AMA with Noemi Stauffer
How to supercharge your newsletter’s growth
Yesterday I had the pleasure to answer questions and share practical tips about growing your email list with the Women Make community. Here are the main takeaways and the different links that I shared during the session.
Listen to the full audio:
Note: my newsletter, Fresh Fonts, is a stand-alone product, thus a product on its own. I don’t use it as a marketing channel to encourage its readers to visit an online store, for example. Even if your newsletter has for objective to drive traffic to a blog or online store, I encourage you to think about it as a product on its own, and share content that is valuable, even if it’s not yours (with proper credits and permission, of course).
What was the most effective strategy in growing your newsletter?
First, I can’t stress enough how important it is to find a good niche.
A good niche is very ‘niche’. For example, ‘developers’ is not a good niche, it is too broad: depending on the products they build, the programming languages they use, or whether they work in-house or on freelance, they face different challenges and have different needs. ‘iOS developers’ would be a better niche, as you can tailor the content of your newsletter to their specific needs.
Second, before pushing for growth, make sure that you’ve achieved product-market fit — or ‘content-audience fit’ as I like to call it for a newsletter.
You can validate this point by sending the Must-Have Survey, designed by Sean Ellis, to your readers. You would need to get at least a few hundreds of responses to trust the results of the survey.
I personally adapted the Must-Have Survey into a Typeform survey that I sent to my readers in an email reserved for that:
👉🏽 Typeform was very handy for this task since it’s easy to use (both for you and the survey participants) and has a great dashboard where you can track and filter answers.
👉🏽 I unfortunately couldn’t share the survey that I used, but you can find the different questions of the Must-Have Survey here. (Thanks Veni Kunche!)
If more than 40% of your respondents say that they would be “very disappointed” if you stop sending your newsletter, you can start actively growing your subscriber base.
If not, I encourage you to review the content and value proposition of your newsletter, and test it, until you validate your ‘content-audience fit’.
👉🏽 MailChimp landing pages, that are free and offer a/b testing, seem to be a convenient way to do so.
After I had validated my ‘content-audience fit’ with my readers, here are the two tactics that allowed me to gain 7'000+ subscribers in just four months, without making use of promoted posts or paid advertising.
1) Offering a *high-value* lead magnet 💌
Many blogs offer a free pdf when signing up for their newsletter, just like many online stores offer a 10% discount on your first purchase when signing up for their newsletter.
I took this idea a step further by commissioning a type designer to create a typeface (font) that I give away for free when people sign up for my newsletter. This typeface would have a retail value of at least $100.
As my newsletter focuses on new font releases, offering a free font makes sense, and also makes sure that the subscribers who sign up just to benefit from the free font will also be interested in the content of the newsletter.
I encourage you to think about something very valuable, and aligned with the value proposition of your newsletter, that you could offer for free.
Once I had a typeface ready to give away to my new subscribers, I created a minisite for it (see below), on which people can sign up for the newsletter and receive the typeface via email.
👉🏽 The sign up box (modal) that I’ve embed on the minisite, provided by upscribe, displays a subscriber count (see below). This provides social proof — I strongly encourage you to mention in your sign up box how many subscribers you have, as soon as you have more than 1'000 (let’s say).
I then posted the typeface, always linking back to its minisite, on different channels that my target audience visits:
+ Designer News
+ Sidebar (the best design links, everyday)
+ Behance (a huge directory of design projects)
+ Font Squirrel (a huge directory of free fonts, most of them of quality)
and a few others.
I also reached out to other newsletters in my niche, asking their editors if they wouldn’t mind sharing my typeface on it:
+ It got featured on Dense Discovery (20'000+ subs)
+ It got featured on the newsletter of Typewolf (50'000+ subs)
and later on a few other ones.
2) Writing and cross-publishing articles on blogs in your niche ✍🏻
Before writing my first article, I wanted to make sure that its content would be interesting for as many people as possible, so I had a look at the data of the past issues my newsletter. I found out that the links that I had shared on the newsletter that received the most clicks were free and open source typefaces.
So, I made it the topic of my first article:
It is now published under my own publication (Fresh Fonts) but at the time, I had submitted it to the publication of Muzli, on Medium. Because Muzli also has a Chrome extension used by more than 100,000 people, when they published my article, it was featured at the top of their page every time a user would open up a new tab on Chrome.
That’s substantial visibility, but more importantly, because I had embedded a sign up box (created with upscribe) in the article, it brought me thousands of new subscribers.
👉🏽 Here is how you can publish an article on Muzli, too. However, if your newsletter doesn’t target designers, there are plenty of other publications on Medium with a good readership, most of them inviting you to write for them.
👉🏽 When publishing articles on Medium, I reuse and embed the sign up box (modal) that I’ve created with upscribe (see below). Because it shows the total amount of people who signed up through this specific box, which is also embed on my website, it now displays that 7,000+ subscribers signed up — which is a really strong social proof, and improves conversion.
I reused this strategy and wrote another article focusing on free fonts for Smashing Magazine, to turn the readers of this other publication into subscribers of my newsletter:
Of course, with the editor’s permission, I made sure that the typeface that I offer for free when signing up for my newsletter was the first one at the top.
I also asked Smashing Magazine to republish the article on their Medium account, which has nearly 140K followers:
Also, a few weeks after its publication on the website of Smashing Magazine, when I had the permission to do so, I republished the article on Muzli, still on Medium, where it also benefited from visibility.
You get the point, my strategy is to reuse and republish my articles in different publications so that they get as much visibility as possible, instead of writing many of them. Huge time saver.
👉🏽 Here is how you can write and publish articles on Smashing Magazine.
How do you find sponsors?
All my sponsors so far reached out to me via my newsletter, as they were already reading it. I therefore encourage you to mention in your newsletter how potential advertisers can contact you if they’re interested in sponsoring an issue.
There are also a few places where you can submit your newsletter for free, so that potential advertisers can find it:
How much do you charge for an ad on your newsletter?
I found out that a good benchmark is to charge between $30 and $40 per 1,000 subscribers that you have. If you have a very high open rate (above 60%) or if there are few advertising possibilities in your niche, you can aim for $40 per 1,000 subscribers.
My newsletter has 9,000 subscribers now, so I ask for $270 per ad (9 x $30).
Thanks for reading! 👋
I hope this was useful. If there’s another question you’d like to ask me, feel free to post a comment below or to reach out via twitter!
