The short version: you find email subscribers where you already have permission or proximity to people (your website, your social following, partnerships, and events), and you grow the list by trading something useful for the email address, then emailing consistently enough that people remember why they signed up. Most lists don’t die from too few sign-ups, they die from neglect after the sign-up. I rebuilt mine from under 400 people to over 9,000 in eighteen months and the finding part was never the hard part.
The uncomfortable truth about “finding” subscribers
Everyone wants a source, a channel, a hack. Where do I find people to put on my list. I get asked this in almost every consultation call I do. And the honest answer is that finding people isn’t the bottleneck for 90% of the businesses I work with. The bottleneck is that they built a list of 2,000 people three years ago, emailed them twice, and now wonder why open rates are 8%.
I did exactly this myself. Back in 2019, at the peak of my “influencer” era, I had a list of around 22,000 people. I was proud of the number. I checked it like a scoreboard. Then life happened, my business took a hard turn, and I stopped emailing consistently for the better part of two years. When I came back to it in 2023, I sent a campaign to that list and got a 4% open rate and eleven unsubscribe complaints for spam, on a list of people who had opted in willingly. The list wasn’t dead. My relationship with it was. Finding subscribers is a solved problem. Keeping their attention is the actual work, and nobody wants to hear that because it’s less exciting than a growth hack.
Where the subscribers come from
Here’s the full list of places I have personally pulled subscribers from, ranked by how much they’ve contributed to my own list over the past two years, not theory, just what worked for me and the small business owners I coach.
- Your existing website traffic, gated behind a real lead magnet. A checklist, a template, a short guide. My highest-converting one is a one-page “AI prompts for small business owners” sheet, it converts at around 34% of visitors who see the pop-up, which is unusually high because it’s specific and takes ninety seconds to use.
- LinkedIn, posted natively, not as a link-out. Posts that stay on LinkedIn (no outbound link in the post itself) get roughly three to five times the reach of ones with a link. I put my newsletter link in the first comment instead. That single change added around 40 sign-ups a week for me at one point.
- Guest podcasts and webinars. Every time I’m a guest, I ask for a slide or a mention with a specific URL, something short like lilachbullock.com/newsletter, not a generic homepage. Trackable, memorable, and it converts because the host has already warmed the audience up for me.
- Co-marketing swaps with people who share your audience but aren’t your competitor. I swap newsletter mentions with two or three other consultants a quarter. One swap with a productivity coach in 2025 brought in 180 subscribers in a single week, more than a month of organic LinkedIn posting.
- In-person events and speaking. I still do this the low-tech way: a QR code on the final slide, a physical sign-up sheet as backup because half the room’s Wi-Fi will fail. My last conference talk added 63 subscribers from a room of about 200 people.
- Your existing customers and clients, asked directly. Not everyone who buys from you is automatically on your list, check that. I found 340 paying clients across five years who had never been added to my email list because they came through invoicing, not through my sign-up form.
Notice what’s not on that list: buying a list, scraping emails, or “growth hacking” with bots. Those get you volume and destroy your sender reputation and your deliverability within weeks. I’ve seen a client’s entire domain end up on a spam blacklist after they bought a “verified” list of 10,000 emails from a vendor who promised it was opt-in. It wasn’t. It took them four months and a domain reputation repair process to recover.
Growing it: what moves the number
Once you know where the subscribers are, growing the list is a rhythm question more than a tactics question. Here’s the sequence I use with clients, and it’s the same one I used to go from under 400 subscribers back up past 9,000:
- Step 1: Build one lead magnet that solves one narrow problem. Not “the ultimate marketing guide.” A five-step process, a template, a swipe file. Narrow converts better than broad, always.
- Step 2: Put it in three places within a week. Website pop-up, LinkedIn post, and email signature. Free, and the email signature one is the one people skip and shouldn’t. Every email you send is an ad for your list if you set it up right.
- Step 3: Commit to a cadence before you worry about volume. Weekly beats monthly beats “whenever I feel like it.” I send every Thursday morning. People know it’s coming. That predictability alone cut my unsubscribe rate by roughly a third compared to my irregular sending in 2022.
- Step 4: Segment early, even with a small list. Even at 500 subscribers, split by interest or by how they found you. My “found me via LinkedIn” segment engages differently to my “found me via referral” segment, and I write slightly different subject lines for each.
- Step 5: Prune, don’t just add. Every quarter I remove anyone who hasn’t opened an email in six months. Painful watching the number go down. But a list of 6,000 engaged people outperforms a list of 20,000 where three quarters ignore you, on every metric that matters: open rate, click rate, and what your email provider thinks of you.
If you want the exact mechanics of going from nothing to your first thousand, I’ve written a full walkthrough on how to grow an email newsletter from zero to 1,000 subscribers, and it covers the platform choices and first-30-days plan in more detail than I have room for here.
What this is worth to you
People treat list building as a vanity exercise, but the money case is real and specific. Email marketing consistently returns somewhere around $36 to $42 for every $1 spent according to industry benchmarks, and even a modest list of a few thousand engaged subscribers can produce more revenue than a much larger social following, because you own the channel. Instagram can change its algorithm tomorrow and halve your reach. Nobody can do that to your email list except you, by ignoring it.
If you’re considering this as an actual skill to build a living around rather than just a marketing task for your own business, it’s worth knowing what the work is worth in the market. I’ve broken down real day rates and salary ranges in how much an email marketer can expect to earn in 2026, and the range is wider than people assume, from around £28,000 for an in-house junior role up to £600 or more a day freelance for someone who can prove list growth and revenue attribution.
Common mistakes I still see, even from experienced marketers
A few patterns show up again and again in the consulting work I do, often with people who’ve been doing this for years.
- Building the lead magnet before knowing what the follow-up email sequence says. The magnet gets someone in the door, the welcome sequence decides whether they stay.
- Treating every new subscriber the same regardless of how they arrived. Someone who downloaded a pricing guide is closer to buying than someone who joined from a general blog post.
- Ignoring the unsubscribe page. Mine now has a one-line survey asking why, and it’s told me more about what’s not working than any open-rate report ever has.
- Under-investing in the plain, unglamorous parts: subject lines, send times, and list hygiene, in favour of chasing a shiny new lead-generation tactic every month.
None of this is complicated. It’s just unglamorous, which is exactly why people skip it and then wonder why the list “doesn’t grow.”
If you’re building this alongside a full plate
A lot of the people I talk to are running a household, a part-time job, or another business entirely while trying to build this list on the side. If that’s you, I’d point you toward the practical routes I’ve mapped out for flexible, home-based work in 2026, several of which involve exactly this kind of list-building and content work and pay reasonably well once you have even a small, engaged audience to show for it. And if writing the actual content that fills the list feels like the bigger obstacle than finding subscribers, I’ve written a realistic path for breaking into freelance creative writing that applies just as well to email copy as it does to articles.
If you’d rather not do the whole build yourself, that’s a fair call too, and it’s the point where bringing in help usually pays for itself faster than muddling through alone. I’ve written about what that costs and what to expect in how much an AI consultant costs, since a good chunk of modern list building, from segmentation to send-time optimisation, is now AI-assisted and worth knowing the price of before you commit to a tool or a person.
Related reading: how do i see a list of my groups.
Frequently asked questions
Where is the fastest place to find email subscribers with no existing audience?
Partnerships and swaps with people who already have your target audience, plus a single narrow lead magnet on your website, will move faster than organic social posting when you’re starting from zero, because you’re borrowing trust that already exists rather than building it from scratch.
How many subscribers do I need before email marketing is worth doing?
You can profitably run email at 200 to 500 subscribers if they’re interested and you email them consistently, the return comes from engagement rate, not raw list size.
Should I buy an email list to grow faster?
No. Bought lists are not opted-in regardless of what the seller claims, and sending to them routinely damages your domain reputation and deliverability, which then hurts every email you send afterward, including to people who did sign up willingly.
How often should I email my list to keep it growing?
Weekly is the minimum cadence I’d recommend for most small businesses, monthly is usually too infrequent for people to remember signing up, and daily only works if you have daily-relevant content to share.
