9 Types of Collaboration to Grow Your Email List (And How to Choose the Right One for You)
For years, I thought there was one way to grow an email list. Create content. Offer a freebie. Hope enough people saw it and signed up. Nobody told me there was another approach entirely. This is the guide I wish I'd had back then.
I spent a long time on the content treadmill. Posting consistently, making the graphics, showing up regularly, doing all the things you're supposed to do. And getting five new email subscribers a month for the trouble. On a good month.
The frustrating part wasn't the effort. It was that I genuinely thought this was just how it worked. That building an email list meant creating enough content and hoping the right people would find it, click through, and hand over their email address. That every drop-off point between "they saw your post" and "they're on your list" was just something you accepted as part of the process.
I had no idea there was a completely different way to approach this. One that put you in front of warm, interested audiences who were already looking for what you offer.
That approach is collaboration marketing. And when I finally stumbled across it, everything changed.
There are multiple ways to collaborate to grow your email list. More types than I even knew existed when I started, and probably some I still haven't come across yet. What I cover here are the ones I know: the types I've tried, researched, and seen work for people at different stages. For each one, I'll tell you what it actually involves, who it suits, and what you need to make it work. Because picking the wrong type for your situation is one of the main reasons people try collaborating once and give up.
The right collaboration type, matched to your life and business right now, is a completely different experience.
What You Need Before You Start Any Collaboration
Three things.
Somewhere for people to land. An email list (Kit has a generous free plan) or a community (Skool works well for this). Or both.
Something of value to offer. A freebie, your newsletter, a digital product you're giving away for free, or an invitation to your community.
A link. Somewhere people can sign up.
That's it.
→ Not sure which collaboration type fits where you're at right now? Take my free quiz. It'll match you to the right starting point based on your tech, your niche, and your lifestyle.
The 9 Types of Collaboration for Growing Your Email List
1. Freebie Swaps
A freebie swap is one of the simplest collaboration types available, and a genuinely good starting point if you're not sure where to begin.
Here's how it works: you and another business owner agree to email your respective lists about each other's freebies. Person A emails their list about Person B's freebie and includes a link to sign up. Person B does the same in return. You each pick up new subscribers from each other's audiences.
If you have a community rather than an email list, the same principle applies. Post about each other's freebies in your communities instead.
What you need: An existing audience, however small, because there needs to be something in it for the other person. A freebie that's relevant to that person's audience. And enough overlap in your niches that the swap actually makes sense.
What you get: New subscribers who already know what your freebie is about and opted in specifically to receive it. That's a warm start.
What to watch for: Not all swaps deliver equal results. I try to find people with a list of a similar size to mine to keep things fair for both people involved.
Best for: Anyone with an existing audience, even a small one, who wants a low-effort, low-commitment starting point.
2. Flash Sale Swaps
A flash sale swap works on the same premise as a freebie swap, but instead of offering something for free, you're offering a digital product at a significantly reduced price for a limited time.
You email each other's lists, promoting the other person's flash sale and linking to their sales page. The time limit creates urgency, which tends to push interested people into action.
What you need: A digital product you can run a reduced price coupon for. The goal is a price so reduced it feels like a no-brainer. An existing audience for the swap to work. And a niche alignment that makes the audience crossover relevant.
What you get: Fewer signups than a freebie swap, because there's a purchase involved. But the people who do sign up have already taken out their credit card. They are more likely to buy from you again. You're building a list of buyers, not just subscribers. That distinction matters.
What to watch for: The pricing has to do real work here. If the discount doesn't feel genuinely compelling, then no-one will take action.
Best for: Anyone with a digital product, an existing audience, and an interest in building a list that skews toward buyers rather than freebie collectors.
3. Podcast Guesting
Podcast guesting is one of the best collaboration types for building authority and trust. And it does not require an existing audience.
Podcast hosts are always looking for guests with interesting, specific topics. You don't need a big following. You need a compelling angle and genuine expertise. When you guest on a podcast, you show up in front of an audience that already trusts the host. You're borrowing trust from the moment you start speaking.
At the end of every episode, the host will ask where listeners can find you. That's your moment. You need a clear, compelling call to action. Something that gives people a genuine reason to want more from you. Your newsletter, your freebie, a digital product you're giving away, or an offer that feels specific to that audience.
What you need: A specific, interesting topic you can speak on confidently. A call to action with a link that's easy to remember or find in the show notes. A freebie, newsletter, or community invitation that's genuinely appealing to that podcast's audience.
What you get: Warm, trusting new subscribers who've just spent anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour in your company. If you have a higher-ticket offer where people really need to trust you before they'll buy, this is one of the most effective formats for building that trust. In a much more condensed timeframe than most other strategies.
What to watch for: Time zones are a real constraint. For example, I’m based in the UK and a lot of podcast hosts are in the US, live recordings requiring for me to be available in the evening which doesn’t work for me. Think through what your schedule can accommodate before you start pitching.
Best for: Anyone with a specific topic to speak on who doesn't mind the time commitment of showing up for an interview. Particularly effective if you have a higher-ticket offer where you need to build authority and trust fast.
4. Guest Speaking and Community Training
Similar in spirit to podcast guesting, but instead of a podcast episode, you're showing up inside someone else's community or membership to teach on a specific topic.
This might look like being a guest expert inside a paid membership, where members come specifically to learn from you. Or a training inside a Skool community, a Facebook group, or anywhere else where a group of people have gathered around a shared interest.
The logic is the same: community owners and membership hosts need valuable experts their members will learn from. You don't need a large audience to be that person. You need a compelling topic and a clear perspective on it.
What you need: A topic you can teach in depth. A clear call to action for people who want to continue learning from you after the session ends.
What you get: Authority, direct visibility, and new subscribers who've just experienced exactly what it's like to learn from you. One of the more powerful trust-builders on this list.
What to watch for: Make sure the audience is genuinely aligned with what you do. A significant mismatch here wastes everyone's time.
Best for: Anyone who enjoys teaching and has a clear, teachable topic. Also excellent for positioning yourself as the go-to person in your niche.
5. Summit Speaking
A summit is an event where multiple speakers come together around a central theme, each presenting on a related topic. As a speaker, you gain access to the summit's audience. The host gets your content and your promotion to your own audience.
Summits can be live or pre-recorded. They can happen on a dedicated platform, inside a community, or as an audio-only experience. The format varies enormously. There's likely a type that works for you.
Pre-recorded summits are my personal preference. I can think through what I want to say, record it, edit it, and send it off without the pressure of performing live or navigating time zone complications. If you have similar constraints, prioritise finding pre-recorded opportunities when you're applying.
What you need: A presentation topic. A call to action for attendees who want to go further with you. Some summits also ask contributors to provide a digital product as a bonus for attendees.
What you get: Visibility with a targeted, warm audience that's already in learning mode. Summit attendees are actively seeking information, which makes them receptive to discovering new people.
What to watch for: Summit quality varies significantly. A well-run summit with a host who promotes effectively is a very different experience from a disorganised, last-minute affair. Look for evidence the host takes their events seriously before you commit.
Best for: Anyone comfortable presenting on a topic, who wants targeted visibility, and who can find summits that accommodate their schedule and time zone.
6. Joint Lives
A joint live is when you go live with another person, usually on social media, and you both share the experience with your respective audiences.
This is most common on Instagram and Facebook. YouTube now supports collaborative videos that appear on both creators' channels simultaneously, which extends this format into long-form territory.
I'll be transparent: this is the collaboration type I've used least, specifically because it requires either social media or live availability, and neither fits particularly well into how I work right now. But it's a legitimate strategy, especially if you enjoy live content and have existing relationships with people in adjacent niches.
One thing worth noting: getting people from a live session onto your email list takes a bit more effort than other formats. On Instagram, you're working around the same constraint for sharing links as you would with your own content. You have to send people to your link in bio or use a tool like Manychat that sends links to people via DM. On Facebook or YouTube, dropping your link in the description makes it a bit easier.
What you need: Comfort with going live. Another person in a complementary niche. A clear call to action that's easy to act on during the session.
What you get: Visibility with a warm audience in a personal, real-time format. When there's genuine rapport between collaborators, it shows. Audiences respond to it. You may not get people to join up to your list (particularly on Instagram) with this one. But you should grow your following.
What to watch for: Joint lives require scheduling alignment. Both people need to be on, prepared, and engaging at the same time. This is more complicated to coordinate than asynchronous formats, particularly across time zones.
Best for: Anyone who genuinely enjoys live content, has the flexibility for real-time scheduling, and has existing relationships with potential collaborators in their niche.
→ Take the free quiz. It takes about two minutes and tells you exactly which collaboration type to start with based on the tech you already have and the life you're actually living.
7. Contributing to a Bundle
This is my favourite collaboration type, and the one I come back to most consistently. Possibly because I’m an introvert. If you have digital products and would prefer not to commit to live recordings or real-time scheduling, bundles were effectively built for people like us.
Here's how they work. A host organises a bundle. It's a collection of digital products from multiple business owners. Each contributor provides one product they usually sell and gives it away for free for the duration of the bundle. People sign up to access the bundle by giving their name and email address, and receive a landing page where they can redeem all the products.
Each time someone redeems your product specifically, they're directed to your landing page where they give their name and email address so they are added to your list or community and gain access to the product. So even as a contributor rather than the host, you're gaining several subscribers.
A few things that make this work particularly well for me:
It's asynchronous. No live scheduling, no time zone juggling. You fill in an application, set up your product to be accessible for free during the bundle (usually using a coupon code), write your promotional emails, and the bulk of the work is done.
The time investment is genuinely low. My first bundle took about an hour to set up, plus maybe another hour for the promotional content. And I gained 100 new subscribers in a week from it.
For comparison: an entire month of posting consistently on Instagram had delivered five subscribers and these days, I reckon I would get zero.
What you need: A digital product you're willing to give away for free for the bundle's duration. A place for new subscribers to go, whether that's an email list or a community. Promotional capacity. Most bundles ask contributors to send one or two emails and share at least one social post.
What you get: New subscribers who signed up specifically to access your product. They know what you do and they're already interested. That's a solid starting point for a relationship.
What to watch for: Read the promotional terms of any bundle you contribute to before you apply. Requirements vary, and some are more demanding than others. Be prepared for a number of people to unsubscribe after the bundle. This is to be expected and is a small price to pay for an influx of subscribers to your list.
Best for: Anyone with digital products, a preference for asynchronous work, or time zone and schedule constraints that make live collaborations difficult.
8. Hosting Your Own Bundle
Once you've contributed to a few bundles and understand how they work from the inside, hosting your own is the natural next step. It's where the significant list growth happens.
When you host a bundle, you're organising everything: recruiting and vetting contributors, testing redemption flows to make sure they work properly, creating swipe copy and graphics for contributors to use in their promotion, and running the bundle itself. It's more work than contributing, but the return is proportionally different.
When I hosted my first bundle, I gained over 400 new subscribers in a single week. For approximately 20 hours of work across the whole project. That number was not happening for me any other way in that timeframe.
A note on paid bundles: Paid bundles work in the same way as free bundles, but instead of asking for a name and email address, you ask people to pay a small fee to access the bundle. They used to work for people, but I tried one recently for the first time. I won't be doing it again. It was the same amount of work as a free bundle, and results don't come close to the free model. I'm firmly back in the free bundle camp.
What you need: Enough industry connections to recruit contributors. Or the willingness to put yourself out there and make those connections. Collaboration groups and communities are a great resource for this. A tech platform to host the bundle and manage sign-ups (something is coming for this in my community soon). Time to organise and run the event. Promotional capacity to drive sign-ups to the bundle itself.
What you get: Every person who signs up for the bundle gets added to your list. Not just those who redeem your specific product. Everyone. This is why hosting delivers so much more than contributing.
What to watch for: This is a real project. Budget your time honestly. Have your systems in place before you recruit contributors, because nothing erodes trust faster than a disorganised bundle experience on the contributor side. Make sure you position the bundle to attract the right people to your list. People who will be interested in your offers.
Best for: Anyone who's contributed to a few bundles, understands the process from the inside, and is ready to take on a bigger project for a proportionally bigger return.
→ Join us inside Collaboration Cash In. I share bundle opportunities and help members figure out whether they're ready to host their own.
9. Hosting Your Own Summit
Summit hosting has a similar growth potential as bundle hosting. And the highest investment of time and energy. I'll be upfront: I've never hosted a summit. Partly because of bandwidth, and partly because I've genuinely become fatigued by summits as a consumer. The traditional model requires three to six months of work to execute properly, and I've never quite had the appetite for that scope.
But the format is evolving. Smaller, more nimble summit styles are emerging. Audio-only summits, community-based summits on platforms like Skool, formats that simplify the tech stack and skip the elaborate upsell architecture. These require less project time and can still deliver meaningful list growth.
The traditional full-scale summit model typically includes: multiple speakers who pre-record presentations, a hosting platform, a free access window of 24-48 hours, an upsell to an "all-access pass" for permanent access, and often a bundle of contributor products as part of that pass. If that sounds like a lot, that's because it is. But it can also be stripped back significantly.
What you need: A theme and a speaker lineup. A tech setup to deliver and host the content. Significant lead time. A minimum of two to three months even for a smaller format.
What you get: Potentially large list growth, and to build real authority in your niche quickly.
What to watch for: There are a lot of summits available now so you need to position your summit well. You also need to be sure you have the bandwidth to organise. It’s good to have an idea where you will find speakers (communities, people you already know - a mix?).
Best for: People who have spoken in some summits before with an understanding of how they work and what format you want yours to take. The bandwidth and motivation to make it happen.
How to Find Collaborations in Any Niche
If you're in the online business space, the infrastructure is already there. Facebook groups dedicated to sharing collaboration opportunities are easy to find. Search "collaborations" on Facebook and you'll find plenty. Skool communities serve the same purpose, and as my own community grows, connecting members with real, relevant collaboration opportunities is a key part of what will happen there.
If you're in a different niche, say women's health, nutrition, creativity, personal development, or anything outside the online business world, it takes slightly more initiative. But the opportunities exist. You can still find some opportunities in collaboration based Facebook groups. Otherwise you need to be a bit more targeted.
Start with the people you're already following in your industry. Your peers. The people you admire from a distance. Have a proper look at what they're already creating. Do they have a podcast? Could you pitch to guest? Do they have a newsletter? Could you propose a swap? Are there community spaces in your niche where people gather and collaboration opportunities get shared?
The pitch is easier than you think. You're not asking for a favour. You're proposing an exchange of value. There's something in it for them. That changes the energy of the ask entirely. From experience, it's a much easier yes to get than a client pitch. You're giving value. There's something in it for both of you.
Start small. One person. One swap. One opportunity. That's enough to begin.
→ Join Collaboration Cash In. I share opportunities, help members find the right collaborators, and we figure this out as a group.
How to Choose the Right Collaboration Type for You
Here's where I resist telling you which one is objectively best. There isn't one. There's only the right one for you, right now.
These are the questions to work through:
Tech. What do you already have in place? If you don't have digital products yet, contributing to bundles isn't your starting point. If you don't have an email list or community set up, that comes before everything else.
Time zone and schedule. Would you prefer to pre-record, or are you comfortable showing up live? Think about your availability and any time zone constraints. A format that clashes with your schedule is a reliable way to drop out before you see any results.
Comfort with live formats. Some people find going live natural and energising. Others find it genuinely stressful, regardless of how much they practice. Both are completely fine. Pick the format that fits who you actually are. Not who you think you should be.
Existing audience size. If you're starting from scratch, some collaboration types require you to bring an existing audience, because there needs to be something in it for your collaborator. Freebie swaps and flash sale swaps fall into this category. Podcast guesting, summit speaking, community training, and bundle contributing are all viable starting points even with a very small audience.
Existing products. Bundles require a digital product. If you don't have one yet, start somewhere else.
There's a free quiz inside my community that helps you work through exactly these questions and match you to the right starting point for your specific situation.
Please note, this blog post includes affiliate links, which means I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you if you purchase.
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