I grew a newsletter to drive $3500 in sales each week. Here's how I did it.

Last year, I sold Boondockers Welcome. But email marketing was a huge driver for the growth that allowed me to get to that exit. Here are the details of what we accomplished and how we got there.

What We Accomplished

By the time we sold, we had around 25,000 newsletter subscribers. Our open rates were often 30% or more and our click through rates were a whopping 10%. (Compare this to the travel industry averages of 20% open rate and 1.4% click through rate!) During peak travel season, we would see over 80 sales coming directly from each weekly campaign, totalling over $3500 in revenue.

The best part? It took less than 30 minutes each week to put together a campaign. It was like printing money. 💰💰💰

How We Got Subscribers

There was no magic bullet here. It took us 9 years to grow the list that large, although we weren't trying very hard for the first five or six. But here are the details:

• The list was a double opt-in. That means that our subscribers were 100% interested in receiving our updates, but also meant that 40% of leads never confirmed, and we could have probably grown faster if we'd optimized our confirmation process. (See my IH post from a few weeks ago on what I now recommend to improve double opt-in confirmation rates.)
• Leads could sign up on our home page or any of our blog pages. For a while we had an exit-intent pop-up on our main landing page, but disabled it when we migrated to a new email provider and didn't see a huge hit in our subscription rates. Instead we just had a small pinned bar at the bottom of our main landing page that would open a subscription form. Blog pages had a signup panel at the end of the entry - again, no popups.
• Our product allowed people to create an account to check out the platform for free. We didn't ask on the sign-up page if users wanted to receive the newsletter but devoted an entire page during onboarding to asking if they wanted to receive weekly updates about new hosts.

What Went In the Newsletter

The key to our success when it came to email marketing was providing quick, scannable content in our weekly newsletters that generated some FOMO, and in turn drove sales.

Early on we experimented with aggregating relevant content from the web, highlighting stories from some of our members, or talking about updates to our platform. But eventually we settled on a format that was simple and repetitive, but very easy to produce (we were a team of 2, after all) and got results. Each issue contained:

• A short paragraph or two highlighting our weekly blog post.

• A testimonial from a member. We received these regularly so were not generally short on them, but if we didn't have one we could just as easily use a reference from one of our guests to one of our hosts, as they were often just as compelling and served the same purpose.

• A list of all of our new hosts since our last email, complete with a photo and description.

During our bigger growth spurts, the list would often exceed 25 new hosts each week, so putting it last was important, as some email providers would cut it off and replace the last chunk with a link to view the full email in another tab.

New Hosts Listings - The Secret Sauce

These lists of new hosts were really the magic. We had only a teaser with a host title, the city & state/province, and description as provided by the host, cut off after a few lines. And of course a photo, provided by the host. Sometimes these were plain, but often they were breathtaking.

Being able to quickly scroll through this list of new hosts gave subscribers motivation to open the email every week. They knew they weren't committing to a long read, but between the photos and the descriptions of these free camping locations that were available to them if they became members, they were quickly drawn in and would click through and start planning or dreaming of their future travels on our platform.

How We Cranked Out Newsletters

Because we did this every week, manually putting together lists of new hosts was not realistic. We created an internal tool that connected to our database as well as directly to our marketing email provider (SendInBlue) via their API. From there, all we had to do was enter the date we last generated a newsletter. A list of new hosts would display and allow us to filter out any that we didn't want included, and then with one click of a button the data was sent to SendInBlue and populated a template we had set up to create a new campaign.

Coding that internal tool probably took a day's worth of work, but saved us so much time every week and made it easy to be consistent with our weekly blasts.

If I Did It Again

I'm sure that we could have grown our list faster if we had explicitly driven traffic directly to it, rather than just to our site in general. We never directly advertised the newsletter, all leads came from organic traffic either via SEO, social or backlinks.

If I were doing it again now, knowing how many sales the newsletter drove, I would investigate using a tool like SparkLoop to help encourage people to share the newsletter with friends.

And I would definitely try to increase the confirmation rates for my double opt-in list using a tool like the one my new company Subscribe Sense provides.

But finding the magic content that your readers come to look forward to every week is the trick that I will definitely try to replicate with my next newsletter. User generated content is ideal for being able to do this programatically, but there are other great options, for instance, including testimonials or real statistics about how my product has helped customers achieve their goals.

Anything that is quick to scan but can contain interesting surprises or nuggets, and prompts the reader to click through to explore more is gold.