How “Morning Brew” built an audience of 1.5 million subscribers

Tyler Denk, senior product lead at “Morning Brew,” writes about how the business news newsletter grew its audience to 1.5 million subscribers through referrals and giveaways.

Denk writes, “After a reader opts to share their unique referral link with someone, the goal now is to make sure that someone becomes a subscriber.

“Our landing pages are designed to be minimalist and straightforward. You either sign up or you don’t. That being said, there are still several variables on the landing page that can be tested, which include the layout of the page, header text, subheader text, text on the button, style of the form, color of the button, additional images, testimonials, etc.

“Depending on the source, site visitors respond to different messaging. Facebook ads, blog posts, and in this case, referrals, are all driving traffic to our site. Each of these user buckets responds differently to the aesthetic, language, and functionality of our webpages.

“We use Google Optimize to test every aspect of our landing page, and that’s especially important for optimizing incoming traffic from our referral program. We split our testing audiences into two main cohorts: referrals via email invites and all other referrals.

“Starting with the latter, we increased the conversion rate by over 4% through a few iterations involving the header, subheader text, button text, and button color, and we’re still continuing to test new hypotheses. That 4% increase in conversion rate leads to more than an additional 4,500 subscribers per month via the referral program alone.”

Read more here.