📈 Deep Dive: The $0.28 CPA Newsletter Ad

PLUS: A plot twist

Author

Kieran Lenahan
February 12, 2024

Welcome to BetterLetter 📧 

I’ll skip the lengthy intros for now. We’re starting off with a bang 💥 

Let’s dive right in.

In this email (Part 1), we’re covering:

  • The newsletter behind our (second) best-performing ad

  • The $0.28 CPA ad

  • Why it performed so well

In Part 2, I’ll cover:

  • The $0.16 CPA ad that’s outperforming it

  • Our thought process behind improving an ad that was already killing it

  • How you can apply this to grow your newsletter

Newsletter Profile 🗒️ 

  • The Newsletter: Malachi Daily 🙏 

  • Audience location: US only

  • Niche: Faith + Spirituality

  • Value Proposition: Memorize Bible Verses + Learn Their Context

  • Send frequency: 10x/month (M-F, every other week)

  • IG followers on Day One: 175

Tech stack 💻️ 

Results 📈

  • 11,000 subscribers in 2 months

  • $3k ad spend

  • $0.28 CPA

  • Open rate: 49%, CTR: 11%

The $0.28 ad 📹️ 

Before you watch it, you have to realize:

the performance of an ad is not just a function of “how good the ad is”

Think About It GIF by Identity

It’s a function of:

  • The newsletter’s value prop (the problem it solves)

  • Targeting (who sees it)

  • The ad (caption, creative, headline, CTA)

  • Landing page (copy + design)

  • Post-Subscribe flow (true ad performance doesn’t stop at acquisition)

Remember: The goal isn’t a higher sub count.

It’s a higher sub count of people who click, share and buy your stuff.

Watch the ad, then come back here. We’re just getting started.

💡 Note: Not only does everything listed above (value prop, targeting, etc.) affect your CPA. It affects subscriber engagement after they subscribe.

How do we know? We tested multiple landing pages. The winner leads to a ~10% higher engagement rate from subscribers.

Tweak any of the above and everything downstream will be affected.

Why the ad performed so well 🤔 

In order to answer this, we need to look at the components I listed above:

  • Value prop

  • Targeting

  • The ad (caption, creative, headline, CTA)

  • Landing page

  • Post-Subscribe flow

Value prop 📈 

  • This newsletter offers something people actually want and are actively looking for

  • “Memorize Bible verses” gets 100k searches/month

Targeting 🎯 

  • Malachi Daily had 175 followers and a few thousand “interactions” (profile visits, likes, comments, DMs) from an organic push when it first launched in 2023

  • We targeted a lookalike audience based on those people who engaged with their profile (estimated audience size: 2-5 million people)

The ad creative 🎨 

One indicator of a winning ad is how often it gets shared. This one has gotten shared hundreds of times 📣 

  • A few key things you’ll notice when you watch the ad:

    • Hook: Pointing to something that pops up within the 1st second of the ad grabs attention

    • Value prop: The viewer gets the value prop concisely within the first 5 seconds

    • Uses captions: People who have volume off (most people) can still understand the ad

Landing page 💻️ 

  • This landing page is converting over 80% of visitors into subscribers

In the period of time shown in the chart below, we drove 7,400 new subscribers.

Post-subscribe flow 🗒️ 

Here’s the flow when someone subscribes:

  • Sparkloop upscribe

  • Thank you page (what to expect) + give away free value (free access to an app)

  • Welcome email (CTA = reply)

    • High reply rate 13% of subscribers reply to our welcome email

In the future, we’ll do deep dives on each of these components to break them down further.

But for now, the key takeaway?

This is an example of when each step of a funnel is dialed in, but all of this success is built on a foundation:

👉️ Value prop. Value prop. Value prop. 👈️ 

Your value proposition is like the foundation of your house.

foreign workers are building the highest skyscrapers of the world in southeast asia. often under precarious working conditions.

If it’s strong, it gives you a chance to build something beautiful.

If it’s crap, it doesn’t matter what you build on top of it - eventually it will crumble.

A strong value proposition is necessary but not sufficient for growth.

Me, just now

Houses are built from the foundation up. Newsletters should be the same.

The good thing about newsletters, is that you get to iterate on the foundation (value prop). With houses you don’t get that luxury.

Malachi Daily’s..

  • Low CPA

  • Landing page conversion rate

  • High % of people who share the ad with their network

  • High reply rate to the welcome email, and

  • Overall high quality engagement with the email

..All flow from a strong foundation.

So…

Think about what problem your newsletter solves:

  • What’s the tangible thing they get from your newsletter that matters to them? How do you say that in a sentence or less?

  • Are you saving people time? Money? What do they get that they actually want.

We’ll talk a lot more on value prop in the future.

Lastly, the plot twist 👀 

Isaac and I run the newsletter you’re reading right now, and the agency behind it that goes by the same name: BetterLetter.

…We also happen to be the operators behind Malachi Daily.

Oh My God Wow GIF

We don’t just know growth. We know what it takes to operate a top notch newsletter from start to finish.

That was Part 1 🫡 

In Part 2, I’ll cover:

  • The $0.16 CPA ad that’s beating it

  • How we improved an ad that was already killing it

  • What to do with this information

Much more to come on all things newsletters. We’re just getting warmed up.

Isaac + Kieran ✌️

P.S. When you’re ready to grow your newsletter…

  • We’ll do it for you: We help creators, brands and ministries grow their newsletter so they can drive more sales and donations. If you want us to grow your newsletter for you and are ready to invest at least $2k/month on ads, book a call with us here.