Where should a newsletter send people right after they subscribe?

The worst thing you can do after someone subscribes is say "great, thanks, keep an eye out for your email." You just paid for their attention, and you're handing it back.

"This is the time that your audience is paying the most attention to you ever. You will never have them more focused than this."

What's my flow?

1. Ad. A Meta ad sends people to a bare landing page.
2. Subscribe. Email only.
3. Survey. The very next page, through a redirect on the subscribe button.
4. Offers, where the brand has them.
5. Instagram. When they hit done on the survey, we send them to the brand's Instagram page.

Maybe one in three people hits Follow. Now one ad dollar bought a subscriber and a follower.

Decide this before you run a single ad. It's part of the one or two focused days of setup I tell new operators to do: landing page, survey, the post-survey destination and the welcome email. The survey is the piece to get perfect, because you can't easily change it later without starting over.

Does it work if your Instagram is empty?

Yes. On one new brand the Instagram was blank and people still followed, because they wanted it so bad. You'll do better with something there, though. Make one or two posts. Better yet, aim the camera at yourself and record a 30-second video: hey, I'm so excited, we're part of the team, make sure you're following us and tell your friends. It humanizes the brand.

For a different audience, pick the channel where they live. For my software, the survey's finish screen should send people to our YouTube channel, ideally straight to a demo video.

What if you have a paid plan or take donations?

Send them there instead. For a legacy local media brand, the two things that move the most money are getting people to pay something like $10 a month or getting them to donate, say $10, $50 or $100 to support a great local organization.

For a nonprofit newsroom without a paid plan, the donation is really the main thing you want, so the post-survey redirect should go to the donation page. I was told one nonprofit newsroom made about $7,000 fairly quickly just by sending new subscribers to a donation page. I don't know the specifics, but it fits everything I've seen about this moment.

None of this has to feel salesy. You're paying for their attention and getting it. Use it however fits your brand.

What if you don't have a survey yet?

At minimum, send people to a custom thank-you page instead of the default. Make it as human as possible: we're so excited, we're new here in town, we want to be your go-to source, here's the team. In most email tools this is a simple redirect setting.

The survey doesn't need fancy tools. Another nonprofit newsroom sends new subscribers to a plain Google Form and gets about 60% to fill it out. Check that your platform can send people somewhere right after subscribing, though. When I looked at Kit, I didn't think it had a survey right after subscribe, and that's a lot of value to miss. For now I recommend Beehiiv, and nobody pays me to say that.

What else can that moment do?

• Tag people. Business owner, donor, event-goer.
• Add them to a second newsletter with one click.
• Send them to Instagram for the follow.
• Promote a paid plan or a donation.

All the answers sync to your email platform for segmenting later. By my guess, 98% of people growing newsletters aren't doing any of this. That's a wide-open lane.

Can the page do everything at once?

No, so pick an order. The page right after subscribe can only do one job first. I put the survey first because data compounds, then the offer or redirect after it. If your top priority is a time-limited offer, that's a valid choice too. Just know you're trading survey completions for it.