An honest review of The Sample for free newsletter traffic growth

Note: for full transparency, The Sample has a referral program where any referrals result in increased exposure for your newsletter. Any links to The Sample in this review include my own referral link! This means if you sign up to The Sample using a link on this page, then my newsletter gets a bit more exposure.

The Sample is a newsletter recommender of sorts that sends out samples of different newsletters to subscribers. If someone sees a sample from your newsletter, they have the opportunity to subscribe to you. This is entirely free, unless you opt to pay The Sample to boost your exposure. I have not done (nor do I plan on doing) the paid exposure route. This write-up represents my experience with the free service.

Setup

Setup for The Sample was really easy. When you sign up for the site, they give you a unique email address to add as a subscriber to your newsletter. Once it's added, that email address will receive future newsletters and distribute it to The Sample subscribers (supposedly only subscribers interested in the sorts of content you write about).

Stats

I have been using The Sample for 10 days now. My stats are as follows:

Newsletter forwards: 360
Newsletter opens: 164
Newsletter subscribes: 7

Analysis

First, let's talk total forwards. 360 in 10 days? Really not bad at all for a completely free service! That's 360 sets of eyes on my email to decide whether to read and/or subscribe to it.

Next, the open rate. 47%? Excellent! These are pretty cold leads, so getting almost half of the email recipients to subscribe seems like a big win to me.

Finally, I'll talk about the number we'd care most about: subscribes. On its face, seven subscribers in 10 days is just okay. That being said, it was seven completely free subscribers. That's actually not bad. If this rate can be assumed for an entire year, that's a couple hundred subscribers, per year, for free.

Remaining questions

I have a few remaining questions about the service that I'll probably learn over time:

What is the quality of subscribers from the service? It feels like anyone using The Sample to find newsletters will quickly become inundated with newsletters and won't necessarily open all of them. Fortunately, Substack has some stats I can export and analyze over time to see how engaged users from different sources are.
Will The Sample keep working? I mentioned before that if the rate can be assumed for an entire year then it'd be a couple hundred subscribers. But is that realistic? At some point, I suspect this might hit a plateau.

Conclusions

I'm going to keep using The Sample because setup was pretty simple and now it just keeps working without intervention. When I get a bit more data on the quality of subscribers, I'm going to do a follow-up post here.

If you appreciated this review and want to give The Sample a try, please use my referral link here so I can get a bit of extra newsletter promo out of it: The Sample.

Cheers!