TL;DR: ConvertKit Has Grown My Email List Fifteen fold in 3 Months
ConvertKit email marketing has grown my newsletter list from 150 to almost 2,300 subscribers in barely three months with content upgrades.
And the growth of the list is continuing:
I Love Curating Industry News
I love curating industry news for my peers. I even developed my own content management system — Newsmate.io — for that purpose.
My Feedly directory is about 1,000 sources strong, not to mention Medium, and several newsletters I am subscribed to. And every morning, I go through about 3,000 different articles to pick the best posts on Agile, Scrum and lean methodologies as well as product management.
Thus, over a period of eight years, I have created far more than 40,000 tweets for my two Twitter accounts @StefanW and @AgeOfProduct.
The Dire Situation Before ConvertKit
However, what I was missing until late 2015 was my own newsletter. When I started this blog, I also created a newsletter, based on AWeber. A decent, dependable solution that never failed me once on the delivery side.
What didn’t work out, though, was the growth of the email list. It was slow, barely a few sign-ups per week and I was questioning the whole newsletter endeavor. Until the end of December 2015, my email list comprised of no more than 150 subscribers.
I tried to improve the sign-up rate with an email course based on my Lean User Testing ebook. It took quite some effort to create it and I was rather bullish concerning the expected impact. However, it turned out to be a sobering experience. I could witness the course generating a total of 7 sign-ups at costs of approximately $60 each.
ConvertKit Email Marketing Comes to the Rescue with Content Upgrades
Then I heard of a new software, claiming to provide email marketing for professional bloggers. Not that I would think of me as a professional blogger, but the tag-line resonated with me. Their pitch: be useful to your readers by providing content upgrades to posts.
So, we included the first content upgrade in late December 2015 and started promoting the Hiring: 38 Scrum Master Interview Questions To Avoid Agile Imposters post in early January 2016.
ConvertKit email marketing proved to be an instant success! So far, more than 2,000 people have downloaded the two versions of the PDF and 1,800 of those are still subscriber of the newsletter. I was also approached by Scrum Alliance and the article was syndicated to Scrum Alliance’s new career site.
So, I started creating other content upgrades based on ConvertKit and I have made it a habit to include one with every post. Up to now, my email list has grown more than fifteen fold in about three months. And the email list is of a special quality:
- Low churn: on average, the weekly churn rate is between 0.1% and 0.4% — that is incredibly low.
- High opening rates: they reach constantly between 30% and 40%.
- Good ROI: acquisition costs of an active subscriber are less than $0.35.
So, if you want to build a meaningful email list for your own blog or business, too, I suggest using ConvertKit. Start right now.
Disclosure
The link to ConvertKit provided in this post, is an affiliate link. This means that if you choose to make a purchase based on my recommendation, I will earn a small commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you.