If you’re in the email publishing business, you know that growing your email subscriber list is a crucial part of building a successful brand. First and foremost, you need a healthy audience of engaged readers who are excited to read your content.
That’s why it’s essential to keep adding fresh, fully opted-in subscribers to your email list. To do this, most people share their newsletter signup form on a variety of platforms—from pricey social media ads to custom referral programs.
However, we believe native email advertising is a powerful new alternative that gives you access to a high-quality audience of newsletter readers all over the world.
Introduction to list growth methods
Traditionally, there are a few methods that email publishers use to get new subscribers. Each has its own unique advantages and disadvantages for building a subscriber base:
- •Newsletter referral programsA referral program offers rewards or prizes to subscribers who bring new members to your audience. The right rewards incentivize your audience to promote your newsletter. Keep in mind that rewards don’t have to be pricey to be effective. For example, Andrew Kamphey offered a rewards program in his popular newsletter, Influence Weekly. When a reader successfully refers 3 people to the newsletter, they’re invited to a private chat group for Influence Insiders.
- •Although referrals can be a great way to grow your list, this strategy offers limited control of audience engagement. Not all referrals are great prospects or potential customers, so the quality of your new signups may vary.
- •Sharing signup forms via social adsYou’ve probably seen them everywhere: from Facebook to TikTok and everything in between, social ads are a big part of the internet landscape. Many newsletter creators use these ads to promote their newsletters and win new subscribers. For example, the WebToolsWeekly newsletter recently experimented with Facebook ads for the first time. After sharing their signup form in a Facebook ad with a max budget of about $50 per day, they generated dozens of new subscribers.
- •However, this list growth method isn’t without downsides. Typically, social media marketing offers a low ROI compared to other types of marketing. And some newsletter publishers also find that signups from sources like Facebook don’t often open their emails.
- •Sponsoring other newsletters
Email sponsorship is the practice of advertising your brand in an email newsletter. Many newsletter makers use email sponsorship to advertise their newsletter in a similar publication. This strategy is highly effective: booking a sponsorship in a popular newsletter can give publishers access to millions of readers in no time at all. For example, TravelZoo (a newsletter that curates vacation booking deals) recently partnered with the popular AirTravelClub newsletter to secure new signups.
- •According to the Content Marketing Institute, this method works. 31% of marketers agreed that email newsletters are the best way to nurture growth and generate leads. However, this method can be challenging to scale for maximum list growth since it only targets the audience of one newsletter at a time.
The secret to scaling list growth: targeting multiple newsletter audiences at once
Even the biggest newsletters in the world started somewhere. With a combination of high-quality content and a smart list growth strategy, they became industry leaders.
Big players like Morning Brew, Industry Dive, and Hired.org have cracked the code to scalable list growth. These premium publishers know that people who open and click other newsletters are likely to engage with their newsletters, too. So, they sponsor multiple newsletters at once to capture more subscribers for their audience.
How do they do it?
With dynamic email ads like this one:
What's a native newsletter ad?
Native ads help brands automatically run placements across a variety of newsletters—all with a single campaign on Paved's Ad Network.
This type of ad is used across various industries, but here, we’re focusing on newsletter publishers who use these ads to promote their signup form in newsletters with a similar audience profile.
For example, the Hired newsletter, a popular publication for job seekers, targeted professionals in dozens of industry newsletters like eWebDesign:
6 list-growing newsletter ad samples
Need some inspiration? Check out the ads that won hundreds of new signups from other newsletters in the Paved Ad Network.
- Morning Brew
- Industry Dive
- Posttly Newsletter
- Nomad for Less
- The French Digest
- The Fitt Insider
How to create your list-growth campaign on the Paved Ad Network
As you build your own newsletter audience, take it from the pros like Morning Brew and Industry Dive: native email ads from Paved are an ideal solution for stress-free, sustainable list growth.
The Paved Ad Network is the easiest way to jumpstart your list growth with fully custom, automated newsletter ads. Best of all, ad creation only takes a few moments. Simply decide on your budget, set your audience targeting, design your ad, and run it in hundreds of top-tier email newsletters.
Ready to grow your list with a single powerful ad from Paved? Here’s what the process looks like:
1: Define Your Audience
The audience targeting in the Paved Ad Network offers incredibly precise segmentation across over 12 million newsletter readers. To begin the process, you’ll define the ideal target audience for your potential new signups.
If you’re not sure where to start, think about the audience demographics of your most engaged subscribers, and target a similar group. To attract new signups, a tech-focused newsletter like Morning Brew might consider targeting young tech industry executives in the USA.
As you define your own audience, you can target people based on their geographic location, interests, age, employment information, and more:
2: Create your ad
Next, craft the creative for your ad based on what you know about your potential subscribers. Be sure to upload a link to your signup form’s landing page. When testing ideal ad copy and images, our experiments found that emotion-based language combined with photos of people resulted in the most new signups. For instance, check out what Morning Brew designed using Paved’s Native Ad builder:
Once you’ve written your copy and uploaded your visuals, our platform creates a native ad that will automatically fit in with hundreds of different newsletters in our Ad Network.
3: Set your budget
Next, it’s time to set your budget. With Paved, you’ll never have to worry about hidden subscription fees or charges. The amount you spend will always be predictable since you set your budget on a cost-per-click basis. You can set a maximum daily budget, as well.
Here, you can also choose your ad's run dates and set frequency capping to control the number of times people see your ad.
4: Submit your ad
Finally, you’ll review your ad and submit it. It’s as easy as that to run a growth-driven campaign in the Paved Ad Network. Your native newsletter ad will be displayed in your audience’s inboxes very soon, specifically targeting a motivated group of subscribers who are interested in your subject matter.
Don’t forget to check out the Reports section of your Paved Advertiser account to watch the real-time results roll in.
Get new subscribers on auto-pilot with Paved Ad Network
List growth can feel like a chore sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be. With native email ads from Paved, publishers can grow their lists automatically and get back to doing what they do best: creating awesome newsletters.
Sign up for a free Paved Advertiser account to see how easy it is to grow your list with dynamic email ads.
The Paved team is continually building even more Ad Network features for Publishers to help you automate list growth. If you have any feedback for us, don’t hesitate to reach out!
