We’ve recently covered went over the many reasons why even paid newsletters should offer a free subscription option.
There are several pros & cons of going with a straight-up free newsletter subscription offer and we’re going to tackle the single biggest obstacle.
In this post:
→ How to set your funnel up to recover your subscriber acquisition costs.
→ Why free newsletter subscriptions require you to accelerate the relationship & how to do that.
Pro: It’s (obviously) a lot easier to convert cold traffic into subscribers when your newsletter is free.
Con: If that traffic bringing in the subscribers is paid traffic, you need a fail safe to recover the money you put into the campaign, otherwise you’ll be staring down the barrel of negative growth.
Solution: Offer something
for sale immediately.
Know how you will sometimes click on an ad offering a product for sale and you choose to buy that product?
And then, upon paying for that product, you get a special offer for a related product at a special price?
The majority of the time, that special offer isn’t there for the company to make extra money, it’s there to recoup the cost of bringing you to the initial offer.
Applying this same strategy to your free newsletter will serve the same purpose…
…to help you make back the money you spend on traffic, so you can keep buying more traffic and keeping your growth perpetual.
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Case study:
DappChap regularly advertises in smaller newsletters to continuously build its subscriber base.
Let’s say one of those ads costs $50.
We now have our recovery target.
The Plan: have new subscribers coming in from that newsletter ad be re-directed to a one-time offer page.
On that page, new subscribers will be offered a related product at a whopping 50% off for a total price of $19.
It would take 2.5 sales of that product to recover the $50 we initially paid for the ad.
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There is always the strong possibility that this one-time offer does not lead to any sales or barely enough to recover a significant portion of your ad spend.
That’s where your welcome email comes in to lay the groundwork for your next shot at recovering your ad spend.
You see, cold traffic is cold because there is little to no familiarity with who you are and what you do.
When people know, like and trust you, selling becomes a lot easier.
That’s why you should NEVER settle for a standard welcome email.
The “welcome email conundrum” is this: they are absolutely necessary…
…but since everyone uses them, subscribers tend to have “welcome blindness”.
You have no choice but to do something different to get people opening and engaging with your email.
Here’s an example of an opening line in a welcome email that immediately sets the tone for a different attitude and approach:
Your welcome email should:
→ Stand out from the crowd.
→ Encourage new subscribers to respond to you with questions (not just great for relationship building, but also helps your deliverability rates).
→ Increase their exposure to your brand by having them follow your socials.
Remember the rule of 7 touches.
The more frequently you are seen, the easier it is for you to be remembered.
This relationship building will allow you to present subscribers with a pricier offer than your first one-time offer.
When You Stop Moving,
You Start Dying
That was something one of the first marketers I learned from told me and it applies 100% to your free newsletter subscription offer.
Growth is the only path forward. Money is the key to that growth. Making back the money you spent on traffic is essential.