3 Steps to actually grow your business newsletter

If you’re running a SaaS platform or any kind of B2B business - stop asking people to subscribe to your updates.

That’s one of the biggest mistakes that B2B startups and growing midmarket companies make. Trying to grow email lists by saying “Subscribe to our newsletter/updates/blog”.

Your potential customers don’t care about your updates.

They care about their business.

Offer people free guides, templates, calculators, anything valuable.

The best way to make people use your product is education.

Education doesn’t mean boring lessons.

It means:

• promising a valuable outcome (based on pain or opportunity)
• delivering it in a format that people actually want to consume
• explaining both WHY and HOW
• offering even more valuable outcome with the paid option
• repeating this constantly

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1 - Capture emails properly

Lead people from your social content and ads into dedicated landing pages or funnels.

Common tactics on Linkedin are:

• “Comment to DM” funnel
• Link in the first comment under post
• Adding your resource in profile’s Featured section

Convert people from your blog articles with dedicated opt-ins:

• Find your top traffic-bringing articles
• Make custom lead magnets expanding on their topics
• For less active articles - use common lead magnets (still preferably as topically-similar as possible)

If you’re not getting enough signups - make the form super simple (just email address), ask for more later. If your signups are low quality - ask questions after email form, but BEFORE sending anything. Collect -> qualify & segment -> send.

A/B test your headlines, bullet points, images.

Example of a clean, simple form - email address, nothing else:

Step 2 - Send sequences, always

Send your resource (e.g. first lesson, checklist, etc) immediately (or after double opt-in).

Continue sending every day until you move the person to a different audience segment (like buyers), or the initial sequence is over (typically 3, 5, or 7 days). It’s like Netflix series, people want to see what’s next.

That’s why educational email courses often get significantly higher open rates. But the same approach applies to every type of lead magnet if framed correctly.

Step 3 - Filter the audience

During a sequence, if a person showed no interest - consider moving them away from your active list, or coming up with a question to understand their situation better.

If they showed any sign of interest, but didn’t yet take an action you wanted - move them into an extended sequence (highly recommended cadence - weekly emails).

There are 3 common approaches for segmentation of inactive members:

• Don’t send to inactive members. Re-activate your inactive list after some time (e.g. in 3 months, send an email asking if they are still struggling with X / interested in Y)
• Continue sending weekly, always, but make emails different for active/inactive members
• Never move someone into an inactive bucket. Treat this as an infinite game where everyone is a potential customer 10 years down the line, and everyone deserves the same main emails. This also applies if you think your activity signals aren’t reliable

Continue filtering until a person converts or unsubscribes.

Need help with any of that? Email me at leon@internetisdead.net