👋 Hi friends -
Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. Twice a month, I share short reflections with my newsletter clients + other operators.
Zero formality, ads, or affiliate links - just a guy sharing learnings from working with media operators doing $25-500k+ / month with newsletters.
New reader highlights: Welcome to Dan, Founder @Inbox Collective | Rameel, founder @The Bottleneck
Happy NYE!
I’ve had a ton of fun being in the trenches helping grow newsletters and convert readers into customers this year.
Through that, I’ve had a ton of conversations - 100+ across public/private media holding companies, newsletter native brands, sponsors, and ESPs.
And I have a few predictions for 2025 that I think will be useful for the strategy of your marketing + sales teams.
Here we go.
Ad networks will push prices down for many newsletters - and that’s ok
I think the future for the newsletter ad market looks similar to web.
In web, most of the ad inventory is via programmatic (in other words, automatic) channels like AdSense and managed services, not direct publisher deals.
The newsletter versions of this are Live Intent (programmatic) and companies like Paved/beehiiv (managed service).
beehiiv has made a big splash here this year and I think they’ll be much larger competition for existing publishers than folks realize because:
There's a long tail of great newsletter inventory advertisers couldn’t access before
Individual direct buys are time-intensive for large-scale advertisers
Many newsletters don't actually perform at $30-100 CPMs
If, for example, Hubspot can allocate a meaningful budget to beehiiv for 20% of direct deal CPMs… are their existing newsletters partners really going to get the same share of wallet?
That competition will hurt some folks… but I think we should believe that’s easily worth continuing to establish newsletters as a go-to marketing channel.
And that tide will lift all ships - beehiiv has already brought many new advertisers onto the market.
The best newsletters will go from marketing channels → partners
This is the answer to prediction #1: The very best newsletter brands will go deeper with their sponsors, owning more of the funnel.
There are a ton of newer newsletters that kill it on editorial content - 1440, The Rundown, Arnold’s Pump Club, among others, and their sponsor results reflect that.
These types of newsletters will grow net revenue retention with direct deals and have the trust of sponsors + their audience to go full-funnel.
If you want to check out the “end-game” of products/services to become a thought partner for your sponsors, Industry Dive’s media kit is a peek into best in class.
Co-branded webinars, lead magnets, executive reports, and evergreen web content - these are all tools to have a stronger impact on the buying process.
Companies with large email lists will create editorial newsletters
Carta, CB Insights, and beehiiv all have newsletters with hundreds of thousands of readers.
We work with beehiiv’s flagship newsletter, Creator Spotlight, and have watched first-hand even auto-signups translate into extremely sticky readers.
There’s a huge opportunity for companies that ‘end up’ with large email lists as a byproduct of performance marketing to create great editorial content for their lists.
Think mobile apps, SaaS, e-commerce, and large B2B services.
I think we’ll see a few B2B companies launch successful experiments while companies like Alex Lieberman’s StoryArb and 6AM City help push the envelope for companies that don’t have the internal resources/strategy.
The newsletters that curb their CPL addiction will outperform
Everybody growing with paid ads is addicted to low CPLs.
I’ve seen that lead to so many growth decisions that introduce low-quality readers into newsletters, completely unbeknownst to the team.
I’ve talked about this for months.
So far it’s still only my agency and a handful of individual newsletters/media companies that use subscriber quality metrics as the north star for paid ads.
I want to be clear: I’m not blaming other agencies or publishers - most ESPs make this technically impossible or very hard to do without data analytics resourcing.
I spoke with Austin Rief a few months back and even he admitted, while Morning Brew is on the stronger side analytically, he doesn’t think they or anyone else has nailed it.
E-commerce, mobile, and other industries all have their own sets of SaaS tools and best practices around LTV:CAC and ROAS.
Newsletters will get there, it will just take time - but it needs to be a priority.
And so I think for most of 2025 the window will remain open: any publisher taking even a manual stab at quality tracking + feeding that back into growth decisions will easily outperform their peers.
Newsletters will grow out their Media Mullet
Free-ad-supported content in the front, high-LTV products/services in the back.
Media mullets are a force multiplier for brands:
Axios converting 1-2% of readers to $1,000 memberships
Blockworks cruising past $10M+ in events
WorkWeek turning niche B2B newsletters into 6 and 7-figure professional communities
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which these opportunities are outputs of these brands investing in quality content and disciplined growth first.
But if you’re already there, back-end products + services are the next step.
Newsletters will make a lot of money using their 1P data correctly
Very simple personalization can drastically alter sales outcomes.
Earlier this year, Justin Welsh launched his Creator MBA product.
He ran an AB test - 15% of his readers received a default email sequence/sales page, the rest received variations based on how they responded to an onboarding survey.
There was a 40% lift in CVR - 12% vs. 8.7%, and the net result was an incremental $600k in product sales within a 2-week launch.
The personalization was extremely simple - top-of-fold copy changes in the emails and sales page.
The low-hanging fruit is there and I suspect more newsletters will take advantage of it in 2025.
Email nurture will become useful to the nurture-ee (finally)
Email is a fantastic vehicle to sell.
The issue (particularly in B2B) is a lot of email nurture sucks - it’s pushy and occurs before ANY value has been provided to the reader.
Strong email nurture gives value before asking for it.
We’ve already seen founder-led educational content crush on social in 2024 for folks like Adam Robinson and Tyler Denk.
I think that same playbook will find its way to B2B SaaS/service email lists next year.
That’s the letter.
- Nathan
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