Email marketing is an important and effective tactic. It allows you to cut through the noise and sell directly to new customers and potential leads who actually want to hear from you. A popular way to build your list is to offer content upgrades (like free courses, worksheets, and ebooks) and enticing incentives (like exclusive offers and discounts).

We grew our list by thousands of subscribers by going against the grain of everything being taught right now about list building.

Earlier this year we decided to ditch this very method of growing our own email list. We made every single branding exercise and worksheet on our site available for direct download without the exchange of an email address.

So imagine our surprise when our email list, which had plateaued at around 13,000 subscribers for over a year had attracted 2,000 new subscribers within months of removing all opt-ins and content upgrades.

Source: https://braidcreative.com/blog