One email subscriber is worth 1,000 followers – let’s get that out of the way first. But not all subscribers are created equal. They vary greatly in quality. Here’s my email subscriber tier list.
S Tier: Customers
Buyers buy. Someone who has bought from you already is far more likely to buy again. They are also a lot easier to sell to. If you could only fill your email list with buyers, that would be perfect. My personal daily email only goes out to customers. And the only way you can get on my personal list is by buying something from one of my businesses: Dropkick Copy, Copyskills or MuslimMan.
However, only letting buyers on your list isn’t practical. For one thing, your top-of-funnel marketing will have to work overtime to convert your audience into buyers. For the second, you’ll deprive yourself of the many sales that come from building a relationship with your subscribers. So your list will always be a mix of non-customers and customers.
A Tier: Affiliate Bonus Claimants
These are people who’ve bought an affiliate offer you promote, and because you’ve offered exclusive bonuses if they buy using your link, end up on your list. The way I like to do this:
- Tell people to email me a copy of their receipt when they buy
- Have a form that triggers an automation which delivers their bonuses
- Manually enter their details into the form (this can also be automated)
Because they pay – and you get paid via affiliate commissions – to get on your list, bonus claimants are as good as customers. I haven’t included them in S Tier because they may only want your bonuses and have no interest in buying any of your products. Still, once they’re on your list you can develop a relationship with them, and they may eventually buy.
B Tier: Lead Magnet Getters
Offering something for free in exchange for their email is the most common way to grow your list. The problem with lead magnets is many people only subscribe to get the freebie and don’t care to engage with your emails. This leads to a lot of low-quality “gray mail” subscribers who don’t open your emails and don’t bother to unsubscribe.
The way to resolve this is to choose your lead magnet wisely. You want something that is only valuable to potential customers and useless to everyone else. We’ll talk more about lead magnets in lesson two of this course, which you’ll get tomorrow.
C Tier: Newsletter Opt-ins
If you don’t have a lead magnet to offer you can still grow a sizable list. Many businesses also have a secondary newsletter opt-in CTA to collect subscribers who are generally interested in hearing from them but not interested in the lead magnet.
The problem with these subscribers is they are unqualified. Anyone can join your list. While this is true for lead magnets also, the freebie being offered acts as a psychological filter and adds some friction to the signup process.
Sometimes, newsletter opt-ins can be better than lead magnet getters. This is particularly true if you have a personal brand or a themed newsletter. You know they’re signing up because they want to hear from you.
D Tier: Referral Signups
This is specific to referral programs, i.e. offering rewards for referring new subscribers. I’m not talking about word-of-mouth referrals. Referral programs are often abused. Even with fraud-detection in place, that doesn’t stop subscribers from referring real people who have little to no interest in what you have to offer.
A referral program makes sense if you monetize your newsletter via ads. In this case you want as many email addresses as possible. More subscribers equal more impressions and clicks, which equal more revenue.
E Tier: Recommendation Engines
If you’ve subscribed to a newsletter on Substack, beehiiv or ConvertKit, you’ve probably seen a pop-up recommending other newsletters to sign up for. There are also third-party tools that do this, like SparkLoop’s Upscribe. These recommendations happen as part of the signup funnel or within emails that get sent out. Some newsletter owners will recommend your list for free if you’re friends with them or you ask nicely. Or you can pay them to promote you – it’s an advertisement.
Recommendation engines are similar to co-registration (below), but here the subscriber is given the semblance of a choice of which other newsletters they’d like to opt-in to.
Any newsletter owner who has tracked the engagement of recommendation engine subscribers are shit. The reason is that many subscribers aren’t paying attention and just want to get the signup process over with, so they end up joining a bunch of newsletters they have no intention of reading. Not only that, subscribers have a finite amount of attention to give. What happens when 5 different newsletters show up in their inbox? Who are they going to read? They’ll read the one they originally signed up for. Or they won’t read any of you.
You can mitigate this quality issue someone if you advertise, i.e. pay newsletters to recommend you, and set strict conditions on the type of subscribers you’ll pay for. E.g. I’ll only pay for subscribers from the USA and only if they open X emails in two weeks.
The corollary is also worth pointing out. If you are a newsletter owner, do not use recommendation engines. You worked hard to earn your subscribers’ attention. Don’t squander it for a quick buck.
F Tier: Co-Registration
Co-registration is when a person signs up on one form and is opted in to multiple email lists. An example of this is a contest where a number of businesses sponsor prizes and giveaways. The giveaways are the lead magnet. You submit your info for a chance to win. Your email address is shared with all the sponsors. Another example is when a business has several newsletters and when you opt-in to one, they subscribe you to them all. In many cases, the entity running the co-registration promo does not inform or make it abundantly clear that a person will be opted-in to multiple email lists when they subscribe.
As you can imagine, this is an awful experience for the subscriber whose inbox is gang rayped by dozens of emails from organizations or people to whom they had no intention of signing up. They end up mass-unsubscribing or reporting the emails as spam. Or they become gray mail, dead-weight subscribers who don’t open, read, click or unsubscribe. How’s that for a return on investment?
Now go read your bonus lesson. The subject line is “[7LBL] Bonus tip 1: Avoid this sales-killing mistake.”