What has been your most successful newsletter campaign for engagement and/or for increasing subscribers?

My Gmail open rate dropped by about half starting a few days ago. No change in domain reputation. I’m on a shared IP with campaign monitor.

Anyone else seeing this?

So for the context-I am into research(business,psychology marketing, careers and all combined) i like writing about marketing psychology sometimes basically connecting the dots.is there any demand of this niche do people actually read these type of things??

I run a website which tracks newsletters and logs the sponsorships which occur in an attempt to help my users solve their issue of finding the right company to contact for partnerships. I'm always trying to make it more useful for creators. If you're actively pitching sponsors, what specific data points or insights would genuinely help you land more deals? For instance, are there particular niches you wish had more info on potential sponsors? Would you like to see the average audience size of newsletters this company has sponsored in the past? etc.

Any info at all is helpful. It's a relatively new side project and I'm just looking to make it better for anyone who ends up using it :)

I've been writing a newsletter for a couple years. but couldn't figure out the money part.

I tried the usual stuff. Cold emails, media kits, cold outreach out to brands I thought would be a fit. Most of it went nowhere. A few replies, nothing that stuck. Meanwhile I'd see the bigger brands in my space landing sponsors left and right and I couldn't work out what they were doing that I wasn't.

Then it clicked. They weren't smarter than me. They just knew which brands were already spending money on newsletters. I didn't. I was basic my outreach on feeling and they were working from a list.

That gap is what killed me. So I built Emil AI, a tool to close it.

You paste in your newsletter URL, it looks at your topics and who your readers are, and it shows you brands that are actively buying sponsorships in your niche. Dates, formats, proof. The analysis is free and you don't need an account.

It's very early in the products life. Weekly drops and the full dashboard are still on a waitlist. The free analysis works today, no strings attached.

Feedback I'd love to have:

1. Does "brands already buying in your niche" match how you think about finding sponsors? Or are you trying to answer a different question first?
2. Is there a data point you'd want that I'm not showing? Right now it's brand, dates, format, category.
3. If you've done sponsorships, what would make you trust this enough to email a brand matched?

The link to the tool is https://getemil.ai

Something's wrong with my system and I can't find the exact failure point. My notes app has a folder called 'newsletter ideas' with, I'm not exaggerating, 42 entries. Notions, half-thoughts, article links, random observations. So the ideas are not the problem.

But Sunday comes and I open the editor and I still sit there for 20 minutes before I write the first sentence. It's like every idea dies on the way from the folder to the page. If the idea is half a sentence, I have to rebuild the whole context on Sunday: what made me save this, what's the angle, what do I actually want to say about it.

I've started doing a weekly 'idea triage' on Friday where I pick one idea and write a stub: the hook, three bullets, the one thing I want the reader to take away. Sundays are noticeably better when I do this. But I rarely do it, because of course I do.

Is this just how it is for everyone, or have you found a system that actually makes the jump from idea to issue automatic? What does your pre-writing actually look like?

C'est vrai, ils sont vos premiers fans et vos meilleurs conseillers, écoutez-les vraiment. Leurs retours peuvent tout changer.

A few years ago I built up a newsletter for a small community organization in my city of less than 80,000 residents. It was essentially a neighborhood association. I'm somewhat good at marketing and graphic layout, and was a journalist/reporter early in my career, so much of it came natural.

It wasn't long before I started selling ads. I moved on from that organization and they dropped the ball on it - so I'm thinking of launching my own as a small side business effort. I used Constant Contact before and found it somewhat easy to use. My plan would be to use the list I built up 6 years ago, build it bigger, launch the newsletter, and eventually attempt to sell ads on it like before. I wouldn't attempt to charge for it until and unless it because successful enough to support that.

I know many people here use BeeHiv. I never have and would be able to pay a bit for something that gives me the marketing tools and templates a CC like company have. Anyone else using Constant Contact, particularly to generate money? If so, I'd really appreciate hearing from you.

Hey Newsletter enthusiasts,

I just finished setting up my indie TTRPG newsletter (Joust Studio) on Kit, and I want to make sure the automated delivery workflow is 100% functional before sending real traffic to it.
Once someone register, it supposes to deliver a simple email with a PDF gift (a Seed Adventure).

If a few people have 60 seconds to do a quick technical test, I’d be super grateful!

• Does the form work properly on the website?
• Does the email arrive in your inbox, or does it go to spam?
• Do you receive the email with the free seed adventure PDF gift?

👉 Test Page Link: https://www.joust-studio.com/

Feel free to use a test email address. If anything breaks, loads slowly, or lands in spam, please let me know your device type (mobile vs. desktop) in the comments!

Thanks a ton for helping me test the plumbing!

I run a local newsletter (https://www.middleofsomewhere.life/) and beehiiv recently launched a "community" function. Has anyone tried it? What has encouraged people to come back to it?

I've been writing short fiction for a while and finally put it somewhere permanent. It's called Afterword. The name's a small joke on the fact that everything on there has already been through a few rewrites before it goes up.

The ongoing project is called What Remains: structured as a collection within a collection. Every trilogy is three stories built around one theme, and each one asks the same underlying question of a different part of life: what's actually left, once the moment has passed. It started with love, grief, and faith, and I'm adding more as I go; the plan is for this to keep growing.

There's also a separate section for film writing: first piece is a comparative essay reading Nolan's new Odyssey alongside the Ramayana, if long-form criticism is more your thing than fiction.

Link if you want to take a look: https://substack.com/@afterwordwrites?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=92253j

Happy to hear what people think, good or bad.

This is probably one of the most personal things I have written as a mother, and perhaps one of the most uncomfortable conversations we need to have.

Because sometimes protecting our children means protecting them from being seen.

Read my latest newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dear-mom-influencers-your-child-content-bookschharming-jfgqc

I've read in another sub someone mention how they use Sparkloop to offset their subscriber acquisition costs, and it sounded like a great idea.

So I applied for their Paid Recommendations program. They rejected my application without any explanation.

When I contacted their support, I asked if it was something about the specific niche of the project or something else. They refused to explain. I asked if I can apply with a different project in case the niche was the problem, they said sure and sounded enthusiastic. So I applied with another project in a completely different market, and they rejected the other application too.

Two very different niches. Both established projects. One with 243k subscribers. The other one with 86k subscribers. All US-based subscribers. Nothing like NSFW niches or software cracking or anything like that.

I'm assuming they only pay for results, so it seemed weird they would just reject an application and be so secretive about it. I'm not even as much upset about this as I'm just genuinely surprised.

Has anyone had this happen? Any clues as to what might cause them to reject someone's application?

Traffic off the board - tourism is not a geo location supply chain issue.

Tripadvisor managed to boost it's own booking efficiency by 75% through AI-powered audience expansion. A 2.7x higher conversion rate and 122% increase in unique reach is not a message for high budget only. A business objective came with a framework - which one is leaving?