The Best Paid Acquisition Channels for Newsletters

0:00So 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 were some really interesting people. I actually met a guy, Neil. So his newsletter does like$20 million a year. And yeah, 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$800 ,000 a month on ads. 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.

0:35This 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 going to 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 a b c d f there's actually an 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 said so when i worked at the hustle we tested 20 plus paid growth channels to the newsletter to grow the newsletter to over 2.5 million subs.

1:06And since then, I've helped 35 plus newsletters add 5 million plus subscribers with paid acquisition. I've tested Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Sparkloop, Quora, CoReg, Influencer, Newsletter Ads, and basically everything, right? Sponsor scholarships, LinkedIn, whatever, right? So here's what he says is S-tier. He says Facebook and Instagram ads. So - What does S-tier stand for? S-H-I-T? S-H-I-T? Shit. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, S tier is above eight. Like in Japan, S tier is like, if you're like an S tier, like anime character, you're like elite. That's what it means. Okay, so S tier is the highest quality.

1:43Yes. 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$3 CPA cost per subscriber, 40 to 55 % open rate, which I discount. Open rates are like out of whack right now. And then the five to 15 % 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 are 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.

2:18Funny enough, in B2B, we've tried LinkedIn ads for newsletters. The quality is amazing. We couldn'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 CPAs are pretty good. We're not quite down to three yet. It's more like maybe four or$5 CPAs. We're trying to get it down. That ties in 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$4 per subscriber.

2:51A tier is right underneath S, correct? Correct. I know it's on the screen, but I don't know if that's a ranking system. That's correct. I'm using A, B, C, D, E, F, just like we have in school here. Just put the S as like A+. 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 Beehive, the good thing about it is you can pull your users and you can pull really with any software, but they have a built-in like, hey, what did you think about this week's newsletter?

3:32So for us, we determined that our newsletter was good once over a four-week period. Over 60%, 70 % of people were 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 me 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, 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.

4:09It'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, Neil. It's a lot of random 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 D2C, e-commerce. I've tried TikTok ads for services. It didn't work too well.

4:41I'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 have used successfully, Morning Brew, I remember one of the co-founders of Morning Brew, Alex, he said back in the day, what really worked was that once a new ad format would come out, they would just go crazy on that ad format because the cost 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.

5:13Beehive Boost. So basically, here's how it works for Beehive. So this is B tier. So Booz is already affiliate network for Beehive newsletter. So Beehive is kind of like an email service provider. It's new. It's hot. It's what I've been using. SteadyFix 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, there's an ad for another newsletter. So I've tried this. The jury's still out, but the costs aren't that crazy. But the quality, there's a big variation on quality.

5:46Like 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 stuff just to governments and you have a newsletter for people who are high up in the government, 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?

6:25So 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 arm and leg in CPA, 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 Facebook and Instagram ads, and it'll work well.

6:57Yeah, I mean, marketing one-on-one again for everyone, 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$100 ,000, 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, Sparkloop partner program. I recommend reading this post, but we should work towards wrapping this one.

7:24So look, you can buy ads in other newsletters. That's newsletter ads. Sparkloop is an affiliate network for newsletters. You can list your newsletter and subs. By the way, when you're talking about buying ads in other newsletters, like I know the rating here is like a B. I found to buy ads in other newsletters, 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 were 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.

8:00Yeah. 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 C tier. So not that good. Live Intent is a platform for programmatic display ads and email.

8:30You can buy ads, hundreds of email publications using one ad platform. And then Google and Bing Ads, C-tier. And then CoReg is the worst one. So, Neil, you want to explain what CoReg is? Yeah, CoReg 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 in print that you're subscribing to both news editors. Then you start getting emails from people you didn't expect, and you're like, what the heck?

9:02And then you just start marketing the spam. All right, so that is it for today. We went a little longer here, but please rate, review, subscribe, five stars, please. And we'll see you tomorrow.