Issue #229 All About Email

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #229 of All About Email!

Last week was about turning your emails into a live experiment. 🧪

This week is a little bit of rare self-indulgence, but I know you will find it valuable. How I am growing my newsletter organically with LinkedIn being a primary channel.

Let’s go! 👇

Last week, I talked about your emails becoming a live experiment as you look to improve:

In the same way, my email growth strategy has been one big experiment, growing my newsletter organically.

🤑 No paid acquisition in sight. No paid subscriber referrals, no paid ads, and definitely no purchasing lists.

That makes growth hard and slow, at least in my experience, and I'm fine with that. It keeps me on my toes and helps me find new ways to grow my newsletter without paying for that growth. 🧪

💡 Social media is a great way to grow your newsletter organically. However, you can be on all platforms at once, so you need to:

🧪 That last one is very important, as you can then build cool dashboards to help you make accurate decisions, more on that later.

I currently focus on three social media platforms for growing my newsletter:

After an initial bump, Bluesky has quickly died off, and most of my engagement there happens around SEO and WordPress or WooCommerce.

🚨 Twitter (X) used to be brilliant for me, but over the last two years, most of my email audience and peers have gone, and engagement has dropped off a cliff for my email-related posts (again, my posts about WordPress or WooCommerce thrive).

🎉 Then there’s LinkedIn, which did the exact opposite of Twitter (X). Now my email-related content performs best there, and my overall engagement across all social media platforms is best on LinkedIn.

Let’s get the negatives out of the way first:

However, here’s the thing: for all the negatives, LinkedIn has an incredible email community!

✅ My strategy is not earth-shattering; it's simple, it works for me, and it could work for you (I use the free version of LinkedIn). It’s a weekly cycle of rinse and repeat:

💡 I am also active on LinkedIn regularly (apart from the weekends), building connections, engaging in industry-related conversations, and that has an impact, too.

Consistency and patience bring results.

After two-ish years of doing this consistently, the results speak for themselves.👇

LinkedIn is my highest-quality channel. It makes up 25.3% of my total base but outperforms across every engagement metric:

🎉 All the LinkedIn sources combined make it my biggest newsletter growth driver, ahead of my own website (which is quite, not sure if that’s relevant), and in_profile stands as my number 2 growth channel on its own.

❤️ It’s hard not to love the type of subscribers LinkedIn is sending me:

🐝 If you would like to dig in a little bit more (it’s fascinating), I had Claude build a dashboard using the JSON data from Beehiiv.

💡 LinkedIn might not be the platform for you, {{first_name|friend}}. That’s fine, and takes us back to the point at the start of this email about finding the social media channel(s) that work for you and focusing on them.

But, whatever social media platform(s) you choose to focus on to grow your newsletter, the key is consistency; you’ve got to show up and invest the time.

That’s it for this week. 👋

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋