📈 Part 2: The $0.16 CPA Newsletter Ad

Welcome to BetterLetter 📧

Isaac and I are newsletter operators turned agency owners.

We practice what we preach and bring everything we’re doing for our clients and our own newsletters to you.

📈 Today’s email is Part 2 of a deep dive into the ads we’re running for a newsletter we personally operate.

In Part 1, I covered:

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

• The $0.28 CPA ad

• A breakdown of why it performed so well

📈 Click here to read Part 1 →

Today in Part 2, I’m covering:

• The $0.16 CPA ad that’s outperforming it

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

• High-level principles to apply to your growth efforts with paid ads

As a reminder, here’s the 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

The $0.16 ad 🖼️ 

In Part 1, we linked to the video ad that was getting a $0.28 CPA within a few weeks of launching the ad.

I’ll share the simple ad creative that’s outperforming it ($0.16 CPA), then I’ll break down a bit of how we got there.

Here it is…

Remember…

🧩 As we talked about in Part 1, ad creative is just one piece of the puzzle.

So, no. You can’t just throw up a Drake meme ad and expect an amazing CPA.

The performance of any given ad 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)

Exposing our thought process 🤔 

When we find a winning audience and winning creative, we keep testing.

1. We had strong signals of a validated value prop (high ad shares, low CPA, high replies, positive feedback from subscribers)

2. The landing page was killing it (over 80% conversion rate and people keep telling us it’s beautiful)

Call it content-market fit or ad-audience fit or whatever you want. The point is, things (and people) were clicking.

So here’s what we did at a high level…

👍️ We kept these exactly the same (with 1 tweak):

• Value prop

• Caption, headline, call-to-action (small tweak to the first line of copy)

  • Old: Malchi Daily is a free email newsletter that {value prop}…

  • New: Want to {value prop} memorize Bible verses and learn their context?

• Post-Subscribe flow

• Landing page (already converting > 80%)

🧪 We AB tested these:

• Audience // Targeting

• Ad creative

Targeting 🎯 

Because of the niche for this newsletter and FB’s limitations on targeting people based on religious or political affiliations, we knew we’d need to rely on the data we had generated from interactions we’ve had with our current audience.

• Audience getting $0.28 CPA: We used a lookalike audience based on people who engaged with the Malachi Daily Instagram account (estimated audience size: 2-5 million people).

  • We didn’t have a ton of data at first (145 followers isn’t exactly influencer status), but we had enough. And it worked because the quality of engagement.

  • Meaning, the engagement (IG profile visits, likes, comments) came only from people who had a high degree of interest in our value prop. Yet another example of the power of a strong value proposition.

    • More on the mechanics of this in a future newsletter.

• Audience getting $0.16 CPA: We wanted to see how well Meta would be able to find our most valuable subscribers.

  • So we created a segment in beehiiv of the most engaged subscribers:

    • Active

    • > 10% click rate

    • > 60% open rate

    • unique sends > 6

  • Using that segment (~2k subscribers), we built a lookalike audience (estimated audience size: 2-3 million) and targeted them with the new wave of ads.

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The ad creative 🎨 

After broader testing, we landed on 3 static images to compete with the OG video ad:

1. Basic Image w/ Value Prop

2. Expanding Brain Meme

3. Drake Meme

Trust your gut, sometimes..

Everyone is so serious all the time.

At BetterLetter we like to have fun and make some internal wagers 🤝

Here were the predictions I sent to Isaac right before launching the ads…

👉️ I didn’t actually think any would outperform the OG ad

👉️ I thought what would perform best was basically a stripped down version of the landing page with a high contrast background

• 💭 My thought: The landing page was killing it and the value prop is easily understood in a short phrase. So why not pull the landing page further upstream?

• 🙅 Why it probably didn’t work as well: It looks more like an ad than the other creatives and sparked less curiosity, resulting in a lower CTR

Here’s were the actual results:

Moral of the story? 

There’s a place for gut instinct and hunches.

But data is the ultimate truth teller when it comes to ad performance.

There will be times when your gut is spot on. And other times where you will be surprised by what performs best.

Be willing to test things you think may not work. Have an opinion but be willing to be proven wrong.

💡 Always be testing and let the data tell the story.

That’s all for today.

If I had to summarize Parts 1 and 2, it would be this 👇️

At the foundation of what’s making this newsletter grow is the fact that:

1. People actually want what this newsletter promises (100k google searches/mo)

2. The newsletter actually delivers on its promise

And when you have a strong, concise value proposition:

1. Repeat it everywhere your newsletter has a digital presence and become synonymous with it: from your ad creative, ad copy, CTA and landing page to your social media profiles, thank you page and welcome email.

2. Find your audience and leverage platforms like Meta to find more people who love what you’re doing.

In future newsletters, we’ll break down:

• How to run tests on a budget to find winning ad creative + find your audience

• Why memes are so effective + examples of top performers

• And so much more about how to operate and grow a newsletter that leads to people clicking, sharing and buying your stuff

So much more to come. We’re still in the locker room, not even getting warmed up yet.

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 for you and are ready to invest at least $2k/month on ads, book a call with us here.