The Best Paid Acquisition Channels for Newsletters

Published Oct 13, 2023, 11:00 AM

In episode #2580, we break down the best-paid acquisition channels for newsletters. Growing your newsletter has become sexy once again, and today we unpack the lessons from Matt McGarry’s article ‘The Best Paid Acquisition Channels For Newsletters’. Join us as we take a closer look at the best ad sources for your newsletter, how to make sure your newsletter doesn’t suck, and what you can do to maximize your ad strategy. For a detailed breakdown of the best-paid acquisition channels for your newsletter, along with actionable marketing advice, be sure to tune in today!

TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:

  • (00:00) Today’s topic: The Best Paid Acquisition Channels for Newsletters.
  • (00:11) Matt McGarry’s success with newsletters, adding subscribers, and paid acquisitions.
  • (01:21) An overview of the best ad sources for newsletters.
  • (03:15) Why do you need to make sure your newsletter doesn’t suck.
  • (03:53) The best ways to use X and TikTok ads to drive traffic to your newsletter.
  • (04:55) Strategies for buying low-priced ads.
  • (05:48) Why you should experiment and take ad ratings into account.
  • (08:38) The downsides of email co-registration.
  • (09:04) That’s it for today! Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe!

Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more!


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So we're going to talk about the best paid acquisition channels to grow your newsletter, because growing the newsletter has become sexy again and everyone's talking about it. I was in a newsletter Mastermind last week and there are some really interesting people. I actually met a guy, Neil So his newsletter does like twenty million dollars a year and wow, yeah, it's agree better on. It's like a general newsletter, kind of like The Hustle, kind of like Morning Brew where they talk about a lot of general business news and they spend like eight hundred thousand dollars a month on AD. So paid is the best channel And I'm going to go through this list and we can talk about if we agree or disagree with this list. This post was actually created by the guy that runs that Mastermind, Matt McGarry, So he has this thing called the Newsletter Operator. So I'm gonna share my screen over here and those of you that are listening, it's okay. We will explain it as well. So, Neil, you don't watch anime, but let me explain to you there are It's not just ABCDF. There's actually a S tier. So S tier is like an elite tier. Okay, it's above a if that makes sense. So here's what this guy said, Matt. So, when I worked at The Hustle, we tested twenty plus paid growth channels to the newsletter to grow the newsletter to over two point five million subs. And since then, I've held thirty five plus newsletters add five million plus subscribers with paid acquisition. I've tested Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Spark, Loop, Cora, Courage, influencer newsletter ads, and basically everything right, sponsored scholarships, LinkedIn whatever.

Right. So here's what he says. Is S tier.

He says, Facebook and Instagram ads.

So was S tiersam for Sahi t sh shit?

No no, no, no no no, S tiers above eight like in Japan. S tiers like if you're like an S tier like anime character, you're like elite.

That's what it means. Okay, So S tiers the highest quality? Yes, okay.

So he says Facebook and Instagram aka meta ads, and then he says estimated subscriber cost and quality. I'm not gonna read all this stuff over here, but one to three dollars CPA cost per subscriber, forty to fifty five percent open rate, which I discount. I just open rates are like out of whack right now, and then five to fifty teen percent CTR. I know you don't necessarily use meta ads for your newsletter because you just use organic. That's like your S tier. But general thoughts on this because here the newsletters.

That he's used this on. Yeah, no, I agree with him.

I do believe Facebook and Instagram ads are one of the best sources for newsletters. Funny enough, in B to B we've tried LinkedIn ads for newsletters. That quality is amazing. We kind't get the cost per newsletter subscriber to pan out.

Yeah, so we believe this is S tier on my side because we are actually doing this right now and the cps are pretty good. We're not quite down to three yet, it's more like maybe four or five dollars CPAs we're trying to get it down. That ties them with your creative at the end of the day. So meta ads, I believe this S tier. If you don't have any traffic sources, go for it. The next tier would be A tier, which is Twitter and x ads. So basically the CPA is one to four dollars per subscriber.

A tier is right underneath s correct correct on the screen. But I don't know if that's a ranking system.

That's kind of ABCDF, just.

Like we have just the s as like a plus, got it? Yeah, so Twitter X we've experimented with this, and our CPAs are around this range. I would say jury is still out, like we want to ramp this quite a bit for the newsletter that I am growing. But here's what I should say first, and same thing for Neil too, is you shouldn't try to drive ads to your newsletter if it sucks. So like Beehive, the good thing about it is like you can pull your users and you can pull really with any software, but they have a built in like hey, like what did you think about this week's newsletter? So for us, we determined that our newsletter was good once over like a four week period, over sixty seventy percent of people are like.

I really love this newsletter. So that's important.

You got to get product market fit first, all right. TikTok ads. This is interesting to mean because Neil, I've never ran TikTok ads to get newsletter subs. I don't know about you.

I have, So what I found with Twitter ads is not Twitter TikTok Oh, TikTok my bad. But going back to Twitter, you know, a year ago we didn't see Twitter ads working as well. The cost was just too high. But because of all the changes with X good or bad, it doesn't matter. It's much more affordable for marketers than it was a year ago.

Yeah, and that's another lesson, right, you want to buy low when other people are selling. And so this is a situation with Twitter where they have a lot of inventory that's available and I see a lot of stupid ads, like I see a lot of solitaire ads. I see a lot of game ads.

I don't know about you and Neil. So there's a lot of around stuff and then TikTok ads.

Going to that question, I've never tried TikTok ads for newsletters. I've done TikTok ads for selling products like D two C e commerce.

I've tried TikTok ads for services. It didn't work too well.

I've tried actually TikTok ads for services quite a bit, but it mainly works really well when you're selling products and you can show in a video how you can use like a spatula to cook or something like that.

What I can say to TikTok ads is when you look at the people that newsletters I've used successfully, Morning Brew. I remember one of the co founders of Morning Brew, Alex He said back in the day, what really work was that once a new ad format would come out, they would just go crazy on that ad format because the costs would be really low. So that's another example of buying low when other people don't really understand or other people are maybe exiting that market. Beehive boosts so basically here's how it works for Beehive.

So this is B tier.

So Boosts are they affiliate network for Beehive newsletters. So Beehive is kind of like an email service provider. It's new, it's hot, it's what I've been using, set a fixed CPA, and other newsletters on the platform can apply and get paid to recommend your newsletter. So this is like one of those situations where you might have your newsletter and then in the newsletter's an ad for another newsletter.

So I've tried this.

The jury is still out, but the costs aren't that crazy, but the quality there's a big variation on quality. You just don't know what you're going to get.

So what you want to end up testing out with a lot of these ads is, you know, just see how they end up working. Some channels are going to be better than others, and even though they're saying S for some classes a for others. The big thing here is it's not just a general rating. It really varies per sector and per business. Like if you're selling just for if you're selling stuff just to governments and you have a newsletter for people who are high up in the government or running Facebook ads, isn't really going to help you get a lot of your ideal customers LinkedIn will But it's just because your buyer base is really really tiny, right, So it really depends on the industry.

And I know that's an extreme example.

It's like the same thing if you're running a newsletter for defense and war related stuff.

I'm not talking about news about the.

War, but people who would buy your products like missiles and tanks, et cetera.

Just your potential subscriber base is going to be very very low.

You're going to pay an arm and leg and CP and you just got to look at the channels that can help you target that ideal person. But if you have something more broad like the Morning Brew. You can end up going really broad with like Facebook and Instagram ads.

It'll work well.

Yeah, I mean marketing one on one again for everyone. It's you got to know where your audience is hanging out and ideally you know the numbers so you can understand how much you can actually pay for these right because a lot of these people that are buying newsletter ads, they are actually trying to attract other advertisers. It just depends on your business model. If you're selling services and your LTV is one hundred thousand dollars, you can pay a little more for a newsletter sub.

So that's that.

I don't want to go too much into everything here, but newsletter ads spark Loop partner program. I recommend reading this post, but we should work towards wrapping this one. So look, you can buy ads and other newsletters. That's newsletter ads. Spark Loop is an affiliate network for newsletters. You can list your newsletter and subs.

By the way, when you're talking about buying ads and other newsletters, like I know, the rating here is like a B I found to buy ads and other newsters super effective, assuming it's somewhat competitive and what I mean by that is, like, you know, Eric and I both do marketing. If we're to buy an sem Rush newsletter, it would be amazing fit.

But on this flip side, if we're.

To buy an AD in a morning Brew newsletter, it's not bad. It's just not going to convert as well because the audience isn't exactly what our audience is.

Yeah.

And the other thing too is let's say so you have an AD agency that focuses on working with lawyers for example, Well you could go to a lawyer newsletter and that would make a lot of sense, like you would want to find like an affluent newsletter, right, and you can see how much you can see the demographics, you can see how much people make the size of their businesses and all that type of stuff. Right, So that again ties back to marketing one on one. So working towards wrapping up here. Live Intent this is a seed here, so not that good. Live Intent is a platform for programmatic display ads and email. You can buy ads hundreds of email publications using one ad platform and then Google on being ads set here and the coorage is the worst one. So Neil, you want to explain what courage is, Yeah, coverage is terrible.

It's just like, hey, subscribe to Eric's newsletter and oh, by the way, we'll also subscribe you to Neil's newsletter. And you may love Eric and I and we appreciate that, but it's kind of like deceiving because you don't really know and you're not being the print that you're subscribing to both news letters. Then you start getting emails from people you didn't expect and you're like, what the heck, and then you just start marking a spam.

All right, So that is it for today.

We went a little longer here, but please rate for you. Subscribe five stars please, and we'll see you tomorrow.