The Rules for Newsletter Growth Have Changed. Here’s What Works Right Now.

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In my first three years as BuzzFeed’s director of newsletters, we grew our email lists to about two million subscribers. We did this without a super-sophisticated growth strategy. Almost every subscriber we added to our lists between January 2013 and December 2015 came from one of three growth tactics:

• Our landing page, where readers could sign up for multiple newsletters.
• Sign-up boxes at the bottom of relevant stories — for instance, a reader on a DIY article would see a sign-up for our DIY newsletters.
• Individual articles promoting newsletters with headlines like “Find Your Next Great Book With The BuzzFeed Books Newsletter!” that we promote across our site and on social media.

This strategy was pretty basic. We didn’t run pop-ups on our website, use quizzes to drive growth, or focus on the dozens of different growth tactics at our disposal. But we kept growing our email list anyway.

Our secret weapon? Every day, Facebook and Google sent millions of new readers to our website. It was a golden era for traffic — our social team would post and watch the pageviews roll in. Search drove consistent readership to our site. The promotional tactics employed by my newsletter team weren’t particularly advanced, but they were more than enough to convert new readers into subscribers.

But if I were trying to grow a newsletter list today, I wouldn’t rely exclusively on those on-site tactics. I couldn’t. Traffic from Facebook and Google is a fraction of what it was a few years ago. Publishers aren’t awash in new traffic; they have to fight for every new reader.

The good news is that it’s still possible to grow your email list — and possible to scale a list into the thousands or even millions — though you need to be much savvier to grow. But before I explain which tactics you should use, it helps to understand how the playbook for growth has changed.

Major changes from social and search

The channels that fed growth at places like BuzzFeed — social media and search — have been making major changes lately. And every time Google or Meta makes a change, it has a massive effect on the behavior of the people who rely on those platforms and on site traffic for publishers.

I don’t spend every day focused on these sorts of changes, but I know people who do. So I reached out to Melissa Chowning, the founder of Twenty-First Digital, for answers:

What the heck is happening with these changes in traffic from search and social?

Publishers are facing another wave of disruption, courtesy of the platforms that dominate distribution (Meta and Google). With Meta, it’s been a slow burn for years. The bigger story, though, is Google. AI Overviews picked up steam in April, and we’re seeing the effects. Impressions are up, clicks are down, because readers are getting their answers without leaving the results page. It’s unclear how much further the share of keywords with AI Overviews will grow. Google is watching behavior closely and will adjust as needed. At the same time, Google rolled out AI Mode, which by mid-June was live for all U.S. users. Those two significant product changes make it much easier for people to get answers without ever leaving Google.

Why now? 

In my opinion, AI Overviews and AI Mode are defensive moves triggered by competition from OpenAI and others, weaving search into their platforms. Google earns too much ad revenue from queries to risk losing user attention. At the end of the day, their AI push seems to be about incentives: keeping users in Google, protecting revenue, and worrying about everything else later.

How fast is it happening for publishers? And how freaked out should they be?

It’s happening fast. Between May and June, publisher sites saw a median 10% drop in referral traffic from Google, even as impressions held steady. That is a kind of watermark of the AI Overview effect. As of August, AI Overviews show 20 to 40% of keywords for the average client.

Publishers shouldn’t panic, but they should act. In my view, they still need to optimize for Google. Even a smaller share of search traffic can be highly intentional and incredibly valuable. But they also need to be laser-focused on diversifying their reach to their target audience.

Re-thinking your growth quadrants

To Melissa’s final point, if social media platforms and search engines aren’t going to send you new readers, you need to find new places to reach your audience.

Let me explain how.

I introduced a concept here on Inbox Collective last year that I called “the four growth quadrants.” The idea is that there are four categories, or quadrants, for growth:

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

The goal should be to try tactics in all four quadrants in order to build a more robust growth strategy.

Owned growth

Let’s start with Owned growth. All of those on-site tactics we tried at BuzzFeed fell into that category, but it’s not just about how you grow via pop-ups or sign-up boxes. If you host events and use those to grow your list, that’s Owned growth. If you have a checkout page where people can donate or buy products — and also check a box to sign up for your newsletter — that’s Owned growth. Promotion on your podcast falls into this quadrant. If you have control over what you say and where you say it, that’s something that falls under the label of Owned growth. (More later on this!)

Algorithmic growth

Algorithmic growth is anything tied to social media or search — basically, any channel powered by an algorithm. There are still opportunities to grow here, but the rules keep changing for these platforms. What works today may not work a few weeks from now when a platform updates its algorithms. My advice around Algorithmic growth: Make sure you’ve covered the basics, like having a link in your bio that drives people back to your newsletter. Otherwise, success here depends on moving people to what I call a “middle place.” 

For instance, if you publish an Instagram story that tells people to sign up for your newsletter, you probably won’t see much success. But what if you promote a quiz, like Generalist World did on their Instagram account? That might be interesting enough to get people off of social media and over to their site, where they can then sign up for the newsletter as part of the quiz. Creating that middle place — a lead magnet, a giveaway, a contest, a quiz — creates the bridge to move people from the algorithmic channel to your newsletter.

Earned growth

Earned growth comes from partnerships with other newsletters or brands. (The name refers to a public relations term. “Earned media” refers to any time you don’t have to pay to promote your work.) One reason it’s so powerful is that you’re tapping into someone else’s owned audience. There is no worry that an algorithm will or won’t show the promotion for your newsletter. These are their readers, this is their audience, and they’re giving you the platform to get in front of them and talk about why they should sign up for your newsletter.

Cross-promotion with other brands, promoting your newsletter at a conference, even guest writing for another newsletter — all are good examples of Earned growth.

Paid growth

Of the four quadrants, Paid growth is the one that even my mother understands. (Love you, ma!) If you spend money to grow your list, you’re employing a Paid growth tactic. Typically, if you see a newsletter that goes through a massive growth spurt, there’s almost always a Paid tactic behind that growth. It can slingshot a small list into the stratosphere, numbers-wise.

All four quadrants are worth investing in, but the two growth quadrants I’m most bullish on in this new era of growth are Earned and Paid. Here’s what I see working in each quadrant.

Earned growth tactics that work

In the indie newsletter world, Earned growth is one of the primary sources of growth. But others in the newsletter space — publishers and non-profits, in particular — haven’t leaned into Earned growth the way they could or should. It’s not too late to try, though. 

There are a lot of growth opportunities that I’m excited about right now: 

Cross-promotion with other newsletters or brands

This one is super simple: Find another organization with an email list that has your audience but doesn’t compete in terms of topic, and then you help each other grow.

Maybe that means sending a dedicated email on their behalf, and they do one promoting your newsletter in return. Or you could run a promotion within a regular newsletter — you do a shout-out for them, they do a shout-out for you.

Some platforms, like Beehiiv, have one-click magic links that allow someone else to sign up for your newsletter with a single click. Sparkloop also has a free magic link tool that works with lots of different ESPs. These are great because the sign-up rate is much higher if readers don’t have to go to a landing page and type in their information all over again — they only need to click.

There’s another way to tackle these cross-promotions: by recommending someone else’s newsletter in the moments after they sign up for yours. Some of the biggest newsletters and independent platforms like Substack have seen massive growth through this tactic. Someone signs up for their newsletter, and then, immediately after, a little pop-up appears recommending another newsletter. If you can find good partners that you can grow with, you may be able to benefit from someone else’s successful growth.

Promotion on someone else’s Owned audience

There are so many great events and podcasts out there, and many of them have readers, listeners, or attendees who would potentially be your ideal audience. If you can get in front of them, you’ve got a chance to convert them to your newsletter.

Just about every podcast or event gives its guests the chance to do a little spiel at the start or end of the appearance, where you can promote your newsletter. That’s a good start. But I’d take things a step further and make sure that, like we talked about with Algorithmic growth, you give them a middle place to go to.

For instance, whenever I give a talk, I like to do two things:

• I tell anyone there that, at the end of my talk, I’m going to share my slides (this helps to make sure that they stay all the way to the end!)
• When I finish the talk, I offer the chance for them to access the slides — plus some bonus material, like a .pdf or additional resources — by scanning a QR code. That code takes them to a landing page where they can sign up for my newsletter and get the resources I’ve offered.

This sort of strategy is simple but drives much better returns than simply sharing a link to my newsletter on the final slide.

Guest posting

When you’re just getting started with your newsletter, a big question arises: How do you get it to the right audience? It’s a real challenge. It can feel like there are the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Some publishers have these huge audiences — and then everybody else is struggling to bring in a few new readers a week.

But there’s another way: Getting in front of those existing audiences.

Think of it this way: If you’re writing a weekly newsletter, are you going to have something brand new to share every single week? The answer is: Maybe not! And that’s where guest posting becomes valuable. You can have experts and smart people to pop in, take over the newsletter for a week, share their own expertise or ideas, and then promote their own newsletter at the end of the post.

So go out and pitch some of your favorite newsletters. Many people will say no, but even a handful of successful guest posts can give your list a big bump.

Another way to tackle this strategy: Propose a swap with another newsletter. You write their newsletter for a week, and they write yours. You’re creating content as usual, but by getting in front of a new audience, you might be able to reach lots of new readers. It’s a win-win!

Co-registration

This tactic, sometimes known as co-reg, got a bit of a bad reputation in the early 2010s. It’s easy to understand why. A handful of newsletters would come together to offer some sort of giveaway — say, a trip to Fiji. Together, you’d drive thousands of readers to register for the giveaway. But there was a catch: To register, you had to sign up for every newsletter that was part of the giveaway. Enter your email once, and you might end up signing up for five or ten newsletters at once.

Newsletters loved the results — you might be able to add tens of thousands of readers to your list all at once! — but hated when those readers ignored their emails or marked them as spam.

But I don’t think you have to stop doing co-reg. You just have to be smart about how you do them.

Instead of giving away a trip to Fiji, maybe think about a partnership with one other newsletter on a webinar, or work together on a lead magnet that makes sense for both of your audiences. And instead of auto-enrolling readers in your newsletter, give people the chance to clearly opt in or out of your list.

The result might not be tens of thousands of new readers, but you may get a few hundred engaged readers from this tactic. That’s still a win in my book.

Paid growth tactics that work

Paid growth can be a powerful tool for any newsletter looking to quickly build their email list. But one note of caution: Before you spend any money, make sure you consider these metrics. Otherwise, you may be spending unwisely on growth.

Here are four effective Paid growth tactics that I’m seeing these days:

Running ads, particularly through Meta

There are three big reasons to use Meta as your main ad platform: 

• Meta reaches a massive audience across two widely used social networks: Facebook and Instagram.
• They offer pretty targeting options — for instance, trying to reach people within certain cities or even zip codes.
• The cost to acquire an email address is typically much lower than on other platforms. Many newsletters can acquire email addresses for $1-2, and with the ads we’ve run for Inbox Collective, engaged subscribers can sometimes be acquired for as low as $0.70.

There are other places you can run ads, too. Google is certainly an option. Reddit, LinkedIn, and TikTok all make sense in certain cases. But for most newsletters, I’d advise at least starting with Meta.

If you’ve never run Facebook ads before, I’d suggest starting with one of these two formats. I call the first a Contrast ad. (The Contrast is because of the strong color contrast that sets these ads apart in someone’s social media feed.) There’s typically some simple message about the value of the newsletter set against either a solid color background or an image of your community. This example from Lookout Ottawa is a good one to mimic — it’s simple and effectively explains why you’d want this newsletter in just a sentence.

Some teams lean into the Problem + Solution ad format. That’s where you explain the challenge that many readers face, and then tell them how your newsletter helps. This example from TheSkimm is a perfect example of that. There’s a problem (“I don’t have a ton of time to stay informed about the day’s news”) and then the solution (“Sign up for TheSkimm”).

Also, search through Meta’s Ad Library. You can use it to see the ads your favorite newsletters currently run, and then use that to come up with versions to try with your newsletter.

Paying to advertise in someone else’s newsletter 

Readers who enjoy one newsletter may be interested in another, which is why advertising in other newsletters can be effective. You can do this in one of a few different ways. Tools like Sparkloop act as a middleman to help match newsletters. You set the price you’re willing to pay per email address, and other newsletters can promote your newsletter to their readers. When they send you a new reader, you pay them the preset rate. Beehiiv and Kit offer ad networks that help you reach a wide audience, too. There are larger ad networks, like LiveIntent, that offer programmatic solutions to reach readers in thousands of newsletters, but those usually require a significant (read: five-figure) spend.

But there’s also the old-fashioned way: Reaching out to individual newsletters and asking them if you can buy an ad. You’ll find that many newsletters have a low-cost ad offer, like a classified section, where you can reach an audience for just a few hundred dollars (or less!).

Running contests or giveaways

Readers might need a bit of an incentive to sign up for your newsletter. That’s where a contest or giveaway can be useful. Let’s say you’ve got a newsletter that highlights fun things to do in your community every week. Then you add on a giveaway: “Sign up today and you’ll be entered to win one of five gift cards to a local restaurant!” If a reader’s hesitant to sign up, the contest gives them one additional reason to enter their email address. You may need to pay out of pocket to purchase those gift cards, but that’s OK. You’d measure success the same way you would with any other paid ads. You’d take the total cost of the gift cards, divide it by the number of email addresses acquired, and then compare the cost per email to other paid channels.

Another idea: Before you go out and buy those gift cards, ask your sponsors if there’s anything they’d be willing to give away for free to your readers. Often, clients have found that sponsors are willing to provide them with a variety of items, from tickets to merchandise, for free. You just have to ask.

Acquiring another newsletter

There are a lot of newsletters out there. Some are excellent; many are not. But even the mediocre newsletters have audiences — and if the writers behind those newsletters decide to stop writing, there may be an opportunity to swoop in, make an offer to buy that email list, and add those readers to your newsletter.

Of course, this only makes sense if you’re acquiring a newsletter that’s in your topic area and has a similar audience. By purchasing the list, you can continue to deliver useful content to those readers. I do expect to see more newsletter acquisitions in the next 12 to 18 months — there’s been so much expansion in this space over the past five years, and expansion and contraction usually come in cycles. One newsletter’s sunset might end up being your newsletter’s gain.

Owned growth can still be effective

I’ll go back to something Melissa Chowning said at the start of this article: “Publishers shouldn’t panic, but they should act. In my view, they still need to optimize for Google. Even a smaller share of search traffic can be highly intentional and incredibly valuable.”

She’s right. Even if you don’t reach lots of new readers every day, it doesn’t mean you should ignore your site. You can still use Owned growth to get those readers onto your newsletter — the people who show up on your site may end up being among your most loyal readers in the long run.

But getting readers to sign up for a newsletter is getting harder. The tactics we used to deploy at BuzzFeed feel so Internet 1.0 compared to what’s possible today. I’m advising clients to focus on a few Owned growth tactics going forward:

Registration walls

These sorts of walls — where a reader is asked to register their email address and sign up for a newsletter in order to continue reading an article — can be very effective. (One argument against them in the past had been that they might affect your SEO ranking with Google, but if Google’s going to send a fraction of the amount of traffic to your site, are you still worried about upsetting their algorithm?) If you try these, make sure you emphasize the value you’re providing once they register. Are they going to be able to get to read your site for free? What newsletter will they be added to, and why should they be excited to receive it?

If you’re nervous about deploying a registration wall — yes, some readers will see it and decide to leave the site entirely — try showing them only on certain types of content, whether that’s a specific vertical (i.e., sports) or on older content (i.e., stories published 30 or more days ago). That way, you can test out the effectiveness before rolling out the wall to a wider audience.

Another option: Try a faux wall, where readers see the sign-up module, and the text on the page gets blurred, mimicking a traditional wall, but they can still “X” out of the unit and go back to reading. The faux wall can be highly effective but also friendly to readers.

Lead magnets

These have always worked well for B2B publishers, but I’m glad to see more publishers and newsletters starting to use them. Here’s how it works: You put together a big guide, often in the form of a .pdf, and then tell a reader that you’ll send them the .pdf for free if they sign up for your newsletter. An example: the team at Apartment Therapy and The Kitchn created nine different lead magnets using top-performing content that had already been published on their site. The result? They reported 61,000 new subscribers.

Checkout pages

Anywhere someone enters their email address on your site, you should ask if they’d like to sign up for your newsletter. This especially matters when they’re entering their credit card. Whether they’re paying for a subscription, buying an ebook, or purchasing a course, you should ask if they want your newsletter, too.

You’ve got two options. One is to include a checkbox on the purchase page. (Make sure you tell them more about why your newsletter is valuable! A checkbox with the words “Sign up for our newsletter” won’t cut it.) The other is to offer visitors the chance to sign up for the newsletter immediately after they make a purchase. And if you have multiple newsletters, you can always use both tactics: Offer a sign-up to the main newsletter on the checkout page, then tell them about additional newsletters after.

Events

I’m bullish on events — we’ve written about them, and I’ve seen the value with events that I co-host, like the Dine & Deliver dinner series. But there’s another reason events can be so valuable: They’re a great way to add readers to your email list.

Take Dine & Deliver. On the application form for future events, readers can check a box to sign up for my newsletter and the weekly newsletter from Who Sponsors Stuff, with whom I co-host the dinners. I went back and looked through the numbers. Twelve percent of applicants have signed up for my newsletter through that event, which has added hundreds of readers to my list.

But the sign-up process goes beyond the initial events page. Digital events, like webinars, are a great opportunity to promote lead magnets or additional resources. In-person events can drive growth, too: You can take advantage of screens or signage around the venue, using QR codes to drive readers to sign up. (Heck, you can have staff wear shirts with QR codes that anyone can scan to sign up. Try it and see what happens!) 

Here’s a super-easy example: A few weeks ago, I attended a free concert in my neighborhood, and I was so happy to see that my local NPR station, KPCW, had a sign-up form where anyone could sign up for their newsletter. (If you signed up, they gave you a free tote bag.) Pen and paper? Yeah, it still works.

Send +1s to your audience

An underrated tactic: Promote newsletters to your existing email audience. I call these emails “+1s” because you’re encouraging readers to take one more step — in this case, asking them to sign up for a newsletter. So often, I find that publishers and non-profits have existing lists of donors or event attendees who aren’t on their email list. Send them a dedicated email encouraging them to sign up, and use a one-click sign-up link to convert as many readers as possible.

There are other ways to try this. You can add an email like this to your welcome series, or you can create ad units within newsletters to encourage a reader to sign up for additional newsletters underneath your brand.

Quizzes

When I think back on my time at BuzzFeed, I only have one regret: We didn’t use quizzes to grow our email list. It seems so obvious in retrospect, but hindsight is 20/20. Quizzes, I’ve seen, can be excellent opportunities for growth. I love what Gretchen Rubin’s done with a suite of quizzes on her site, helping readers find their next favorite book or a gift to give a loved one. Readers love taking quizzes like these — they’re fun, and you get something of value at the end — but Gretchen also asks readers to sign up to get their results, which means that these quizzes also drive significant growth.

The great thing is that there’s plenty of out-of-the-box, low-cost software that can power quizzes, like Outgrow or Typeform, and those tools can automatically add readers from the quiz to your email list (either through direct integrations or tools like Zapier).

Surveys

Surveys are an incredibly underrated source of growth. I wrote about one example earlier this year:

Here’s a real example from a client. They’ve got 10+ newsletters, and they did a big survey of their newsletter audience.

5,000 people took the survey.

3,500 chose to sign up for at least one additional newsletter.

And those 3,500 people signed up, in total, to more than 11,000 newsletters. (Each person signed up for, on average, about three additional newsletters.)

11,000 email sign-ups — all by adding one question to the end of a survey.

You can promote surveys to your site or social media audience, and use them as a way to get readers onto their first newsletter. You can also use them to get existing readers to sign up for a second (or third, or fifth) newsletter. They’re a powerful tool for growth, and more newsletters should be using them. (Of course, you should also use them to learn more about your readers and help you build a better newsletter!)

Keep your eye on the big picture

The internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s were defined by search, and the 2010s and early 2020s were defined by social media. This next decade will be defined by artificial intelligence, and we’re still learning how that will affect all of our online behaviors. (We don’t even know all the players in the AI space! I’d be willing to bet that in the next five years, there will be a widely-used AI platform that a huge percentage of the population uses — one that does not exist today.)

The rules around newsletter growth will continue to change, and you need to be prepared. What I’ve outlined above is what’s working right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more of these tactics is no longer effective — or perhaps even much more effective! — a year from now. Be flexible as you focus on growth. If something works for you, lean into it, and if you see a tactic start to lose effectiveness, know when to move on. The rules will keep changing; so should you.

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