AskBuffer: How Do I Gain More Email Newsletter Subscribers

Question: I’ve recently started an email newsletter but haven’t been receiving as many subscribers as I hoped. Do you have any tips on how I can drive up awareness and get more people to subscribe?

Newsletters have made quite the comeback. While it’s true that email marketing has always been an important tool for business growth, in recent years the popularity of platforms like Substack has made it clear that this medium is in demand. In fact, the newsletter company recently hit over 1 million paid subscribers and is still growing five years later.

The appeal of newsletters is understandable given that email is an owned channel which makes it an incredibly powerful medium, as it’s one of the most direct and reliable channels to reach your audience.

You may have your very own newsletter and are hoping to grow it. In this #AskBuffer, we’ll cover the best practices for gaining more subscribers and also give examples from successful newsletters. As a bonus, we’ll provide a glimpse into our social media newsletter here at Buffer and take a look at how we recently revamped it.

Newsletters are one way to reach your audience directly in a format that has worked for a long time now. Growing an email newsletter can be challenging, though, so here are some tactics you can use to grow your newsletter subscribers.

1. Create great content that people are interested in

This may sound a bit obvious, but to get more email subscribers you need to be creating content that your followers want to see. Most people already have jam-packed inboxes, so you need to incentivize them and prove that your newsletter is worth them receiving one extra email.

When you’re brainstorming topics for your newsletter, make sure to hit the key topics that interest your audience the most. We’ve talked about content pillars on the blog before, and they’re basically core themes that you always revolve your content around. Establish content pillars for your newsletters that you know will resonate with your community. If you already have a following on social media, you can just pull from your prior posts.

Influencer and small business owner Alison Wu recently told her Instagram community that she will be pulling back from the platform and focusing more of her attention on her new Stubstack email newsletter. In a post announcing the news, Alison detailed the exact content she’ll be releasing, including: