You’ll have to excuse me if this issue comes across informal – I’m writing it at the very end of a vacation.
I’ve been off work the last two weeks, mostly tramping through the woods of New England with my dog. But the last two days have been a big party with the family. So I’m sneaking this in under the wire.
When I go back to work tomorrow, it’ll be primarily to focus on growing Hampton’s blog and newsletter. Both are new (just two months old), and up to this point we’ve been scrappy – our strategy hasn’t gone much further than:
- Publish cool stuff on the blog
- Promote it on social to draw readers to the site
- Use a (cleverly-worded) pop-up to grab emails
- Rinse and repeat
It’s a lot of work to publish great articles, and before we press the gas on traffic, I want to be pretty sure that the site is set up to turn as many visitors as possible into email subscribers.
So the question I sat down to answer this week was…
Which calls to action should you definitely have in place on your newsletter’s website before going hard on promotion/growth?
To find out, I texted my buddy Matt McGarry. If you don’t know Matt yet, he runs a newsletter growth agency called Growletter, and is one of the best in the biz.
We worked together at The Hustle, and he’s since gone on to help grow a bunch of the most successful newsletter companies out there.
I’ll get to his thoughts in a sec, but while I was waiting for him to respond, I decided to visit some of his client’s sites just to see how they’re doing things.
Matt’s pretty focused on Twitter, Meta, and TikTok ads. So I don’t think he touches much when it comes to site design.
But his speciality is growing newsletters from 100k to 1m+ subscribers, so I figured that anyone on his list has their act together enough to build a 6- to 7-figure audience.
That’s good enough for me.
I spent an hour digging into The Hustle, 1440, and Chartr, and can boil the learnings down to 4 areas:
- The Five Basic Email Captures Common To Newsletter Sites
- A Universal Framework For Newsletter C2A’s
- The Importance Of Customized Interactions
- Inspiration And Unique Design Elements
I’ll go through each quickly, then share Matt’s insights too.
1. The Five Basic Email Captures Common To Newsletter Sites
Spend any time comparing major newsletter sites side-by-side, and one of the first things you notice is that a lot of them look… like… really similar.
After a few years in the space, I chalk this similarity up to two things:
- It’s a small world: There still aren’t that many people who specialize in designing, publishing, or growing newsletters. The ones who do all talk. So you see the fingerprints of the same few people across sites
- This design works
Great. That’s gonna save us time. Each of these companies is testing, tweaking, and trying to optimize conversions. So whatever they have in common should be a safe baseline for our purpose.
I opened an incognito tab so I could browse all three sites like a new reader, and found that while the details vary, they seem to have these five email-captures in common:
- Above The Fold
- Footer
- Nav Bar
- In-Content
- Exit Intent
We’ll zip through an example of each real quick…
1. Above The Fold
“Above the fold,” is an old newspaper term used to describe any content on the top-half of the front page of a newspaper (a.k.a. the part people actually see before picking the newspaper up).
We use it in websites too, to talk about anything you see without scrolling when you hit a landing page.
As you can see in the image above, while The Hustle has their daily and featured stories listed lower down on the homepage, the space above the fold is mostly focused on capturing email addresses.
That same is true for other newsletters too. For example, Chartr and 1440…
It’s interesting to see that Chartr and 1440 don’t curate stories to their homepage or have a nav bar.
Makes sense. Both can be distracting, and these pages are designed to capture as many email addresses as possible.
The Hustle’s homepage used to be the same way. I’d be interested to know what led to the change, and how it’s performing.
Regardless, the point is clear — when people land on your site, the first thing you want to do is show off the newsletter and give them a way to sign up (more on exactly how in the Universal C2A Framework in section No. 2).
2. Footer
This one’s simple — at the bottom of each site, there’s another email capture.
3. Nav Bar
I almost missed this when I did my first inspection of the sites, but each has a link to join their newsletter somewhere in the nav bar.
As I mentioned above, Chartr and 1440 don’t show their navigation on the homepage. But if you dig to pages deeper on the site, the C2A is there.
If you’re a little OCD (like me), and wondering why this is third on the list when it’s positioned the highest up on the website, here’s why: If two of three case studies can afford to leave these C2A’s off their homepage, I’m assuming they’re less effective than the things I mentioned earlier.
4. In-Content
When you click to read an individual story, each newsletter has a clear email capture visible somewhere on the page.
For example, The Hustle uses these forms embedded directly in the text (one always about 20% into a story, the other at the very end). If a story is short, they skip the first one, and simply use the second at the end:
Chartr is similar. Their stories are all quite short, and begin & end with embedded forms like this:
But 1440 is different — they use a sticky subscribe form that’s locked to the bottom of the screen.
I like this idea, especially for longer stories, since it makes it easy to subscribe at any time as you read an article. You never know which sentence is going to connect with someone and make them think, “Wow, where has this been all my life?”
But when that happens, you want the subscribe form to be close by.
5. Exit Intent
Finally, the pop-up. Not just any pop-up though. An exit-intent pop-up (meaning that it triggers when someone moves their cursor out of the website tab, as though they’re attempting to navigate somewhere else).
That’s it.
Each of the newsletters has other things individual to them (we’ll get into some in sections 3 and 4).
But when it comes to major similarities, and 5 good email captures to start with, those are the five.
2. A Universal Framework For Newsletter C2A’s
Okay, so we know which email capture forms we’re going to start with. But how do we design them to be most effective?
Well, obviously, that’d take some testing (each site/audience is different). But if you scroll back up through the examples above, you’ll see that most newsletter signup forms contain these four things:
- Promise: What will you get if you sign up?
- Cost: How much does it cost to sign up?
- Audience: How big is our audience (aka social proof)?
- Time: How long will it take you to read (aka how much effort will you need to invest in order to get the thing we promised)
Promise. Cost. Audience. Time. PCAT for short (or cat pee, if you’re seven).
Now obviously, you would want to adapt these depending on the type of newsletter you’re running. If you write 5,000 word deep dives, you probably won’t jump on the “5-minute” bandwagon.
The trick is to realize what each of these is actually doing so you can adapt for yourself:
- Promise: Gets the reader thinking about what’s in it for them
- Cost: Lower the barrier to entry by showing how little is needed
- Audience: Build trust by showing other people like/trust you
- Time: Show how your newsletter saves people time (even if it takes more than five minutes to read)
3. The Importance Of Customized Interactions
Here, I want to pause briefly to look closer at a couple of email captures we’ve already discussed — namely, The Hustle’s…
- In-Content Forms
- Exit Intent Pop-up
The Hustle is a particularly interesting case study because it’s owned by HubSpot, so they’ve got a ton of resources to work with when it comes to page design.
Not only do they have way more manpower and money to test/optimize/design, but HubSpot is the marketing platform used by thousands of other companies – so they have internal data from users on what’s working best to grab attention and capture leads.
And one thing they’re doing that the other two aren’t doing quite as much, is customizing the copy on email capture forms to match the interaction the reader is having at the moment they see the forms.
It’s subtle, but I noticed that this felt different as a reader, and I think (if done well) it’s got to have an impact on your conversion rates.
1. In-Content Forms
As I mentioned, The Hustle serves two different in-content forms. One embedded about 20% into the piece looks like this:
Somehow it feels a little more engaging than a generic email capture. Because they’re acknowledging what I’m doing (reading/enjoying the piece)
2. Exit Intent Pop-Up
The same goes for the exit pop-up. Look at the copy, and how they’re almost having a live conversation with me as I try to exit the site.
It seems like a little thing.
I think the reason this stood out to me is because I know that my default personality would be to NOT do this. I’m not typically the person who digs into the settings to customize things perfectly to my needs.
It’s tempting to just throw up a basic pop-up, and focus more on driving traffic.
But I bet little customizations like this make a difference, and after experiencing these as a reader, I’m going to look for opportunities to do this kind of thing on our site (and probably… ugh… my personal site too.)
It will be very interesting to see what generative AI offers in this regard soon.
4. Inspiration And Unique Design Elements
The last thing I’ll point out before we close with Matt’s advice is something I can only call “style points”.
Each of these newsletters does cool little things to encourage readers to sign up.
For example, a lot of newsletter companies have this mobile phone aesthetic on their homepage, but The Hustle takes it a step further – this is actually a custom slide-show that gets updated every day with headlines, and photos from the last few newsletters.
Think about what that does for conversion when you land on this page and see images, stories, or headlines you recognize from social media chatter the last few days.
The Hustle also just does a good job of using motion in general to bring the homepage alive.
This content section looks like something out of The Daily Prophet.
1440 uses motion too. They have this cool little ticker on the homepage that shows how many people have opened the newsletter so far that day.
When it comes to audience social proof, this is one of the cooler implementations I’ve seen so far (though I have no idea if it’s real, or just a nicely designed ticker that counts random numbers over two million).
Finally, Chartr has gone ahead and updated the title tag on their homepage so that their organic Google result has a “Subscribe” call to action in it.
Helps readers know they found the right result, and primes them to sign up.
5. Matt’s Advice
Okay, so we’ve seen a bunch of common email capture forms the big dogs are using. We’ve dissected how they structure their calls to action, and the role that customization and “style points” can play.
Then Matt came back and gave me two pieces of guidance I found really helpful:
- First: He shared this list of 52 ways to grow your email list
- Then: He said to pick at least 4 (ideally more) to add to your site
The list is from Dan Oshinsky, who led newsletters at both Buzzfeed and The New Yorker. He knows his stuff.
And of course, Matt knows his stuff about email capture too.
“One dedicated landing page. And three other ecap options isn’t a ton,” he told me.
“Count how many units popular media companies have,” he said, pointing to even bigger brands, like Motley Fool, or NYT.
It’s a good idea. And I’ll do it one day. But this email is already longer than I meant for it to be, so this’ll have to do for now.