📧 Tell them the surprising part

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👋 Hey!

This month in Miami, at a closed-door session of the Digiday Publishing Summit, a publishing exec admitted something awkward. After the person who curated one of their newsletters left, they handed the job to an algorithm. Opens didn't move. Clicks didn't move. Referral traffic held. The newsletter lost its human and the numbers didn't notice, which is... only natural now.

This week: Facebook starts charging more Pages to post links and cloudonaut swaps Kit for a homemade AWS setup that costs under $1 a month. Plus Meta ad formats buying subscribers for under $2, a test where the chatty intro costs clicks and a Mac app that makes your issue look the part.

Let's dive in! 👇

Two full days of email marketing tips and trends, powered by Constant Contact. Famous keynotes (Molly Ringwald, Dan Levy, Amy Porterfield!), DJs, world-record breaking, rom-com fun, and networking.

Save your spot!

Facebook is charging more Pages to post links. Since Meta One for Business launched, some non-paying Pages are capped at two link posts a month. Publisher Pages are exempt, and 98.7% of US post views in Q1 carried no outside link.

Creating a homemade AWS setup to cut bills from $590 a year to under $1 a month. Andreas Wittig built it in 40 hours with Claude Code. His sharpest complaint: security scanners clicked Kit's confirmation links, confirming people who never signed up.

Most newsletter checkouts still assume everyone pays by card. Stripe found that showing one relevant payment method beside cards lifted conversion 7.4% and revenue 12%. Most major newsletter platforms still don't offer Brazil's Pix.

Snail mail newsletters are having a moment, and the smart ones cap subscribers before launch. Past 1,000 subscribers, Martina Calvi had to outsource fulfillment, which tripled her costs, and she eventually closed her club. Buttondown's advice: set a ceiling and pilot with an inner circle.

Mail Designer 365: newsletter content sorted, what next?

Why You'll Love It: Once you've got great content, it's time to make it look the part. Mail Designer 365 makes it easy for anyone to create professional, on-brand newsletters, no design or coding experience required. Use the drag-and-drop editor to bring your ideas to life, then send your finished newsletter directly from Mail Designer 365 or export it to your preferred email marketing platform.

Best For: Newsletter creators on a Mac who want their issues to look as good as they read, without hiring a designer or touching code.

Try Mail Designer 365 for Mac free.

Build your Meta ads from seven proven formats instead of one-off ideas

How: Matt McGarry treats Meta creative as templates rather than individual ads. His seven: motion graphics with big on-screen copy and no voiceover; B-roll with an AI voiceover and captions; fake UI screenshots styled as a tweet, an iPhone note, or a Gmail inbox; authentic photos with text that looks written into the scene, like a whiteboard or sticky note; plain, ugly text blocks; filmed IRL text, such as a highlighted book or a printed page, read aloud in a voiceover; and 30 to 60 second direct-to-camera UGC with a strong hook.

Why: McGarry says these formats have brought in B2B subscribers at $1.39 each and B2C subscribers at $0.43, and not on toy budgets. He's talking about accounts spending $50k, $100k, and $300k+ a month on Meta while still paying under $1 to $2 per subscriber. His main example is 1440 Media, because it runs nearly all seven.

Expected Result: Treat these as agency numbers from big accounts, not a promise for your first $500. The case studies he cites land a little higher: a B2B healthcare brand added 106,943 subscribers at $2.26 each, and a prosumer brand for software engineers added 609,329 at $2.31. The practical win is speed. Instead of guessing ad by ad, you find the one or two formats your niche responds to and make more of those.

Read the full breakdown.

Spotlight: The Tooltester Newsletter by Josep Garcia

What works:

Creator quote: From the landing page, on what makes the cut: "If it saves time, money or makes life easier, it's in."

Your takeaway: Give every recurring item a fixed footer, and give every recommendation one honest complaint. The structure makes you skimmable. The complaint makes you believable, because readers can't tell your real picks from your paid ones unless you show them where you'd push back.

Test: At a closed-door town hall during the Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami, publishing execs compared notes on newsletter personalization, speaking anonymously. One team is about to roll out fully automated, individually personalized local briefings to 20% of registered users, with stories picked from reading behavior and no editorial curation. They had tested personalized against editorially curated sends and looked at how chatty the top of the email should be. Another exec automated a hand-curated newsletter after the staffer running it left.

Result: Early tests showed a 20% lift in click-through with the plain, non-voicey top, and personalization beat editorial curation on engagement. The automated newsletter didn't budge at all: same opens, same clicks, same referral traffic and nobody touching it. That exec called it a win, then worried out loud that the newsletter no longer felt distinct. A third publisher said its professional readers pushed back on heavy personalization because they want to read exactly what their peers read.

Takeaway: In a digest of links, a chatty warm-up can be a speed bump between the reader and the click. But if an algorithm can replace your curation and nobody notices, readers weren't subscribing for your judgment. Put your voice where it changes a decision, like the verdict on a tool or the reason a story matters, and cut it from the paragraph people scroll past.

Read the Digiday briefing.

Thanks for reading,

Eren & Cagri