 | This case study is presented thanks to beehiiv, an all-in-one newsletter suite built by ex-Morning Brew engineers. It comes with built-in growth tools, customizable templates, and best-in-class analytics that actually move the needle — all in an easy-to-use interface. If you want to start a newsletter or are looking to grow your existing email list, sign up and try beehiiv absolutely free — no credit card required. |
The hardest part about running a newsletter isn’t launching it — it’s scaling it.
Email platforms like Beehiiv make it easy to get a newsletter up and running and hit important growth milestones. Getting your first 1,000 or even 10,000 readers isn’t quite as hard as you’d expect. Word-of-mouth referrals, cross-promotion from other newsletters, and traffic from search engines can help your newsletter grow.
But inevitably, every newsletter hits a wall. Growth slows, and newsletter operators start to wonder what to do next.
If they ask around — How did other newsletters scale from 10,000 readers to 100,000? — they’ll hear a few common themes. Some will swear by referral programs or giveaways; others tout the value of spending money to acquire email addresses.
But here’s the truth: Not all subscriber sources are made equal.
Subscribers who come via word of mouth or sign up on your website are already fairly engaged. But what about those other sources? Did readers sign up for a giveaway en masse only to ignore your regular emails? Are subscribers who sign up via social media more engaged than those who discover it in other ways? And how do you actually measure the return on the time and money you invested in these growth opportunities?
Best-in-class newsletters can put their acquisition sources under a microscope. They can see which channels drive both short-term growth and long-term engagement. And all of it starts by understanding what to measure and how to measure it.
Looking at growth + engagement by segment
Lots of email platforms offer similar features: The ability to send emails, trigger automations, or collect data. But very few offer the dashboards and data that newsletter operators need to understand if they want to grow in a steady, sustainable way.
That’s where a tool like Beehiiv stands out. Their 3D Analytics dashboard doesn’t just showcase open rate, click rate, or list size. It allows any operator to dig into the data and see how different audience segments engage with their emails.
In Beehiiv, you can get a 10,000-foot view of what’s happening with your newsletter — including delivery, open, and click rates. Then you can go even deeper in 3D Analytics, which gives you the capability to do things like:
- Filter data to see engagement from readers who came via a particular source, like a referral program.
- Look at engagement for a specific campaign, like readers who came via a Facebook ad campaign.
- Create a segment of readers who signed up during a particular time frame.
- Combine any of these filters — for instance, looking at acquisition from TikTok ads during the previous 30 days.
By slicing and dicing the data, seeing opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and even paid conversions by source, newsletter operators can get the data they need to make the decisions that matter.
Here’s how three newsletter-first businesses — Lookout Media, Payload, and Fantasy Life — used this data to identify the channels to invest in to successfully grow their newsletters.
Lookout Media: Using data to cut acquisition costs
At first glance, Ottawa Lookout looks like a lot of other local newsletters. Three days a week, they cover news, culture, and food for readers in Ottawa, Canada. But unlike some other local newsletters, they aren’t attached to a well-established media property — they’re a bootstrapped media venture.
Geoff Sharpe, a co-founder of Lookout Media, told me that paid acquisition has been crucial to the newsletter’s growth. By spending money, particularly on social channels like Facebook and Instagram, they’ve been able to scale their audience — from zero in October 2021 to over 28,000 readers today, with an open rate above 50%.
Like other newsletter operators I talk to, Sharpe knows exactly how much it costs to acquire an email address on each channel. (Anywhere from $0.50 to $0.70 Canadian, or about $0.35 to $0.50 in U.S. dollars.) He knows that Facebook and Instagram perform well and that TikTok’s shown promising results, though the cost per email address on TikTok is high in a market like Ottawa.
But thanks to Beehiiv’s 3D Analytics, Sharpe can go deeper than just the data he gets from Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
“The tool makes it really easy,” he said. “I can segment by time frame, I can segment by source. If I query ‘all ads,’ it’ll pull up all the data of all the different ads, and I can look and see how engaged the audience is, what the open rate is, what the unsubscribe rate is.”
For instance, he’s been testing out three different ad formats on Facebook:
- Driving readers to sign up on the Lookout landing page, hosted on Beehiiv.
- Running straightforward ads for their newsletter and collecting the email address within Facebook.
- Highlighting original stories in the Facebook Feed and asking readers to enter their email addresses to view the content.
Sharpe isn’t just looking to see which drives the lowest cost per email address — he also wants to identify which leads to engaged subscribers. He adds UTM codes to every campaign so he can easily run queries and create segments in Beehiiv. From 3D Analytics, he knows that about 45 to 48% of the paid audience sticks with the newsletter in the long run. As he runs new tests, he monitors the segments to make sure the engagement rates match historical trends. With more data, he’ll be able to understand where to invest his money going forward.
“For us, it’s a matter of testing and seeing what’s working,” he said, “and then scaling that up as we go.”
Sharpe is the sole person handling growth for Lookout Media, plus he’s taking the lead on marketing, audience analytics, and sales. “A little bit of everything, as you do when you’re a startup,” he told me. He’d previously worked in paid media, where he spent hours downloading data and running reports in various spreadsheets. So he said it’s been a game-changer having an email platform with built-in dashboards that give him the information to make good decisions quickly. “Beehiiv has helped with that, for sure,” he said.
And as he figures out what works in one city, Sharpe can apply the lessons to other sites. When Lookout Media launched a new newsletter, Vancity Lookout, in Vancouver, Canada, in winter 2023, they used their learnings to acquire email addresses at half the cost of what they spent when they first launched Ottawa Lookout.
Another benefit of using a versatile email platform: Lookout’s running a membership strategy through Beehiiv. Readers can become members for about $10 per month or $99 per year (in Canadian dollars — about $7/month or $70/year in U.S. dollars). In Beehiiv, they can track conversion to membership — about 3% of their list has become a member — and even see which segments are most likely to convert to members. As they learn more about conversion by segment, they can invest more in the channels that might lead to a significant return on their investment.
Payload: Getting all the metrics under one room
When Ryan Duffy joined Payload, he’d already worked at one of the most successful newsletter operations in the world. He was employee No. 10 at Morning Brew and the founding writer of their Emerging Tech Brew newsletter, so he’d gotten an up-close look at how to scale a newsletter into the millions of readers.
But when he became managing editor of Payload, a newsletter about the business of space, he expected things to be a little different. Payload is a B2B newsletter, not a B2C one — it’s a niche readership, not a broad one.
When Duffy first got to Payload, they used an email platform that didn’t allow them to segment the data to understand who was signing up and how engaged they were. “The tracking was effectively nonexistent,” he told me. But since switching to Beehiiv, Duffy can now access all the newsletter technology Payload needs in a single place.
“Instead of cobbling together all these third-party tools to put out the newsletter that we wanted, we can do it all under one roof,” he said.
Their dashboards tell a clear story about their audience. Their initial growth came via the sources they expected: Word-of-mouth, industry conferences, and events where the Payload team spoke. They also launched a referral program, through Beehiiv, as a trial balloon. Duffy had seen how well the referral program worked at Morning Brew, but he wasn’t sure if it would work at Payload. The audience was older than Morning Brew’s, more international, and many readers worked in government. Would this audience actually want to share the newsletter in exchange for merch, like stickers or hats, plus an exclusive monthly newsletter?
Thanks to 3D Analytics, Duffy can see the results of the referral program: “It’s actually really successful for us. It has been responsible for around 10% of our growth.”
In Beehiiv, he can see the number of referrals per reader plus the percentage of readers who refer a friend. “Based on the initial success, and continued traction, we continue to invest and double down on our referral program,” he told me. In 2023, they’ll upgrade their swag and create more content exclusively for readers sharing the newsletter with colleagues and friends.
The reporting’s also been useful in understanding larger trends. They can track the big numbers — total number of subscribers (16,000) and average open rate (54%) — but also drill down for certain types of users.
“We definitely look at the subscriber acquisitions by day, just to see if there’s any larger patterns or cohort analysis that can be gleaned,” Duffy said. “Then, of course, we look pretty heavily at opens and clicks by acquisition source.”
His team can also better understand which organic sources of growth are most valuable. They can see, for instance, that readers who come via LinkedIn are especially engaged. Now they’re strategizing about how to build up their presence there to drive more subscriber growth.
Payload is just starting to test out paid acquisition. Duffy said they’ll track the numbers in 3D Analytics to see what channels bring in engaged audiences and shift their spending towards the ones that drive the best results.
Fantasy Life: Analyzing which paid channels drive deeper engagement
Matthew Berry’s been one of the leading experts in fantasy football for almost 25 years, writing for his own digital platform and offering advice to viewers on ESPN and NBC. And in 2022, he made a significant investment in growing his newsletter audience.
Fantasy Life is a daily newsletter and website covering all things fantasy football. They’d previously launched a newsletter, but last year, priority No. 1 was scaling their audience.
Fantasy Life prioritized organic growth channels in year one, building out their website, launching a radio show on SiriusXM, and leveraging their massive social media audience. (Berry alone has has 1.1 million followers on Twitter, and his staff has hundreds of thousands of additional followers across other social platforms.) But Eliot Crist, the CEO of Fantasy Life, said that paid acquisition will be key to growing their list beyond their existing fans.
They ran some experiments in 2022, particularly on channels like Facebook and TikTok, and then dug into the data to determine what worked best.
“One of the things I really like about Beehiiv is their built-in analytics platform, especially their segmentation, where you can create easy segments to track different data,” Crist said. “Segmentation allows us to sort every different type of audience, so I can understand exactly what my open rate is from the website versus TikTok versus Facebook. That will allow me to understand what the open rate is, what the click-through rate is, what the churn rate is, and what the referral rate is to get true metrics of what this audience is.”
The results from 2022? Readers from TikTok had a 10% higher open rate than those from Facebook, but readers from Facebook had a 10% higher click rate. And for Fantasy Life, clicks — not opens — are the best measure of engagement. They plan to adjust and invest more in their paid strategy based on the data.
Understanding who engages and for how long will allow the Fantasy Life team to calculate the payback period for a user — how long it’ll take them to make their money back on a single new subscriber. (Newsletter Navigator, a free tool from Beehiiv, can help you run the calculations for your newsletter.) Once they understand the payback period, they can make sure they’re not spending more than necessary to acquire a new subscriber.
Fantasy Life grew its newsletter to over 300,000 readers last year, with in-season open rates above 55% and click rates above 8%. Now they’re using the NFL’s offseason to implement new tactics. They’re building out automations in Beehiiv, like an improved welcome series to engage readers in their first seven days after signing up, and are putting together the game plan for the 2023 season.
“2023 offers an incredible opportunity to improve our product,” Crist said. “We have a year’s worth of data on acquisition and engagement, and we are optimizing our product to create the ultimate user experience.”
There’s still lots more to learn. Crist and his team are keeping an eye on the seasonality of the business. The subscriber who signs up in August might just want advice for their fantasy football draft — will they stick around for the rest of the year? And what about the person who signs up for their newsletter in the offseason? They might be hardcore fans who want to read about the NFL all year long. Crist said they’ll use 3D Analytics to track different segments and figure out strategies for various types of users.
All of this data, Crist said, has given his team the confidence to keep investing in their business. They’ve hired someone to lead their growth strategy — though he’s careful to note that in the long run, growth isn’t just about the overall size of their audience.
“People chase vanity metrics like list size,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong: List size is important. But truly what matters is how many people are reading your newsletter every single day and how they’re engaging with it.”
Editor’s note: Ryan Duffy announced his departure from Payload at the end of March 2023, after publication of this piece.
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