Intro
"We add 1'000+ new subscribers every day... for free!"
.. that's what a newsletter growth manager casually told me last week.
She can't share publicly (company policy). But I pressed hard and got you the full story with names/brands removed.
Which is lucky... because I've never heard of anyone growing like this before!
Let's dive in 👇
Background Info
The newsletter in question is a "personal finance" newsletter for Gen Z.
It sends weekly, and is monetized via sponsorships and partnering with brands and financial institutions. They also have a popular app, for which the newsletter works as a funnel.
The newsletter's target audience: Anyone currently enrolled in a US college.
The Growth Tactic
Ok so let's get into the details of how this newsletter is adding thousands of subscribers per day for free.
Here's their 3 step process:
1 Recruit ambassadors
The newsletter team "recruits" student ambassadors at colleges all across the US.
These ambassadors are paid on a performance basis: $1 per student they sign up to the newsletter.
The first ambassadors were friends of friends. Now, as they scale to thousands of ambassadors, they are recruited from within their existing pool of newsletter subscribers.
2 Ambassadors follow the playbook
New ambassadors are given an exact playbook to follow (with scripts and examples).
They are told to target large classes where they can reach hundreds/thousands of students at once.
In those classes (at the beginning or during breaks), their job is to go to the front of the class and invite all their classmates to sign up for the newsletter.
To maximize signups, the ambassadors are trained to do 2 smart things:
- They hold up a big QR code on a sign — making it easy for students to subscribe
- They run a giveaway — at every college the newsletter gives away a macbook to one lucky subscriber at random
Combined with a strong "hook" for the newsletter, this works super well.
Ambassadors regularly convert hundreds of students into subscribers each time they pitch a class.
With tens (soon to be hundreds) of active ambassadors, the end result is thousands of new subscribers per day.
3 Earn back the acquisition cost
So far, this growth tactic doesn't seem very "free".
Yes, the newsletter is adding thousands of subscribers per day. But they're also paying for them...
- $1 per subscriber to the ambassador
- ~$0.30 per subscriber in giveaway prizes (the macbook)
That's an acquisition cost of $1.30 per new subscriber.
So how's it "free"?
That's the really smart, innovative part: Paid recommendations arbitrage.
When students subscribe to the newsletter, they see a pop-up with recommendations for other newsletters (like this one from The Neuron newsletter):
These recommended newsletters pay a small amount — $1-5 — for each engaged new subscriber the original newsletter refers to them.
Now, most students who subscribe don't opt into (many) recommendations. And many who do don't go on to become engaged, valuable readers of them.
But it's still enough to earn the newsletter ~$1.40 per new subscriber on average.
That's $0.10 more than the $1.30 it cost to acquire the subscriber... making them (technically) free!
What to steal for your own newsletter
You probably don't have a newsletter aimed at college kids. So you can't just copy and paste this growth tactic directly.
But there's a lot you can steal:
- local newsletters: why not try this tactic, but instead of student ambassadors, pay kids to put flyers through letterboxes?
- all newsletters: how about trying this same tactic with influencers on social media? Giveaway video --> manychat to automate sharing the newsletter signup link --> paid recommendations to cover the cost of the influencer + prize
- newsletters growing with meta ads: reduce your cost-per-acquisition by up to 100% by adding a paid recommendations widget into your signup flow
How can you adapt this to grow your own newsletter faster and more affordably?
