What I Learned at The Newsletter Conference This Year

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The Newsletter Conference for 2025 is in the books, and it was a fantastic day of learning in New York. (And for yours truly — I was the MC, moderated two panels, and gave a talk — an exhausting day!) We had 400+ attendees for the second year of the event, but that means that thousands more of you couldn’t make it that day to be part of the conference.

So this year, I wanted to recap a few of the big ideas I heard on stage. Here’s what stood out to me at this year’s Newsletter Conference.

Find the metrics that make sense for you

For Adam Ryan, founder & CEO of Workweek, success ties back to three specific metrics:

• The ratio of total opens to unique opens — The absolute best-performing newsletters, he said, usually see about 1.9 total opens per unique open. If readers are opening the newsletter multiple times — or forwarding the newsletter to friends who open — that’s a great sign that whatever you’ve written has really hit home.
• Ad click-through rate — Workweek tracks this against two benchmarks. For a B2B newsletter, getting 0.75% of your users to click on an ad means that ad performed well above average. For a newsletter aimed at a general audience, a click rate above 1.5% is an indicator of success.
• Churn rates — Instead of tracking unsubscribes per newsletter, Workweek’s team looks at the big picture. They track to see how long readers stay active and use that as a better signal of success. (I do the same with my newsletter — I use Glueletter to automatically create reports to show how many readers who signed up in a certain month are still active a year later.)

For others, key metrics tied back to growth. Tara Palmeri, author of The Red Letter, talked about modest goals for converting readers from her social media profiles over to her newsletter. Tara’s a former political correspondent for Politico and Puck, and she launched her new newsletter earlier this spring. She’s got 14,000 subscribers — not bad for a newsletter that only launched in March! — but her profiles on social media are massive:

• 104,000 followers on Twitter
• 54,000 on Instagram
• 19,000 on TikTok
• 18,000 on YouTube

She’s been aggressive about promoting her new newsletter on those channels, with a goal of converting five percent or more of those audiences to the newsletter. It’s unrealistic, she said, to expect to convert the majority of the audience — especially when you consider that these platforms do everything they can to keep you from leaving the app — but getting to that five percent benchmark would represent nearly 10,000+ new subscribers for her newsletter.

The other key piece of the data puzzle: Make sure you understand what your metrics really mean. Sean Griffey, co-founder of Industry Dive, spoke about the growing issue of bot clicks within newsletters. (I first wrote about it back in 2024.) Data from Omeda showed that in the first quarter of 2025, about 71 percent of all clicks on newsletters came from bots. Sean said he sees too many newsletter operators ignoring the impact of bots and telling sponsors that the clicks on their ads are all from humans. His advice: It’s time to be transparent about what’s really going on. Better to be honest now about bot clicks than to have them find out later on that the clicks you reported weren’t real — and watch as that sponsor walks away from your newsletter forever.

Keep optimizing your welcome flow

Louis Nicholls, co-founder of Sparkloop, spoke about the importance of upselling readers right after they subscribe to your newsletter. Instead of just sending them a welcome series, Louis recommended optimizing the thank you page after sign-up to drive readers to buy something from you, like a product, subscription, or membership.

Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO of Briefs Media, echoed that idea in a conversation with Chenell Basilio of Growth in Reverse. Jaspreet said that at first, the Briefs team tried promoting other newsletters — and getting paid to do so — through Sparkloop. Then they added an additional page where they promoted a financial advisory tool and got paid for every new referral. For every email they collected, he said, they were immediately getting paid about $2 through these tactics.

But when they started running paid ads to grow their newsletter, the cost to acquire a single email address was about $3 to $5. (Their intended audience is investors, and niche audiences usually cost more to reach.) So they rebuilt their entire post-sign-up flow to encourage readers to pay instead for their premium offering, Briefs Pro, which costs nearly $500 per year. They’ve gotten good enough at selling subscriptions to Pro right away that they immediately make their money back on those paid ads, and then they can reinvest the profits back into reaching more of the right readers for their newsletter.

When it comes to revenue, think outside the inbox

Back in August 2020, I was interviewed by a writer at Wired UK about the strategy from the team at Every. At the time, lots of writers on the web were choosing to go solo with their newsletter. Every took a different approach — a few writers decided to come together to launch a publication. The Wired piece was incredibly optimistic about the opportunity for these sorts of publications, but I’ll admit that I was a bit dismissive of the idea that Every was doing anything particularly noteworthy. “There’s nothing they’re doing that’s magical,” I was quoted as saying.

But in the years since, Every’s gone far beyond just a publication — and what they’re doing is absolutely worth paying attention to. (It’s also a nice reminder that I’m frequently wrong, particularly about the future. In this case, I’m delighted that they’ve proven me so wrong!) Every’s since spun off several lines of business. There’s the stuff you’d expect (advertising, a paid subscription), but also a few things that most publications wouldn’t try (a consultancy, paid courses, and most interestingly, a line of products, like Lex, an AI-powered, Google Docs-like writing tool).

Kate Lee, editor-in-chief and general manager of Every, said that they start by building tools for themselves — if they get excited about the potential for a tool, that’s usually validation that their audience will, too.

But these products also open up lots of new ways to monetize their email audience. For instance: They rolled out an AI-powered app, called Sparkle, that organizes the content of someone’s Mac into folders. Kate said 80 percent of Sparkle users are free readers on one of Every’s newsletters — meaning that they’ve found a way to take users who’d otherwise only be monetized with ads and increase the lifetime value of those users.

Not every newsletter operator is technically savvy enough to roll out their own software, but it’s easy to envision other ways to take your audience out of the inbox and monetize them. Boye Akolade, co-founder and president of The Future Party, spoke about the power of pairing newsletters with events. Whether it’s a big conference or a local meet-up, those sorts of offline experiences have given newsletter operators like Boye the chance to drive significant revenue in a new way.

And Dwayne Lafleur, CEO and founder of Ezoic, mentioned the importance of monetizing your website. He said that a decade ago, many large businesses didn’t put much emphasis on collecting email addresses, but now those emails are the center of any good first-party data strategy. Advertisers are eager to work with brands who understand their audience, and that starts with an email address. He said that newsletter operators should look to be selling ads not just in their newsletter but also on their websites — because you’ve got an email address already, your audience could be very valuable to an advertiser.

Old-school growth tactics still work

Aine Stapleton, now the director of audience development at Semafor, said that in her time at International Intrigue, they found that certain strategies consistently worked well. One was what they called the “Diplomat Salary Report,” where they compiled a list of salaries for diplomats from big countries like China, Germany, and the United States. To get access to the report, you had to enter your email address, and that lead magnet was a huge source of growth. (Turns out that plenty of readers were curious about how well their peers get paid!)

Nathan Barry, founder and CEO of Kit, talked about opportunities for cross-promotion with other newsletters and turning your top-performing content into email courses.

Manny Reyes, founder and CEO of Boletin Growth, talked about landing pages, which can be linked to in everything from the footer of your website to ads in other newsletters. The secret, he mentioned, is keeping everything super simple: The less you have on the page, the better these pages tend to convert.

Let your mantra guide your strategy

Something I absolutely loved was hearing the mantras that guide some of the best newsletters out there.

For Adam Ryan of Workweek, it was: “Don’t chase reach, chase resonance.” That aligns nicely with Workweek’s mission to build a suite of B2B newsletters for professionals working in spaces like HR or content marketing. The goal isn’t to build the biggest newsletter but to deliver something of real value to their core audience.

For Sean Griffey of Industry Dive, it was: “Find your niche, then scale from there.” Industry Dive now reaches millions of readers across dozens of verticals, from automotives to retail, but each started as a niche publication. Once they’d found the right fit between content and audience, they worked to grow their audiences.

For Isaac Saul, founder of Tangle News, it was: “Zig when others zag.” He talked about the idea that plenty of other daily newsletters are doing brevity and bullet points better than he ever could; instead of trying to copy that format, he’s built a newsletter that often takes 10-15 minutes to read every single day. It’s intentionally different, and by being different, he’s found a loyal audience.

When you find that mantra, you can use it to shape whatever strategy you want to build going forward.