State of Recruiting Brainfood 2020: Part 1: Growth / Subscribers

What this post about

As some of you might know, I write a weekly newsletter called Recruiting Brainfood. It's a pretty simple idea, solving a pretty clear problem: there's too much crap recruiting content on the Internet. My job is to sort through that crap, pick out the must reads / hidden gems and summarise it in a once-a-week email sent to the recruiting industry. Delivered every Sunday, it's there to give us all some 'recruiting brainfood for the week ahead'. For those of who you who are not yet on it, you're welcome to check it out and subscribe - it's 100% spam & sales free.

Since I started 3 1/2 years, 160+ issues and nearly 3000 articles ago, I've accumulated a ton of data on what works and what doesn't in writing an email newsletter. Also, I've since become a firm believer that this format is a vital channel for communicating with your audience and strategically significant part of your tool kit whether you are an in-house recruiter building employer brand, an agency recruiter building a vertical, a recruitment service provider promoting your services or simply anyone who is interested in amplifying the impact of the message you want to send.

Hence: this blog 10 parter. Originally, it was going to be single blog post to give a 'State of the Brainfood' for 2020, but I realised that it would be way too long for a single post, so I'm splitting it into a 10 posts - each one covering a dimension of creating and sustaining a newsletter from subscriber growth to performance to category interest to audience analytics. I'll share what data I can and what insights I've drawn from them. Please note: I'm no expert at any of this: just an amateur enthusiast, learning as-I-go. I hope this series will be interesting to the brainfood community, as well as for those who are planning to run a newsletter for personal or professional means in 2020

First up, its subscriber growth. Here goes

Growth / Subscribers

Brainfood entered January 1st 2020 with 18,846 subscribers - up from 10,228 at the end of 2018, a net gain of 8,618 over the 12 months of the newsletter, with an average of 165.7 net new subscribers per week. This was a little short of the my stated objective of 20K subs at annual rate of net 10,000, at a weekly rate of 200 per week. However it was 84.5% increase of subscriber numbers from 2018-2019

The trend line isn't a hockey shaped curve but it is going North East - the right direction for anyone who cares about growth.

Its worth talking about how we get there - because one thing that all newsletter writers know is sending out the newsletter itself does not drive growth; on the contrary, each send out usually triggers a small regression in subscriber numbers due bounced emails and unsubscribes - almost always less than 0.1%. but with 18,000+ subscribers, this will mean a decline of 30-40 net after the send. This is the main reason why I recommend that you DO NOT auto subscribe or import contacts when you first start your newsletter. All you will be doing is creating a reverse the trend line, from NE to SE and setting yourself up for a demoralising routine of seeing your overall numbers drop every time you send out. So here's the first lesson:

Lesson No1: Sending the newsletter itself does not grow subscribers - it reduces them. Writers need to find a way to grow subscribers, off-platform

There are currently four ways or channels in which the brainfood subscriber base grows

Public endorsement by brainfooders

Readers have been generous in helping spread the word about Recruiting Brainfood. Every week, there are 10-15 shout outs by readers - many of whom I have not had the pleasure of meeting in-person - who go out and paste up the brainfood url on a LinkedIn status update and recommend to their connections on LinkedIn to sign up. There's no question this remains the No1 driver of new subscribers to the newsletter.

Eg:

This post from John Rose is pretty typical - a simple, quick update, with a link to the newsletter homepage. This started happening around about 6 months in from the start of the newsletter - so it takes time (and a relentless cadence from you, the writer) to build up an audience who have gained enough value over time to start giving public endorsements. I don't know how to thank people like John for going the extra mile in doing this. However, I am making a note, every time I see a mention and reciprocate as best I can.

The reciprocal thanks is annoying to some readers but I'm committed to returning the endorsement favour in a shout out in next week's issue, until I come up with a something more substantive. There's actually opportunity to do this for the advocates of the newsletter - the 'foodhall of fame' has been a project I've been baking for some months now and will soon be close to release. More on this later in a later post. This brings us - tangentially - to the next lesson I've learned when it comes to subscriber growth

Lesson No2: LinkedIn status updates is by far the best social channel for new subscriber growth, 100x the value of anything else.

Me, starting discussion posts on LinkedIn

So, in line with Lesson 2, I began experimenting LinkedIn status updates as a media channel. Sure enough, it's value as a channel became obvious when a simple update or 'mini blog' managed to accrue what was then a seemingly massive view count of 10K+. Now we can dispute the accuracy of these numbers (only LinkedIn knows...), or what the numbers actually mean (impressions vs views), but the reach is still an order of magnitude or two more than you might achieve on any other platform (including LinkedIn's own article publishing platform, like the one we're on right now).

The recipe is simple; through newsletter analytics I usually get a good idea on what the readers found interesting that week, so take a perspective on the topic and start a conversation around that content.

i.e

The idea is to get engagement on the post, talk to the folks who are interested in the topic and 'build the value in the comments'. If you follow comment centred social networks like Reddit.com or Hacker News, you'll know that the best stuff is often from other commentators, not original poster.

Of course, we're also shooting for the LinkedIn newsfeed algorithm here; the more people engage, the more people will see the post and so reach can exponentially increase. Which means that it makes sense to put in some sort of link back to your newsletter at some point in the update. It might be worth noting how the content is structured - the link to subscribe is an 'incidental CTA' of checking out the newsletter - it's not the focal of the update, but the source of the idea which readers are welcome to check out.

A post like the example above - semi successful at 30,000 views - will probably translate into 30 or so subscribers to the newsletter. Yes - conversion rate on LinkedIn status updates is super low - usually less than 0.1%. But the reach is big enough to make it worth it. So onto to Lesson 3

Lesson 3: Engagement, not Conversion, is the aim on LinkedIn Status Updates. Strong engagement leads to weak conversion but extraordinary reach currently provided by LinkedIn Status Updates makes it worthwhile

Brainfood being featured in other industry publications

At some point, other publishers end up recommending your newsletter. This happened several times this year from influential bloggers, recruitment tech vendors, other newsletters and recruitment service providers.

Eg. from Yello's End of Year Review post

It's unexpected and usually welcome boon. I suppose you can engineer this with cross promo deals but I've found the most effective shares of this type of authentic and non-solicited. There is some industry overlap - we are all talking to a recruiter / HR audience - but the fact promotion from other publishers drive subscriber growth is a reminder how large the total addressable audience (over 2 million people worldwide call themselves 'recruiter' on LinkedIn) is. By comparison, 18,000+ brainfooders is a very small drop in the ocean.

Lesson 3: The recruitment world is big and even if you do gain traction, you only have a very small piece of it.

Private endorsement by Brainfooders

Last but not least is the private endorsement by existing readers; this is readers sharing the brainfood in company Slack channels, internal email updates or even just old fashioned word of mouth. There is no way of tracking this, but there are some signals, such as when you get a series of sign ups from people in the same company within a short space of time.

In the above example, it's likely that a member of the recruiting team at LinkedIn recommended the newsletter in an internal channel, triggering a short burst of team member sign ups.

Lesson 4: There are hidden growth channels that you can't measure or control but perhaps you can encourage.

Final thoughts

So that was it for Growth / Subscribers. To summarise the 4 x Lessons I've learned

1. Growing newsletter subscriber base comes, off-channel
2. LinkedIn status updates 100x better than any other growth technique
3. Cross promo exchanges with other publishers should work
4. There are hidden heroes who advocate for your newsletter in ways you can't measure - find a way to encourage this

What other growth channels is missing here? I've done nothing with paid ads, SEO and the like so far, so likely a hockey shaped curve might've been there brainfood all the time. Let me know in comments below if you have any ideas you would like me to try for 2020

....Coming up...Part 2: Performance Metrics

Hung Lee is the curator of Recruiting Brainfood, the weekly newsletter for the recruiting industry. Trusted by 18,000+ recruiters & HR professionals worldwide. Free to sign up, so do it here