Thread by @ecomchasedimond

How I Got 500k Email Subscribers in 10 Months:

Plus lessons on how to get MASSIVE open rates, devoted subscribers and make serious email $$$.

//Thread//

People don't want to give you their email.

With so much garbage, they're skeptical of everything that lands in their inbox.

If you want them to love (and buy from) you, there’s only one solution:

Value.

You have to bring so much value that they will EXPECT you.

But how?

Good question.

By extensive research.

Example:

We wanted to build an email travel series.

So we asked ourselves: "What do these people want?"

We interviewed,

We asked,

We researched,

And finally the idea came to us:

An email travel series where we promise to transport you to far off destinations right from your inbox.

We had 4 acquisition channels:

Cold Email
Giveaways
Organic Social
Ambassador program

We'll explore each of their roles in getting us 500,000 subs:

1) Cold Email:

This was our top channel.

We had a tool that built aggregated data from Instagram:

-Accounts people followed
-Posts with #travel
-Accounts people geotagged (i.e. Bali, Indonesia)

So we started scraping until we had a number we were comfortable with...

Total addresses scraped?

5 Million.

We knew everything on these (already public) profiles.

This allowed us to send highly personalized subject lines:

-Your (hashtag) photo
-Travel influencer
-Came across your Instagram
-(username) <> The Discoverer

Average open rate?

45-50%

We can't sub those 5 million people,

But we could ask them to via massive broadcasts.

With 10-15% CTR's,

We managed to acquire about 200K subscribers from roughly 5M emails sent

Lesson:

People like feeling important.

Genuine personalization goes a long way…

Channel 2: Giveaways

Another massive channel.

We put together some travel packages that lucky subscribers could win via giveaways.

Who doesn’t love free airfare tickets and hotel stays?

Every time we ran one of those we got 20-40k entries and 5-15k new subscribers.

How?

By incentivizing people to share.

If they got someone to give us their email, they got an additional entry into the giveaway.

Worked like a charm because it was a true win-win scenario.

In ecom, giveaways are a MASSIVE hit or miss.

We ran the risk of losing money if this didn’t work.

Fortunately for us, people were really interested in travel and the response was great.

Lesson:

Give first, ask second.

ALWAYS.

Channel 3: Organic Social (Instagram and Facebook)

All we wanted was to get more traffic to our website.

But what came from these two networks was even better:

A COMMUNITY of people who wanted to hear from us.

Instagram:

We bought a bunch of viral accounts,

Spent about $10k and got about 700k followers.

And after cleaning up the content and rebranding, we created a whole network of accounts.

The secret?

We niched them HARD.

We had accounts for people that slept in their van.

Other for luxury travel.

People who liked camping…

All in all, we got a total of 2.5 Million total followers within our network.

The following and the traffic were great.

But our secret weapon was the community aspect.

We featured thousands of our own people.

Everyone loved it because they could be seen by MILLIONS.

Stories, posts, highlights…

If you wanted to be famous we could make you famous.

Facebook:

We focused on Facebook Groups, promoted via email.

Then it grew organically due to the quality.

We had close to 30k members, with about 35% of them brand new to the community.

Lesson:

A community creates trust.

Trust creates revenue.

Build a community.

Channel 4: Ambassador Program

We already had data on 5 million accounts (remember?)

All we had to do is see who they followed,

Reach out to these influencers,

And ask them if they’d promote our brand in exchange for points that could be redeemed for free airfare tickets.

Lesson:

You can leverage other people’s hard-earned trust, if you know what to give in return.

Figure out what big accounts want.

Pay the price of leveraging their audience.

And convert that into true value for both of you.

Conclusion:

This is how we grew to 500k email subs in 10 months:

-We gave people what they wanted
-We leveraged paid and organic audiences
-Genuine win-win scenario led to people wanting to do business with us
-Top-notch content.
-Built a community based on trust.

Building this wasn’t easy, but it was simple:

Find a need. Solve that need. At scale.

If you enjoyed this thread, please like every tweet and retweet the top one.

Thanks for reading!

-Chase

I can make you money with email marketing.

Or so I’ve been told by 5,016 people who receive my weekly email.

Short reads. Unlimited upside.

Sign up here:

chasedimond.com/chase-email-ne…

Is your store ready for Q4?

This is your BIGGEST opportunity:

Why leave money on the table and wait another year?

I’ve sold $50MM for my clients and put every lesson on a course.

It's hard NOT to make thousands and thousands of dollars with this:

chasedimond.podia.com