Best marketing channel? Your subscribers

If it’s good enough, people will talk about it.

I hear this a lot. It’s partially true.

Take Alissa Walker’s newsletter Torched which just launched this summer.

Every time Alissa’s newsletter comes out, people take to social media right away to share the newest edition. A great indicator that she’s nailing it for her audience.

But many writers would leave it there and let people talk or not.*

Are you letting your word of mouth fade away OR are you amplifying it?

Today’s issue features three ways you can be getting a lot more shout outs—not just for stories but for your subscriptions too.

* (Not Alissa, she knows how to drive buzz! It’s why she’s picking up so much steam)

Turn subscribers into a marketing channel

The most valuable audience is the one you already have.

I don’t know what marketing poison got into all our brains that makes us constantly look to meet new people in new places.

But there’s a bunch of viral mouthpieces sitting right there on your email list. You just have to put them to work.

Method 1: The post subscribe shout out

What it means: Right after someone subscribes, ask them for a shout out. Have them share why they subscribed. Your readers are proud to support you—remind them that they should say it out loud.

How to do it: In your “thanks for subscribing” email, ask them to share why they subscribed. This should be the main call to action in that email. You can use this as a testimonial AND if you get them to share it, you’ve now reached their audience too.

I’d use Senja to do this (check out my example—you can leave me a testimonial while you’re at it! 😉).

Senja’s a powerful word of mouth tool you can use to gather and share testimonials (I love it so much I work there now on contract and I encouraged them to build this “Share to X” feature specifically for journalists.)

How to automate it: Add the Senja form into your “thanks for subscribing” email new subscribers receive right after they subscribe.

Method 2: The readymade forward

What it means: Give your subscriber an email to forward so they don’t have to think about what they’d say about your publication. Especially good for introverts!

How to do it: Draft an email that you’d want sent to a new potential reader. Keep it short but explain what your publication is and what you cover. Include a top story or two.

At the top of that email, write your current subscriber an instruction like “Want to help keep News-R-Us going? Forward this email to 2 friends who you think would love it!”

How to automate it: Add this as a 2nd or 3rd email in your new subscriber flow (the emails someone gets after they start paying.) Don’t have those? Check out this issue on 5 email sequences you need.

Method 3: The milestone mission

What it means: Fill your subscribers in on the next milestone you’re trying to hit and enlist them in your cause.

How to do it: Tell your subscribers where you are and where you need to be. For example: we’re at 700 subs and we need to get to 1000. I’ve seen this done via website (Aftermath), social (LA TACO) and email (RANGE).

Encourage them to share with friends (and let friends know they’re a subscriber too) to reach the goal.

How to automate it: This one’s a little hard to automate without custom code but on your website, you can streamline it so you only have to update once and it will broadcast everywhere on your site (like Outpost’s autodisplay or HelloBar’s modal).

Our takeaway

Before you look to find new subscribers on new channels, make sure you’ve leveraged your current base to the fullest extent.

These three ideas are just the beginning.

There’s all kinds of stuff you can try like subscriber referral programs (where subscribers get their own code) to contests with giveaways (refer the most and win XYZ) and even having a subscriber write a promotional email 😱 

Look to lean on your advocates before you dig for strangers.

P.S. I’ll be at ONA in Atlanta later this month. If you’ll be there too, reply and let me know! Also I live here in Atlanta so let me know if you need recs :)