Here’s what to do if you want to start a newsletter

Kait Richmond is a writer, producer and contributor to the M.T. Deco Blog

If you’ve been thinking about adding a newsletter to your personal digital strategy, consider this your time to start.

Whether you’re a writer, creator, or just someone who wants to share your musings, newsletters are an excellent place to build an audience as well as make money through paid subscriptions, affiliate links and, more recently, brand partnerships.

We probably don’t need to tell you that newsletters are an incredibly valuable tool to anyone looking to build a community. Being able to reach people directly in their inboxes is powerful [just think about how many times you check your email every day]. But if you’ve been working on your digital strategy, putting the time in to create a whole newsletter can be an intimidating addition to your to-do list.

That’s why you have to make it work for you. Quality and consistency are both key here, so when you map out what your newsletter will look like, it should be a schedule that feels manageable with content you can keep up with creating.

Trust us, it’s worth your time. Like everything else in digital strategy, newsletters are becoming a place for partnerships, AKA one of the best ways to grow your audience and make money while doing it. Here are a few examples:

  • “On a day that a Substack [featuring the brand] is published, we typically see 3-5x our average sales volume,” the founder of new fashion brand Nelle Atelier told Glossy.

  • Advertisers on beehiiv “see 12x ROI than traditional paid channels,” the company’s VP of Creators told TubeFilter.

  • Even big brands are experimenting. Glossy reports that the denim brand Madewell saw “significant click-throughs and sales” following an official Substack partnership with Emily Sundberg’s “Feed Me” newsletter.

You don’t need to be a current or aspiring creator for this to work for you, either. Anyone wanting to develop their thought leadership digital strategy should get to work on a newsletter.

So, where to begin? It’s important to think about the goal of your newsletter - i.e. reaching new people, cultivating your existing audience, driving sales. That will inform the next step [and, really, all the other steps]. As you identify the goal, you can start exploring the email platforms that will help you design, produce and send your newsletter, as well as track the analytics.

We’ll dive into some of the platforms in a second, but there are a couple of things to consider as you weigh your options: budget and ease of use. Many of the platforms have free options you can start with, but depending on your goals, you may want to think about a paid plan. Additionally, if you’re new to publishing newsletters, you want a platform that is easy to use and looks professional without too much work.

The platform most of us are familiar with is Substack. It has become hugely popular and attracted a lot of prominent writers - but it’s also had its fair share of controversy. Still, it’s a huge platform that hit the milestone of 3 million paid subscribers earlier this year. The Recommendations feature has been especially useful in audience growth, even if some users feel the platform’s efforts to replicate the social media experience is not helping them with subscriptions.

beehiiv has become a strong competitor to Substack, especially as the company jumps on the aforementioned creator trend. Popular Peloton instructor Robin Arzon launched her weekly newsletter with beehiiv, and in two months has amassed nearly 40,000 subscribers and an average open rate of 71.4%! [Context: there is much debate about what a “good” open rate is, but many are happy with 20-25%.]

Rounding out the top three is Ghost, which recently made headlines with the news that it would join the fediverse [Mastodon, Flipboard and Instagram’s Threads are doing the same - here’s what it all means]. Ghost has become a popular alternative to Substack, especially in the last few months. When the well-known newsletter Platformer decided to migrate away following a story about hate speech on Substack, editor Casey Newton also shared that he was happy that “[Ghost] does not seek to be a social network. Instead, it seeks only to build good, solid infrastructure for internet businesses.”

These three options are all strong if you are just getting started and need an easy-to-use platform. Chances are, you’ve heard of some of the bigger platforms like MailChimp, HubSpot or ConvertKit, and those are all great options if you’re a big brand with a big budget and not starting from scratch.

Additionally, some social media platforms offer newsletter features, with LinkedIn having the most popular option. While this is a great way to get your content out there, we’d suggest the LinkedIn newsletter as a complementary piece of the puzzle. It’s still social media, meaning it’s part of a larger algorithm and therefore not an “owned” platform. Having an email list is far more valuable than a follow [of course, having both is great, too].

Hopefully, there are a ton of newsletter ideas swirling around in your head by now. Make sure you’re reading a variety of newsletters so you understand the landscape, and remember there’s space for all of us out there. We’ll leave you with a few more resources to get you going:

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