ARK Watcher
Big bets by ARK Invest, delivered every weekday morning
I started this as a tool for facilitating my own investment strategy but realized many investors would find this helpful as well.
For the past few weeks, we've been focusing on devising a monetization plan that suits our subscriber base and using affiliate links for products that we currently use to invest seemed like a good way to start.
After 2 weeks of trial campaign, we got one $30/conversion referral!
Growth has definitely slowed down since the shoutout that helped push to 4000, but incentivizing current subscribers to share by sending a sample of the Weekend Summary newsletter that subscribers with 3 referrals get, we were able to push our subscriber count to 5000.
Currently we are seeing around 50~60% of daily added subscriber count coming from referrals.
Reaching 5000 is a big milestone for us and definitely feel lucky to have such a loyal subscriber base!
With the help of another Youtuber giving a shoutout for the newsletter in one of their recent videos, we reached 4000 subscriber milestone! A bit less than our goal for this week (5000) but still incredibly fortunate to grow so fast.
With additional Youtubers in the pipeline preparing to provide a shoutout and by updating the referral program, I hope to reach the 5000 subscriber count milestone in a week or so.
Even with the sudden growth spurts, open rate is consistently around 45% with CTR at 40~45%.
Updated the landing page design to be minimal with iPhone device mockup.
After analyzing the traffic, I realized most subscribers viewed the emails on their phone so showing value prop of being mobile friendly for potential subscriber seemed critical.
Added a referral program to incentivize subscribers to share with their friends to gain access to weekly summary newsletter. Though there are several referral program SaaS options, there wasn't one for EmailOctopus that I could integrate easily, so I just built my own with AWS Lambda.
Preliminary data suggests that this won't be a huge driver of subscribers like it was for MorningBrew and the Hustle but will keep improving the copy to increase the utilization rate.
Long tail from the youtube shoutout helped to push the subscriber count to 2000 strong!
Fixed issues with broken links in the email and will do another follow up with other Youtube content creators for feedbacks to see if I can improve the newsletter for their viewers.
Building goodwill with micro-influencers seems like a winning strategy for increasing subscriber count early on.
When one of the early Youtube content creator I reached out for feedback showcased the newsletter in one of his videos, huge amount of his viewers and subscribers found the landing page and subscribed!
Note to self, make sure to have ample daily email quota at all times for automatic confirmation email and welcome email.
After cold emailing Youtubers and getting one of my colleague to share the newsletter to investing communities he is part of, I got to 25 subscribers with over 50% open rates.
I even got few Youtubers to reply back with valuable feedback to improve the newsletter.
Due to lack of audience I have in typical social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter, I resorted to gathering potential subscriber contact info in Youtube. By searching for Youtube channels discussing growth stocks (and specifically ARK Invest's picks) with emails, I got around 20 emails to start.
After cold emailing said 20 contacts, I got my first subscriber!