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
🎙 Tyler Denk gives beehiiv AMA: Awesome Reddit thread with lots of very valid questions around the platform (the website builder, specifically). Tyler answers gracefully and honestly. Worth a read if you like ESP drama.
📈 Rahul Issar on pace for 8 figures of NL revenue: The monetization stack is not totally clear, but this is just another reminder that you don't need to have a hyper-scaled list to make life-changing money with a newsletter.
📉 Substack app-walls posts. The Substack app drama continues. They seem to be planting their flag in the ground even harder with this move. beehiiv must be happy!
2 Winning Ads
Ad 1: The "Old School" Poster.
Newsletter: Because of Sales
What Makes It Great:
The format itself is the scroll-stopper.
One of our creative strategists wanted to test an old-school poster look with copy that had already proven itself on a different ad. This format ended up becoming a top performer for 3 clients, all within the last month.
The vintage visual style disrupts the feed enough to get people to actually stop and read a block of ad copy, which is the hardest thing to get someone to do on a platform where they're swiping past everything.
The copy still has to carry the weight:
A poster format with weak copy will not work. The visual gets the thumb to stop, but the headline and body text are doing the actual convincing.
In this case, the hook "Salespeople: your job doesn't end when the clock strikes 5" is direct, challenges the reader, and makes them want to keep reading. If you're going to test this format, bring strong copy or don't bother.
Ad 2: The Doctored Reddit Post
What Makes It Great:
Another cross-platform format that earns the thumb-scroll stop:
Same principle we've covered with fake tweets, fake iMessages, and fake Slack conversations. A Reddit-style thread showing up in someone's Instagram or Facebook feed looks like organic content, and that's exactly why it works.
The format earns attention because it feels native to a different platform, not like an ad.
This one lives or dies on the question:
The Reddit "post" at the top of the conversation needs to be relevant to your ICP and immediately spark curiosity.
If the question falls flat, nothing else matters. But when the question hits, the format performs extremely well because the reader is drawn to read the replies the same way they would on actual Reddit.
I'll be honest, this is 80% copy strength and 20% format choice.
1 Meta Ads Pro Tip
If you are running Meta "lead form" ads for your newsletter, stop. Today.
Lead form ads are the ones where a user clicks the ad, and Meta autofills a native form with their email so they can hit submit without typing anything. The CPAs look great because the friction is almost zero.
And that’s the problem.
When Meta autofills that form, it pulls the email the user created their Facebook or Instagram account with.
For a huge percentage of people, that's an email from 2001 or 2008 that they no longer check. Because the form is autofilled, the friction to just tap submit is so low that they do it without changing the email. You now have a subscriber who may never see your newsletter.
The move is to create a landing page and drive ad traffic there instead.
The visitor reads the copy, manually enters their email, and subscribes with intention. Yes, there is more friction. That friction is a good thing. Every newsletter operator I have convinced to make this switch has seen better engagement from those readers. And with a strong landing page and solid copy, you can still achieve very similar conversion rates.
If you're on beehiiv, you have almost no excuse with how easy they make it to build a landing page.
BONUS FOR AD COPY: If your team is running Meta ads and you want us to revamp the copy on one of your ads, reply to this email with the word COPY, and we will pick one person to get in touch with and audit some of the ads you're running to see if our copy variants could help your CPAs.
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!