1000 newsletter subscribers within 30 days

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Disclaimer: pls don’t report to LinkedIn thnx

We did a whoopsie last month which turned out to be one of the best things we did for our newsletter.

📢 WE TRANSFERRED ALL OUR LINKEDIN NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBERS TO BEEHIIV!

Ok, not all. Like, 80%.

But why?

For a lot of people, the easiest way to start a newsletter is to use LinkedIn’s newsletter feature. And it has one killer advantage: every new connection request or follower gets a notification to subscribe to your newsletter the moment they choose to connect/follow.

That means, people get advertised your newsletter in a single-click-to-subscribe manner precisely at the moment when they are most likely to subscribe.

And it works like magic. You can get 1000s of subscribers within a few weeks if you’re active on LinkedIn (+ you can send invites to subscribe to your current connections/followers and it works because it’s so easy to subscribe, and majority of your connections would know about your domain expertise).

But there’s some big problems with running a newsletter on LinkedIn. We’ll get to that.

In today’s issue

1. Why we moved to Beehiiv

2. How we moved everybody from Linkedin to Beehiiv

3. Gotchas and pitfalls you need to be careful of if you wanna do the same

4. The perfect growth mix of an early-stage newsletter

5. Update on the cohort (spoiler: it’s going beautifully, thanks to the community)

Here we go.

Why we moved to Beehiiv

If you came here from the pre-CTA, you can skip this part. If you didn’t, here’s a screenshot of the post:

TL;DR

You don’t own the audience and you cannot monetize it on LinkedIn (the only way we’re monetizing you people is through ads, don’t worry these are for your own good which brings me to … )

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How we moved everybody from Beehiiv to LinkedIn

3 simple steps:

1. Scrape subscriber profile URLs from LinkedIn

2. Get their emails using a B2B database or just run a DM campaign (ideally, do both)

3. Wait and watch for results to pour in

Let me break it down.

Scraping profile URLs from Linkedin

Use Data Miner.

Here’s a video explaining how you can use Data Miner on Linkedin:

Of course it’s about comments. But it works in exactly the same way for your subscribers. All you have to do is go to your newsletter, and click on the subscriber number.

It will open up this view:

And the rest of the steps are similar to what’s shown in the video.

💡ProTip (VERY IMPORTANT): Select one row only at the top first, verify that it shows up correctly in the Data Miner sidebar, and then scroll to the bottom of the subscriber list. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but it’s important. You have to “load” the whole list in the view otherwise Data Miner will only scrape what’s visible on screen (only 10 rows), and you’ll be scratching your head finding ways to start over (it’s a hassle).

💡💡 Another ProTip: Scrape both the profile URLs and the names of the people. This will be helpful if you plan on running an email campaign. Most B2B databases require both the LinkedIn URL and the name of the person and their company (which, unfortunately, you can’t scrape from this view) to find the email. Feel free to skip the company — or if you want to get creative and do nested scraping, be my guest, just don’t forget to share your recipe.

💡💡💡Last ProTip: Don’t forget to save your recipe. It’ll come in handy later. I’ll explain below.

When you are all done, it will look something like this inside Data Miner:

I know this step looks a bit intimidating but it’s really quite simple. If you get stumped, just reply to this email that you’re having issues. I’ll respond (or probably make a video of the process).

Running an email/DM campaign

The next step is to start approaching these people directly.

Sidenote: You may be wondering, “Rassam why don’t we just put a link to the external newsletter inside a LinkedIn newsletter edition instead of doing all this?”.

Good question. We tried that first. Didn’t work. Why? cuz ~20% open rate on LinkedIn and add to that the inertia of switching platforms and it goes down to 0% conversion.

There are two ways you can do this:

1. Find emails and add them to the newsletter.

2. Run a DM campaign directly on LinkedIn

Both approaches have their pros & cons. But first, how do you even get emails?

It's pretty simple. You can use Linked Helper or Lemlist or any other B2B database of your choice. I recommend using Linked Helper because it’ll help you run the DM campaign too, just in case.

Inside Liked Helper, you can configure an “Email finding” campaign easily:

Caution: You only have limited email finder credits, around 1500. Which … is all you need, if you have less than 1500 subscribers.

It will ask you whether you want to use Snov.io integration to find emails or just go vanilla. I went vanilla because I wanted to test out both email & the DM approach.

The green check is how many emails it was able to find, the red cross are the profiles for which it failed to do so:

You’ll probably have a better mileage if you use Snov.io integration or try any other email finder, because the vanilla version tries to find emails from the LinkedIn profile. So, if they don’t have it listed there, you’re out of luck.

But that also means that getting emails this way is … ethical???

I leave that judgment up to you.

Now you have essentially two sets of people:

1. Linkedin URLs + Emails

2. Just LinkedIn URLs

Back to the crossroads:

Adding emails directly to the newsletter

You can export the emails that Linked Helper found and import them manually into the platform of your choice. For my convenience, I assume it’s Beehiiv.

Beehiiv allows you to export subscribers via CSV (every respectable newsletter platform does).

I recommend creating a Segment. Call it “LinkedIn Export”.

Then send out an email telling them, “Hey, we are moving away from LinkedIn, just thought to give a heads up. Not interested? click unsubscribe”. Something along those lines.

Best practices for the transfer email

1. Give a highly valuable resource inside the email to incentivize their sticking around with your new platform. Otherwise, they’ll churn. We tied sticking around on Beehiiv with two things:

   1. That we will not be posting on LinkedIn anymore.

   2. We will be sharing exclusive resources via Beehiiv, and offered the AI playbook right away.

2. Put the unsubscribe option front and center. Or just leave it in the footer and call it out clearly. These people did not give you their email by their consent, so you want to respect that. If they don’t want to be subscribed to you in two places, they should have the option to unsubscribe.

3. Exclude them from all newsletter editions for at least 2 weeks. And clearly explain in the email that you’ll wait until 2 weeks for them to unsubscribe, if they don’t, you’ll take it for their consent.

Pros

• It’s fast and easy. You just need to import the emails and wait until everybody skips out on the unsubscribe option.

• Bulk import. You get an instant boost in subscribers.

• You violate federal laws while doing so

Cons

• People may find it annoying if you fail to sell the newsletter in the transfer email. A valuable resource + a strong incentive is absolutely critical.

• The scraped emails may unfortunately be … wrong. Or just inactive. Remember these are emails scraped from their LinkedIn profile. People usually put their dead emails publicly (or stop checking up on them because they know they are public so they’ll get trash). So open rates can take a huge hit.

Honestly, we did this for like 30% of the exported list and now we have to run a re-engagement campaign for 80% of that crowd. So, I really don’t recommend this approach.

Run a DM campaign directly on Linkedin

Now this is where Linked Helper really comes in handy. And it’s super simple to configure.

Literally 2 steps campaign:

You can probably add a follow-up message or two to ensure conversion but I prefer to leave it at just the first.

The key item here is the message that you send. You can see the message that we sent out in the screenshot above.

So, did this actually perform?

Well, yes and no. It’s a bit slow. I mean, you can’t really spam DMs. Even with Linked Helper, you can only send out at max 50 DMs a day before Linkedin detects spam activity. Reaching out to all 1000 subscribers will take a while.

Moreover, people take time to see the message. Or to make a decision (which you can influence by following up btw — some people may have just ‘forgot’; I prefer to not remind them cuz it can hurt the brand image but it’s a matter of taste).

But on the flip side, people who subscribe in this way are guaranteed to open your emails.

And if you know me or Junaid, you know we’re both huge proponents of:

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

To sum it up.

Pros

• Easy setup if you’re using Linked Helper (or Lemlist — works just as well)

• Not annoying

• Much higher open rates

Cons

• Is slow. Very slow. Will take at least a month to start seeing results.

The 2-in-1 approach

If you want to do both email and Linkedin DM in one go, you can do that on Lemlist.

I haven’t personally tried it for this exact use-case, but I have done multi-channel outreach using Lemlist before and it’s a delightful tool with immediate relevance to this use-case.

The best part is that the email portion here is going to be separate from your newsletter. So you can appear a bit ‘nicer’ in the transfer email.

If you’re thinking of trying it out, please do and let me know how it goes. The more approaches we have for this, the better.

PS you only need the free trial to do something like this. So, no money involved.

The perfect growth mix

If you’re thinking of starting a newsletter, start on both LinkedIn & Beehiiv. And then do this:

Let LinkedIn acquire subscribers on autopilot for you.

Every month, run your Data Miner scraping recipe on the new subscribers (see, told ya this will come in handy), and then repeat the process laid out above for them.

The first cycle will take around 60 days. Afterwards, every successive bulk import/DM is a 15-day cycle. In our case, we add at least 150 people every 2 weeks to the newsletter. It helps that we are also actively growing our LinkedIn presence as well.

Don’t forget other growth practices for newsletters btw. There’s plenty of other ways to grow. But I’ll talk about it in more detail some other time. This one’s getting too long.

Cohort Update

Just 3 days into it, and dare I say, it’s going amazing. A huge thank you to all the cohort participants 🥳 

I’m seeing high-quality discussions, candid questions, and genuine improvements in posting quality + profile. Just look at this transformation:

Or look at this post transformation.

And the most beautiful, straight-from-the-heart, post of the cohort so far:

It’s a bit long, you should probably just read it on Linkedin.

No more cookie-cutter ChatGPT-esque stuff. Only high quality value posts.

That said.

ATTENTION TO LURKERS: THE PURGE IS COMING.

While a lot of cohort members are actively engaging and improving their personal brand, some cohort members are still in lurking mode. And that’s okay. We know the drill.

I’ll start removing inactive people by the end of next week. That means, more seats will open up.

And we’ll open them up for people who are already in the server. So if you want to be a part of this, just get in:

That’s all for today.

See ya,

Mo Rassam