How do you grow your newsletter? 👀

Great question. I'm struggling too :)

Heyyy ! I've seen since few days that many people like you are struggling to grow their newsletter. What are your main pains ?

Focus on valuable content, personalize your newsletters and promote it on social media.

Honestly, I don't have a great answer to this because I just started my own newsletter and am still trying to learn how to improve it 😅 Mainly commenting to stay in the loop and maybe veterans will let me know if I'm thinking about it the right way I spent 18-20 hours thinking about my customer base and what they would enjoy, then tested multiple design concepts in my community first to get feedback on the content. First iteration, they said it was a bit confusing and there was too much content going on. So I skimmed down the sections to just 2 and simplified the layouts. I started with Mailchimp ended up using Substack for the newsletter because it has a subscribe page and allows for unlimited emails (in case it grows!), but the design customization capabilities are limited. My thoughts around promotion are that content is king, if I focus on quality and increasing the "usefulness" of my email (literally get feedback from readers about how useful each issue is) then I'll be able to identify what to do to improve the content. When the content is super high quality and useful, I feel like people will just share it and recommend it! Even if I do a lot of marketing, if the content sucks, everyone will unsubscribe anyways

I started a newsletter about one and a half years ago called Good Book/Good Bread where I review and recommend a book and then bake a bread that fits with an aspect of the story. I found all the usual strategies mentioned here to be helpful, but I also found a more basic way has been quite effective. I just designed some very small, simple stickers that included a QR code and just stuck them in high traffic places, especially those near bakeries or bookstores. I also put one on the back of my iphone case, one on my skis, and one on the back of my car. People ask me about them all the time and then I can just say oh scan it if you want to subscribe. https://goodbookgoodbread.substa...

We have grown our newsletter to 1000 subscribers. These are things that worked for us 1. Cross promotions 2. Lead magnets and 3. Engaing in communities and plugging our newsletter in our replies

I haven't started yet, but planning to start one by the end of June. My plan is to provide some freebies in exchange of their emails

By Defining the target audience, Creating valuable content, Making it easy to subscribe, Using social media, Offering incentives, collaborating with other newsletters, Using paid advertising, Measuring, and optimizing.

I have been able to grow my newsletter (https://saasbites.substack.com/) by swapping. On substack this is an easy task. On other platforms like Convertkit, you need to find similar newsletters and talk about each other's newsletters in one of your issues. This will bring several new subscribers. We are in the same domain, hence would be more than happy to cross-promote :-)

Sparkloop is a great way.