A successful newsletter provides relevant, high-quality content to your audience. Before sending your first email, make sure you establish a newsletter mailing list growth strategy. Luckily, the same strategies you use to increase your overall mailing list subscriber base apply to gaining newsletter subscribers, too. In fact, you might find that increasing your newsletter audience will help boost your entire subscriber list.
Many email marketing platforms don't charge extra up to a certain number of subscribers, which helps entrepreneurs ease into building their lists. Some platforms even support unlimited subscribers, so you can instead focus on strategy, content, and growth.
Best practices for growing your audience
Any newsletter growth strategy should operate in tandem with your existing email marketing strategies. The following best practices will keep the results of both strategies on an upward trajectory:
Produce high-quality, relevant content. People receive hundreds of emails every week. Make sure your newsletter's content stands out because it's both relevant and well-written.
Schedule emails on a regular cadence. Newsletters deployed on a consistent schedule create anticipation. Subscribers are more likely to look forward to and open a newsletter they expect to receive.
Make sign-up easy. Give people multiple opportunities to subscribe by placing sign-up links across your website and social media.
Market your newsletter consistently. Promote the newsletter across your social media channels or other mailing lists. Familiarity breeds affinity on the part of your audience.
Gathering subscribers via your website
Your business website is the perfect place to encourage newsletter sign-ups.
Dedicated newsletter sign-up blocks
When designing your website, you can include a newsletter block that lets visitors sign up for your mailing list by typing their email address into a form. Possible options for placement include a dedicated sign-up area located in the middle of your homepage or in the footer with other contact information. This is a less intrusive way of gathering addresses since visitors need to be proactive about submitting their information.
A separate newsletter sign-up page
Many businesses opt to create a separate page on their website specifically to collect newsletter sign-ups and archive newsletter content. This makes it easier for you or your audience to share links to older newsletter installments and creates a place to share testimonials from readers.
Promotional pop-up
Promotional pop-ups ask for your email address when you've been browsing a website for a certain period of time. From a user perspective, it’s best for a pop-up to greet website visitors after a certain interval of time has been spent on a site or a specific section has been reached.
Offer an incentive
Many businesses offer customers an incentive in exchange for a newsletter sign-up. Incentives could include a discount on a purchase, early access to a sale, or an exclusive download. A newsletter subscription option at checkout in your online store encourages people who are interested in your product to sign up easily as part of their point of sale experience.
Leverage existing content
When considering how to increase newsletter subscribers, you can leverage your existing website content to encourage sign-ups on other brand touchpoints online. Some apps let you share multiple links in bio—including a website link for newsletter subscriptions—across social media platforms.
Social media
If you are promoting a newsletter for your blog, it's easy to ask for email sign-ups via tweets or other social-media posts. In that case, you can share a previous blog post as an example of your content. Plus, people who are already engaged with you on social media are more likely to follow you on other platforms.
Learn about the different ways to collect emails via your website.
Building your email list
Building mailing lists of customers and potential customers takes time and patience. These lists represent people who have chosen to subscribe to your newsletter because they like your product, brand, or business, or they are curious to learn more.
You can use multiple methods to collect email addresses. For example, you could gather information at virtual or in-person events and upload a CSV or spreadsheet of sign-ups to your email marketing platform. Or consider leveraging your main email marketing campaigns to encourage newsletter subscriptions. For example, place a permanent call to action, like "Subscribe to our newsletter," in a prominent place in promotional emails.
Learn the messaging that U.S. law requires businesses to include in emails. Avoid using shortcuts to build your mailing list, such as buying addresses or adding subscribers from your main email marketing list without permission. Those activities may cause ISPs to flag your emails as spam, which could result in being permanently blacklisted and your newsletters being blocked from reaching their intended recipients.
You are required to provide an "Unsubscribe" option at the bottom of every marketing email and newsletter. No matter how well-written and targeted your newsletters are, some people will still unsubscribe. Try not to take this personally—use any subscriber decrease as a learning experience and opportunity to improve in your next newsletter.