading exercise and a free trial might work better.
I'm launching one this weekend to celebrate the first month anniversary - will share when live!
$59/year (so just under $5/month). Their churn is very low, so LTV is relatively high.
Good question — I have a newsletter myself (on personal development & happiness) and am trying to gain more subscribers too.
But from the comments here it seems that with effort you can get a cost per subscriber of $1, which still seems pretty hefty. I'm currently sharing my newsletter on a variety of newsletter curation websites (like https://emaillove.com/), and engaging more on Twitter/Reddit/Indiehackers, which could also be a step in the right direction.
Thank you for sharing!
I've experimented with Facebook ads to grow my newsletter and had some success. I created a couple different offers: ebook, case study, and a free course to test out.
I was getting like $2-$3 per subscriber. But since I didn't have a product or any way to recoup the investment, I've stopped.
One strategy that I've been doing the past few weeks is lead magnet exchanges. It can be tough to find opportunities with a small list, so I just hit up my friends :)
Will give this a go! Thanks.
Honestly, I got more luck making posts on here and Reddit than using ads.
For perspective.
Last week Friday I launched the first issue of my newsletter to 31 subscribers, and now this Friday I’ll sending it out to 173.
All I did was make posts to subreddits where I thought my audience would be and I figured they would be inclined to sign up and they did. I also made a few posts on here, and I do a lot of cross promotion and and it seems to be working. I must say, it is a lot more tedious than doing ads.
Yes I definitely agree - people are very engaged here, which is great. I haven't posted to Reddit yet because I read that promotion is frowned upon. How did you do it?
When I say promotion, you’re kinda not actually promoting (I know, that kinda sounds weird) but you’re more like making a blog post in a way.
And yes “promotion is very frowned upon. That’s why it’s best to become part of the community.
Here is an example of the type of post I made.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/h8cthy/i_have_a_curated_newsletter_to_showcase_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Thanks for the example WonderingZall! Just a question with regard to this particular example: it still seems quite promotional - that wasn't an issue on this particular subreddit?
In any case it seems that starting with a question or request with a link to your newsletter works well.
I thought this too. But I wondered whether it was because it was a start up/entrepreneur subreddit so a certain amount of self promotion was expected?
Are you promoting the newsletter straight? Meaning just writing ads about your newsletter?
When I did some FB ads late last year, I was told to advertise a freebie. I made a PDF of stats and sent that in the welcome email. Ended up doing very well on keeping the pricer per subscriber down below 50 cents.
Yes the LinkedIn option was very limited - you only get three lines of copy so I probably didn't put in enough call to action.
What do you mean by PDF of stats?
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I'm thinking about exploring that next but need to find the right fit - I've launched straight into paid, which makes it a little harder to gain traction. Especially when apparently the UK is least enthusiastic about paying for content!
http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2020/how-and-why-people-are-paying-for-online-news/
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I also subscribe to one, which I use for work. But lots of free ones, which is what led me into newsletters. But it's hard to gauge whether I'm being impatient or it is actually going slowly.