📧 The inbox thinks you're a coupon

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👋 Hey!

A jewelry designer with 6,200 subscribers and a steady 31% open rate hired a designer to make her newsletter look more professional. Full-width header photo, three buttons, a discount badge in the corner. Her next send opened at 12%.

Gmail didn't see a nicer newsletter. It saw a coupon, and it filed her with the coupons. Nothing about her list had changed. The format had, and the classifier reads the format.

This week: the plain-text rebuild that took her past where she started, a one-man college football newsletter that told its readers paywalls don't really work and then asked them to pay anyway, and a signup checkbox hiding inside forms you already run. Plus Puck's $250M price tag, X bringing back the ad format it killed in 2016, and Postmaster Tools finally explaining itself.

Let's dive in! 👇

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Puck is about to be worth $250M, and ads still out-earn its subscribers. RedBird's deal triples the 2023 valuation. Jacob Cohen Donnelly's math: roughly 50,000 paid subscribers at $120 to $250 a year, plus an ad business that grew over 35% last year.

X brought back the lead gen ad it killed in 2016, and email lists are a named use case. A colored CTA bar sits under the promoted post, one tap opens a native form and forms pre-fill after the first submission. Email lists and waitlists are on X's own list of uses.

Ghost gift subscriptions now arrive with a note and a delivery date. Buyers pick the day, Ghost emails the gift, and the term only starts at redemption.

Postmaster Tools V2 now tells you why Gmail filters you, in plain English. Al Iverson walks through every Deliverability Analysis verdict, what each one means, and what to do when yours turns negative.

Put a newsletter checkbox on every form where readers hand you content

How: Audit your site for forms that collect user-generated content: news tips, letters to the editor, reader questions, photo contests, essay submissions, award nominations, feedback on an article. Each one already asks for an email address. Add one line at the bottom offering the newsletter that matches the form, with a sentence on why they'd want it. Google Forms plus Zapier is enough; no new stack required.

Why: Dan Oshinsky's latest Inbox Collective piece walks through WHYY, WBUR, Fort Worth Report, and the Salt Lake Tribune all doing this. The reader has already typed their email and is mid-task, so the ask costs them nothing. WBUR's version is the one to copy: their New Year's resolutions form pitched a feel-good pop-up newsletter instead of the flagship daily, so the offer matched the mood the reader arrived in. In the US, the box can be pre-checked; elsewhere, readers need to tick it themselves.

Expected Result: Oshinsky doesn't put a conversion number on this one. What you get is a signup surface on pages you already run, when a reader is most invested, with a second shot when the best submissions become an article carrying its own CTA. Hearken pioneered the tactic for newsrooms; it works just as well for a solo operator with a tips form.

See the examples.

Tilda: no-code websites and landing pages built from 550+ ready-made blocks

Why You'll Love It: Tilda assembles pages from 550+ pre-designed blocks, including covers, galleries, forms, and pricing tables. Every page is adaptive out of the box. Zero Block gives you a freeform editor when a template won't do; the AI builder drafts a page from a prompt, and lead-capture forms connect to your email service. CMS Feeds handles multi-page setups like a newsletter archive or a blog without a developer.

Best For: Operators who need a signup page, a sponsor page, or a proper archive that doesn't look like every other platform default and don't want to learn Webflow to get it.

Test: Lilach Bullock's client, a jewelry designer selling through her own site and Etsy, switched email providers in early 2023 with 6,200 subscribers and a steady 31% open rate. Version A was the new template her designer built to look more professional: a full-width header photo, three call-to-action buttons, and a discount badge in the corner. Version B, a few sends later, stripped it back to a single column, one button, no sale language, written like a personal note.

Result: Version A opened at 12% on its first send. Bullock pulled the source: roughly 80% image by weight, four tracking links, the word sale six times in about 400 words. Nothing was flagged as spam. Gmail simply filed it where it files retail marketing. Version B climbed to 27% within three sends and settled at 33% by the sixth, above where she started.

Takeaway: The Promotions tab is a classifier trained on structure and behavior, not a keyword list. Image-to-text ratio, button count, and whether anyone has ever replied to you weigh more than your subject line. Bullock's order of operations: send from a person, aim for 20% images to 80% text, one CTA, and ask new subscribers in the welcome email to drag you into Primary. One check before you rebuild anything: if your readers open Promotions on purpose to shop, leave it alone and look at clicks and sales instead.

Read the full breakdown.

Thanks for reading,

Eren & Cagri