Hi, I'm Lennart Schneider, Founder of Subscribe Now, helping decision-makers in the subscription economy attract subscribers and keep them happy.

When I talk to newsletter creators, it usually doesn't take long before one of two questions comes up:

1) What actually constitutes a good open rate?

2) My newsletter has an open rate of 40%. That's great, isn't it?

The honest answer is: There is no such thing as a "good" open rate, and the open rate really says nothing about the quality of your newsletter. 

In this article, I want to clear up this misconception and explain when you should still pay attention to it.

P.S. I've written a book! The playbook for successful subscription models: With growth strategies and best practices from 50 leading companies. You can pre-order here (or on Amazon).

I completely understand the need for benchmarking and comparability. With newsletters, you have relatively few metrics, so you try to draw as many conclusions as possible from what you do have. Often, however, you draw more conclusions than are actually useful.

Let’s start with the basics: open rate is a fraction. You calculate it by dividing the number of unique opens by the total number of recipients. So far, so simple.

However, this leads to a small detail that is often overlooked. You can increase the open rate in two ways: more openers, or fewer recipients.

The latter point is often overlooked, but it’s crucial. People who don’t open your newsletter are often the same ones. And especially with older mailing lists, you often have a large proportion of inactive subscribers who have lost all interest.

So, if you have a 50% open rate with 10,000 recipients, then there are probably several thousand among them who haven’t opened a single email in six months. Let’s say there are 3,000 of them. If you remove them from the mailing list, your open rate immediately jumps from 50% to 71.4% (5,000 opens/7,000 active recipients).

Has this improved the quality of your newsletter? Are your readers more satisfied? No!

Has the quality of your distribution system improved as a result? Absolutely!

Why would you delete valuable leads?

Admittedly, I’ve recommended this to many newsletter creators, but the enthusiasm is usually lukewarm. They’ve put a lot of money and effort into acquiring these subscribers, so why would they just delete the addresses? Perhaps the reach is even important for advertising sales (even if nobody sees the ads).

But here are a few reasons why it’s worth it:

1. If someone hasn’t opened your emails for a long time, the likelihood of them returning is relatively low
2. You increase the risk of being perceived as spam
3. Depending on the newsletter tool and contract, costs increase as you send more emails
4. Your brand suffers when customers perceive you as pushy
5. Your advertisers are surprised when clicks fail to materialize on a supposedly large distribution list, and become suspicious
6. …

Many of the world’s leading newsletters therefore place great importance on the quality of their mailing lists and remove users after a long period of inactivity. The New York Times even discloses this quite transparently:

How can I find out who is inactive?

Good question! And not so easy to answer. Since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, it’s often difficult to track who actually opens an email – Apple automatically opens emails before they reach the recipient, and therefore your email program thinks these users are active. Other users block tracking and are registered as inactive, even though they enthusiastically read every issue. So if you’re unsure: just ask the users.

Clicks can be tracked more reliably than opens, and if readers don’t click after (repeated) requests, you can remove them from the mailing list with a clear conscience.

Do I really need to delete them?

No. You can also pause them for now, or reduce the frequency. A good example is the sports newsletter “The Gist”. They temporarily pause inactive subscribers, and then when a major event is coming up (for example, the Olympics), they try to reactivate them.

However, you shouldn’t overdo it. If you haven’t contacted them for 1.5 years, you should continue to refrain from doing so. After that time, their consent to contact them also expires.

Even more reasons why open rate is misunderstood

Your open rate depends on numerous factors, and the quality of your content is just one of them. Here’s a (likely incomplete) list of factors that affect open rates:

Mailbox display:

• Subject lines (Do they encourage clicks?)
• Pre-header (Do you tease the content well?)
• Sender’s name (Do they trust you and look forward to your emails?)
• Sender images (Will they stand out in the inbox? Only works with certain clients)

The quality of your distribution:

• Cleanup of inactive users (Are non-openers regularly removed?)
• Segmentation (Do you always send emails to the entire mailing list or do you select recipients based on interests?)
• Preference Center (Can users configure which emails they receive and how frequently?)
• Age of the addresses (How long ago did someone sign up?)
• Lead campaigns/address origin (On which channels and with which promises were the users acquired? Did they want the newsletter, or did they just share their email to participate in a competition, for example?)

Deliverability

• Advertising tab in Gmail (Are emails from Gmail classified as advertising and not delivered to the main mailbox?)
• Spam (Do the emails often end up in the spam folder?)
• Bounces (Can the emails not be delivered? What are the different types of bounces, hard and soft?)
• Image sizes (are the images too large?)
• Email size (Will the email be truncated, for example, by Gmail, which happens from 102 kb upwards?)
• Shipping time (Is the shipping time chosen?)

Contents

• Good quality & relevance
• Diversity (do you cover different needs so that every issue contains an “aha” moment?)
• Continuity & predictability (Do readers know what to expect and why each issue is worthwhile?)

Technology

• Email tool or measurement technology (each mailing tool measures opens slightly differently, which affects the KPIs)
• Tracking Opt Out (Have users disabled tracking of clicks and opens?)
• Auto Opens on iOS (Are open rates inflated because emails are automatically opened due to privacy settings?)

So I can ignore the open rate?

Not quite. Since we don’t have many metrics, it’s still a valuable signal, as long as you’re aware of what it tells you, and what it doesn’t.

What you shouldn’t do is compare your absolute open rate with competitors who use completely different tools and whose lead generation works differently. This apples-to-oranges comparison is completely pointless.

What you can do instead:

• Observe long-term trends: Is my own open rate constant? Have there been any sudden changes I should understand? (But keep in mind that these changes could be due to technical reasons, e.g., more users with tracking protection.)
• Optimize your open rate with A/B testing: e.g., send each email with 3 different subject lines to a sample group beforehand and send the best version to the rest of the distribution list.
• Examine outliers: Were there any particular issues that were opened more or less frequently than average? What can I learn from them?
• Re-contacting those who didn’t open the email: Some companies send a newsletter a second time if it wasn’t opened the first time. I find it a bit spammy, but it seems to work.
• Use net reach (recipients x open rate) as the basis for advertising deals: This is fair to your advertising clients and you can also justify why the CPM (cost per thousand contacts) is higher if you are contacting a cleaned distribution list.
• Comparing segments: When running different lead generation campaigns, you shouldn’t just focus on the short-term cost per lead (CPL), but also consider whether the campaigns generate active recipients in the long run. A sweepstakes often generates a large number of addresses cheaply, but the open rate drops significantly after just a few campaigns.
  For better comparability, you can calculate a cost per lead after, for example, 10 campaigns. If you generate 1,000 leads per campaign for €1,000 in each of two campaigns, the short-term CPL is €1. If, after 10 campaigns, 70% of the leads in campaign A are still active, while only 30% remain active in campaign B, you get a clear picture: In campaign A, an active lead cost €1.43, while in campaign B it cost €3.33.
• …

PS: My newsletter has an open rate of 51-58%. That’s great, isn’t it?…

PPS: To hear more from me about subscription and newsletters, sign up to my own newsletter, Subscribe Now, here

This article was originally published in German on the Subscribe Now website, translated and republished with permission.

John Rahim is founder of The Media Stack, a newsletter delivering in-depth analysis of the advertising, media, and marketing technology sectors, with a focus on emerging trends in AI and monetization.

In this article, John shares his interview with Joshi Herrmann, founder of The Mill, a UK-based digital publisher known for its award-winning, high-quality local news newsletters. They discuss what an "overwhelmingly reader-driven" revenue strategy means for their business:
-> Cities are chosen based on having the right person to pioneer the launch. Herrmann looks for someone who loves their city and believes in narrative journalism
-> Funds, when needed, have been from individuals who care about journalism, not firms with processes and exit timelines
-> The company has a model that prioritizes readers over traffic and quality over volume

By 2020, the infrastructure was in place to try something different. Substack had shown individual creators could build businesses charging for content. Tony Mecia was running a successful local business newsletter on the platform in Charlotte, North Carolina called The Charlotte Ledger.

“I thought, well, it is a different market, he’s operating in a much more affluent area than Manchester—but this might be worth a go.”

Herrmann had no money for a big team. That constraint became an advantage. He’d launch a newsletter, keep costs low, and focus on quality over volume. He set the price at roughly double what most Substack newsletters charged, betting readers would value proper local journalism enough to pay for it.

They did.

The numbers

Mill Media now operates in Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Birmingham, London, and Glasgow. About 175,000 people are on free email lists. 13,000 paying subscribers.

The original Mill in Manchester has 4,000 paying subscribers. The Sheffield Tribune has 3,000. Liverpool Post has 2,000. Newer titles are growing.

Revenue is overwhelmingly reader-driven. Advertising accounts for about 5% – high-quality sponsorships with the FT, Royal Horticultural Society, and Manchester Museum. Herrmann wants to grow that to maybe 20% for diversification, but the core model stays reader-funded.

“If you’re reader-funded, your incentive is to give quality to those readers,” he says. “We’ve got to maintain that.”

The company moved from Substack to Ghost, cutting platform costs to less than a fifth of what they had been paying while gaining greater control over design. “It’s a lot cheaper… it allows us to experiment.”

How to pick a city

There’s no spreadsheet. Herrmann doesn’t analyse demographics or run market sizing models. He looks for someone who loves their city and believes in narrative journalism.

“The most important determinant is the person in the city who wants to do it.”

The Bell in Glasgow happened because Robbie Armstrong got in touch, they met for a drink, and Herrmann recognised someone with encyclopaedic knowledge of the city and genuine passion for quality work. “At the beginning, when it’s difficult, and it’s a real battle, and you have almost no money, and it’s a real risk, you need that first person who is a pioneering person.”

Cities with universities help. Strong local identity distinct from London helps. But the human element matters most. “If someone came along in a city that I really loved, and I had the right person, I’d probably go for that over not the right person in a very large city.”

Individual backers, not VCs

Herrmann raised funding from people, not funds. Mark Thompson, former CEO of the New York Times and current CEO of CNN, Nick Johnston from Axios and Investor Turi Munthe.

They’re individuals who care about journalism, not firms with processes and exit timelines.

“The conversations I had with those people were no different from the conversation I’ve had with other journalists”, Herrmann says. “Someone who cares about journalism asks a bunch of questions for 45 minutes, and then I say at the end, would you throw in a bit of cash?”

They provide advice when Herrmann asks for it. They don’t interfere with editorial. “Fundamentally, you can take all the advice you want, but you have to go with your gut. The mistakes are mine, and the decisions are mine.” The investors share Herrmann’s view that journalism must be commercially sustainable.

“The only genuine solution to the journalism problems that we have is via commercial sustainability.”

City by city profitability

Each city aims to break even within two to three years. Manchester and Sheffield are already profitable. Liverpool and Birmingham should hit profitability this year. London by year’s end. Glasgow early next year.

“I don’t expect us to be the most profitable company in the UK, but I expect us to cover our costs in our cities after a couple of years,” Herrmann says. “Otherwise, you’re creating some sort of vanity project. I’m not interested in that.”

When The Bell launched in Glasgow, journalists at traditional Scottish newspapers weren’t thrilled. They felt they were doing quality work but were stuck writing 14 stories a day to feed the traffic machine. Herrmann’s not criticising the journalists.

“It’s not the quality of the journalists. It’s not about their effort. It’s about the fact that the people who make decisions in these newsrooms have made bad strategic business decisions that have led them to a model that means these young journalists have to write 14 stories in a day.”

What works

Mill Media now employs 22 people and is growing. The company has a model that prioritises readers over traffic and quality over volume.

“We’re trying to introduce a way of people valuing high-quality local journalism in a way that hasn’t been there in the culture before,” Herrmann says. It’s not easy. It requires exceptional journalism every day, smart promotion, and relentless focus on basics. But the growth is real. From one person during lockdown to a multi-city operation, backed by media veterans and sustainable economics in each market.

Regional journalism’s problems were never about reader appetite. They focused on business models chasing the wrong revenue. Herrmann’s success is the proof. The question for Britain’s struggling regional newspaper groups isn’t whether this model works. It’s whether they have the appetite to execute it.

Anil Chitrapu is a Senior Product Manager at Wirecutter (The New York Times), focused on audience growth, AI, and personalization.

In this article, Anil takes a closer look into the operational choices, guardrails, and tech powering Wirecutter For You, the new email that tailors article recommendations to each reader - without compromising editorial judgment or inbox trust.

In a strategic move to engage a new and distinct audience, as well as take note from the creator economy, The Economist has launched its data journalism newsletter, “Off the Charts,” on Substack. This decision to venture beyond its traditional paywalled ecosystem offers a fascinating glimpse into how a legacy publisher is adapting to the evolving digital landscape. 

I sat down with Aaron Coultate, Head of Newsletters at The Economist, to discuss the thinking behind this exciting initiative.

Newsletter for audience acquisition

The BBC’s Upbeat newsletter offers an interesting case study on how newsletters can help acquire new audiences and combat news avoidance.

Zoé Tabary, Senior News Editor at BBC, spoke about how the broadcaster has started engaging with underserved audiences, particularly news avoiders, with email newsletters.

BBC’s strategy was driven by data:

1. Nearly 39% of people (up from 29% eight years ago) sometimes or often avoid the news, as stated in Reuters’ 2024 Digital News Report.
2. Young readers are more interested in stories that inspire them, connect them to society, and entertain them than older generations, as the BBC’s internal audience research found.
3. Its research also found that BBC’s consumption most aligned with heavy news fans, but that unserved audiences had great potential. 

The questions was, how could the BBC reach younger audiences and fight news fatigue?

Zoé’s answer: with a weekly newsletter focused on positive news stories.

The BBC Upbeat Newsletter curates uplifting stories and acts as a gateway to drive engagement.

1. It’s only around 600 to 700 words in length, with an informal, friendly tone
2. It doesn’t give too much away and fills the curiosity gap by encouraging audiences to read more online
3. It links to content from other platforms if the newsletter curators think it is interesting to the audience

Thanks to this data-driven approach that focuses on User Needs, BBC has successfully driven engagement, page views and built habits with readers who previously avoided news content. 

How can you approach making a targeted newsletter for your newsroom?

1. Understand your audience demographics, and try to recognise segments with untapped potential. 
2. Consider the value proposition canvas to align your product (e.g. a newsletter) with this audience’s needs
3. Consider having a dedicated newsletter curator (if possible) to build close relationships with your audience, but remember to maintain a consistent tone of voice.
4. Involve the audience in the curation. If you receive a positive note or comment on your newsletter, don’t hesitate to respond to it in the next edition.
5. Don’t shy away from sharing articles you find interesting and relevant from other media companies if it ensures a variety of content.

Newsletters for audience conversion

When Reuters launched a paid subscription model earlier this year, they replaced the data wall with a paywall, losing their most valuable newsletter subscriber acquisition channel. At the Festival, Elaine Piniat, Senior Manager of Newsletter Revenue Strategy, shared that this company-wide strategic shift encouraged her team to revisit their newsletter strategy, remodeling it with subscriptions at the centre.

They began by classifying their various newsletters into different buckets based on the intended audience and target KPIs.

1. Automated newsletters: focused on advertisers and increasing traffic and ad revenues
2. Briefings: focused on the general audience and driving conversions 
3. Industry newsletters: focused on subscribers and ensuring higher CTRs and retention 

For instance, as part of the “briefings” bucket was Reuters’ Daily Briefing newsletter, which curates the day’s top news from around the world. It was a key conversion driver, but saw an increase in disengagement since the launch of subscriptions. Elaine explained that this could be due to frustration from users hitting the paywall, news fatigue with the 24/7 news cycle and natural churn.

To tackle this, Reuters started a three-step re-engagement campaign made up of three emails:

1. ‘You haven’t read the email in a while.’
2. ‘Maybe your interests have changed. Here are our other newsletters.’
3. ‘You’ve been unsubscribed.’

To be as data-driven as possible, they reach out to disengaged audiences and ask them via surveys and interviews why they signed up and why they disengaged.

If you are in the process of reevaluating your newsletter strategy, consider building off your mission with a holistic approach:

1. Re-evaluate your mission when launching a paywall
2. A/B test with that mission at the centre
3. Consider all aspects of newsletter engagement, including disengagement, and re-engagement
4. Find the right data models to support your mission

A tool that Piniat found helpful and recommended as an email service provider is GlueLetter, which gives you the data you need to better understand your newsletter audience.

For more inspiration on Reuters’ approach to newsletters, check out Elaine’s article on the five essentials of A/B testing.

Newsletters for audience engagement

David Topping, speaking about his time at the Toronto Star as newsletters director, highlighted the 4 things the Canadian daily did to drive engagement via newsletters. If you are a publisher struggling to make your newsletter relevant and valuable to your business, these four steps are a great way to ensure that every newsletter counts.

1. Find a magic word

Describe the audience’s problem you are trying to solve in one word, and use this as a solution to define the nature of your newsletter. 

At the Star, they recognised three main buckets of such one-word solutions: 

1. If you want to make your audience feel special, your newsletter should be ‘the best’ or ‘premium’ 
2. If you want to make your audience feel that they are ahead of the curve, your newsletter would need to be ‘up-to-date’ or ‘the latest’
3. If you want to improve your audience’s access to the news, your newsletter would need to be ‘quick’ and ‘easy’

These words can then be used in the copy of the newsletter itself, and with teams internally to guide its curation. 

As a bonus: Topping pointed out the one magic word that should go without saying for most newsletters, but one that is often not communicated with readers — ‘FREE.’

2. Link different 

Hyperlinking articles in the headline or blurb is not the most effective way to entice audiences to click on them. Instead, try telling the audience explicitly why they should read the article.

1. “Here’s what’s happening…”
2. “Here’s what they are saying…”
3. “Here’s how it is going to be…”

These should follow your headline and link directly to the article. 

3. Make it a big stupid button ()

Third, make your call to action noticeable. Topping’s suggestion, in his own words, is to “Make a Big Stupid Button.”

The idea is simple: if you want your audience to click on something, make it clickable, i.e. a button, with clear prompts like “Read more” or “Get the recipe”. 

4. Embrace what’s clunky

The fourth and final tip was to embrace what’s clunky and find a way to work around the limitations of your company’s resources and technology when you develop a newsletter.

Essentially, it doesn’t matter if the newsletter isn’t perfect, as long as you follow the three tips above — define the newsletter’s purpose, shift your linking style to make it relevant, and make the call to action clear — you are ensuring greater engagement via your newsletters.

By looking at the above three case studies, you are sure to be able to make better decisions when it comes to crafting the perfect newsletter to ensure audience acquisition, engagement and retention.

1. Focus on your goal

Every newsletter should serve a purpose, whether that is to drive revenue (ads or subscriptions), traffic, loyalty/retention, etc. Identify the result(s) that you’re trying to achieve and focus your a/b testing efforts on that.

We launched digital subscriptions to Reuters.com in the fall of 2024. While growing revenue via digital subscriptions is a priority, it’s unrealistic to expect that of every newsletter. Some newsletters are meant to be strong editorial products simply because of their newsworthiness. They’re inbox experiences that serve the readers, but we do expect them to lead to subscriptions and reduce churn. Others do a great job of driving users to the site to eventually hit the paywall and hopefully convert. The formats likely look different, which leaves room to experiment.

Last year, we a/b tested click-centric sections, driven by feeds, to see if we could drive more users to the site from narrative newsletters. This turned out to be extremely effective, increasing click through rate (CTR) across all newsletters. We also tested moving the click-centric section higher up in the newsletter, which always performed better in the a/b test.

The goal of those newsletters is still to generate an engaged and loyal audience, but we were able to find additional value in terms of bringing traffic to the site.

2. Sell your idea and build on the results

Some ideas are more involved and require significant changes or additional resources. You need to justify the change and work. That’s where a/b testing comes in. It’s less of a commitment and a good opportunity to show if the change is worth it.

For example, we were looking to introduce new newsletter sign-up modules and tested one successfully at the bottom of articles. We wanted to move the sign-up module to the top of articles, assuming this would increase newsletter subscriptions, but this would impact ad revenue.

We a/b tested it and found it performed 50% better than the original article sign-up link. Because the test was successful and we realized the impact on ad revenue would be acceptable and the uplift in newsletter subscribers and user engagement would be more valuable, we were able to justify permanently moving up the sign-up link.

Since doing so, clicks on the newsletter sign-up module increased by 63%, which was higher than we expected, with total newsletter sign-ups up by 9%. Our next step is to a/b test our sign-up page to drive more conversions. A/b testing is a continuous effort. You make one small change that influences the next.

> How Reuters and The New York Times use newsletters to drive loyalty, subscriptions, and revenue

3: Keep it simple

Ideas don’t have to be extravagant to matter. The smallest change can move the needle, and a series of simple a/b tests can have lasting impact.

Our earliest tests included basic subject line tests, where we learned that being witty when appropriate while maintaining Reuters standards, tapping into subscriber demographics and utilizing SEO keywords helps increase open rates.

Another test was removing images from list-centric automated newsletters. This increased CTR by 29-33% in four newsletters. We tested moving an image to the bottom of a narrative newsletter rather than the top, which increased CTR by 15%. We also tested the length of a newsletter that summarizes one story per day and found that shorter is better. These tests were nothing fancy, but were still an improvement. A/B testing subject lines, in particular, is useful because the learnings will impact the performance of future editions.

4. Learn from your peers

The best ideas come from our peers. It’s important that the media industry works together by sharing best practices and learnings.

Last year, at The Audiencers Festival, a peer from the Washington Post shared that they saw an increase in clicks after removing descriptions from list-centric newsletters. This was also confirmed by former colleagues at Newsday. We a/b tested this in three of our automated newsletters at Reuters, and increased CTR by an average of 59%. There’s no shame in learning from industry best practices.

5. Listen to your readers

For the relaunch of our flagship newsletter, the Daily Briefing, we had an iterative process that involved prototype-building, surveying the audience, and reflecting regularly whether the changes were successful. Now, two years since we relaunched, it remains one of our most successful newsletters, with consistently high open and click rates. You can review our process in this presentation from ONA 2023.

Our objective was to give the newsletter a clearer design and bring our audience a digestible news overview. We drafted three prototypes of varying lengths and with different sections. Our UX team designed a survey, which more than 300 readers participated in and gave their feedback. The results were clear: a short and concise news overview won over prototypes that had more background information or deep dives into one specific news story. This prototyping experience influenced the development of other Reuters newsletters in our portfolio.

As our strategy continues to evolve, especially with a subscription model in mind, so will our a/b testing, but we have a solid foundation to build from. The point is to learn from the data and to remain curious.

The newsletter man himself, Dan Oshinsky, founder of Inbox Collective, spoke at The Audiencers’ Workshop in New York in March 2024 on how to grow your newsletter list. With 35 recommendations and multiple examples for each, this was an incredibly valuable session for newsletter teams to be inspired and benchmark others in the industry.

Below you can find Dan’s slides and the full list of 35 ways to grow your newsletter list.

35 ways to grow your newsletter list

1. Main newsletter sign-up page: Many teams have a version of this page already, but there’s almost always room for some improvement.
2. Individual sign-up pages: For orgs with multiple newsletters, create pages for each newsletter.
3. Header/navigation bar: This is real estate where you’re already directing readers to other places on the website — and the main newsletter sign-up page should be listed among these choices.
4. Footer: Adding a newsletter sign-up to your footer is means you have a sign-up box on every page of your site.
5. Social icons: Anywhere you list the social platforms that your org is on, consider adding a newsletter icon, too.
6. House ads: Create house ad slots to promote newsletters on site, or display these in your remnant ad inventory.
7. Text-based CTAs: These sorts of units don’t have to be complicated. They could be as simple as a line of text with a link back to a sign-up page, placed at the top or bottom of a story.
8. In-line units: A visitor who’s reading one of your articles is engaged, so give them the chance to stay engaged by signing up for newsletters.
9. Right rail: On desktop, right rail units can be less intrusive and often blend in nicely with the design of the page.
10. Pop-ups: Pop-ups are among the most effective units for converting readers to subscribers. Show these based on scroll depth (25, 50, 75%) or time on site (at least 15 seconds on a story). Offer two clear opt-outs (a “X” and a “No, thanks”) option on these forms. And utilize art to reinforce the value or voice of the newsletter.
11. Toasters: Toasters pop-up from the bottom of the screen (like toast from a toaster), and can be a less-intrusive option that still converts well.
12. Registration walls: You may want to deploy a registration wall to convert readers to newsletter subscribers/members.
13. Exit-intent units: These are pop-ups shown only when a reader navigates to leave a page.
14. Banners: These are a great way to promote a newsletter to readers on all pages of your site. Try not to overuse these units. They’re good for new launches or to promote a newsletter a day or two before it goes out.
15. Auto-registration: You may want to auto-enroll new paying supporters in your newsletter as part of the subscription, membership, or donation process.
16. Post-payment / onboarding: Readers are highly likely to take an action in the moments after they subscribe, so offer readers the chance to sign up for newsletters here.
17. Event registration: Encourage a reader to sign up for a relevant newsletter when they register for the event.
18. Comments: Ask both registered and anonymous users if they want to sign up for a newsletter as part of the commenting process.
19. Quizzes: Quizzes drive great engagement, and they’re also an opportunity to drive readers to sign up for a newsletter.
20. One-off polls: If you’re asking readers to vote on something, ask them to sign up for a newsletter, too.
21. User generated content: Any time you ask a reader to enter their email address to submit a question or feedback, ask them to sign up for a newsletter.
22. Surveys: Surveys can be an effective way to drive sign-ups.
23. Social media: There are still opportunities to convert readers from a social platform to a newsletter. Lean into the strengths of each platform.
24. Forward to a friend: Encourage readers to share the newsletter with a friend. These word-of-mouth referrals are always among your most loyal new readers. 
25. Newsletters: Ask your existing newsletter readers to take a next step and sign up for more newsletters.
26. Cross-promotion: Partner with other publications or newsletters to do cross-promotion.
27. IRL promotion: Growth doesn’t have to come via online channels. You may be able to convert some readers via IRL opportunities.
28. Giveaways: Giveaways can drive significant sign-ups — but they don’t always drive highly-engaged readers.
29. Best ofs: Best Ofs can be about businesses, professional services, or to identify and honor outstanding local individuals.
30. Lead magnets: With a lead magnet, a reader trades an email address for access to a guide or email course.
31. Homepage units: As long as your homepage is driving traffic, you should have some sort of sign-up box on this page.
32. Lead ads: Promote your newsletter to a specific audience and ask them to sign up. Popular formats at the moment include image plus CTA, video-based testimonials and carousels.
33. Content-to-capture: Content-to-capture effectively combines two strategies: Lead ads and registration walls.
34. In-newsletter ads: Existing newsletter readers tend to like signing up for more newsletters.
35. Run a referral program: Referral programs can help you grow in small ways

> Find the slides here

You can sign up to Dan’s newsletter here.

> We’d also recommend reading: Newsletter landing page: 9 essentials for a successful acquisition strategy