How to 10x the buyers on your newsletter

👋 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 $25k-$2M+ / month with newsletters.

New reader highlights: Adriene, Founder @Arena | Julian, Founder @PointsPath | John, Founder @Community Impact

A client came to us from another agency 4 months ago and since then we’ve taken them from $80/day to $1,000/day in revenue.

That’s a 10x - not too bad!

But, here’s some cost per lead (CPL) data that’ll make you scratch your head:

Weird, right?

Today I’ll walk through one change that can 10x the buyers and clickers on your list without needing to revise your creative or media buying.

Here's the standard flow for most newsletters:

Someone sees your ad → Signs up → You tell Facebook "good job, you got a reader"

So Facebook learns to find people who sign up.

Okay. Fine. But what if that reader sucks - if they never open or click?

All the same to Facebook!

You need to take your conversion events extremely literally.

If you make Facebook acquire sign-ups, that’s what it will do - there is ZERO promise those people will ever make you money.

And so if you’re not careful, your list fills up with dead weight.

Sponsors see increasingly poor CTRs and stop renewing with you.

Or if you sell your own stuff, you spend 100+ hours on a launch only to find out your list is full of a bunch of window shoppers.

No other industry runs paid marketing like this.

The newsletter I mentioned earlier is in a high-income professional niche.

Their Meta CPL was $8.50.

(For my consumer folks, I know that’s a wild CPL - but plenty of prosumer, B2B, and finpub media companies are paying this much for growth.)

But fewer than 10% of signups were actually in their ICP.

The real cost per qualified lead was north of $85.

So we made sure Facebook was only rewarded when qualified readers signed up.

New numbers:

Many newsletters - Industry Dive, Puck, Workweek - etc. can and should do this.

In fact, this is valuable to anyone who…

CPL matters a whole lot less when you have great LTV and can afford to go after the right people.

Here’s how to do this without ever speaking to a developer.

Your new sign-up flow:

Ad → Landing Page → First-party data form → Conditional thank you pages

The form (usually a Typeform) asks a minimum of three questions:

Based on their answers, sign-ups get routed to one of two thank you pages.

Now Facebook learns to find your actual ideal customer profile (ICP).

This was just one way to find higher quality readers.

The broader question you should be asking:

“Is there ANY event down-funnel where I can train Facebook to find better readers, where I still have A LOT of data to pass back to Facebook?”

Some ideas I’ll leave you with!

These are harder - ultimately, opens/clicks are pieces of data that live on your ESP.

And so it’s up to beehiiv, Kit, etc. to expose this data via their API so that you can send it back to Meta.

To date, they don’t, but I hope that will change this year.

Don’t get me wrong - you can still bring in high quality readers simply by niching down your creative and measuring which ads drive the best readers.

Here’s us doing it for the man himself!

But the operators who marry creative, measurement, and conversion event optimization will have the biggest edge in our industry.

That’s the letter.

- Nathan