10000 email subscribers

Advanced List-Building Strategies: How to Scale Beyond 10,000-20,000 Subscribers

You’re currently reading Chapter 16 of The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List.

How can you scale your e-mail list BEYOND 10,000 e-mail subscribers? What about 20,000? Or 40,000?

Sooner or later in your list-building journey, you’ll hit a plateau where your e-mail list growth will stall. Sure, your e-mail list will still grow steadily, but it won’t grow exponentially any more.

At that point, you’ll wonder “what can I do differently to grow my e-mail list 2x, 5x or 10x as fast?” and “how can I go from 10, 20 or 30 e-mail subscribers per day to 50, 100, or 150?”.

That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this post.

The good news is that if you already have 5,000 or 10,000 e-mail subscribers, you’re already doing A LOT of things right:

You’ve found your Profitable Online Business Idea
You have one or more Epic Lead Magnets
You’re consistently creating Remarkable Content

And your e-mail list is growing by tens of e-mail subscribers.

Nice job, give yourself a pat on the back! You’ve already made it further than 99% of online entrepreneurs.

How to Break Your List-Building Plateau

You can’t really know WHEN you’ll hit a plateau with growing your e-mail list, but one day, it will come.

Perhaps a strategy that used to work will suddenly stop working over-night. This is exactly what happened to Karen Dudek-Brannan:

“For 5 months, I created content on my blog, and hustled in Facebook groups to promote it. That got me to 2,000 subscribers. Then, one day, it stopped working. The Facebook groups got less and less engagement and other people started promoting their content as well, and I wasn’t getting the same results any more.”

Or, you’ll be in luck, and your core strategy WILL keep working well beyond 10,000 e-mail subscribers (Luke McIntosh from Become a Bassist successfully grew his e-mail list through 77 YouTube videos to over 25,000 e-mail subscribers). But even then, you’ll eventually hit a ceiling of results you can get with the time you have on your hands.

At that point, you’ll know you need to change something, as just “creating more content” won’t do the trick any more. You’ll have to go back to the drawing board and create new ways to grow your e-mail list.

WARNING: Don’t go and look for advanced list-building strategies UNTIL you hit a plateau. Instead, focus on “squeezing the lemon” out of the strategies that are working well, BEFORE moving on to other strategies. Keep doing more of what works and putting in the work – who knows, you current strategy might help you get to over 20,000 e-mail subscribers.

Ok, back to breaking the plateau.

Surprisingly enough (or not), the solution to your problem isn’t throwing money at the problem through Facebook Ads, or learning about advanced e-mail list segmenting. Those strategies might have the time and place in your online business, but they’re not the most efficient ways to continue growing your e-mail list an effective way.

Instead, the solution tends to be much simpler.

The Layering Strategy: The Simplest Way to Exponentially Grow Your E-mail List

The answer to exponentially growing your e-mail list is surprisingly simple.

Once you hit a Growth Plateau with your current list-building strategy, layer new strategies on top of existing ones.

Let’s look at a few different real-life examples of entrepreneurs that did just that to grow their e-mail lists beyond 10,000 e-mail subscribers.

This is how Karen Dudek-Brannan grew her e-mail list to over 14,000 e-mail subscribers:

“I focused on layering one thing at a time, and having one paid and one free strategy that is working at all times. Now I get about 50 new e-mail subscribers a day, and a total of 14k subscribers.

I’ll take courses about new strategies, try to look for a specific person that’s good at it, and take their course. I got Melissa Griffin’s Pinterest course, binge-watched the course for a few weeks, spent 3-4 weeks of doing little stuff, 4-6 weeks watching the course and setting everything up.

Then I was in the routine of implementing the strategies. “You need to spend this much time per week, pin this much, and use these apps”. Pin at least 30 things/day, use tailwind – schedule a lot of stuff out, batch it – 2-3 hours every couple of weeks, pins, keywords, figure out how to drive traffic to your posts, during the big batch, just pin stuff. Try a bunch of different things. See what works.

I implement one strategy at a time, and the more strategies I have working, the less risk I have. The more things I have over time, the less fear I have.”

Karen has successfully added layers like Facebook Ads, Pinterest, and now Instagram to her first layer of creating blog posts and sharing them in Facebook groups.

Next, let’s look at how Nagina Abdullah from Masala Body grew her e-mail list to over 16,000 e-mail subscribers (she cleaned her e-mail list multiple times in the process):

“When I started out, I just focused on guest posting, and grew my e-mail list to 5k subscribers. It took me 2 years of heavy guest posting to get there. Other things came out of guest posting: ideas for programs, relationships with people.

Then, I added on a layer of publicity to get extra credibility, got a FOX news interview, pitched a lot to media, a lot of business insider articles, a huffington post feature, I focused a lot on pitching.

I later layered on 6 additional strategies (Social Media, Facebook ads, Podcasts, Summits, Partnerships and SEO) which all helped me keep growing my e-mail list, and I currently focus on the last 4 strategies.”

Nagina followed a very similar approach to Karen – she created 8 different layers of list growth to continue growing her e-mail list through different channels – one at a time:

“I always learned from someone (for partnerships, I joined the partnership accelerator), and in 4 weeks, I learned all the methods (examples of partnerships, templates to pitch), got up to speed, then hired someone to do it for me.”

Finally, when I asked Christina Rebuffet from Speak English With Christina what her biggest “inflection point” in her list growth was, she said:

“It was definitely SEO. I learned about SEO, optimized my videos and blog posts, and hired an SEO manager. Since last summer, we’ve added 10k people to our e-mail list”

Take a look at any online entrepreneur with an e-mail list of 20,000, 50,000 or even 100,000+ e-mail subscribers, and you’ll find that they have one thing in common: They all have layers of list-building strategies that keep bringing new e-mail subscribers their way day after day.

Learn, Master, Systematize, Delegate

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking “that’s great, but I couldn’t possibly create all the content I’m already creating, keep my business running, AND add new list-building strategies to my business. There’s just too few hours in my day!

And you’d be right.

That’s why, to make all the time and space for mastering new strategies, you need to decrease the amount of time and energy you spend on your existing strategies.

The best way to do that is by bringing on new people to your team that can support you in content creation and list-building.

For example, this is how Nagina Abdullah streamlined her list-building efforts through Podcast interviews:

“After I learned about podcasting, I created a system, and reached out to 5 podcasts/week. I later hired a virtual assistant to pitch podcasts regularly, after I did it myself for several months to see if it’s worth it. I choose one strategy at a time, get really good at it, systematize it, and hire someone else to do it for me. That way I built a system that I can manage over time.”

Once you’ve mastered a new list-building strategy that keeps bringing new e-mail subscribers to your business week after week, you can bring on team members to help you with parts of (or the whole) strategy.

The most common hires are:

A Virtual Assistant: To help you with things like formatting blog posts, importing them into WordPress, editing / uploading YouTube videos, organizing customer research, and pitching podcasts, guest posts or partnerships
A Copywriter / Copy Editor: To help you create remarkable blog posts, Ultimate Guides, lead magnets, and eventually even write sales pages and sales funnels.
SEO Manager: To help you with SEO research and optimization for your blog posts or YouTube videos
Facebook Ads Manager: To help you with paid advertising

You’ll likely want to start with a Virtual Assistant to help you take over some of the easier tasks, and later on delegate the work you don’t particularly enjoy doing that’s harder to delegate (like creating blog posts).

As you implement the Layering Strategy, you’ll typically follow the following steps:

Learn & Master: Take 3-6 months to learn and master a new list-building strategy (joining online courses or hiring coaches to speed up your progress helps tremendously), and get it to the point where it’s consistently bringing high-quality e-mail subscribers to your business
Systematize: Create a system you can execute that helps you repeatedly grow your e-mail list (like pitching 5 podcasts a week with a set of proven scripts)
Outsource & Delegate: Then, once you want to add a new layer of list-growth to your online business (or have money to spare for hiring), you can outsource or delegate your system to a contractor or a team member

You can go through the above steps over and over again, and scale your e-mail list well beyond 10,000 or 20,000 e-mail subscribers by adding a layer upon layer to your list-building efforts.

A Word on Cleaning Your E-mail List

Finally, let’s touch on a subject that you’ll need to learn about as you build your e-mail list to tens of thousands of e-mail subscribers: cleaning your e-mail list.

Over time, it’s natural that less and less e-mail subscribers will open your e-mails, click through them, and buy your products or services.

These are typically called “cold subscribers”, and are defined by e-mail subscribers that don’t open any of your e-mails over a set period (typically the last 90 days).

These “cold subscribers” lost interest in what you had to say or moved on to different things in their lives, and likely won’t buy any products or services from you in the future.

After a while, they’ll become “dead weight” that you’ll pay hundreds of dollars for every month (maintaining an e-mail list of 20,000+ people can be expensive), and it might make sense to “purge” them from your e-mail list.

This is a painful process, especially emotionally (as Vickie Gould said when we had a conversation about this topic):

“Cleaning up the list feels like stabbing you in the heart. But if people aren’t opening your e-mai list and don’t want to hear from you, then remove them”.

But like Danny Margulies said, going through the pain is worth it:

“I had an e-mail list of 40k subscribers, and cleaned it to 20k. It was heart-braking but it saved me over $1k/year in fees, the open rates of my e-mails are higher, and the deliverability is better”

When your e-mail open rates start dropping way below where you want them to be (for example, you used to get 30-35% open rates, and they drop to 15-20%), it’s time to clean up your list.

To learn how to do that, you can read the detailed tutorials from your e-mail providers (here’s an example from ConvertKit).

It hurts to clean your e-mail list and it might feel like taking a step back, but you’ll soon see that it’s much better to have an e-mail list that’s actually interested in hearing from you, than to keep the people who aren’t.

Summary: How to Scale Your E-mail List Beyond 10,000 E-mail Subscribers

As we discussed in this post, scaling your e-mail list beyond 10,000 e-mail subscribers is surprisingly simple:

Use the Layering Strategy to add new list-building strategies to your online business
Learn, Master, Systematize and Delegate existing strategies to create time and space for adding new strategies to your business

That’s all really need to know (on a high level) to continue growing your e-mail list to tens of thousands of e-mail subscribers.

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the FINAL chapter of The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List!

Congratulations!

You’ve made it to the very end of this 440+ page guide :).

I hope you enjoyed reading it just as much as I enjoyed writing it, and that it will help you grow your email list by thousands of new email subscribers.
It’s been one hell of a journey, that’s for sure!

Now if you enjoyed reading the guide, I’d like to ask you for a quick favor.
I know a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with growing their email list, and I’d really like this guide to reach as many of them as possible.

If you enjoyed the guide, I’d love for you to share this link to the guide with your entrepreneurial friends:

https://primozbozic.com/list-building-guide/

You can email it to your friends, send them a Facebook message about it, share it through your Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or share it in online communities you’re part of.

It would mean the world to me to spread the word about this guide and reach as many people as possible.

And if you REALLY enjoyed the guide and wanted to let me know about it, please do leave a comment here. I read all the comments.

Thank you in advance - you rock.

Until next guide,

-Primoz

Are you ready to build an e-mail list of 1,000+ BUYERS?

Download the full 393-page PDF version of this EPIC list-building guide, to print it out or read it on the go!

Your Roadmap to 10,000+ E-mail Subscribers

By Primoz Bozic Leave a Comment

You’re currently reading Chapter 1 of The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List.

How do you get your first 10,000 e-mail subscribers from scratch?

I interviewed 20 online entrepreneurs with e-mail lists of 1,000-40,000 e-mail subscribers to answer that exact question.

To get to your first 10,000 e-mail subscribers and beyond, you’ll have to go through 4 different stages of e-mail list growth:

STAGE 1: TRACTION (Your First 100 Email Subscribers)
STAGE 2: MOMENTUM (Getting to 500-1,000 Email Subscribers)
STAGE 3: GROWTH (Growing to 5,000-10,000 Email Subscribers)
STAGE 4: SCALE (Scaling Beyond 20,000-40,000 Email Subscribers)

In this post, I’ll give you a high-level overview of how you can go from 0 to 10,000+ e-mail subscribers and beyond, and guide you to other chapters of The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List that will give you specific strategies and tactics for moving through each of these stages.

You can use this as a high-level guide and refer to it whenever you’re in doubt what you should be doing to grow your e-mail list to the next stage.

Note that these stages aren’t set in stone.

You might find that you can use the strategies from the TRACTION stage to go to well over 500 e-mail subscribers.
You might find that you can use the strategies from the MOMENTUM stage to go to over 2,000 e-mail subscribers.
Or, you might find that you’ll have to move to the SCALE stage earlier than expected, at 5,000 e-mail subscribers.

These are general benchmarks that I created based on the common patterns I noticed among the entrepreneurs I interviewed, but will differ from industry to industry.

STAGE 1: TRACTION (Your First 100 Email Subscribers)

When you’re just starting an online business, the first big benchmark that you’ll pursue is getting to your first 100 e-mail subscribers.

Finding this initial traction will tell you that “there’s something there”, and you’ll want to hit this benchmark within 1-2 weeks of choosing a new business idea.

This stage doesn’t require you to set up a website, write any major content, or put a lot of effort into growing your email list.

It’s a much more experimental stage where you’re dipping your toes in the water and figuring out if your business idea is a good idea to pursue, and finding your first few potential customers for your new business.

The most important thing at this stage is to see one or more Moments of Traction – signs that there is a lot of demand for this idea.

Throughout this stage, you will:

Come up With a Profitable Online Business Idea
Run List Building Experiments to Validate Your Idea
Experience Your First Moments of Traction
Collect Your First 100+ Email Addresses

You won’t need a website or to write a ton of content at this stage. You won’t need to spend months in this stage either.

By running List Building Experiments and experiencing your first Moments of Traction, you’ll be able to collect your first 100 e-mail subscribers in a matter of days or weeks.

You can read the chapters of the TRACTION stage to get to your first 100 e-mail subscribers below:

Chapter 2: How to Find a Profitable Online Business Idea

Chapter 3: How to Validate Your Online Business Idea

Chapter 4: How to Get Un-Stuck With Your Online Business Idea

STAGE 2: MOMENTUM (Getting to 500-1,000 Email Subscribers)

Once you’ve got to your first 100-ish e-mail subscribers and successfully validated your Unique Business Idea, you’ll have your first 100 potential customers that you can talk to and better understand how you can help them.

You’ll also have your first 100 Raving Fans that will give you feedback on your first few pieces of content, help you spread the word about it, and maybe even become your first paying customers.

You’ll then create (and spread the word about) an Epic Lead Magnet that will solve a major problem of your audience and help you attract more Raving Fans to your business.

Creating and spreading the word about this resource will help you make a name out of yourself and make a big entrance in your industry, as well as grow your e-mail list to 500+ e-mail subscribers.

You’ll also create a High-Converting Website with all the essential elements that will help you convert your website visitors into e-mail subscribers.

Throughout this stage, you will:

Find Problems Worth Solving
Create Your Lead Magnet
Learn How to Write Mouthwatering Opt-in Copy
Set Up Your Email List
Get Over Your Fear of Putting Yourself Out There
Promote Your Lead Magnet
Create Your High-Converting Website

If you squeezed the lemon out of the TRACTION stage, you will be able to go through this stage over a couple of weeks.

After you complete this stage, you’ll be able to create your first online course or get your first few coaching clients or to continue to the MOMENTUM stage to grow your e-mail list to thousands of e-mail subscribers.

You can read the chapters of the MOMENTUM stage to build your e-mail list to 500-1,000 e-mail subscribers below:

Chapter 5: How to Find Problems Worth Solving

Chapter 6: How to Create an EPIC Lead Magnet

Chapter 7: How to Write Mouthwatering Opt-in Copy

Chapter 8: How to Set Up Your E-mail List (Plus my 3 Favorite E-mail Providers)

Chapter 9: How to Get Over Your Fear of Putting Yourself Out There

Chapter 10: How to Promote Your Content

Chapter 11: How to Create a High-Converting Website

STAGE 3: GROWTH (Growing to 5,000-10,000 Email Subscribers)

By the time you reach the GROWTH stage, you’ll feel like your business idea is turning into a real business.

You’ll have an e-mail list of 500-1,000 e-mail subscribers, and you’ll likely already have your first few paying clients through coaching or online courses you created.

You’ll also have a High-Converting Website with an Epic Lead Magnet that will convert your website visitors into e-mail subscribers.

At this point, the real work will begin.

You’ll spend the next few months consistently creating Remarkable Content, which will become a core driver for adding new streams of email subscribers to your business.

There’s no “one size fits all” strategy here in terms of choosing the right Content Platform for your business, though the vast majority of established entrepreneurs either use blog content, or YouTube to get to their first 5,000-10,000 email subscribers.

What more or less everyone has in common though is that they:

Stick with ONE Content Platform that suits their industry and their strengths well
Consistently create World-Class Content to keep growing their e-mail list
Don’t worry about pursuing multiple platforms (like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook Ads,…) at the same time

The focus on mastering ONE List-Building Strategy, consistently creating World-Class Content that your readers love and building a Bulletproof List Building System will help you go from 1,000 to 5,000 or even 10,000 e-mail subscribers.

Throughout this stage, you will:

Choose Your Ideal Content Platform
Learn How to Consistently Create Remarkable Content
Develop Your Long-Term Content Strategy

This stage will take longer than the previous two stages, in most cases anywhere between 6-12 months.

The key in this stage is staying focused on your one core List-Building Strategy and consistently building and growing your Content Base so you can continue to attract new, fresh potential customers to your business every day.

The less you get stuck in random List-Building Strategies, the more steadily your e-mail list will grow.

Throughout this stage you might want to take a “break” from list-building to create and launch online products and services (which is a big reason why your list growth might slow down), which will help you bring in the revenue to your online business.

At this stage, you’ll likely be able to make anywhere between $10-$50k/year with your online business (or in some cases even over $100k/year), which might be enough to run your online business part time or even full time.

You can read the chapters of the GROWTH stage to grow your e-mail list to 5,000-10,000 e-mail subscribers below:

Chapter 12: How to Break The Magical 1,000 Subscriber Mark (and 7 Mistakes to Avoid)

Chapter 13: How to Create Remarkable Content

Chapter 14: How to Consistently Create New Content Every Week

Chapter 15: Your Long-Term Content Strategy

STAGE 4: SCALE (Scaling Beyond 20,000-40,000 Email Subscribers)

Once you get to roughly 5,000-10,000 e-mail subscribers, your steady growth of your e-mail list might slow down, especially if you frequently launch online products or services and clean up your e-mail list.

Just doing “more of what works” won’t be enough to break the plateau, and even though your email list will grow, you’ll want to grow it faster.

To break this plateau, you’ll want to:

Streamline your Remarkable Content Creation through automation, systematization and delegation
Layer one or more new List-Building Strategies on top of your existing strategies to create additional streams of e-mail subscribers

Streamlining your existing system will help you create the time and space to master and layer on a new strategy, so you can reach new audiences and diversify where you get your traffic from.

For example, if YouTube is your main List-Building Strategy but you feel like you’re hitting a ceiling with it, you might want to start blogging, learning about SEO or using Pinterest to add a new, fresh stream of traffic to help you grow your e-mail list.

Doing this might take longer than you’d want it to (as adding each layer could take 6-12 months), but it’s what will ultimately help you keep growing your e-mail list to 10,000-40,000 email subscribers and beyond.

You can read the final chapter of the SCALE stage to scale your e-mail list to 20,000-40,000 e-mail subscribers and beyond below:

Chapter 16: Advanced List-Building Strategies

WARNING: Don’t skip the earlier stages!

The #1 reason why most entrepreneurs fail with growing their e-mail list (that nobody talks about) is that they skip one of the earlier stages of growing your e-mail list.

For example, you could create an incredible lead magnet (MOMENTUM stage) and write all the content in the world (GROWTH stage), but if you haven’t got the initial traction with your Unique Business Idea, chances are you’ll hear crickets as you try to attract people to your website.

Each of the foundations you create is the foundation for the next stage:

Going through the TRACTION stage helps you validate your business idea, so you can invest more time and energy into pursuing it (and helps you attract your first 100 Raving Fans)
Going through the MOMENTUM stage helps you make a name out of yourself in your industry, turn new visitors into Raving Fans, and convert traffic into e-mail subscribers.
Going through the GROWTH stage helps you create a repeatable system for growing your e-mail list, that will make sure your e-mail list keeps growing every day.
Going through the SCALE stage helps you streamline your existing list building system and add additional layers of list building systems to your business

If you skip (or half-ass) any of the stages, you’ll sooner or later hit a plateau as you try to speed through the remaining stages.

Instead of breezing through the stages, focus on squeezing the lemon and getting everything you can out of every stage.

I’ve seen entrepreneurs attract 500+ e-mail subscribers in TRACTION stage within a few weeks, and well over 2,000 e-mail subscribers from the MOMENTUM stage within a few months, with far less work than if they quickly moved to the next stages.

Too simple to be true?

This high-level breakdown might sound super simple, perhaps even too simple.

Notice I didn’t talk about e-mail list segmentation, 5-day challenges, giveaways, chat bots or other List-Building Tactics many people like to talk about.

That’s because almost every entrepreneur I talked to didn’t rely on those tactics to grow their e-mail list to thousands of e-mail subscribers, at least not in the long run.

90% of entrepreneurs I talked to used a system very similar to this one and agreed that the other List-Building Tactics were mostly distractions and shiny objects that slowed down their list growth.

In essence, going from 0 to 10,000+ e-mail subscribers IS simple:

Find a Unique Business Idea, test it and collect your first 100 e-mail subscribers
Create and spread the word about an Epic Resource and create a High-Converting Website to get to 500-1,000 e-mail subscribers
Create a lot of World-Class Content through a core List-Building Strategy that works for you to get to 5,000-10,000 e-mail subscribers
Streamline your initial List-Building Strategy and layer on additional strategies one by one to beyond 20,000-40,000 e-mail subscribers

But of course, just because list building is simple, it doesn’t mean it’s easy.

There are a lot of details that go into each of these stages, a lot of mistakes you could make along the way, and a lot of distractions that could slow down your progress.

The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List will help you navigate each stage in A LOT more detail, and help you build your e-mail list of tens of thousands of e-mail subscribers throughout the next chapters.

Continue to Chapter 2: How to Find a Profitable Online Business Idea

Your Turn: Which stage of E-mail List Growth are you in right now? TRACTION, MOMENTUM, GROWTH or SCALE? Let us know in the comments below!

Are you ready to build an e-mail list of 1,000+ BUYERS?

Download the full 393-page PDF version of this EPIC list-building guide, to print it out or read it on the go!