📧 Nobody complained, so you kept it

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👋 Hey!

Every newsletter has one decision nobody has looked at in years. The template you built when things were working. The signup box you never bothered to move. The second newsletter you launched because a competitor did.

Nobody writes in to complain about any of it, which feels like proof it's fine. It isn't. The people it was failing already left, and they didn't fill in your reply prompt on the way out.

This week: a B2B email pro who asked a peer to roast his newsletter and rebuilt the whole thing in one issue, a single survey checkbox that turned 5,000 respondents into 11,000 signups, and a test that proves running two newsletters is usually just running one badly.

Let's dive in! 👇

Substack will now find your collaboration partners for you. Creator match ranks publishers with similar audience sizes and interests. Audience-specific content blocks allow a single post to show different CTAs to free, paid, and founding subscribers.

Workweek opened its newsletter platform, ad network included. CEO Adam Ryan says the network runs roughly $50 CPMs, and Workweek can identify about 81% of newsletter subscribers by name and employer.

Apple backed out of the Hide My Email domain move. Those addresses stay on icloud.com and stay indistinguishable from regular iCloud mailboxes.

Your custom font is probably not the font your readers see. Buttondown's Ryan Farley cites caniemail.com, which reports that fewer than 25% of clients recognize @font-face. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and Proton Mail all fell back in testing.

Add one signup checkbox to the end of your next reader survey

How: You are already collecting email addresses at the top of the survey. So put a question at the very end that lets people tick a box to subscribe to one or more of your newsletters.

Why: Dan Oshinsky at Inbox Collective ran this with a client and the math is hard to argue with. Survey takers are the readers who already like reading things in their inbox, so they are the warmest audience you will ever ask. The checkbox works because it removes every hoop. Nothing to click through to, nothing to fill in twice.

Expected Result: In that client's case, 5,000 people took the survey, 3,500 of them opted into at least one extra newsletter and each of those picked about three. One question at the end of one survey produced more than 11,000 signups.

See how it was built.

Spotlight: Email Advice in Your Inbox by Des Brown

What works:

Creator quote: On why reader feedback has a ceiling: "Feedback from inside the tent tells you how the tent is holding up, but it can't tell you the tent is pitched in the wrong jungle."

Your takeaway: Brown's three rules for picking a critic are worth stealing whole. Go adjacent, not alien, so they critique your hierarchy instead of telling you to add more CTAs. Hand over the thing you would instinctively explain away, because that instinct is the tell. And use a blunt word like "roast" on purpose, since a soft ask only ever gets a soft answer.

Read the whole teardown.

Campaigner: full-fat email marketing automation

Why You'll Love It: Campaigner covers the whole send stack in one place: automation workflows, segmentation, a drag-and-drop editor with raw HTML access, landing pages, custom sending domains, analytics, and an API for anything you want to wire up yourself. It leans on AI-assisted insights for personalization, so you are targeting behavior rather than blasting the full list.

Best For: Operators who have outgrown a basic ESP and want advanced automation and segmentation, but do not want to buy an entire marketing platform to get them.

InboxBid: The newsletter board where the ranking formula is just the price

What the deal is: Place any paid bid on InboxBid and you get 30 days of HeyNews Hobbyist free, a $39 value. Bids start at $1, so a dollar buys you a listing and a full month of the tool. There are 24 seats left, which means the top of the board is still going for pocket change.

Who should take the deal: Operators who want a discovery listing and a real look at HeyNews in one transaction, and anyone who has been meaning to try us but wanted an excuse.

Claim a seat here.

Test: One LinkedIn newsletter or two? Lilach Bullock ran this on her own profile in early 2025 because she was tired of answering the question without having checked. Her main newsletter sat at roughly 3,200 subscribers and she published every Tuesday. She launched a second one on the same profile, shorter and more tactical, aimed at readers who wanted quick AI prompts instead of longer strategy pieces.

Result: The second newsletter pulled about 400 subscribers, and almost all of them came from her existing audience choosing the new one over the old one. Combined open rate across both landed lower than the single newsletter had managed alone. Her readers were just splitting their attention because she had split her content. She killed it after ten editions, folded the good material back into the main newsletter as sections, and open rates recovered within a month.

Takeaway: If you cannot sustain one newsletter at your stated frequency, a second is just avoidance of the harder job. Bullock's practical ceiling is two, maybe three, and almost everyone should be running exactly one. Worth knowing: profile newsletters and Company Page newsletters are entirely separate and build separate lists, so that is the one case where two does not cannibalize.

Read the full test.

Thanks for reading,

Eren & Cagri