Thread by @ecomchasedimond

I scaled an email list from 0 to 500k subscribers in 10 months without using paid ads.

Here’s exactly how I did it:

(Steal my playbook)

THREAD

500k subscribers in a year.

(For context, this was a travel series).

Now, if you work in email, you know how hard it can be to scale a list…

Even some of the biggest ones making 7-figures/year have less than 100k subs.

But I was up for the challenge…

So I accepted, and we smashed their goal with 2 months to spare.

How did I do it?

By leveraging the 4 channels in this thread.

Let’s go…

1. Cold email

Cold email was our top channel.

We built a tool that aggregated the following data from Instagram:

> Accounts with posts tagged #travel
> Popular travel account followers (e.g. NatGeo)
> Accounts people geotagged with popular traveling destinations (e.g. Bali)

And continued collecting until we hit 5 million addresses.

Once we had the emails, it was time to start sending.

Which meant finding some killer subject lines.

Luckily, we knew everything about these people from their IG profiles, so…

We were able to send highly-personalized subject lines.

For example:

> Your {{hashtag}} photo
> Travel influencer
> Came across your Instagram
> {{username}} <> Email Travel Series

The average open rate?

45-50%.

Meaning out of the 5 million addresses, almost 2.5 million saw our email.

Not bad.

Now we couldn’t just auto-sub these people to the list…

But we could ask them to opt-in to our new community via our broadcasts.

And with our highly-personalized emails based on the data collected, we achieved 10-15% CTRs.

Resulting in 100's of thousands of clicks from roughly 5 million emails sent.

Note:

This result was only possible because of the time we put into segmentation & personalization.

2. Giveaways

This was another massive channel for us.

We put together some insane travel packages (free airfares, hotel stays, etc.) that lucky subscribers could win via giveaways.

And every time we ran one to our existing audience…

We got 20-40k entries and 5-15k new subscribers.

To achieve these numbers, we also incentivized current subscribers to share the giveaway by giving them additional entries if they did.

And the best part?

The emails were so good & value-packed (we weren’t selling anything yet) that subscribers from the giveaway would stay even after the winner was announced.

Note:

People think giveaways aren’t worth doing as they result in low-quality subs.

But if you target them correctly and send killer emails full of value, they can be extremely effective for almost any ecom brand.

3. Organic Social (IG)

All we wanted was to get more traffic to our website, but what came from this channel was even better:

A COMMUNITY of people who genuinely wanted to hear from us.

IG was key because of its visual nature.

So, we spent about $10k buying viral accounts…

And got around 700k followers.

From there, we cleaned up the content, rebranded the pages, and scaled them to a combined 2.2 million followers.

Our secret?

We niched them HARD.

We had an account for people who lived in their van…

One for luxury travel…

One for people who liked camping…

And on every page, we gave our followers the chance to become stars.

We featured thousands of people who submitted content on stories & posts being seen by millions.

Which drove our engagement through the roof.

We’d tag people, they’d blow up, they’d tag us right back…

It was a two-way street that resulted in a ton of new email subscribers.

4. Ambassador Program

We already had insights on 5 million accounts from our cold email data, all we had to do is see which influencers they followed…

And ask those influencers if they’d promote our brand in exchange for points (redeemable for free airfare tickets).

It was a huge success, and we were able to leverage other people’s hard-earned trust to drive more traffic to our site.

Note:

Anyone can do this, figure out what big accounts want, pay the price of leveraging their audience and create value for both sides.

To wrap up, here are the key points that allowed us to acquire 500k email subs in 10 months:

> We gave people what they wanted
> We leveraged "paid" and organic audiences
> We created a genuine win-win scenario which led to people wanting to do business with us

[cont.]

> We had high-quality, top-notch content (this is KEY)
> We built a community based on trust

Obviously, some of our strategies required some "paid" $$, but many of them were free, meaning anyone can do this to build a list of at least 25-50k subs.

⬇️⬇️

If you enjoyed this thread and want me to write more behind-the-scenes content, follow me @ecomchasedimond and RT the first tweet below:

https://twitter.com/ecomchasedimond/status/1589673059572908035