how to get your first 1,000 email subscribers

Summary

email is still the highest-ROI channel in my business. I’ve measured roughly $32 earned per $1 spent on email over time. that’s not a typo. if you don’t have a list yet, this is what I’d do today to get your first 1,000 subscribers.

start with the foundation. before you write a word, lock in the purpose of the newsletter and the three or four content pillars it lives under. that’s what makes it consistent enough to be worth subscribing to.

cadence. weekly is the floor. miss weeks and you train people to ignore you.

tech stack. Kit for the email platform. Card for the landing page if you don’t have a site already. that’s enough to get going.

growth. organic content that points back to a free, specific lead magnet is the base. then paid traffic to the same magnet once your funnel converts. don’t run ads to a leaky funnel.

monetization. start with a low-cost product so you train the list to buy something. then layer a higher-ticket offer once a quarter. don’t burn your list out pitching every week, and don’t be afraid to ask. the list that never gets sold to doesn’t pay for itself.

Transcript

why email is still the highest ROI channel

Did you know that for every dollar spent on email marketing you can expect a $36 return? Now that was a study done by Litmus which is a well regarded authority in email marketing. So I decided to see if that held up to our own data. So last year we hired a full time email marketer and his salary was $60,000 per year.

And we looked at the data and he generated over $2 million in revenue just from email marketing campaigns. So for us that’s $1 spent, $32 in return, pretty close to the study. So I’m going to be going over that today. I’m going to be diving into email marketing and running email newsletters. I’m going to teach you how to get your first 1,000 email subscribers to an email newsletter if you don’t know how to do that.

And I’m also going to talk about how to monetize your list without burning them out. So stick around and let’s dive in. So I started email marketing in 2011 and one thing I noticed on a lot of different websites of the creators who were doing well at the time was they had some way to collect someone’s name and email address.

I didn’t know why they were doing it. I didn’t know how they were doing it. But it seemed like something I should be doing. Ever since then I’ve been trying to get better and better at refining my process for email marketing and running email newsletters. And I’ve been running them profitably ever since then.

And so I’m going to be talking about exactly how we dive in. I’m going to be showing you this framework right here. So I’m going to be going over all the steps today to get your first 1,000 email subscribers and then also how to monetize your list without burning them out. So let’s dive into it. Here we go.

The first step you need in running a newsletter is you need to know your purpose and your pillars. So what is the purpose of your newsletter? Do you have a reason for writing it? Is it just your thoughts like what I do? Jerred’s thoughts or is it something specific? Are you trying to help somebody get better at fitness or nutrition or taking better care of themselves?

Health injury prevention. What is your newsletter about? What is the main purpose and how does it help the reader? That’s the biggest thing. Not just what do I want to talk about, but how will this actually help the reader? Once you have your purpose of the newsletter, you’re going to be diving into your pillars.

purpose and content pillars

So I want to go over my purpose and pillars real quick. So as you can see, the main purpose of my newsletter is to build better businesses and humans in the process. I like to work with business owners who are helping other humans get better in some way, shape or form. This could be strength and conditioning coaches, fitness coaches, nutrition coaches, chiropractors, physical therapists.

If you are helping other people get better, I want to help your business get better. But I also want to push you in the process of becoming a better human through self-development. Because I am a firm believer that if you develop yourself, your business will grow. That is the main purpose of my newsletter.

Every time I sit down to write a newsletter, that’s what I’m thinking about. What’s the purpose and how is it going to help somebody? Within that, I have my five different pillars. So I talk a lot about operations and systems. I also talk about productivity. I like to talk about freedom, both time and financial freedom.

And I have a category I call better human, which has to do with killing comfort, trying harder, self-development, things in those areas. My last pillar, I’m calling behind the scenes. So a lot of what I’m trying to do online is new. Up to this point, since 2011, I’ve predominantly been running paid advertising and also email newsletters.

Everything I’ve been doing has been behind the scenes, actually behind the scenes, not showing anybody. And I’ve grown very large businesses almost fully operating behind the scenes. I had a podcast as well, but it’s not the same forward facing as everything I’m doing today with lights, camera, action, and all the different places I am putting content these days.

But I am trying to grow organic channels I’ve never done before. And so while I have some of these systems mastered, organic content is not something I have mastered as far as YouTube and all these other areas that you can do. So I like to show people behind the scenes of how I’m growing, and that’s one of my content pillars.

So this is the purpose of the newsletter, build better humans and businesses. And then also I have my five pillars so I know what I should be writing about to achieve that purpose. All right, the second step is quite simple. You just have to decide on a cadence. I oftentimes call this your no-fail publishing calendar.

cadence and tech stack

So what is your cadence? Are you going to send something weekly, monthly, twice a week, three times a week, every single day? What do you want your cadence to be and what can you actually stick with? I recommend most business owners at a minimum do monthly. And to be honest, I encourage you to really, after you get used to that monthly, go to weekly.

Weekly is the sweet spot for running a newsletter. Mine specifically is weekly on Thursday. I send a newsletter out every single Thursday. If you want to get access to that, you can go to jared.com slash newsletter or just jared.com, J-E-R-R-E-D.com. And you can sign up for the newsletter. If you’re watching the YouTube video, it’s in the comments.

And also on Spotify, you can actually click in the show notes as well. And you can go sign up for my newsletter to see this all in action, how I’m doing these things. So set your no-fail publishing calendar, your cadence. Weekly is best. Monthly, if you are just struggling to start with a newsletter.

And then from there, you have everything you need to get going. All right, next step three, we’re going to be diving into the tech stack. Ultimately, what do I recommend people use when they are getting started down this path? The first tool I’m going to recommend is Kit, ConvertKit.com. It used to be called ConvertKit.

Now it’s just called Kit. So you can go to Kit.com. And you can sign up for a very simple, very easy-to-use email marketing service with plenty of automations and templates and all sorts of things that you can do. It also includes landing pages. It’s really your one-stop shop for building exactly what you want and being able to send email newsletters very easily.

This is where I suggest most people start. Now you could dive into a lot of different types like HubSpot is one that I highly recommend. But if you’re getting started, this is where you should start. Kit.com, it makes everything so easy. It’s what I’m still currently using even though we have a HubSpot account just because of how absolutely easy it is to run my newsletter through ConvertKit.

Now the second place I recommend if you’re trying to get a little bit more dialed in with your landing pages is Card, C-A-R-D.co. And Card is just a landing page service. It can integrate with almost any email service provider. But while Kit has some built-in landing pages, they’re a bit limited at times.

Card is very inexpensive, very effective, and has a ton of templates. And you can almost build anything you want, something I highly recommend if you’re trying to build a more customized landing page for your newsletter. And that is the tech stack. Kit, really that’s all you need. And if you want to go one level up for more customized landing pages, get Card, C-A-R-D.co.

growth, organic and paid

Now moving on to step four, we have content and ads. So here is the process right here. You create content, you have engagement, then you have an ad. So how exactly does that work? So you’re going to be creating content in some way, shape, or form. Let’s say you’re creating content on Instagram just for this example.

So I’m posting reels, I’m posting carousels, I’m just posting on Instagram. Well, when I’m posting organically on Instagram, I am going to get some engagement. Some people are going to like, comment, share. They’re going to do multiple different things, and Instagram or meta is watching all this behind the scenes.

They’re looking for who’s engaging with your content. And what you can do from there is set up an ad with a specific audience of people who have engaged with your content. This is important. When you’re running ads that I’m talking about, you want to make sure it’s people who have engaged with your content.

That means they like what you’re doing and they want to see more. And then I’m going to run an ad, a daily ad that has people sign up for my newsletter. And it’s that simple. So landing page from CARD is the ad. The audience is people who have engaged with your Instagram account in the last 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, last year you can even go up to.

And this is the simple process that you can use to bolster growing an email newsletter quickly. You can skip the whole ad portion and only use organic content. And when you’re using organic content, just putting it in your stories, putting it in your YouTube descriptions, everywhere you can you’re putting links to your newsletter.

But sometimes organic traffic is very slow to grow. So if you want to put a little bit of, you know, fuel on the fire, this process has been very effective for me over the years. Run the content, create the content, see who engages. Of the people who engage, push them to your newsletter, not only organically but also through paid advertising.

And that’s where all these green arrows are headed on the screen. We have our content, I’m pushing people to the newsletter. Ad, I’m pushing people to the newsletter. Over and over again, you’re going to see that’s the main goal. Get people to the newsletter. Get them to sign up. Because when you have people on an email list, this is an audience that you own.

You can communicate whenever you want to with them. You can talk about whatever you want. Instagram or any other social platform doesn’t like that. You can’t, if you had 10,000 followers on Instagram and you post a reel today, you’re announcing some new product. Instagram might be like, well, this isn’t good viral content.

monetization without burning the list

There’s not a good hook. People aren’t as engaged. So 100 people get to see it. And you’re trying to do a big launch. Maybe your people, your followers actually want to see that, but Instagram didn’t think it was worthy of sending it to more people. That’s not how email newsletters work. People have said they want to hear from you.

And so when you launch something, they want to hear from you. They can decide whether or not to buy. But if you have 1,000 people on a list, all 1,000 people will get that email. Only a certain percentage of them are going to end up opening and clicking the email. But it’s going to be a lot more than the people who engage with you on Instagram or your followers overall.

That’s the big idea behind this. You want to own your audience and not rely so much on algorithms to push to people to see what you can and can’t from your audience. Okay, step five, we’re talking about monetization without burning out the list. So step five, you have to make offers. Yes, you need the valuable content.

Like I said, every Thursday is my personal cadence. I try to provide value in each and every single one of these emails. That’s my goal. I look at my purpose. I look at my pillars. I write something that I feel like will help the people who have subscribed to my newsletter. I’m continually providing value.

But at some point, this is all costing us money and people want a deeper way to work with you if your content is good. You’re going to have to make an offer. And there are two different offers I have people make. The first is a very quick, low dollar amount offer. So this can be anywhere from $5, $20, $49.

Anywhere in that range, you want to offer quickly, within the first two weeks of someone becoming an email subscriber. That way you can find out if this person is someone who wants to work with you at a deeper level. You can offer them something that is low dollar. This can be some sort of an e-book, a short program, whatever it is that makes sense in your business, but it’s going to be inexpensive.

It’s a very low dollar, high value product from your company, ultimately to see who wants to work with you at this deeper level. And then you’re going to make quarterly launches or bigger pushes on a quarterly basis. And this is where you’re not doing necessarily a low dollar amount. This might be a coaching program that’s a high ticket program.

You might be selling a set of packages. You might be doing some sort of big push, and I recommend people do this quarterly. It’s very easy to come up with a reason. It could be the company’s birthday. It could be the fact that it’s Black Friday. It could be a summer sale. It can be anything, but you want to just pick one per quarter because this is going in conjunction with what you’re already doing as a business owner.

the math that makes it worth it

We’re not email marketers necessarily where we’re trying to make $1,000 every single day via email by just getting in a bunch of people and burning out the list. That’s a really bad strategy long term. Email marketing and specifically email newsletters should bolster what you’re already doing. So you have customers coming in.

You’re getting them from different referral sources. They’re referring other customers. That’s a healthy business. Now we’re adding an email newsletter to provide additional value to our prospects and current customers, and then we’re offering things to them that make sense at the right time. So it’s the right offer at the right time.

We’re not trying to burn out our list. If you do it too much, you pitch too much. You try to sell too often. You will burn out your list. People will stop opening. They’ll stop clicking. They’ll unsubscribe. They won’t be a part of it. But I found that if you stick to this quickly, then quarterly offer structure, it will go really well because some people are so bought in right away.

They want to buy your course. They want to know how they can work with you. What additional resources do you have, especially if it’s only going to be 20, 30 bucks, 40 bucks? They want to jump in and do that. Then these quarterly pushes, you give them an opportunity to work with you at a deeper or bigger level, and it’s very, very effective.

Now when you go through this strategy, I’ve talked a lot about how to ultimately run email newsletter. But if you’re getting to that 1,000, you really need to focus on step four, the content, the organic content, engagement, and ad structure. If you do this for a month or two months, even with a low budget, you’re going to get to 1,000 email subscribers very quickly.

Then follow the rest of the steps in this video, and you will also have a profitable email newsletter. And this process just keeps going. Yes, I said for your first 1,000 subscribers, this works for 1,000, 10,000, 100,000. So long as you are providing value, making offers at the right time, not doing it too often, and really paying attention to what your audience wants, and you’re delivering that on a consistent basis.

All right. Try harder. Live bigger.