I used the subject line “Size matters” for an email on Friday and yes, I knew exactly what I was doing.
I was talking about email lists because one of the things people tend to obsess over in this business is how many subscribers they have.
And I understand why.
We’ve all heard the stories about people with lists of 50,000 or 100,000 subscribers who can send one email and make thousands of dollars.
But I’ve been doing this for a long time now and I can tell you that the number itself doesn’t tell you very much.
I’ve seen small lists make a surprising amount of money and much bigger ones produce very little.
What matters is who those people are, why they joined your list and whether they actually want to hear from you.
In other words, size matters. But quality matters a lot more.
And if you don’t have a list at all yet, I really would start building one.
You don’t need thousands of people. You don’t need a complicated funnel and you certainly don’t need to spend a fortune getting started.
You just need to give the right people a good reason to hear from you again.
So I went looking for some genuinely useful free resources that might help, whether you’re starting from scratch or trying to grow the list you already have.
1. 35 ways to grow your email list for free
This is from Kit and it’s particularly useful because the ideas don’t depend on having a big audience already. There’s also a simple four-step plan for starting without a website.
https://kit.com/resources/blog/grow-email-list-for-free
2. See which email platforms you can use for free
If the cost of an autoresponder has been putting you off, Zapier has tested more than 60 email marketing platforms and picked the eight best free options for 2026.
Some of the allowances are surprisingly generous. Kit, for example, currently allows up to 10,000 subscribers and unlimited sends on its free plan.
https://zapier.com/blog/free-email-marketing-software
3. Make the list you already have more valuable
Growing your list isn’t always about adding more people.
Sometimes you’ll get better results by improving the quality of the list you’ve already got.
Mailchimp has a useful guide to building and maintaining an opt-in list, including welcome emails, segmentation and cleaning out subscribers who never engage.
And that’s important because a smaller list of people who actually want your emails can be far more useful than a huge list of people who routinely ignore them.
https://mailchimp.com/resources/opt-in-list/
4. Create something people actually want
This sounds ridiculously obvious but it’s where a lot of list building goes wrong.
People don’t want to “join your newsletter”.
They want the thing you’re offering them in return.
That doesn’t have to be a 47-page ebook you’ve spent three weeks writing. In fact, something small that solves one immediate problem can be far more attractive.
HubSpot has a useful free guide to creating lead magnets here:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/creating-lead-generation-offers-from-blogs
Have a look at the examples and then ask yourself what you could create that your ideal subscriber would find useful enough to hand over their email address for.
5. Learn the basics without buying a course
If you’re completely new to email marketing, HubSpot Academy has a free email marketing course.
It covers the whole process, so you can learn what you need and then actually get on with doing it.
https://academy.hubspot.com/courses/email-marketing
6. Start thinking beyond more traffic
This is probably the one I’d spend most time thinking about.
You don’t necessarily need to get your opt-in page in front of thousands more people. Sometimes it’s worth looking at what happens to the people who are already seeing it.
Are you offering something they genuinely want?
Is it immediately obvious why they should want it?
And are you attracting the right people in the first place?
HubSpot has a good overview of list-building strategies here, including plenty you can use without paying for advertising.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/list-building
And finally, here’s something to watch with a cup of coffee.
It’s a classic TED Talk from Seth Godin called How to Get Your Ideas to Spread but the basic idea is probably even more relevant now than it was when he gave it.
We’re all surrounded by so much stuff competing for our attention that it’s incredibly easy to ignore anything ordinary.
Which is worth remembering when you’re trying to persuade someone to join your list.
Now, there’s a reason I’ve been thinking about all this…
I put a few of my It’s Not The… systems up this weekend because I see so many people assuming they know what’s stopping them from making more sales.
Things like needing a bigger list, more traffic or a better product.
And sometimes they’re absolutely right. But most of the time they’re putting all their effort into fixing something that wasn’t really the problem in the first place.
If that sounds at all familiar, you can see my solutions here:
And in the meantime, if your list isn’t as big as you’d like it to be, pick ONE of the resources above and do something with it.
Because 100 people who genuinely want to hear from you is a much better place to start than 10,000 people who don’t.