She had 2,600 subscribers before she sent her first email
The question I'm asked most often about newsletters is the most basic one: how do I even get subscribers when I'm starting from scratch?
Today, you'll hear the story of someone who solved this in a way that still impresses me.
In 2018, Mette Will quit her full-time job. She'd been working in email marketing since 2001 and now wanted to set up her own business organising conferences for marketing and communications professionals. But she faced the problem most self-employed people recognise: no mailing list. No readers. No one to write to.
Most people solve this by setting up a newsletter and starting to send it out and then hoping that people will find them. Mette did the opposite. She created something people wanted before she'd even sent her first email.
Before she left her job, she ran a survey among Danish companies about their email marketing. 1,458 responses. She analysed them and published the results as a report, the first of its kind on the Danish market.
People signed up to her mailing list to get the report, and by the time she started promoting her first conference, she had around 2,600 subscribers, every one of them there by choice.
Using that list, she sold out her first Email Summit, 350 seats at Odense Concert Hall. No adverts. No complicated sales funnel. Just a list full of engaged people and a well-written series of emails.
The point goes beyond Mette's story: in an age where AI can churn out an e-book in minutes, original, in-depth content becomes even more valuable. A report based on 1,458 real responses cannot be replicated with a prompt.
So ask yourself: what piece of content could you create that is so useful to your target audience that they'd be happy to give you their email address to receive it?
Mette's story is one of the twelve case studies in Build Your Own Profitable Newsletter, out on 1 October. Pre-order before then, and my live workshop is included. The e-book costs $7.
