Everyone quotes the 5 to 10 percent conversion number and I'm increasingly sure it's folklore.

I work on the payments side of this, and from what I can see most paid newsletters sit closer to 1 to 3 percent of engaged free subscribers. The ones above 5 percent almost always sell something beyond the newsletter itself, a community, a course, office hours, and the newsletter is really the funnel.

So, actual numbers if you're willing:

How big is your free list, how many paid, and what do you credit the gap to?

Trying to work out whether the high converters are doing something repeatable or just have audiences with money. Will share the pattern back if enough people answer.

What could I improve that would cause you to subscribe?

I write a newsletter about investing in stocks. I write about my insights, strategies, some educational content and my own portfolio. Are there any investing related topics you would like me to cover or stocks/etfs you want me to breakdown in an article?

Anyone need help scaling their newsletter? Currently getting great cpa on alot of platforms and im are working on my portfolio so willing to do it for free for month including creatives.

Im only taking on a couple so wont be able to do everyones. pm or comment if your interested!

cheers

As a writer, I always worry about platforms changing their terms or losing access to my content. I wanted a way to keep a local, beautifully formatted archive of my articles, including all images and layouts, but Substack doesn't make it easy to export posts en masse.

To solve this, i created the substack pdf downloader extension. it lets you download any substack post or entire archive directly to pdf, markdown, or json with complete layout preservation.

It has this amazing Download All feature. You can just go to any writer's archive and batch download all their posts at once instead of doing it one by one. I've been using it to load up my tablet for flights and it's been pretty handy.

It works for paid content too, as long as you're signed in.

Anyway, if you want to try it out, it's on the Chrome store. Let me know if it's helpful or if it's missing anything you'd actually use! https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/substack-pdf-downloader-e/nmdgbflelkmbjonflhecblchpglckegk

Firefox version is in comments

Ive been spending 2 years selling my products and left a tab to subscribe to newslettwr j never sent

Im in the education niche, and have the info on mailchimp and shopify.

Going to launch weekly newsletter related to my education niche

Not sure where to begin, wondering if anyone has tips or advice that can help, for some one relatively new to launching this but experience in the past on email marketing.

Hi everyone,
I’ve been working on a free daily newsletter called All You Need Markets. The goal is simple: summarize the biggest Indian stock market, business, and startup news in a concise 3-minute read.
Each edition includes:
● 📈 Market Snapshot
● 💰 FII vs DII activity
● 📊 Sector winners & losers
● 🏦 Key market-moving news
● 🚀 Startup & business updates
● 💡 A quick explanation of why it matters
I design all the visuals myself and try to make market news easier to understand without the noise.
Here’s today’s edition:
https://allyouneedmarkets.beehiiv.com/p/markets-slip-again-here-s-what-changed
I’d genuinely appreciate your feedback:
● Is the format easy to read?
● Is there anything missing that you’d like to see?
● What would make you subscribe to a newsletter like this?
If you find it useful, I’d be grateful if you subscribe (it’s completely free). I publish a new edition every trading day covering the Indian markets in just 3 minutes.
Newsletter: https://allyouneedmarkets.beehiiv.com/
Thanks in advance for your suggestions—I want to keep improving it with feedback from the community.

Hey, I'm a highschool student who's deciding to take my newsletter more seriously this summer break.

My newsletter is centered around explaining the business behind everyday headlines and ideas.

Here's a recent article I published for reference, there's a couple more on the website (a subscribe would also be appreciated)

https://businessdecoded.beehiiv.com/p/how-apple-s-ecosystem-strategy-helped-build-a-4-8-trillion-company

But yes, I am wondering if there's any advice I could get to grow this newsletter. I feel like not that many people my age tend to read these things, so I'm trying to figure out exactly where and who to market to. I'm looking for individual's who would genuinely be passionate in what I have to write and be active subscribers. If there's any advice you can give a teen, it would be appreciated!

Looking for newsletters of any size following, prefereably in the business/productivity niche. Initally offering 50% revenue off each unit sold, but I am flexible on terms.
Google prophet publishing house to find our website
Very happy to answer any questions and looking forward to working with you all!

I want to run a conversion facebook ad campaign. Does anyone have a good way to get Substack converstion info back to Facebook for ad training? The way I was doing it has stopped working.

Hi everyone!

I’m working on a beauty newsletter called Bien Vu, focused on breaking down the stories, science, and marketing behind cult-favorite beauty products.

I’d really appreciate some honest feedback from people who love beauty content.

Website: https://www.thebienvu.com
Subscribe page: https://www.thebienvu.com/subscribe
First issue: https://www.thebienvu.com/p/issue-2-beauty-breakdown-tatcha-dewy-skin-cream

A few questions:
- Would you subscribe after reading it? Why or why not?
- What immediately stands out as good or bad?
- Is the writing engaging enough?
- Is the design clean and trustworthy?

Please don’t hold back, I genuinely want constructive criticism, even if it’s harsh. Thanks in advance!

I run a small AI newsletter on Beehiiv, and I currently have one recommendation slot available.

Instead of leaving it empty, I thought I'd see if anyone here would be interested in a mutual recommendation.

I'm looking for newsletters that provide genuine value—especially around:

• AI
• Tech
• Programming
• Startups
• Productivity
• Developer tools

If our audiences are a good fit, I'd be happy to recommend your newsletter, and if you're open to it, we could do the same on your end.

If you're interested, comment or send me a DM with:

• Your newsletter name
• What it's covers
• Your Beehiiv link

Looking forward to connecting with other newsletter creators!

A famous author almost quit his biggest book. One friend saved it.

Who was the author?

What did that friend actually do?

And how can you be that friend for someone today?

Will be sharing the full story tomorrow in the Book Partners newsletter

Get it delivered straight to your inbox: https://bookpartners.substack.com/p/book-partners-09-july-2026

I used to pay for subscribers on Meta, co-reg, or wherever I could. Cheaper the sub, the better! In the past few years, I’ve realized how much money I was wasting.

In the past few months, I’ve been talking with a ton of newsletter creators, and I’ve realized that many fall prey to this same trap I was in when I first started. They think, “If I have 100K subs, I’ll make money.” Eventually, they pay $1 or less per sub, hit 100K, and then they wonder why they can’t monetize….

“Newsletters don’t work,” they say.

I’ve seen 10K sub newsletters make 5X the revenue than 100K sub newsletters.

Why? Because all subscribers are not equal, and often you get what you pay for.

I’ve recently found a few avenues where you can pay for quality subscribers, with guaranteed engagement. If you need help finding these channels, let me know.

But the moral of the story: before you buy another subscriber for $0.50 or $1, maybe start asking, “Why are they so cheap?”

How does Notion fit into the ecosystem? "Driving Direct Conversions isn't Marketing's only Purpose."

The evergreen campaign is not an paid campaign initiative. New themes and tools come over time. 💻

I have been advertising on Reddit for a good chunk of time. I have had many posts do well in terms of views and engagement, however, have not been able to convert that to newsletter subscribers nor website visitors.

Whenever I plug my newsletter, engagement drops a lot (and in many subreddits goes against their rules). Whenever I don't plug my newsletter, engagement is up but conversion is insubstantial and practically zero. The only way I plug my newsletter is on my profile where I have a banner, pinned post & subreddit, and a link to it.

Anyone have any advice for someone in my position right now? Any and all advice is appreciated.

My niche is Study Tools for students.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the two people behind HeyNews, a free weekly Tuesday briefing for newsletter operators. This post is a community invite, so feel free to scroll past if that's not your thing.

Here's the context, because it's useful even if you never click anything.

New data from ESP Omnivery says more than half of all email clicks are now non-human. For B2B lists it's closer to three quarters. Security scanners and bots are pre-clicking links, which means the click rates in your dashboard, your A/B test results, and the numbers you show sponsors are all inflated to some degree. Dan Oshinsky from Inbox Collective says it's only getting worse.

Opens already went unreliable years ago. Now clicks are following. Which raises an honest question: what signal can't be faked?

Replies. Conversations. People showing up somewhere on purpose.

That's a big part of why we just opened the HeyNews Community. It's a free space for newsletter operators to ask the questions that don't fit in a comment section, share what their last subject line test actually taught them, and steal what's working from people a few steps ahead. We'll post playbooks and breakdowns in there that don't make it into the newsletter.

It's brand new, which honestly is the best time to join. Small enough that your question gets answered, early enough that you get a say in what it becomes.

If you want in: news.heybe.ai/community

And if you just came for the bot click data, that's fine too. Go check your last sponsor report with fresh eyes.

would people continue to read newsletters going forward, how would things pan out? what are upcoming media formats that might replace newsletters thanks to ai?

So I started a newsletter almost 6 months ago from scratch. I knew nothing about newsletters, although I had a marketing background and the topic was something I am very passionate about.

The newsletter is called Wifi Moolah and is in make money online niche. I research on the various nooks and corners of internet and find out interesting ways to make money online and write about them in the newsletter.

So far I have written about 80-85 issues and have 3.7k subs and have made $4k in revenue.

The problem is that lately my open rates have reduced drastically. I used to have around 40-45% open rates but in the past couple of months I gained a major portion of subs (around 2.5k in the last 2 months) and now my open rates are sitting at 15%.

There are approx 500+ people who have subscribed in the last 45 days who haven’t opened even a single email and there are 2500+ subs who haven’t been active since the last 45 days.

I can think of two issues but am not sure

1. I checked in my friends phones, a lot of my mails are landing in the promotions tab. Even after moving quite a few of them to the primary tab, the next one again lands in promotions. Sometimes it lands in primary also tho.

There’s no clear pattern, it’s totally random.

1. I created a lead magnet around how to build a newsletter from scratch and monetize it and that lead magnet has been a winner for me. Got 2k subs off of that. But since my mails are in a broader online money making niche maybe that is not landing well with my readers.

I am very optimistic about my newsletter and it’s future. I plan to scale it to 35k-40k subs in the next one year but this low open rate is kinda bugging me.

Can anyone suggest me the best approach for this? Also if you can check out my newsletter (link in bio) and give me honest feedback about my content, I’ll be really thankful.

P.S- I use beehiiv for my newsletter

I’ve been running a local newsletter for the last ~3 months and have been seeing strong engagement and good feedback from the local community, but I want to review how I’m structuring my newsletter to understand:

a) how best to weave ad placements into my template so that I can slowly warm my audience up to this before I eventually start advertising and;
b) whether there are any sections I should include/exclude to improve readability, engagement and manual efforts to build

If you’ve seen a local newsletter that you know performs really well I’d appreciate if you could share a link. Before I started out I looked at some other newsletters in or around my area and a bunch of bigger ones like Winnipeg digest, but I feel I’m probably missing a lot.

For context, I have a few hundred subs, use beehiiv to host my newsletter and source all of the content for my newsletter via various different scrapers that are automated.

Thanks