Our journey to 1000 subs - Follow along!

Hey everyone 👋

Just thought I'd start a thread to show you our journey from 0 - 1000 email subscribers. Sharing both the strategies we use and how long it takes. Hopefully there are some useful insights to be made!

TODAY WE'RE AT: 109 - 20/06/2020 (UK-style date)

About 1 month ago we decided to start a free monthly email that would share trending topics and keywords from a range of categories. The idea was to send marketers a bunch of up-and-coming content opportunities that weren't super competitive yet.

More info on that email here.

I'm going to keep this short and simple, so below are all the steps we have taken so far.

--

1. First I approached 10 of my personal content marketing contacts, told them about the idea and asked if they'd like to be added to the subscriber list and receive our first trial email, and (importantly) share their feedback on it.

What happened? Thankfully, all 10 agreed to take part. I'm hoping to lean on these guys a little further down the line to help promote the email once we're past the trial stage and we feel confident enough that the email is providing great value.

2. Next, I posted on the OkDork Facebook page that we were looking for triallists, if anyone was interested. I wanted to grow the list from 10 to 25 at this point, to have a nice number to get some feedback from, and to make the trial feel a little more exclusive. I also posted on the Hubspot content marketing Facebook page.

What happened? We got more than 15 subscribers pretty quickly from both of those posts, so we hit 29, I think it was in the end.

3. We sent out the first email on June 1st, with a survey included in the email. We used 'Mailerlite' as the email builder is really smart and easy to use.

4. We got some feedback from our triallists - a lot of which was positive! They could see potential in the email, but needed more keywords from a broader range of categories - makes sense. They also really like the additional findings and insights that we added into the email which provided some context.

With this feedback, I felt confident to start promoting the email ahead of the second one coming out on July 1st. Trial 2.0.

5. Both I and someone I'm working with on this shared the email on our LinkedIn profiles, and we shared in a few digital marketing and content marketing groups we're a part of.

What happened? We got some great feedback and response from this and the list shot up to around 75 in less than 24 hours. And because of the targetted nature of the messages, all of our subscribers are in marketing or content marketing, which is exactly the audience we want. A few days later, and a couple of additional LinkedIn updates later, we reached 98 subscribers.

6. We set up a 3-stage email campaign to ask more marketers and content marketers to sign up for the next trial email, and share their feedback with us. For this we used 'Find That Lead' to get the emails, and 'Lemlist' to send the emails. Using our parameters, we got a list of 800 emails to target

What happened? So far the stats tell us that: 529 emails have been sent. 169 have been opened (43%) 31 have been clicked (18%) and 9 people actively got in touch (5%). These numbers are reasonable so far and with some tweaking here and there with the message and follow ups, I think we can get this higher.

There are two more emails in the sequence for anyone that didn't open the first one. One of the replies we got was fantastic and there's a great potential partnership opportunity to discuss.

We also got Converse/Nike signed up!!

TBC...

--

Thoughts, advice, critiques in the comments below :)