This will double your newsletter CTR

👋 Hi friends -

Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. I run The Feed, the largest newsletter growth agency - 2x a month I share short reflections with my clients and other operators.

Zero formality or ads - just a guy sharing learnings from running paid ads & launching digital products for operators doing $50k-$5M / month with newsletters.

New reader highlights: Andrew, CEO & Chairman @ Active Interest Media | Luciano, Head of Growth, APAC @ Rippling | Jonathan, Co-CEO @ Kajabi | Matthew, Director of Marketing Data, Audience & Automation @ Active Interest Media

We just boosted a newsletter’s open rate from ~45% to 59.3% and CTR from 2.4% to 4.9% using a little hack that tricks Meta into sending only A+ subscribers.

And it turns out this trick works in all newsletters.

Here are two more:

A B2B newsletter where we’re quite literally delivering hundreds of senior roles from Meta, Unilever, Verizon, and other F500 companies:

A client that will do $3M this month on fewer than 300,000 qualified subscribers, spending $350k/month on growth (8x+ ROAS):

Let’s jam on two things:

Nearly all of you reading this email optimize your paid growth for sign-ups.

Platforms like Meta are great at finding those people who just sign up.

And that’s really dangerous. Any marketer on the planet can get people to sign up to a free newsletter and celebrate cheap leads.

And then later you find out:

What if you could train Meta on something better? Well, here’s something cool we’ve been doing with our clients the past 6 months:

We’ve started optimizing our Meta ads to readers who do things like click sponsorship links.

And we measure not just cost per lead (easy to manipulate, as I’ve written about before), but cost per ad clicker.

One newsletter we work with is paying ~$6 per ad clicker.

If a reader costs ~$2 to acquire, about 30% of those new subscribers are clicking ads to hit a $6 cost per ad clicker.

Think about how much your sponsors would love you if 30% of your list was ad clickers.

How much less time you’d spend chasing new logos.

Instead, working with a smaller set of advertisers who throw money at you because your newsletter inventory actually performs.

It would be quite good!

1. Openers and clickers

This is for weekly senders - you won’t have enough ad clicks for Meta to optimize that far down the funnel, so you’ll need to stay up here (still way better than CPL).

2. Ad clickers

For sponsor-monetized 3-5x a week senders.

One client spending ~$400k/month went from bragging about a $2.30 CPL to being happy at $5. His LTV:CAC went from 2x to 5x+.

3. Affiliate offer clickers

We work with many of the biggest newsletters in financial publishing, credit cards, and financial advisory.

Optimizing to offer clickers can often drive a 30-50% higher ROAS.

4. Qualified B2B leads

For B2B or service/software offers. This is done via a combination of survey forms and waterfall enrichment.

5. Trial starts

For anything with a free trial (apps + paid subscriptions).

Optimize to the trial start over the purchase: it has the best correlation with buyers without getting too expensive.

6. Shows / VIP upgrades (for my info product folks)

For webinars. Optimizing for registrations is how you buy no-shows.

One client changed their conversion event and doubled their show rate. Dramatically higher ROAS.

Every one of these takes some plumbing between your email platform, your data, and Meta.

And as you saw in the screengrabs above, they’re delivering buyers, ad clickers, and VP+ roles and titles for our clients.

In fact, we’ve driven millions of subscribers and sales for SecretCFO, The Points Guy, Workweek, Tyler Denk, Jay Shetty, The Rundown, and 70+ other newsletters and audience-first founders.

If you want to dramatically increase the quality of your readers so they actually buy from you and your sponsors, let me know here and we’ll grab some time together.

That's the letter.

- Nathan May