Hey, Manny here. First things first, mea culpa for not sending a newsletter last week. My wife and I moved into our first house, and things have been stir crazy (and that’s the nice way of putting it). Anyways, we’re so back, and my goal is to never miss again for the remainder of the year!
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
💰 Substack, who was vehemently anti-advertising forever, hired its first head of brand sponsorships. Probably nothing.
🎥 Kit opens IRL creator studio: Another entry in the ESP war. It’s interesting to see Kit try to incentivize creators this way. What’s even more interesting is that this seems designed for video and audio (nobody needs a studio to write a newsletter).
🐝 Write access via the beehiiv MCP: This feels like it could be a true change in how newsletters are drafted. Most, including the one you’re reading right now, are created in the native ESP. Like many other facets of our work lately, this may be moving to Claude. I’ll be curious to check back in a few months to see how adoption goes.
2 Winning Ads
Ad 1: The Freebie List
Newsletter: Wellworthy
What Makes It Great:
The ad itself is the lead magnet. There's no PDF to download and no landing page funnel to click through. You're just giving the person a list of 10 things related to your newsletter's niche (in this case, 10 health and wellness product drops from the last 30 days) and the value is delivered right there in the ad.
This format only works when the primary copy (the copy that sits above or below an ad depending on which platform it is seen on) does the heavy lifting. The copy above the image needs to say something like "these are the 10 most awaited health and wellness releases that just happened, and if you want to be the first to hear about future drops, subscribe to Wellworthy." The ad gives value for free, and the copy promises more of it if they subscribe.
Because you're leading with something genuinely useful, the person feels like they already got something out of the interaction before they even click. That goodwill is what drives the subscription.
Ad 2: Local NL Background Image
What Makes It Great:
For local newsletter operators, this format is as simple as it gets. Background image of the city or town, copy that calls out the biggest problem your audience has (in this case, struggling to find things to do in Bay of Quinte), and a subscribe CTA.
Problem callout. Notice how the ad calls out the pain point of someone who would want to subscribe to a local newsletter: not knowing things to do in their town or city. This is easy copy you can benefit from.
We run some version of this for almost every local newsletter client, and it consistently brings back strong results because the targeting is built into the creative. It’s not sexy, but it works.
1 Meta Ads Pro Tip
Scale horizontally, NOT vertically
If your ads are performing well and the urge to crank up your monthly budget is kicking in, I want to give you a word of caution on how you scale.
The CPA you get when running $50/day on a campaign is very unlikely to be the same CPA when you want to spend $500/day on it.
Meta has always been this kind of beast where whatever budget you feed it, it will eat, but it may not return the data you expect.
So, when a client is happy with results and wants to scale up, we scale horizontally.
That means duplicating campaigns or ad sets at the same budget with slightly different ads to see if you get the same results.
Yes, there is a counterargument of "will you be competing against yourself?", and to that I say “maybe”.
But the alternative is scaling vertically, which means increasing the campaign or ad set budget by about 20% daily until you reach the desired spend. That’s where you’ll typically see CPAs almost certainly creep up gradually as the budget goes from $2k a month to $8k a month.
Horizontal scaling lets you test whether your results hold at a wider footprint without blowing up what's already working.
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, Mark Manson, The Daily Upside, James Clear, Tangle News, 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!