11 Super Common Newsletter Questions, Answered

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There are certain questions I get asked all the time: Should I republish my newsletter on my website? What’s the best time to send my newsletter? How many links are too many to include in a newsletter? Readers will write in and often add, “I read something in one newsletter that answered the question one way, and then attended a webinar where I got a completely different answer. Who’s right?”

My take is that in the newsletter space, no answers work for everyone. Some of the newsletter operators I admire most are the ones who tend to break the rules and ignore many of the best practices I preach.

That being said, there are certain best practices I do think that a majority of newsletters should follow. So I wanted to answer some of those common newsletter questions and provide a few answers that I think might help you figure out what’s right for your strategy.

1.) Should I republish my newsletter on my site?

Why republish your newsletter on your site? Simple: It’s content that might drive list growth.

Let’s say you send out a great edition of your newsletter. Some readers might forward it to friends or colleagues, and hopefully, you’ve got a call-to-action, or CTA, that gets those new readers back to your landing page to sign up for the newsletter.

But if you’ve got a web version of the article, you open up all sorts of new growth opportunities. Now, readers can share the newsletter in ways — via text message, social media, or Slack, for instance — that might help you reach a wider audience than beyond an email forward. Once you’ve got those readers on your site, you can run pop-ups or registration walls to convert those readers to your newsletter. “Want to read the rest of the story?” you’ll say. “Sign up for our newsletter.”

But should you republish back issues of your newsletter on the website? That’s the real question, and the answer depends entirely on what’s in the newsletter.

If you’re an org whose newsletter consists of a few links back to your website, then no, republishing a newsletter on your website probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Your newsletter’s entire purpose is to get people back to your website — but in this case, they’re already on your website! There’s no additional value there.

However, if you create original content for your newsletter, particularly material that’s relatively evergreen (i.e. not tied to a very specific moment in time), there might be a reason to republish on your site. I usually see newsletters that do, so try one of these two routes:

Republish the entire newsletter on your website

For newsletters with lots of original content, it may make sense to try this strategy. You might need to reformat things for the web — certain design elements that look good in email don’t always work online — and you may want to remove ads or other in-newsletter promotions to make the newsletter look more like a normal article on your website.

Some platforms, like Beehiiv, Ghost, or Substack, make it really easy to send an email and publish to your site all at once. (All of those tools also offer on-site conversion tools, like pop-ups, that you can use to convert readers to your newsletter.) There are some plugins for certain publishing platforms, like WordPress, that also make this easy: Newspack Newsletters (a free plugin) and Newsletter Glue (a paid option) are both worth looking at. In other cases, you’ll copy and paste from your email platform to the tool you use to publish on the web.

One more thing: Make sure you write web-friendly headlines for republished newsletters. The subject line you wrote might work well in the inbox, but you may need to add additional context to make sure the same piece stands out on the web. For instance, the newsletter version of the story you’re currently reading might have a subject line like, “Your newsletter questions, answered.” That’s fine for email — it’s short and clicky! But I’d want a longer headline on the web version that explains what kinds of questions and answers a reader would find in the piece.

Republish some parts of your newsletter on your website

What happens if your newsletter is a mix of original content and additional links? The answer might be to republish just the original content on the web.

A great example of this comes from WBUR. (Full disclosure: They’re a longtime client of Inbox Collective.) In their daily newsletter, they open with what they call a “top note,” which goes through some of the big news of the day. It often runs a few hundred words. Below that, they’ve got additional links back to both their website and other sites that cover news in Boston, where WBUR is based.

In this case, the top note is pretty valuable, but the rest of the newsletter mostly features content that’s easy to find on their website. So, instead of publishing the entire piece online, they republish just the top note and then include a CTA at the top and bottom of the story to sign up for the newsletter.

At BuzzFeed, we tried a similar tactic with our books newsletter. Every week, we published a book recommendation from a staff writer. At the end of the month, we’d take all of those recommendations and republish them as a post (i.e. “Four Books BuzzFeed Staff Loved This Month”) with a note about how you could get more recommendations like those in your inbox and then a box to subscribe. Those posts always drove new growth for our list.

2.) When is the right time or day to send my newsletter?

The short answer: There isn’t one.

Yes, there are reports out there about the optimal time to send. Beehiiv, for instance, put out a report highlighting the optimal send time for a newsletter based on data from over four billion sent emails. Their findings: Emails sent at 10 a.m., 11 a.m., 1 p.m., and 2 p.m. all had the highest open rates. “The worst time to send is the early morning,” they wrote.

And yet, Some of the biggest newsletters with the highest open rates — from brands like Axios or 1440 — come out in the early morning.

So who’s right? The truth is that what time you send a newsletter matters a lot less than you think.

I worked with a client once on their daily newsletter. They’d always had an automated RSS-to-email strategy for their daily newsletter. They were making a big switch and moving to something curated by a staff writer. As part of the switch, they went from an early morning send (6 a.m.) to the afternoon (1 p.m.).

Why? Because they tended to publish most of their stories mid-day, and sending at 1 p.m. would mean they’d have a newsletter full of fresh, new stories.

But there was some nervousness about the switch. Would it affect open rates at all?

So we measured it. This was in the days before Apple MPP messed with open rates — at the time, open rates were a lot more accurate.

In the 30 days before the switch, the open rate on their newsletter was 32.1%.

In the 30 days after, the open rate was… 32.1%.

Don’t worry about finding the perfect send time. Pick one that works for you and your schedule, and if the newsletter is good, readers will make time for it.

3.) Is it OK to take a break from my newsletter?

Yes, absolutely! I think consistency is generally important for a newsletter since readers like to build the habit of looking for your newsletter at the same time every day or every week, but everyone needs to take breaks from time to time. You’re not a robot, and producing a great newsletter takes a lot of work. Give yourself permission to take time for yourself.

Readers will appreciate the breaks, too. There are certain days on the calendar, like the day after Christmas, where open rates tend to drop since many readers are busy doing other things. You don’t need to fill up their inbox with emails they might not read.

If you really feel the need to stick to your schedule, see if you can pre-schedule a newsletter. Maybe there’s an interview you can do, or some sort of article you can write that isn’t time-sensitive. You can write that ahead of time and schedule it. That way, you can still publish to readers without hitting send that day.

If you want more examples of newsletters that took a break, we’ve got a few case studies here.

These 5 Newsletters Took A Break From Publishing. Here’s How They Did It.

4.) When should I pay to grow my list?

I think there are two situations where it makes sense to spend money to grow your list. The first is when your newsletter is recently launched, and you want to prove that the product will work for your audience. Spending a few hundred dollars to quickly build your list might make sense. The faster you can get to 500 or 1,000 readers, the faster you can see whether you’ve got a newsletter that actually works. (I’ve got suggestions here on tactics for paid growth.)

The other case is when you’ve reached the point where you’ve nailed your content strategy and also understand some of your newsletter’s underlying metrics. What is a unique email subscriber worth? How much revenue can you make from each new subscriber? When you know that, then you can set reasonable limits on how much to spend to acquire a new reader.

5.) How long should my newsletter be?

The quick answer: as long as you need to drive the intended action for the newsletter.

I’ll share two examples. The first is from a newsletter I love called Growth Design. They write case studies about how to optimize a website or app for a user. The entire purpose of the newsletter is to get readers to the case study, so their newsletter has absolutely no fluff. Each email is usually less than 50 words long, with a simple explanation of the case study and a link to click.

The goal is to get readers to click, and the newsletter does exactly that.

Here’s another: Tangle is a newsletter that goes deep into one big topic in politics every weekday. Their newsletter is usually several thousand words long, and it often takes 10-15 minutes to read the whole issue every day. The value of their newsletter isn’t to drive a click or sell a product — it’s to make readers a lot smarter about one big current events story. Their founder, Isaac Saul, told Inbox Collective that he made an intentional choice to build something that looked different from other daily newsletters. That decision’s paid off: Tangle now reaches 150,000 readers and earns more than $1 million in revenue per year.

When possible, work to cut out the extra fluff — don’t publish 2,000 words when 1,500 or 50 might do. But if 2,000 words are what you need to drive readers to take a specific action, then that’s the right length for your newsletter.

6.) How many links is too many?

When I took the job as BuzzFeed’s first newsletter editor, I thought I had a pretty good handle on this question. The first version of our first newsletter had five links. To me, that seemed like a lot to read from a single email.

But my boss at the time, Dao Nguyen, encouraged me to run an A/B test to see how readers would react if we added more links. So we tested: How much traffic could we get if we had five links vs. ten? What about 12? What about 15?

What we found was that readers just kept scrolling and clicking. More links meant a lot more traffic. (Traffic, at the time, was one of our core metrics for success.) It also meant that readers pretty much always found at least one link to click — sometimes, with only five links, a reader might get to the end of the newsletter and decide there was nothing interesting to read that day.

Should you add as many links as possible to your newsletter? Probably not. But test different numbers of links and see what happens if you add a few extra ones to your email.

7.) Should I auto-enroll readers in my newsletter?

When someone pays for a subscription to your newsroom, becomes a member of your organization, or makes a donation to your non-profit, should you automatically add them to your newsletter list?

I think it’s fine to do so in most cases. (Though if you’re based in a place with more strict email laws, like Canada or the European Union, you may want to check with a local lawyer first.) If you do, I’d recommend one of two routes: 

1. Have a checkbox on the subscription/membership/donation form that readers can use to opt in or out of the newsletter.
2. Make sure that you tell these supporters what they’ll get and how to change their preferences in multiple places, including on the checkout page and in post-payment emails.

Here’s a good example from the Anchorage Daily News. (Disclosure: They’re also an Inbox Collective client.) When you go to their subscription page, they list access to the daily newsletter as one of the benefits you get when you subscribe. They mention it again on the checkout form and again in the confirmation message after payment is made — where they also tell you how to unsubscribe if you do not want their newsletter.

Yes, those are a lot of places to mention the daily newsletter, but transparency goes a long way with readers. I’ve seen this with several orgs I work with: Auto-enrollment is often a smart strategy for growth and engagement, but only if you take steps like these to ensure readers know they’ll get your newsletter.

There are a few other times you might want to auto-enroll readers in a newsletter:

• If someone’s just completed a pop-up newsletter or email course and you want to add them to a related newsletter.
• If someone has attended an event tied to your newsletter.
• If you’re shutting down a newsletter and want to move subscribers to a different newsletter.

In all those cases, transparency is key. Make sure you tell readers up front that they’ll be added to the newsletter, and make sure readers can go to a preferences center to unsubscribe if they want to. 

In many cases, if you’re moving readers from one newsletter to another, I’ve advised clients to treat highly engaged readers differently. Readers who frequently open and click might be added to a list and told they can opt-out if they choose; everyone else would get an offer to opt in.

8.) Is it OK if my newsletter isn’t growing quickly?

Absolutely! Not every newsletter needs to grow fast — there are lots of niche products that may only reach a few thousand readers and lots of people who run a newsletter as a side project. Some newsletter business models, like the Expert model, can succeed with as few as a thousand readers. 

So, while some newsletters do scale into the hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers, slow growth doesn’t mean your newsletter isn’t working. There are a lot of other ways to measure success with a newsletter.

9.) Do I need to participate in promotional swaps with other writers?

Intra-newsletter recommendations can be super powerful. If you’re a newsletter that’s being recommended right at the point of sign-up — via one of those widgets that pops up after a reader first enters their email address — it can lead to lots of list growth. But for indie writers, these swaps can also be a pain to handle. Writers, especially ones with larger audiences, are often inundated with requests from smaller newsletters who want some promotion.

Here’s what I say: You have permission to say “no” to any and all requests that come your way. Yes, I do think some cross-promotion with other newsletters can be a valuable tool for growth, but you don’t have to agree to work with every writer who wants to promote you, even if that writer has a big audience or has already sent some readers your way. At the very least, I suggest only endorsing newsletters you actually read and like.

10.) What if my sending schedule is a little inconsistent?

Everyone — well, at least everyone of a certain age who remembers a world before DVR and streaming — knows when “Saturday Night Live” comes on. But imagine if “SNL” constantly changed its broadcast time. One week, it broadcast at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday; the next week, it came on at 3:15 p.m. on a Tuesday. They’d never be able to build an audience that way — viewers would have no idea when they should expect to see the show.

The same rule applies to newsletters. The more consistent you are with send times, the easier it is for a reader to build the habit of checking their inbox for your newsletter at the right time. This is particularly important for daily newsletters.

But there are exceptions to the rule. Weekly or monthly newsletters have a bit more leeway — a reader might be less picky if you skipped a week or sent a day or two late. My newsletter comes out every Wednesday, but there have been times when I’ve missed a day, and I can’t recall readers ever writing in to say, “You missed a day! Is everything OK? I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t send a newsletter this week!” It’s just a newsletter, and sometimes, life gets in the way. Don’t sweat it.

11.) How much money would I make if I started (fill in your monetization idea here) with my newsletter?

I’ve received some bizarre questions on LinkedIn lately. They almost always come from bros who operate in the crypto or AI space. They say something like: “I want to launch a newsletter, but only if it will definitely be profitable. I don’t have an email list yet. How much money will my crypto/AI/whatever publication make?”

And the answer is: I have absolutely no idea. While there are plenty of newsletters that drive lots of revenue, simply having a newsletter is no guarantee of revenue.

Everything comes down to how well you execute the idea. There are newsletters that sell ads for $10 and some that sell ads for $10,000. Some newsletters can successfully build out a paid offering, while others try and fall flat. Many newsletters start with one revenue model and eventually pivot to another once they better understand what makes their newsletter unique. 

I’m often hesitant to even share benchmarks around revenue because there is so much room for variation based on the writer of the newsletter, the uniqueness of the audience, and the quality of the offering.

My best advice: Don’t try to compare your newsletter to someone else’s. There are plenty of best practices you should apply, but there is no one playbook that works for every newsletter. The smartest newsletter operators figure out how to monetize in a way that works for them; you should, too.

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