I Tried to Grow My Email List With A Platform Nobody’s Talking About. Here Are The Results.

Is this a new hidden gem to build your list quickly?

Image generated by the author using DALL·E 3

Last month, I tested a new platform to grow my list.

This platform is called Refind. Shockingly, nobody’s really talking about it. At first sight, it seems like a hidden gem where you can get legit email subscribers for less than $1.23.

But since I didn’t know whether it was worth it or not, I decided to run an experiment. 23 days later, I ended up with 579 fresh email subscribers.

But… was it really worth it?

The ugly truth of organic growth

I see many creators brag about how to grow their list without spending a single dime on ads.

This sounds cool.

But they never tell you what’s really happening behind the curtain.

Growing a responsive email list is hard and VERY expensive. You’ll have to pay the price either with:

your precious time
your hard-earned money
and sometimes… even both!

Organic growth ain’t free.

There are many marketing bada**es like Mike Dillard who were able to grow multimillion-dollar businesses out of paid ads. They’re not necessarily evil. It’s all about the strategy. (More on that later.)

Does that mean that I am not growing organically? Absolutely not.

I’m growing my email list organically using:

SEO
Medium
and YouTube

They all work fine.

However, I’m a growth junkie. So I don’t have any issues spending some of the green stuff if I know that I can make it back and grow faster.

One of the ways to grow your list is by running ads.

You could either sponsor newsletters or run ads on other platforms. I’ve been sponsoring a few newsletters in the past few months, and some did perform well. Others didn’t.

However, during a call with one of my friends, Jamie Northrup - Minimalist Hustler introduced me to a platform called Refind, where you can advertise to grow your newsletter.

It has been working pretty well for him over the past couple of months, catapulting his list from ~2,000 to over 6,000 subs. So I decided to give it a try.

How to grow your email list fast (& for free)

Before jumping into the numbers, let’s talk strategy.

Advertising = spending money. So if you’re greedy like me, you probably don’t want to spend all your savings on growing your list.

My advertising strategy is pretty simple.

When I drive paid traffic to my newsletter and people sign up, they get a series of emails that both teach them something valuable but also give them the opportunity to buy one of my products at a discount.

The goal here is to break even on the ad spend. It’s not to make a profit.

Re-read this twice.

Some people think that you can’t sell to people who just discovered you. That’s just a limiting belief and a fear of selling.

If you do things right, have the right offer, and know exactly how to write effectively, then this method works. It has been working for direct response copywriters over the last 150 years. And I don’t see why you wouldn’t bet on a winning strategy to grow your list.

It also makes a lot of sense for me.

I’m not only selling courses but also buying them. When I opt in to an email list, that’s probably one of the moments where I’m most engaged with the topic. So if I’m really interested in leveling up my skills and I’m getting a great deal, I’m certainly going to pull the trigger.

That’s what I decided to do here.

What is this new platform all about?

Let me introduce you to Refind.

It’s a newsletter platform that covers a lot of different topics of interest. When people sign up for this platform, they can choose their domains of interest. Then, they’re getting a daily digest of the topics they’re following.

On paper, this looks damn interesting.

Because it really allows you to target people who are interested in a specific topic.

In each daily roundup, Refind is going to display an ad like this :

It looks native and non-intrusive. I like that. Because most people are ad-blind.

Another perk of advertising like this is that the email addresses you’re going to get out of this platform are REAL emails. People can’t sign up for your newsletter if they haven’t received the Refind newsletter first.

In fact, this is exactly what Refind is stating on the ads portal:

Different ways to advertise on Refind

There are two ways to advertise on Refind.

Number one is a magic link. What this means is that if people click the ad, it automatically subscribes them to your email list.

The good thing is that you can choose which group or sequence they can join.

For example, you can create a specific welcome sequence for those subscribers and link to that very easily within the dashboard.

The second way you can run an ad on Refind is by simply promoting your landing page. I didn’t try this option.

Other targeting options

As you can see in my screenshot above, you can target not only by topic but also by specific countries.

Setting up my first ad on Refind

If you have already advertised on other giant tech platforms in the past, this might sound a little bit weird.

Setting up an ad on Refind goes through a manual process.

Which means that you cannot run an ad without manually reaching out to the team. Theoretically, you could. But they are going to write the ad copy for you based on your website (you have to provide it when signing up.)

Manual validation ad is actually a good thing.

This allows keeping the platform clean from shadow advertisers, so I had a great experience reaching out to the team. They usually replied within 24 hours and allowed me to get my ad running pretty fast.

The ad copy that they provided me wasn’t bad. In fact, I pretty much liked it. But it wasn’t really tailored to my ad strategy.

So what I did was email them my ad text and then update it on the platform.

Now, I was ready to pull the trigger.

The results

Once your ad is approved, all you have to do is to add your credit card info and click the button “Run Ad”

That’s the beauty of paid advertising. My list was not set to grow on autopilot.

Now, the numbers.

My ads ran for 9 days, capped at a $50–60 daily ad budget. (I adjusted it along the way.)

I stopped my Refind ads straight after getting 579 subscribers to my list. The reason? 500 is a decent number to draw conclusions from.

I then waited for 14 more days from the last sign-up. The reason is because 14 days is the duration of my welcome sequence that promotes the product I want new subscribers to buy (so that I can break-even.)

The results:

579 new subscribers
Total ad spend of $712.17
Average cost per subscriber: $1.23
3 sales at $97 (one guy asked for a refund because he “didn’t use the product”)

My usual refund rate is stupidly low.

Below 0.2%.

Because people who buy my stuff are already educated through my daily emails. They know what to expect and what they get.

But the problem when you’re running paid ads on such broad platforms is that sometimes you’re going to end up with people who don’t really know what they’re buying.

That’s the way it is.

By the time I am writing this, things haven’t settled with this “buyer”.

Which means, on the pessimistic side, I made $97. On the optimistic side, $291. So I took a loss of $421.17 (or $615.17 if the case ends with a chargeback.)

Out of those 579 subscribers, 502 were still on the list at the time of writing this, with a decent open/click rate.

However, 52 of them didn’t click a single link. Worse, 131 didn’t even open a single email:

Which means that at least 30% of the opt-ins are useless.

Keep in mind that I am sending daily emails that include a link in each of them. Which means that they had 14 emails to simply click one link and check out the offer.

I’m going to give them a few more days before I unsubscribe from all of them to not kill my deliverability.

I’d be lying if I told you that I’m happy with the results.

Especially given the fact that I know that my funnel is converting and has been working with other paid collaborations.

This all points to the fact that Refind's quality of subscribers isn’t great or cheap. So I’ll not advertise with them again.

But what I will be doing is exploring more advertising opportunities soon.

No matter which strategy you’re using to build your list, what you need is an optimized way to turn a portion of your subscribers into buyers.

This is exactly what I’ve been doing for several years and showing you in this free course.

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