📧 Organic growth drying up?

👋 Hey!

This week's packed with game-changing insights and proven growth strategies you can steal. We deep dive into MailerLite’s AI assistant that cuts email creation time nearly in half, while smart creators are ditching organic social in favor of earned and paid growth tactics that actually work.

Let's dive in! 👇

Newsletter growth rules shift as organic traffic dries up. Website, SEO, and social aren't enough. Earned and paid tactics are now essential for sustainable list growth in 2025.

NYT launches 'The World' global newsletter with curated analysis. Tailoring newsletters for international audiences boosts relevance and subscriber growth—NYT's setting a new global-first standard for smart segmentation.

Kit App Store rolls out AI, video, and course tools. Newsletter creators can now automate content, boost lead gen, and sell courses, all in one platform, saving serious time and hassle.

Industry Dive's $525M exit proves audience data is king. Industry Dive turned smart audience data into $110M annual revenue: showing top-tier data unlocks premium advertisers and outsized exits.

How: Identify 5-10 newsletters in your niche with similar audiences but non-competing content. Pitch cross-promotion deals or run paid sponsorships in their newsletters. Simultaneously, launch targeted ads on LinkedIn or Facebook pointing to a lead magnet that solves a specific pain point.

Why: Organic reach from websites and social media has flatlined. The fastest-growing newsletters in 2025 are using partnership deals and paid ads to reach new audiences where they already consume content.

Expected Result: Inbox Collective reports newsletters using earned partnerships see 15-30% monthly growth, while those combining earned + paid tactics can hit 40%+ growth. Your CAC stays low because you're reaching warm audiences already trained to read newsletters.

Pro Tip: Track which partnerships and ad sources deliver the highest activation rates (subscribers who actually open emails), not just raw signups. Quality trumps quantity.

Spotlight: Growth In Reverse 

What Works:

Creator Quote:
"Treat your onboarding flow as your first impression; it sets the tone for everything subscribers receive next."

Want all the details (and the advanced 5-step sequence)? Watch the full episode on YouTube or check out Growth In Reverse's deep dives.

MailerLite's AI Writing Assistant

Why You'll Love It: MailerLite's AI assistant helps you draft, edit, and optimize email content in seconds. Early testers report cutting email creation time by 40%, with smart suggestions for subject lines, body copy, and CTAs tailored to your audience.

Best For: Newsletter creators who want to maintain quality while scaling up send frequency without burning out. Perfect for those weekly deep dives that used to take hours.

Test: Travel company Going tweaked just three words in their CTA copy.

Result: By cutting one word and adding two new ones to their call-to-action, Going saw a 104% month-over-month increase in their homepage conversion rate.

Takeaway: Small changes to CTA copy can deliver massive results. Test variations that use specific, action-oriented language aligned with what your audience actually wants. Sometimes the difference between "meh" and "hell yes" is just a couple of words.

Kit's Visual Automation Builder

Before: Newsletter creators struggled with complex automation setups requiring technical knowledge, limiting their ability to create personalized subscriber journeys without hiring developers.

After: Kit's improved visual automation builder now features drag-and-drop simplicity with 28+ pre-built templates, conditional logic triggers, and up to 5 entry points per workflow. You can segment by behavior, create IF/THEN rules, and set up RSS-to-email campaigns, all without touching code.

Result: One creator using Kit's new targeted onboarding sequences saw a 30% growth in product sales over three months. The automation handles welcome flows, re-engagement, and nurture campaigns 24/7.

Pro Tip: Start with Kit's pre-built templates for common scenarios (welcome sequence, product launch, re-engagement), then customize with conditional triggers based on subscriber actions like link clicks or email opens.

When you finally get your newsletter automation working perfectly, but then realize you've been sending test emails to your actual list for the past hour.

Thanks for reading,

Eren Daskesen

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