📈 8 Types of Ad Creative To Grow Your Newsletter with FB Ads

Howdy folks 🤠

I’m writing this for you while expecting a call from my wife at any moment that she’s in labor with our 3rd kiddo.

Which makes for a good mix of urgency and distraction.

Enjoy 🫡 

In today’s email:

• 🔗 3 ways to improve your landing page conversion rate

• 🗣️ 8 types of image-based ad creative to grow your newsletter (with examples)

• 🚀 Best practices + what types of ads are performing best

Helpful Links 🔗 

•  🎟️ The first ever Newsletter Conference is happening in NYC on Friday, May 3rd. If you’ll be there too, let us know! (link)

• 🗣️ Newsletter advice from a VP at a $200m/year media company (link)

• 💻️ 3 ways to improve your landing page conversion rate (link)

• 🐝 The best ESP in the game: Get 20% off of a beehiiv subscription for 3 months (link)*

• ♻️ Get paid to make money: Get a $100 bonus if you make $100 in paid referrals within 2 months when you sign up for Sparkloop (link)*

_{*This is an affiliate link}

Let’s dive in.

The Why 🤔 

Remember - your overall ad performance is 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)

Today, we’re double-clicking on ad creative.

Ad creative can make or break how cheap (or expensive) it is to acquire new subscribers with paid ads.

Even if you have everything else dialed in..

(a killer value prop, perfect targeting, and a high-converting landing page)

..bad ad creative can destroy your CPA (cost per acquisition).

In the rest of this newsletter, you’ll get:

• The main types of ad creative

• examples of each

• insights on best practices + what’s performing best for our clients (at the time of writing, March of 2024)

Types of Ad Creative 🎨 

Here they are broken into 2 categories. Note that some of these will have overlap with each other (as you’ll see in the examples).

Today, we’re diving into Static Images 👇️

(I’ll cover video ads next time)

Static Images 🖼️ 

Static images are typically the easiest, lowest effort ad creative to create. Some are easier than others.

You can use something simple like Canva to create most of these.

1 | 😂 Memes

Ad creative has 2 primary goals:

1. Stop the scroll

2. Quickly communicate the value proposition of the newsletter

Memes do this masterfully.

If pictures are worth 1,000 words, memes are worth 10,000.

Memes will get their own newsletter in the future, but for now here are a few examples:

Our niche newsletter:

Marketing Millennials:

Overheard on Wall Street

3 reasons why memes work as ads:

1. Speed: According to 3M, we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. They get points across much faster than a block of text. They also spark more curiosity.

2. Trojan Horse: Most ads are obviously ads. Memes look like native (non ad) content, making it more likely to stop the scroll.

3. With the Current: The average internet user has seen 1000s of memes + has trained themselves to stop and read them. Memes tap into the habits people already have.

→ We’re seeing memes work well for clients with personal brands and for newsletters that regularly infuse humor into their content.

If you ever use memes in your newsletter, they’re worth testing as an ad.

(use Imgflip to create your memes and import them into Canva to resize if necessary)

2 | 🧔‍♂️ Face of the Brand

If your newsletter is built around a personal brand, you can start creating the association between a specific person and your newsletter in the ad creative.

This example is a lead-magnety ad (more examples of lead magnets further below) that features Codie Sanchez, the face of the Contrarian Thinking newsletter.

→ These types of ads work especially well for things like live trainings and workshops.

• If you sell a high-ticket offer, live calls are a great way to quickly deliver a lot of value in an intimate setting and present the offer to a captive audience.

• The same is true for non-profits looking to acquire donors.

3 | 🐦️ Tweet-style

Tweet-style ads are bite-sized snippets that tease the bigger picture value of the newsletter.

Codie again..

James Clear:

→ What performs best:

• Use content that performed well organically on X, LinkedIn, etc.

• Use Canva to design these (they have templates that make this easy)

• Use a black background with white text (high contrast with FB/IG’s white timelines)

• Ensure the font is large enough to be read easily

4 | 💻️ Landing Page Style

These types of ads perform consistently well.

Like this one from Morning Brew, they often mirror the actual landing pages that ads drive traffic to..

→ The best landing page style ads have a few elements:

• Color: Solid colored background that pops

• Visual: iPhone mockups of an example newsletter (use shots.so to make these quickly for free)

• Value: The value proposition is obvious

• Social Proof: Social proof or a testimonial is front and center

• Concise: There’s no fluff (similar to the best landing pages)

5 | 📒 Plain Text

Plain text ads rely on…text.

A common plain text ad we test is the iPhone note ad.

These became really common in 2023 and we’ve seen performance with these start to decline for finance, startup and business related niches.

Why that happened:

• They became really common because they were working really well

• More advertisers starting using this ad creative

• People learned to associate these with ads, and scroll past them

• CPAs go up

We haven’t completely stopped testing them. On average, they just aren’t performing as well as they used to.

→ Best practices for iPhone note ads:

• Test a light and dark mode version

• Use 1 emoji with a color that pops

• Use your iPhone to create the ad and simply take a screenshot of it

• Use Canva to format it to fit ad placements on FB and IG

Here’s another version of a plain text ad that’s more original from Marketing Millennials:

If your value proposition is dialed in, these ads perform well.

The same recommendations apply here (dark background, colors that pop, concise, etc.).

6 | 🛍️ Window Shopper (Newsletter Preview)

Rather than telling readers the value proposition, Window Shopper ads show the value prop.

These are performing well, especially for newsletters tied to current events.

For example, Caitlin Clark (the baller of an athlete pictured above) broke the all-time NCAA scoring record on February 13th.

This was such big news that it’s ~6 weeks later and they’re still running the ad.

If I had to guess, The Gist will probably be running this ad for at least another 1-2 months, if not longer.

→ Best practices for Window Shopper (newsletter preview) ads:

• Be Timely: If a story breaks and is getting a lot of attention, turn it into an ad. Refresh stories frequently…or

• Work Smarter: Use the BIGGEST stories that everyone in the industry is talking about (and will keep talking about). Ride that wave. These will have the longest lifespan (especially important if you’re running your ads solo and don’t have a team to refresh stories frequently).

• Branding: Your branding should be infused into the ad creative. The same goes for landing pages as well - use the same colors, fonts and styles so people know what to expect before they subscribe.

• Top Performers: Again, if you have high-performing content on social media or in previous newsletters, use that story as an example to demonstrate your value prop with an example.

7 | 🧲 Lead Magnet Ads

Lead Magnet ads promise someone a specific thing like a digital download or a guided email course.

In the context of newsletters ads, a lead magnet ad is any ad that is “selling” someone on anything other than subscribing to the newsletter.

Lead magnet ads work well because they tap into our desire for instant gratification.

You sign up and get something valuable right away.

But they can lead to lower quality subscribers.

This doesn’t always happen, but we’ve seen the open rates of lead magnet ad subscribers be ~5-10% lower than other types of ads run to the same audience.

Why? Because when people signed up, they weren’t buying into the value prop of an ongoing newsletter.

They bought into the value prop of a specific thing (the lead magnet).

→ Best practices for Lead Magnet Ads:

• Measure quality: You should be doing this anyway, but especially with lead magnet ads. Create a segment in beehiiv to automatically track engagement for subscribers you acquire through FB ads.

• Test it: This goes for any kind of ad. You can’t predict the future. Get it out into the real world. When you get it in front of thousands of people, you’ll learn pretty quickly if it works for:

  • acquiring subscribers at the CPA you want

  • acquiring the quality of subscribers you want

• Aligned: This should be obvious, but choose a lead magnet that is as aligned with your ongoing content as possible. Ideally, 100% of the people who want the lead magnet should also want and benefit from your newsletter.

• Welcome Flow: Your thank-you page and welcome email (the next 2 touchpoints with a new subscriber) should be dialed in, selling someone on the value of staying subscribed to your newsletter. Make it a no brainer to engage.

8 | 🗣️ Testimonials

Last one. Testimonials are powerful because:

1. They’re social proof that actual people find value in your newsletter

2. The person “selling” isn’t the person who owns the product, making it more relatable and therefore, more trustworthy (this is why influencers are a thing)

The best testimonial ads have the value prop embedded into them.

→ Best practices for Testimonial Ads

• Gather feedback: Always gather feedback from your subscribers (easiest way is to use a survey in every email you send). You never know when a subscriber will give you your next ad.

• Value prop: Use a subscriber testimonial that makes it clear why someone should sign up.

• Address objections: The example above is great because it simultaneously gets at the value prop and addresses the objection “I don’t have the time”

Note: Video testimonials can be extremely effective as well. We’ll cover video ads in depth in our next email.

Again, these can be combined (e.g., a landing page-style ad featuring a testimonial).

But this should give you plenty of ideas for the types of ads you can run to grow your newsletter.

What’s Performing Best 🏆️ 

Lame answer: it depends. Test, test, test.

Different styles perform better for different kinds of newsletters:

• Window-shopper ads are great for news-heavy newsletters

• Memes are great for newsletters with personality

• Testimonials work well across the board

BUT if you said I only get 3 static image ads that I’m allowed to use all year across various types of newsletters, I’d probably roll with:

• 😂 Memes

• 💻️ Landing page ads

• 🐦️ A combo of tweet/testimonial style ads

…all of that said, well-executed videos tend to outperform static images.

So we’ll dive into video ads next.

👉️ Here’s a summary of the takeaways:

• 🎯 Ad creative has 2 primary goals:

  1. Stop the scroll

  2. Quickly communicate the value proposition of the newsletter

• 🛠️ Tools:

  • Use writerads.com to see the exact ads the biggest newsletter are currently running (and the ones they’ve turned off)

  • Use the Facebook ad library to spy on your competition’s winning ads

  • Use Canva for static images, Imgflip for memes, find stock images on Unsplash

  • Use shots.so for iPhone mockups

• 🤓 Overall principles:

  • Make it look like native content

  • Use high contrast colors that pop

  • Communicate the value prop ACAP (as concisely as possible)

  • Address objections

  • Leverage social proof (e.g., subscriber count or testimonial)

  • Consider showing, not telling (window shopper)

  • Use top-performing organic content

  • Align branding with landing page

just for fun..

Until next time,

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. And we’re fun to work with. If you want us to grow your newsletter and you’re ready to invest at least $2k/month in ad spend, book a call with us here.