The Four Newsletter Growth Quadrants

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Some newsletter operators will tell you that the secret to growth is running paid ads on social media. Others suggest focusing on cross-promotion with other newsletters, leaning into recommendation networks, running pop-ups on your content, setting up a referral program, or — well, the list could go on and on.

But the fastest-growing newsletters don’t grow due to any one strategy.

They grow because they’re building a holistic growth strategy. Instead of trying to find a silver bullet, they lean into four proven — and very different — ways that newsletters grow.

Some newsletters are great at optimizing their owned channels, like their websites, to convert readers into subscribers. Others have built smart strategies for earned growth, from appearances on podcasts to partnerships for cross-promotion. Many newsletter operators excel at building an audience on algorithmic channels, like social media platforms, and then effectively move that audience over to their newsletters. And some have established a paid growth strategy — on social media, through search, or even to advertise in other newsletters — to build their list.

Many newsletters are good at one of these tactics. Fast-growing newsletters may have mastered two or three. But to be best-in-class in growth, you need to operate in all four growth quadrants: 

• Owned growth
• Earned growth
• Algorithmic growth
• Paid growth

So, let’s examine all four quadrants and discuss specific tactics you can deploy from each quadrant to help your newsletter grow. 

The four growth quadrants

There are many ways to grow your newsletter. In the past, I’ve advised clients to try to pick at least 5 to 10 things from my big list of growth tactics. But I’ve realized that that’s a mistake. Many local newsrooms tend to focus on on-site growth tactics but ignore opportunities for earned growth. Indie newsletters that perform well on social media sometimes fail to invest in owned growth opportunities. Newsletters that are doing great with paid growth forget to diversify into other growth areas.

As you consider your growth strategy, I want you to imagine a box with four quadrants: owned, earned, algorithmic, and paid. 

As you read through this guide, jot down which tactics you currently use to grow your list and which quadrants they fall into. (I’ve included a worksheet at the end of this article to help visualize everything and ensure you’re deploying tactics in all four quadrants.)

Let’s start by going through each quadrant and looking at their part of a smart growth strategy.

Owned 

Owned growth refers to tactics you deploy on a channel you fully control. The great thing about owned growth is that — as you’d probably guess from the name — you’re not dependent on any outside partners or sites for your growth.

The most common owned growth channel is your website. On your site, you might want to try the following tactics:

• Create a landing page.
• Add sign-up modules to your site’s header or footer.
• Ask readers to sign up for your stories through a pop-up, toaster, or registration wall.
• Build a lead magnet to convert readers.
• Lean into user-generated content, surveys, or polls.
• Include a sign-up on a checkout form after someone buys something from you, like a subscription, course, or merch.
• Nudge an existing reader to sign up for an additional newsletter.

Owned growth could mean driving readers from another owned channel — like your podcast, print product, or app — to your newsletter. But it could also mean converting readers at events you run. If you host a meetup or conference, ask readers to sign up when they register or buy a ticket and again during the event. (Why ask again? You never know if a reader might bring a friend. It never hurts to ask twice!)

With owned growth, control means you can pick the tools to work with to convert readers to subscribers. It also means that if you want to A/B test different messages to improve your conversion rate, you can do that, too.

Earned 

Earned growth is anything that comes from the relationships you’ve built or the quality of the work you’ve produced. Usually, if you grow your list outside of your owned platforms, you have to pay for that growth — but thanks to your work or relationships, you get this promotion for free.

Earned growth opportunities include:

• Promoting your newsletter on a podcast, TV appearance, or on stage at someone else’s event.
• Getting another newsletter to recommend your newsletter to their new readers.
• Partnering with a different organization to cross-promote each other’s newsletters.
• Being quoted in an article and receiving a link to your site.
• Syndicating your content to another publication and getting a link to your newsletter’s landing page.
• Guest blogging for another site.

Large organizations might have a PR agency to pitch to big media organizations or podcasts, but that’s a luxury that most newsletter operators can’t afford. One DIY approach works, though: Assemble a list of the newsletters or podcasts you enjoy and write back to them whenever they do something you appreciate. (You can do the same for reporters covering whatever topic your newsletter is about.) Being an active — and positive — presence in their inbox sparks conversations, which may lead to invites to run a cross-promotion or appear on a podcast. The secret: Don’t be too pushy and ask for something immediately. Build the relationship first and let the rest happen later.

Some newsletter platforms, like Beehiiv, ConvertKit, or Substack, make intra-newsletter recommendations easy, but most services are compatible with SparkLoop, which allows you to recommend newsletters on just about any platform or set magic links for one-click sign-ups.

Keep in mind: Earned growth doesn’t have to come from promotion via other newsletters. If you get shout-outs from readers on social media, that’s earned growth. If other websites link to your published work, that’s earned growth. If your readers like your newsletter so much that they happily forward it to friends, that’s earned growth. (You can nudge readers by including a CTA and a pre-written email within your newsletter.)

Anytime you, someone in your network, or a reader promotes your newsletter — and you didn’t have to pay them for it — that’s earned growth.

Algorithmic

Algorithmic growth refers to tactics deployed on any third-party platform with an algorithm, like a social media channel or search engine. There’s one big advantage to algorithmic growth: You might be able to reach a much wider audience than you ever could via an owned channel.

Let’s say you’re active on a channel like LinkedIn. You’ll want to take advantage of all the features an algorithmic channel like that has to offer. You can try tactics including:

• Adding a link in your bio that sends readers back to your landing page.
• Creating original content — like text-based posts or carousels — where you share knowledge and then nudge readers to sign up for your newsletter.
• Engaging in what’s known as “power commenting,” where you leave comments on a post with high engagement and try to drive readers back to your social media profile or newsletter.
• Teasing upcoming editions of your newsletter or recapping what was previously shared in the newsletter — with, of course, a link to your landing page.
• Direct messaging your contacts and asking them to give your newsletter a try.
• Repackaging some of your best content onto formats that work on that platform, like LinkedIn’s native newsletter feature, and then encouraging readers to sign up for more valuable content.

Whatever algorithmic channel you use — Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, X, YouTube, etc. — you’ll find a few opportunities to convert readers into newsletter subscribers. Some of these tactics also tie back to some of the earned tactics we discussed earlier. If you’re growing a social audience and bringing people back to your site, you’ll want to ensure you’ve optimized your landing page and other sign-up forms to convert as many new readers as possible.

You should also think about how to grow via search. That might mean optimizing your website for certain keywords — you could build multiple versions of a newsletter landing page to attract readers searching for specific words. Let’s say you write a weekly newsletter about things to do in your area. Sure, you want to have a page for anyone who searches for your newsletter’s name — but you’d also want ones with a headline and copy aimed at someone doing a general search (“free and cheap events near me”) or something a lot more specific (“best newsletter with events for families”).

Algorithmic growth has one big disadvantage. Since you don’t have control over those channels, social media sites or search engines can change the rules of their platform at any time. Be careful about how much you invest in any one channel — it’s their audience, not yours. (Which, of course, is why you’ve wisely invested in building a newsletter and getting a more direct line to your most loyal readers.)

Paid

Paid growth refers to any tactic where you have to spend money to grow — and these days, there are a lot of ways you could deploy a paid growth tactic. You could:

• Spend money on social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok to grow.
• Spend money with a search engine to show up when someone searches for certain keywords.
• Spend money to advertise in another newsletter by booking the ad directly with the newsletter or utilizing tools like SparkLoop’s partner network, Beehiiv’s boosts feature, or an ad network like LiveIntent.
• Run a giveaway or sweepstakes.
• Build a referral program to encourage readers to share the newsletter in exchange for rewards.
• Acquire another newsletter with a similar audience or topic.

If you’re just getting started with paid growth, start small. Use Facebook’s Ad Library to see what ads other newsletters are running, and try to mimic some of the formats you see there. Spend a few hundred dollars to build your audience and establish baseline metrics for growth — what it costs to acquire one subscriber, the value of one subscriber, and how long it will take to make back your money on that first subscriber. (I wrote more about those three metrics here.) You’ll also want to know what kind of engagement you can expect from those new subscribers. If you’ve already identified those metrics for your newsletter — and know that you’ll be able to spend reasonably to acquire engaged readers who will drive revenue for you in the long run — then you should consider spending more to grow.

Let’s see the four quadrants in action

We can use a case study of a real newsletter’s four growth quadrants to illustrate how it works. 1440 is a daily news newsletter that boasts more than 3.6 million subscribers as of this writing. (Full disclosure: They’ve been an Inbox Collective client since 2021.)

Here’s what their growth quadrant strategy looks like:

Let’s break that down quadrant by quadrant:

Owned

1440 has a landing page where readers can sign up, featuring testimonials from loyal readers and details about what you’ll get in your inbox.

If you go to the web version of an issue, you’ll see a toaster unit — a bar at the bottom of the screen that pops up like toast from a toaster — promoting their newsletter.

On the topic pages, where the editors share resources around topics like climate science, you’ll see a call to action to sign up for their newsletter.

And the newsletter encourages readers to share newsletters with a friend. When you click on the link to share, it automatically opens a pre-written email to share.

Earned

The 1440 team has invested in doing many public interviews, from interviews with industry publications to podcast appearances.

Their team also occasionally publishes guest blog posts, like this piece for Rolling Stone. Earned media drives far less growth than some of the other quadrants, but it’s still a valuable part of their strategy.

Algorithmic

1440 has invested in several algorithmic channels, including Facebook (598,000 followers as of this writing), Instagram (454,000 followers), and X (149,000 followers). In their feed, they often highlight stories that appear in the newsletter and then refer readers back to their link in bio, which drives readers back to their landing page.

Paid

While 1440 has had lots of success in all four quadrants, their work in the paid quadrant is a huge reason for their growth. They invest significant resources into paid growth, including:

• Advertising directly with other newsletters.
• Spending money through third parties —like SparkLoop’s partner network and ad networks like LiveIntent — to run ads in other newsletters.
• Advertising on social media, particularly Facebook and Instagram, where they regularly deploy dozens of new ads every week to attract new readers. (You can see some of their recent Meta ads here.)
• Advertising through search engines like Google.

Over the years, they’ve also tested other ideas, like a referral program where people could share the newsletter in exchange for rewards.

Has 1440 tapped into every possible growth opportunity? Absolutely not. There are still lots of opportunities for them. They could publish more original stories and then try to convert readers using on-site tactics; they could use surveys as a way to both learn about the audience and grow; they could even acquire another newsletter. But what’s important is that they employ tactics in each of the four quadrants, allowing them to grow as quickly as possible. If they only operated in three of these quadrants — say, if they stopped engaging on algorithmic channels — they wouldn’t be able to grow quite as fast. 

One more thing: the 1440 team often discusses the importance of measuring each growth channel. The readers who come to you via word-of-mouth are probably going to be a lot more engaged than readers who come via a giveaway. Make sure to track several different metrics — I’ve got some suggestions in this article — to measure engagement, revenue, and feedback as you grow. That’ll help you recalibrate your growth strategy so you can invest more in the quadrants and tactics that are most effective for your newsletter.

Identify quadrants you’re missing

Now, let’s figure out the next steps for your own newsletter.

To get you started, I’ve put together a Google Docs worksheet with a big list of tactics and boxes for each of the four quadrants. You can create your own version of the worksheet via this link.

As you go through the worksheet, identify your current tactics and add them to the right quadrants. Then ask yourself:

1. Are there any tactics I’m not trying in a particular quadrant?
2. Are there any quadrants I’m not operating in at all?

To grow your list as effectively as possible, your goal should be to operate in all four growth quadrants. It doesn’t mean you have to go all-out in every quadrant, though — getting started with paid growth, for instance, might start by spending as little as $100 a month to grow. But if you see a quadrant on the sheet where you don’t have any growth tactics listed, that’s your sign to test out a few ideas and see if you can build out your strategy there.

Thanks to our sponsor

The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are made possible thanks to the generous support of our summer sponsor, GetResponse. They’re an email marketing and automation platform with comprehensive, affordable, and easy-to-use tools to grow, engage, and convert your audience. If you’re looking for a platform with powerful automation and monetization tools, give GetResponse a try — and if you’re a non-profit, get a 50% discount on any of their plans.