Promote Your Newsletter on LinkedIn
If you want to create successful nurturing campaigns for your network, you need a clear newsletter strategy. Adriana Tica shared her approach as a guest of my LinkedIn Power Lab webinar.
Did you know that only 3% of people are ready to buy anything? According to the Chet Holmes Buyer Pyramid 30% of them know they will surely not buy which leaves 67% of those who are just not ready.
Nurturing them is the right way with regular, non-salesy communication. And the best method to achieve that is using an email newsletter.
Of course, that can be tricky as there are endless ways to nurture people between being too pushy or too late. Balancing content creation with running your business can leave you with little energy to inform regularly. And without a clear strategy, your newsletter won’t gain new subscribers and doesn’t convert your network.
Together with European marketing expert Adriana Tica I ran my latest LinkedIn Power Lab webinar titled “How to use LinkedIn to Promote Your Newsletter” - already episode 39 since I started the series in early 2020.
Here are my thoughts from the webinar preparation and delivery.
Part 1: Renaissance
Did you also recognise that recently created newsletters can be quite powerful? Many solopreneurs rediscovered this medium which many companies already gave up producing.
Most of them struggled with consistency and failed in providing useful value in the view of their readers. But these elements are exactly what drives newsletter adoption.
What can we learn from powerful newsletters?
I asked the webinar participants about newsletter examples that fulfil the criteria of value and regular posting. Here are some of their answers worth sharing:
Justin Welsh: The Saturday Solopreneur
- : The Lemon-Tree Mindset
Adriana Tica: Ideas to Power Your Future
William Choi: Freedom Friday
Did you know that they were approx. 4.4 billion email users in 2023, expected to grow to 4.9 billion in 2027? The Statista research also showed about 347 billion emails were sent daily in 2023, that means everyone receives roughly 80 emails per day. Side note: I want to see the person who nearly gets no emails as I receive surely 160 every single day.
The holy grail for marketers is getting access to the inbox of their target audience. Not a surprise that some online forms or telesales people ask “what is your best email address” assuming that professionals have at least two. I also operate one address only for newsletters to keep my real inbox free.
According to Smart Insights, good open rates are around 35-40%. Acceptable click-through rates are reported as 1-3% - which shows us the importance of clever call-to-action (CTA) at the end of each email.
Edison Mail reported that 59% of those in the US confirm that most emails are not useful, and Gartner wrote that “Receiving too many emails is why consumers unsubscribe.
Emails should be obviously purposeful and valuable to reach our inbox. But how to make that happen?
ActiveCampaign recommends hyper personalisation to ensure that regularly sent emails like newsletters hit the right person showing the right message at the right time using the right medium. Sounds easy but takes a while to practice. This way you can meet your contacts where they go to learn more about you as you have proven you learned about your target audience in the first place.
Grabbing a piece of the newsletter business
Justin Welsh started his mentioned Saturday Solopreneur newsletter early 2022 among others to call it a series and to post at the exact same time.
LinkedIn started their newsletter format mid of 2022 as a combination of their existing long-format articles with an umbrella theme. Once launched, all followers of the writer get notified, same for every episode.
My personal experience after 36 episodes of my LinkedIn newsletter “Learn From Books”: about 40% of the subscribers are not my direct connections. Good to get an active audience subscribing to the newsletter - just we don’t get their email addresses, there is also no proper reporting available.
Many newsletter systems emerged over time and other platforms were born such as Substack. While that one doesn’t connect with leading email marketing tools like ActiveCampaign missing an API interface, I’m happy to get the email addresses of the subscribers (there is a hack to combine those two together, please ask me directly if you’re interested).
A recent article in Forbes described newsletters as a “comeback kid” thanks to the “Substack Revolution”. The authors praised especially “a sense of community that is often lacking in other platforms.”
Compared to blogging platform Medium, monetising Substack happens per writer publication, typically starting with a lower amount as $7 USD per month (in the case of mine called “Writing in Cafés”).
Modern email newsletters
You might want to start your own newsletter for various reasons given the current challenges in digital marketing: social media channels including LinkedIn become more and more unpredictable and seem to be ruled by algorithm changes nobody understands and AI features nobody wants. The feed turns into a spam festival, especially since the advent of AI created content. The same is valid for many emails we receive.
There are a couple of do’s to follow if you want to be successful:
Be consistent using the same timing
Deliver value over promotion
Apply segmentation & personalisation
Here are the respective don’ts to avoid:
Overwhelm instead of less is more
Ignore feedback, better ask for it
Missing customer journey mapping
How can we leverage the renaissance of newsletters for our business? Let’s hear about real life experience.
Part 2: Recommendation
Reading her newsletter “Ideas to Power Your Future” for more than a year, Adriana is the best person to showcase a successful email newsletter strategy. First of all let’s start with her promise: “What 3700+ smart digital entrepreneurs learn every Thursday:”
Real strategy, not hacks!
How to grow your business sustainably
Understand upcoming trends and how to leverage them
Get marketing ideas that don’t break the bank
Skip the overthinking and monetise your business as fast as possible
Understand why people buy and how to get them to buy from YOU
Compared to Justin’s newsletter with a maximum read time of four minutes with one tip to implement, Adriana’s weekly episodes cover a comprehensive approach towards a topic with ten minutes reading time. Remembering the mentioned stats above: her newsletter has 41% average open rate, well done!
The strategy starts with your mindset
First and foremost, you have to be very clear on the topic. For a newsletter to be successful, it has to be tied to a bigger why. Sure, everyone seems to be in a rush to monetise and make money from newsletters. You need to have a bigger why about something that you could talk about nonstop for 30 minutes, without slides, without prompts, without anything.
Then ask about what part of your knowledge could your audience benefit the most from? Adriana started her newsletter as a revolution against “bro marketing” and hacks which are often described as “the easy way out”.
With her 17 years experience in marketing running her own agency and working for large brands, she knows that those quick things don’t work, at least not without a solid foundation.
And creating this marketing foundation for her readers became the heart of the newsletter concept.
Growing the newsletter
Newsletter growth is much, much harder now than it was four years ago. But through regularity and consistency you will grow your subscriber base and help them with your content.
In Adriana’s view, consistency is not just showing up every day and doing the exact same thing: “You have to show up every day and do a little better than you did yesterday.”
This is the real tall in the media space, whether it’s newsletter, social media or anything in between showing up every day, but also a little bit better.
Researching relevant content
Content creators often gather information for months and then share them when a trigger appears. Adriana fills a Google doc with statistics and trends she stumbles upon. When it’s time to write the next episode she just goes through her notes to find relevant material for a story to analyse and derive insights from them, and than add practical examples.
In addition to that she also uses Google Keep as a note taker on the run to capture interesting articles or social media posts to make a note out of it. I observed that she occasionally takes a different angle or position than other content creators as they often oversimplify things and she likes to go more in depth avoiding a simple copy of common knowledge.
Promoting and reusing newsletter content
Asked about the overall time it takes for the weekly newsletter, Adriana comes up to three hours for research and writing plus another four to six hours per week to promote it, including podcasts. She also often reuses parts of the newsletter and their announcement posts.
As long-format newsletters posted afterwards on her website and later on Medium support SEO well, her newsletter can be found easily. That online traction helps with getting new subscribers to her newsletter so it becomes a well-oiled machine.
Part 3: Realisation
Recognising the power of sending regular newsletters with well-perceived value for our target audience, Adriana’s example and the other newsletters shared inspired the webinar participants.
The key question was: “Where can we get subscribers from?”
My typical answer is LinkedIn - and depending your area of expertise that can be adopted to other social media channels as well. The flow runs from posting content for your target audience, getting into direct messages outside of the public, let them subscribe to your newsletter and then nurture them accordingly. Conversion happens with a continued direct conversation depending on triggers. That’s how I described it in my book, Connect & Act.
Where to place your newsletter on LinkedIn
The first preferred place in the top of the LinkedIn profile is the Premium Custom Button. As the name suggests, it is only possible for those members on Premium level.
LinkedIn offers six possible button captions: “View my newsletter”, “Book an appointment”, “View my blog”, “View my portfolio”, “Visit my website” and “Visit my store”. Those well chosen CTAs are even visible in the messaging dialogue with that person and also in the header of a post:
The only disadvantage: we can’t change that predefined text - which by the way gets translated as well according to the language of the LinkedIn profile.
The alternative is using a Link with a text describing what readers get when they click on that link. Obviously it should not be the blank URL, rather something valuable let them click. In Adriana’s example the text is “weekly strategy advice ($0)”. Just those link texts are not displayed in a dialogue or with a post - but therefore they allow freedom to describe it as we want.
The next place scrolling through someone’s profile is the Featured section. Most professionals with that section show their most successful or important posts there. Others use this as a clever way to promote their newsletter, their scheduling link and something about their programs. It just requires respective thumbnail images in 16:9 aspect ratio as in Adriana’s example:
Suggestion from practical experience
The next spot is finally the content with regular posts. What I admire from Adriana’s example: she announces on LinkedIn on Wednesday what this week’s episode brings to grab last minute subscribers, then shares it only with her email list on Thursday before finally writing a post for the public about that episode on Monday.
This consistency paired with well perceived value and individual engagement coming from the CTA questions in the episode itself is the key recipe for newsletter success. Well done!
TL;DR
Here is my summary about promoting your newsletter on LinkedIn:
How to learn from powerful newsletters
Provide value for the audience
Pick the same timing & personalise
Engage with your subscribers
How to create a newsletter concept
Define your why
Add your passion
Conduct with consistency
How to promote yours on LinkedIn
Button or link to the newsletter
Featured section
Post announcements
Want to learn more? Please watch the webinar recording here and read this blog post about how to build a newsletter people actually read - thanks for your feedback!
Gunnar & Adriana
I'm trying to branch out into Linkedin, this really helps! Thanks for writing this post.
Adriana’s 📰 is my all time favourite