My newsletter growth hack: How I grew from 0 to 1000 subscribers 🔥

Hey Indiehackers,

Are you running a newsletter or you're looking to start one ?

These are the 5 things I learnt growing our newsletter from 0 to 1000 subscribers:

1. Your email provider hugely affects your growth ⛳

Choosing the right email provider is very crucial before you start your newsletter. Because signing up with the wrong email provider, will mess your email deliverability, open rates and your overall newsletter growth.

So carefully pick a email provider depending on your goal. From my experience, If your goal is to grow your newsletter subscribers and monetize it through paid subscriptions, your best pick is either Substack or beehiiv.

On the other hand, if your goal is to nurture your newsletter audience and then sell your own products or services to them through automations, Your best pick is either ConvertKit or MailerLite (free plans available)

We used substack for our newsletter initially, but then moved to Mailerlite since substack didn't have the automation features we needed for our newsletter. So don't make the mistake we did and choose your email provider wisely.

2. Lead magnets & Freebies are the fastest way to grow 🔥

When we had 0 subscribers, we tried promoting our newsletter in multiple ways on social media and forums. But the one thing that worked big for us and helped us grow the most, is giving freebies.

If you wish to scale your newsletter fast, the fastest way to grow is by giving freebies for subscribing to your newsletter. Offer a free ebook, guide or checklist that'll be useful for your audience, share it on linkedin, reddit, twitter, And ask users to subscribe to your newsletter to get the ebook.

We've gained 200+ new subscribers in a matter of days by using this strategy.

3. Cross-Promote, Cross-Promote, Cross-Promote 🚀

Use crosspromote dot io website to collaborate with other newsletters. Find newsletters with audience who're similar to you, And cross-promote your newsletter to their audience in exchange for promoting their newsletter to yours.

This is one of the most ideal ways to grow a niche audience for your newsletter without attracting spam.

4. Plain text emails have the best deliverability ✅

Fancily designed emails are good to look at, but they're bad for deliverability.

If your email has is designed with too many images, html sections and graphics, yt will 99% land in either promotions or spam. So keep your newsletter plain text & boring for the best deliverability.

5. Send emails at least once a week ⏳

It's upto you to choose the frequency of your newsletter, but send atleast once per week consistently. And if you can send more that's even better.

Newsletters perform much better and have more open rates, if you send emails consistently to your readers.

These are the 5 things I learnt while growing our subscribers from 0 to 1000.

I'm curious to know what helped you get the most subscribers for your newsletter? Let me know in the comments.