How I Built A Free Email Course — and Gained 210+ Subscribers in under 30 days.

I ran an experiment this past month.

Louis and the team at SparkLoop were kind enough to sponsor this Growth Currency experiment.

The goal was to launch and promote a lead magnet to drive subscriber growth.

I decided to create an email course: The 1KS Roadmap — Free course to getting your first 1,000 newsletter subscribers.

Why?

I wanted to create something that would resonate with my newsletter readers — present and future.

And getting them used to seeing “Dylan @ Growth Currency⚡” in their inboxes wasn’t going to hurt, either.

Mostly — I wanted to create a lead magnet that would align seamlessly with my newsletter content.

After all, the whole point of creating a lead magnet is to acquire a new subscriber. If your lead magnet isn’t relevant to your content, you’re doing everyone a disservice.

So here’s how I did it.

STEP 1: Created the Notion Doc

I needed a place to gather all of my thoughts, ideas, resources.

Most importantly, I needed a place to create the course outline. I used Notion. Any other word processor would’ve worked. But I just like Notion.

In the Notion doc, I outlined all of my sections for the course. I set up headings for each section and added a few bullet points.

Once all headings and bullet points were added, I began filling in more details.

Notice I didn’t write out the whole course from start to finish? Writing it that way can feel overwhelming, tedious, and never-ending.

Starting with a quick outline helps you gain the momentum needed to complete a project like a 5-day email course. Nicolas Cole calls this “prepping the page”. And it works.

STEP 2: Created the Email Sequence

After I finished the Notion doc, I hopped into my ConvertKit account and created a new Email Sequence (you need a paid account in ConvertKit to do this; here’s my affiliate link if you want to sign up and support me).

I added the Intro email, and then the working titles for the 5 email sections of the course.

Since I had the email course written out in Notion, I easily copy and pasted it into the email sequence and made a few formatting tweaks.

STEP 3: Created the Landing Page

Next, I created the landing page in ConvertKit. I picked their Oxford template. I kept it simple with a few brand modifications — and I think it worked!

My landing page converted at over 50%!

I added the title of the email course as the headline, included some body copy, and a ‘Get the Course’ form & button.

This is important: this was a double opt-in form. That means that the subscriber has to check their email and actually confirm their subscription to the email course before entering the sequence. Doing this may keep your subscriber rate a little lower, but it will keep your open rates and click rates (the important engagement metrics) much higher.

STEP 4: Created the Automation (including Tags & Triggers)

With the sequence and landing page complete, I whipped up a ConvertKit email automation. I love automation. This was fun. This was also my first time using automations in ConvertKit.

I set up two automations:

• (1) one for my existing subscribers taking the course who clicked in my email launch
• (2) one for new subscribers who signed up from the landing page

The main difference between these two automations is simple. The new subscribers get the opt-in email to confirm — plus they get a ‘New 1KS Subscriber’ tag.

My existing subscribers clicked a link to get the course. Doing so tagged them with the ‘Existing 1KS Subscriber’ tag.

Rationale: I didn’t want to confuse new subscribers going through the 5-day email sequence with a regular edition of my newsletter. Ideally, they go through the entire course and THEN start receiving the weekly. But… I’m still trying to figure that out (help, ConvertKit!)

It was the right thing to do in theory, but I’m struggling to implement in practice.

STEP 5: Scheduled the Tweet & Auto-DM feature in Hypefury

Since Twitter is where the bulk of my audience hangs out, I decided to promote the course with a single tweet — and did so using Hypefury (affiliate).

I followed in the footsteps of other pros like Blake Emal who have used this strategy super effectively.

I created a tweet that said:

Then I used Hypefury’s Auto-DM feature (available on their Pro plan) to automatically send a DM to anyone who replied to that tweet with a zap emoji.

Some considerations here:

1. The user has to have their DM’s “open” to get the auto-DM
2. This feature times out after one week — meaning if someone replies to that tweet 8 days later, they won’t get the automated DM.
3. You can also set the Auto-DM feature to Retweets, meaning only people who retweet the original tweet get the DM.

Once the tweet was published, I shared it with a few friends and DM chat groups I’m in to increase engagement and reach (thank you, friends!)

Launch Tweet Results:

• 182 replies
• 17 Retweets
• 133 likes
• 38,037 impressions

Course Creation & Launch Recap (tl;dr)

So, a quick recap: these were the steps I took to build & launch my email course lead magnet…

STEP 1: Created the Notion Doc (where the course content was built)
STEP 2: Created the Email Sequence (in ConvertKit)
STEP 3: Created the Landing Page (in ConvertKit)
STEP 4: Created the Automation (including Tags & Triggers — in ConvertKit)
STEP 5: Scheduled the Tweet & Auto-DM feature (in Hypefury)

With the campaign live — here’s how the rest of the month shook out.

Pre-launch Day: Email Newsletter (May 3rd)

I wanted to offer my existing subscribers the chance to enroll in the 1KS Roadmap. So I pre-launched it in my Tuesday, May 3rd edition of the newsletter.

About 700 subscribers opened and 98 clicked on the 1KS Roadmap link within the first 24 hours. That’s a 13.6% conversion rate — I think that’s good?

Those who clicked were tagged “1KS Existing Subscriber”.

Launch Day 1 & 2 (May 4th & 5th)

I published the promo auto-DM tweet the next day (May 4th) through Hypefury.

79 people subscribed within the first 12 hours, and then another 40 the next day.

Rest Of The Month

I knew I’d have to keep reminding people about the course. Particularly those who followed me on Twitter post-launch.

So I queued up a few posts to help promote the course — but probably not enough, as you’ll read in the “What I’d do differently” section below.

Here are the most impactful things I did:

• Added the 1KS Roadmap CTA & link in my Twitter bio
• Used 1KS as a CTA at the end of a few threads
• Added the 1KS Roadmap link in my Medium articles
• Obtained free + paid advertising for 1KS in a few newsletters

Final Results…

At the time of this writing (May 29th):

• 140 existing subscribers went through the course (4 unsubscribed — 2.9%)
• 236 new subscribers went through the course (18 unsubscribed — 7.6%)
• 216 net new subscribers between May 03 — May 29th (14.8% increase)

Not all 216 subscribers can be attributed to the lead magnet experiment.

But given the past 3 months of net new subscribers were: 84 (7.4%), 88 (7.2%), and 140 (10.7%) — the 216 (14.8%) increase in subscribers is nearly double the average of the past few months.

Most importantly, I created a valuable resource I can now leverage, iterate on, and add to going forward.

WHAT I LEARNED & WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY

Overall, this experiment came at a critical time: the Creative Companion Club (affiliate) was wrapping up a lead magnet “Shared Focus Sprint” in April and this was my project for that.

Plus — I had been discussing a partnership with Louis at SparkLoop around a newsletter growth experiment.

The 1KS Roadmap fit the bill for both.

Here’s what I learned — and how I might do things differently next time.

1. My Notion Doc link didn’t work at launch. Make sure you test out accessibility to any shared docs, whether it’s in Notion, Google, or otherwise. I didn’t realize I had to change the sharing permissions for a Notion page before sending it out to the world!
2. Don’t. Stop. Promoting. You have to be your #1 promoter — so don’t stop promoting after launch day. You can’t afford to rest on your launch day’s success, expecting the rest of your launch to continue the torrid pace. Next time, I’m going to plan a bunch of tweets and threads and other posts to go out during the launch phase to continue the Day 1 momentum.
3. Seek feedback before launch if possible. I was pressed to get this course launched for my first newsletter edition in May. I scrambled to complete it and didn’t properly beta test it with users or seek out constructive feedback. In the future, I’m going to have a beta deadline ~14 days prior to launching to ensure enough time for testing, iteration, and improvement.
4. Leverage more platforms (LinkedIn & TikTok). I solely promoted the lead magnet on Twitter. I added it to a few Medium posts and had it included in a few other newsletter promotions. But I didn’t use any other social media. Twitter is by far my biggest audience platform, I need to consider a broader reach for promotion.
5. Improve my automations & tags. This was my first email sequence AND automation in ConvertKit. And I set it up in a flurry. The sequence worked flawlessly, but my tagging & automation strategy was clunky. I would have benefitted from more research, and/or consulting with the ConvertKit team prior to launch.

I’m already looking forward to creating my next lead magnet.

I have a few ideas, but would love to hear from you what you’d love to learn.

In the meantime, stay tuned for the Growth Currency June experiment sponsored by SparkLoop! Announcement coming June 7th…