👋 Hi friends -
Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. Twice a month, I share short reflections with my newsletter clients + other operators.
Zero formality, ads, or affiliate links - just a guy sharing learnings from working with media operators doing $25k-$5M+ / month with newsletters.
New reader highlights: Dustin, CEO at Klay Studio | Cole, CEO @ The Flyover | Odysseas, founder @ WalletHub | Mehul, Media Partnerships Lead @ Essentiallysports
Matt Paulson has built a run-rate $65M-$70M+ financial media newsletter with 40%+ margins.
I’ve wanted to do a MarketBeat newsletter edition for a LONG time for a bunch of reasons:
Paulson spent early 2026 on a podcast tour giving away an insane volume of metrics, funnel secrets, and marketing channels he’s using
The Feed (my agency - we do growth for the biggest newsletters in the world) has been helping scale his Meta ads for a bit under a year now
SpaceX IPO’d on Friday - this was a HUGE angle in our paid ads. That’s all stale now, so I can be slightly more open about our process
Before we jump in, I need you to understand what makes financial publishers so interesting:
Matt Paulson generates something like $20-$30/subscriber (SUPER high).
He’ll be the first to tell you he emails a lot, churns 5-10% of his list per month, and so his $60M/yr biz is a race to LTV:
Acquire readers via paid ads with a lead magnet.
Grab the phone number on the way in
Recoup 30-40% of ad spend before the first email using an affiliate funnel I’ll unpack shortly
Write genuinely great markets content.
Run strong financial offers from partners like Agora ($1B+ financial publisher) and Marketwise alongside that content
Get paid 100-150% of the revenue generated for those advertisers on $100-300+ products because they’ll earn it back later via high-ticket backend sales
Guard deliverability like the business depends on it
Many readers l meet IRL like to chirp investment newsletters for emailing readers a lot.
If that’s you and it’s preventing you from studying the finpub playbook, I think you’re being silly.
Finpub advertisers are unforgiving - if you don’t perform, you get dropped.
This has made finpub newsletters much more sophisticated than the average operator.
We’d all be wise to study what they’re doing, so I wanted to explain MarketBeat’s funnel and some of the principles that any email operator can plug into their business.
1. Your sign-up flow can liquidate 30% of ad spend on day 1
Most operators slap a thank you page post opt-in and call it a day.
Your sign up flow is the most valuable real estate you have and you MUST use it to do any number of valuable things:
Runs surveys that collect first-party data
Co-reg with other newsletters you own
Opt readers into affiliate offers
Sell your own products
Get SMS
For Matt, he can make 30%+ of his ad spend back - up to $3 - instantly because new leads are dropped into a 6-8 page funnel that breaks out roughly like this:
(20% of pages) Lead magnets + SMS bumps: These are built around the most popular market ‘metas’ (e.g., SpaceX up until Friday) and MUST capture SMS. More on this in section 6 below
(70% of pages) Co-reg offers: You probably use Sparkloop / beehiiv boosts and call it a day. Matt uses 5-6 partners, each of which might pay $1-2+ for a successful opt-in.
(10% of pages) Partner re-directs: if you continue through the entire sign-up flow, you’ll get redirected to a webinar or video sales letter from an affiliate partner with a front-end ($100-400) offer
This is not a ‘set it and forget it’ funnel.
Matt’s been public that the order of these pages is extremely important and they’re constantly swapping partners in/out and reordering them based on revenue/subscriber.
2. The secret to paid ads: Your customer is your copywriter
Matt’s paid spend mix, as of the latest podcast I could find:
Google: ~$300K
Co-reg: ~$250K
Newsletter ads: ~$200K+
Meta: ~$150K
Misc: ~$100K
If you want to know where his spend is going moving forward:
All roads lead to Meta!
We’ve been a big part of that scale, but I don’t want to take too much credit.
Matt has an incredible funnel. Our goal is to pull in readers already primed for his top-performing offers, so we:
Start with the partners' top performing advertiser links. Typically these are to VSLs (video sales letters that educate someone on a product).
Tear each one down line by line. Find the big idea, the pain it twists, and the mechanism.
Take general lead magnets (Top SpaceX stocks) and build dozens of angles / ads around them congruent with those VSLs
I won’t share the offers he’s running - go sign up and have a look for yourself - but here’s an example of a VSL teardown we did for something a few months back:
Some of our best ads across all of our clients have come from studying the topics / sponsorships users are clicking on most.
Let your customer be your copywriter!
3. You must religiously track and cohort your subscriber cost per lead and LTV data
The most successful newsletters all have a handle on their data. I’ve written about how to track/measure your LTV.
Everything you do with those calculations must end up in dashboards - ideally cohorted - so that you understand what a reader is worth and if new leads are behaving as expected.
Matt went open book on his tracking at a conference and was kind enough to thumbs up me sharing this with you:
You can see his breakeven is typically 30-45 days:
Sourced from the marketing dashboard Paulson provided / let me share
Not pictured, but extremely useful: We can see this data at the ad concept level, which means we…
Are constantly shifting spend mix to blend up ROAS
Have crystal clear visibility into which ad concepts we should be doing iterations on
I highly, highly, highly recommend you do this if you spend $50k-100k+ per month on paid ads.
4. Email blasts and a trigger machine
MarketBeat is a portfolio of newsletters and so it’s tricky to distill everything they do in their editorial, but broadly you should think of their strategy as:
Broadcast emails with affiliate ads / links
These are your traditional newsletters.
Dedicated sends on behalf of partners
Here’s one from Chaikin Analytics - these are typically less image-heavy, are short (<500 words), and designed to create curiosity that drives directly to a partner offer.
Triggered emails
They keep a massive queue of marketing emails:
~200 emails live in the system at once
Open a MarketBeat email? They’ll send you another one immediately - you’re already in the inbox, so that 2nd email will have a 60-70% open rate
Click an offer? The next one fires. Click again, it escalates to SMS.
That system alone does ~$150K/week.
If you have a big roster of advertisers, I’d heavily recommend piloting triggers to sponsored deep dives / dedicated sends.
SMS is ~10% of his list and ~25% of revenue - that’s $1.5-1.75M a month on 400,000 phone numbers.
Crazy!
But the SMS playbook is quite different from email:
Every text includes an advertiser, SMS is too expensive to send otherwise. Write a subject line / quick link that drives curiosity and include a partner link. The partner’s offer page carries the rest.
You need something new to sell daily. Matt rotates 40-50 advertisers.
Acquisition is nearly free - optional phone field next to the required email from paid traffic is where all numbers come from
It’ll be interesting to see if folks outside of finpub can do this. The Flyover mentioned at the newsletter conference they’re testing here aggressively, I’d be watching what they do.
SMS is much stricter than email, you can’t mess around. Matt gave some advice on a recent podcast about reducing risk on the channel:
Link to an aged, reputable domain. Matt's short link got blocked until he switched to marketbeat.com.
Get a short code if you can ($10K/year). Better throughput, dodges iPhone filtering.
Unlike email, you MUST double opt-in, or you're risking TCPA suits at $2,500 a pop.
Scrub / reassign numbers every 30 days and sunset anyone who has 45 days of no clicks.
6. Email deliverability is the unsexy edge
Matt shares everything he does publicly.
And yet he still dominates other publishers when it comes to reader LTV.
I think a big part of it is this:
MarketBeat delivered nearly a dozen emails to me yesterday.
All of them landed in my primary inbox.
That’s insanely difficult to do.
A few deliverability tips from Matt:
Open rates are dead. Gmail cut its open-pixel firing around March 20. Rates dropped 10-15%, though nobody actually opened less. Track clicks instead.
Stop sending everyone the same volume. Subscribers get sorted into frequency tiers:
Active in the last 30 days → daily
Cooling off → weekly
Inactive (30-270 days) → twice a month, reactivation only
Segment by ESP, not just by engagement. Microsoft has historically run a stricter spam filter than Gmail, so MarketBeat sends different mail treatment to Microsoft addresses vs. Gmail addresses, and maintains a separate dedicated IP pool just for Microsoft.
Pay for deliverability expertise, don't DIY it. He has a paid consultant at SendGrid who monitors sender reputation and files mitigation requests with Yahoo/Hotmail on his behalf, which carries more weight with ISPs than requests filed directly by him.
The last thing I’ll leave you with: Matt pays WAY more than the $2/reader everyone obsesses over on twitter.
Sourced from the marketing dashboard Paulson provided / let me share
He has 5-7x the typical 1-year reader LTV and a significantly higher margin business than most newsletters because of the things you just read.
He can afford to pay more than just about anyone - that’s difficult to compete with.
Focus less on cheap leads and more on 10x-ing your LTV!
That's the letter.
- Nathan
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The Feed Media drives hundreds of thousands of subscribers and sales for over half of the largest newsletter advertisers in the US. See if you qualify to work with us here
