📧 The polite email didn't win

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👋 Hey!

In Minnesota, researchers found 7,872 clinicians who were skipping the state's prescription database and split them into three groups. One group got an email explaining how the database helps them follow clinical guidelines. One got an email saying the state requires it. The third got nothing.

Both emails worked. The one that mentioned the law worked about twice as well, and the lift was still there seven months later.

Nobody enjoys writing the "you have to" email. People click it anyway.

This week: Omeda puts a number on how many newsletter clicks come from bots, Validity starts listing domains that faked their warm-up, and beehiiv will pay you for recommendations you were already making. Plus Goalhanger's way of turning podcast listeners into subscribers, a culture newsletter that shows its receipts, and a free quiz that picks your next email platform.

Let's dive in! 👇

More than four in five newsletter clicks come from bots. Omeda's Q1 data puts newsletters at 82.4% bot clicks, the lowest of any major email category. Most are security scanners checking links.

Over 1 million domains flagged for fake warm-up. An agency or vendor may be warming domains in your name.

beehiiv's Paid Recommendations marketplace now filters offers by category, country and payout. Featured offers pay $1.68 to $2.80 per verified subscriber. beehiiv CEO also announced Agent Memory and Subagents, plus one-click connectors for Claude and ChatGPT.

1440 is stretching its $27M newsletter business beyond the inbox. With over 4.5 million subscribers, 1440 promoted Julie Shain to editor-in-chief of the Daily Digest.

Morning Brew bought Express Checkout, a CPG media brand that started as a weekly newsletter. The all-cash deal brings co-founders Nate Rosen and Jenna Movsowitz in full time.

NewsletterFit: see what each newsletter platform really costs at your numbers

Why You'll Love It: NewsletterFit is a free cost calculator that takes under a minute and needs no signup. Enter your subscribers, paid members, subscription price, expected growth, and it estimates platform fees and payment fees. It also estimates future costs across beehiiv, Substack, Kit, Ghost, MailerLite and GetResponse over one to three years. You get a ranked comparison and an estimate of what switching could save. No platform pays to rank higher.

Best For: Operators about to cross a pricing tier, anyone weighing a platform switch, and creators launching a paid newsletter who want to model the fees before committing.

Publish the deep dive in your newsletter, then talk about it where your audience already is

How: Goalhanger, the company behind The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is History, noticed that Britain's "special relationship" with the US kept coming up on the politics show. Commissioning Editor Isabelle Stanley interviewed political figures and commentators and wrote a magazine-style feature for the newsletter on why Americans think Britain is broken. Then she went on the podcast to talk about it. Listeners who wanted the whole piece had one place to get it.

Why: Editorial director Emily Kent Smith ruled out round-ups from the start: "We're at a point now where there's a lot of saturation of those sorts of newsletters." A recap gives a listener nothing new. A piece that only exists in the inbox gives them a reason to hand over an email address. It also gives Goalhanger something that 1.8 billion views and streams in 2025 never did, which is knowing who its fans are.

Expected Result: Goalhanger says The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is History newsletters have grown 500% and 400% since the editorial versions launched earlier this year, with open rates at double the industry average.

Read the full story.

Spotlight: Culture Decoded by Eren Daskesen

Yes, that Eren (hi). Our co-founder writes this one, so discount our enthusiasm as you see fit and judge the structure for yourself.

What works:

Creator quote: "You photograph your food before you taste it. There's a 3,000-year-old reason why."

Your takeaway: Pick a skeleton and keep it. A fixed structure is what lets an essay about Roman tableware and Home Depot skeletons feel like the same newsletter as one about grocery debt. Then add your own receipts. If an issue makes claims, list where each one came from at the bottom. Almost nobody will click them, and everybody will notice they're there.

Test: Minnesota requires clinicians who prescribe controlled substances to hold an account with the state's prescription monitoring database and to search it. Plenty don't. Researchers Adam Sacarny, Mireille Jacobson and colleagues took 7,872 clinicians who weren't using it and randomly split them into three groups of 2,624. Version A was an email about the state's legal requirements. Version B cited national clinical guidelines and said the database could help clinicians follow them. The third group got no email. In both email groups, anyone who hadn't acted after a month got one follow-up.

Result: Both emails beat silence. From a baseline of 11.8%, the legal email raised engagement by 26.5%, more than tripling it. The benefits email added 14.2 points, more than doubling it. The effects held for at least seven months. One catch: neither email changed how anyone actually prescribed.

Takeaway: When your ask is an obligation, say so. Confirming an address, updating an expiring card, re-consenting before a list cleanup: these do better stated plainly as requirements than dressed up as perks. Don't overread it, though. The benefits email still doubled engagement, and nobody tested "you must" on an optional ask like reading your essay. The catch matters too. An email moved a click-sized action and left the bigger behavior alone, so if you want readers to change what they do, plan on more than one send.

Read the J-PAL summary.

Thanks for reading,

Eren & Cagri