How to grow your email list (fast) ⚡️

Hello everybody, welcome back to Moodboard 🌴

Today, I thought I’d give you a glimpse into the newsletter growth playbook that we’ve used to acquire 1.5M+ high-quality subscribers across the 30+ partners that we’ve collaborated with at Tailwind.

If you want to grow (and make more money from) your email list, following even 1/3 of the advice in this edition will put you ahead of 99% of operators.

Let's get into it 👇

Okay, we’ll break strategies into two basic categories (and you should absolutely utilize both):

1. Organic: repurposing newsletter content for distribution across socials, and pointing any and all discovery channels to your email list.

2. Paid: optimizing for high quality subscribers that are qualified as your ICP.

The Organic Growth Strategy

The simplest way to grow your email list is to repurpose all newsletter content for distribution across your social channels.

Turn it into a LinkedIn post, a TikTok script, an X thread, a YouTube concept, etc.

To get a bit more tactical, here's one way a single edition can become a growth machine:

Gate the juiciest part. This is easy in Beehiiv. You drop a subscriber break widget into the edition right before the most valuable section (the full prompt, the complete workflow, the template). Non-subscribers can read the setup and see exactly what they're about to get, but they have to enter their email to get the solution.

Promote it with a comment-to-get post. You've seen these all over LinkedIn: "Comment WORKFLOW and I'll send it to you." There's a reason they're everywhere. They work. Every comment pushes the post into that commenter's network, so reach builds as the comments stack up. If LinkedIn isn’t your thing, we’ve also worked with operators that are doing this on Instagram to great success (using a tool like Manychat to automate the process).

Send the DMs manually. When the comments roll in, I DM each person myself (or have someone on my team do it). The DM is nothing fancy: a quick hello and the link to the article. The DMs are also a great opportunity to connect 1-on-1 with interesting people in your field or niche. It may even provide a chance for you to get an initial conversation started with a potential customer/client!

This is the exact strategy we used to grow Moodboard from 0 -> 1,000 subs in just 27 days. We only did 4 of these LinkedIn posts (each based on the first 4 editions of the newsletter) to achieve that growth.

The biggest one (giving away our entire AI-assisted ad creation workflow) did 3,529 comments and 234,000+ impressions on its own.

With the sheer variety of AI tools, the power of the latest models, and the agentic abilities we've all been gifted with tools like Claude Cowork, OpenClaw, and now Grok Bot, there is literally no excuse to not be prolific as hell if you create any form of thoughtful content.

Put a ton of effort into the first asset. Then chop it up for distribution across every other channel.

If you've been with us for a while, you may have seen one of the dozens of workflows I've sent out for this exact purpose.

Here's a selection:

• Turn your content into a comment-to-get post (a 3-step system for transforming newsletters into the exact format mentioned above)

• A Claude skill that creates on-brand infographics 📊 (feed it your content, get five infographics to test)

• A prompt that turns content into viral posts (using 8 emotions) (a 779-word prompt that extracts the most shareable insights from any content)

The Paid Strategy

Organic coverage is table stakes. If you want to pour fuel on the fire, let's talk paid growth.

To simplify things for you, I'd recommend Meta Ads. We've managed subscriber acquisition campaigns on Meta everywhere from $50/day in budget to $10k/day.

If you set these campaigns up the right way, you can acquire high quality subscribers (high LTV) at an affordable rate (low cost per subscriber).

We recently started scaling a lead magnet campaign for Moodboard targeting agency owners on Meta (hello, if that's how you found us 👋) and have been getting validated agency operator emails for ~$3.50 per subscriber.

It's part art and part science, but I'll give you the basics:

1. Everything is about the creative.

Meta uses your creative to decide who they're going to deliver your ads to. The "meta" of Meta Ads is broad targeting, hyper-specific creative.

This also means that, in order to be successful, you need to test at a high volume and high velocity.

If you want a free sample of the system that we use, check out this ad creative guide we published.

2. Optimize for qualified subscribers, not cheap ones.

You should not be optimizing for the lowest cost per subscriber. You should be optimizing for the lowest cost per qualified subscriber.

This means your conversion event should be a teensy bit further down your "funnel" than just them providing their email (ideally, some self-qualification event in an onboarding survey).

3. Sweeten the deal with a lead magnet.

You can run ads about the newsletter itself, direct traffic to a subscribe page, and still get good results. But you'll get more qualified emails for cheaper if you sweeten the deal with a lead magnet.

And guess what? In the same way that you repurpose newsletter editions for individual social posts, you can combine a bunch of past editions to create a longer, more valuable lead magnet. Smarter not harder!

Like I said at the start, if you use even a fraction of the strategies we covered, you'll grow your email list faster than 99% of businesses.

If you want to expedite the whole process of building a world-class list growth engine like we just covered, reply to this email or drop me a line at Tailwind.