Hey, Manny here 👋
Welcome back to this week’s edition of Growth Levers, where you get:
3 things happening in the newsletter world
2 winning newsletter ads and breakdowns of why they worked
1 pro tip to improve your ads and thus improve your CPA
Let’s get into today’s edition and see if you can find a lever to pull:
3 Things You Should Know
🛠 How Tyler Denk uses beehiiv MCP to cut drastically cut newsletter production time. If you're curious about using AI responsibly within your production process, check this out.
📰 Adam Ryan Highlights the two different businesses hiding behind the word newsletter. Great take from Adam talking about quality of subscribers versus quantity of subscribers. Very relevant to all operators.
📕 How Substack Became The New Book Tour. Interesting Fast Company read on how authors are going direct to their audience to sell their books. Certainly interesting if you want to see how the newsletter game has changed traditional media businesses.
2 Winning Ads
Ad 1: Static Ad, Fake Slack Conversation.
Newsletter: Masters in Marketing (by HubSpot).
What Makes It Great:
Cross-platform format built for B2B:
We've covered fake tweets and fake iMessages in past issues. This is the same concept applied to a white-collar audience. If your readers live inside Slack all day, this format stops the scroll because it looks like something from their workday, not an ad. The familiarity of the UI does the heavy lifting.
The copy has to be believable or the whole thing breaks:
Notice how the exchange flows naturally between three people, one discovers the newsletter, another asks about it, and a third vouches for it with social proof (350k+ subscribers, 2 months of reading).
All the selling happens inside the conversation itself, which makes it feel like a peer recommendation rather than an ad. If the dialogue sounds even slightly stiff, this format falls apart. The copy is the make-or-break element here.
Ad 2: Static Ad, Meme Format.
Newsletter: Route One.
What Makes It Great:
Memes can work as ad creatives for the right audience:
Route One is a daily soccer newsletter, so the readership skews younger and more casual. A meme like this genuinely looks like content a friend posted, not a paid placement.
I would not run this format for a buttoned-up B2B finance newsletter, but for newsletters on the B2C side with a lively, enthusiastic audience, it can absolutely stop the scroll.
The value prop lives inside the joke:
The dog (representing the reader) is "trying not to convince everyone to subscribe." That single line of meme text tells you what the newsletter covers, how often it sends, and that it's free. No headline needed.
The humor delivers the pitch, which means the reader absorbs it without feeling like they're being sold to.
1 Meta Ads Pro Tip
Remove any and all pop-ups from your subscribe landing page.
If you're driving Meta ad traffic to a landing page, the visitor has one job: enter their email and hit subscribe.
A pop-up directly competes with that action, and the conversion rate drop is immediate and significant every single time.
Over the past six years, when a client's conversion rate suddenly tanks from one day or one week to the next, I can almost always point to a pop-up that was added to the landing page.
Cookie consent banners, discount offers, "join our community" overlays, it doesn't matter what kind. Anything that creates friction between the visitor and the subscribe button will cost you subscribers.
You already paid to get that person to the page. The ad did its job. So don't let a pop-up undo it.
Go check your landing page right now. Remove every pop-up (literally no exceptions).
Before you go, here’s how I can help:
I've spent the last five years of my life driving 5M+ newsletter subscribers with Meta ads across newsletters from Morning Brew, Workweek, The Daily Upside, James Clear, and many more.
If you want to skip the hours of work in Canva and the overwhelming UI of Meta Ads Manager, my agency can make the ads and grow your newsletter without you lifting a finger - submit your newsletter details here.
That's all for today. I'll see you back here next week!