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👋 Hey!
beehiiv launched MCP integration, which means you can now manage your newsletter from inside Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity using plain English. Kit keeps enhancing the app store and Buttondown makes a genuinely good case for why AI email agents won't actually kill email.
Ready to level up? Let's dive in! 👇
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😂 Meme of the Week
🔥 This Week's Hot Takes
beehiiv launches MCP: run your newsletter from Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. V1 is read-only: ask your AI to audit your SEO, identify high-intent free subscribers, or spot churn spikes. Paid plans only; request early access now.
beehiiv dropped multi-step Signup Flows. Build different onboarding experiences for different acquisition sources, lead magnet subscribers can get a different intro than organic ones. First impression, optimized per channel.
Kit adds Pexels and Beamly to its App Store. Search and insert royalty-free photos directly from your media gallery with Pexels. Beamly users can now auto-sync new members straight into Kit, no manual imports.
Kit consolidates its Recommendations dashboard into one page. Incoming and outgoing matches now live together, so you can see exactly where your list growth is coming from and act on it faster. Recommendations help creators grow 2× faster.
Email has always had "agents" and that's why AI won't break it. Buttondown traces how Message Submission, Transfer, and Delivery Agents have run email for 20+ years. AI inboxes are just the newest layer, not a replacement.
Writing your own sponsor ad copy costs more than you think. Generic copy hurts CTR, which kills CPM, which trains sponsors to pay you less. The hidden cost compounds every send.
💡 Growth Hack of the Week
Match your onboarding to how subscribers found you
Most newsletters send every new subscriber the same welcome sequence. That's a problem when your referral subscribers (low intent, often signed up for a reward) and your organic subscribers (high intent, found you by choice) are fundamentally different people walking in the same door.
beehiiv's new Signup Flows builder lets you fix this directly:
Go to Website Builder > Settings > Signup Flows in your beehiiv dashboard.
Create a referral/Boosts flow: add a longer intro step explaining what you cover, an onboarding survey (so you can segment by interest), and a recommendation modal.
Create an organic flow: shorter, straight to value. Skip the explainer; these people already know why they subscribed.
Assign each flow to the relevant acquisition source in your Flow settings.
Track 30-day open rates by cohort after two weeks. The gap between your referral and organic cohorts will tell you exactly how much the longer onboarding is helping (or not).
Why it works: Referral subscribers churn faster because they didn't seek you out. A more context-rich first experience gives them a reason to stay before they forget why they subscribed. A/B test from Tyler Denk's own newsletter, Big Desk Energy, runs three distinct flows per subscriber type and it's the same infrastructure you now have access to.
Expected result: 10–20% better 30-day retention for low-intent referral cohorts, based on results from creators already using segmented welcome flows on beehiiv.
Spotlight: MarketBeat
Matt Paulson shared his full monetization playbook at the New Media Summit earlier this month, and one number stopped everyone: his thank-you page generates $3 per subscriber. That's 20 times more revenue per page view than any other page in his funnel.
What works:
The thank-you page is a 5-step funnel, not a confirmation screen. New subscribers land on a co-registration path with advertiser offers. They enter once and the monetization starts immediately. Most newsletter operators waste this moment with "check your inbox."
SMS is treated as a second list, not an add-on. Paulson sends the same ad packages to his SMS list as his email list. Click-through on SMS today is roughly where email was a decade ago, the inventory is cheap and the intent is high.
They run $1.4M/month in paid acquisition across six platforms and stay profitable on all of them. That math only works because their funnel monetizes so efficiently. Low CAC isn't the strategy; high monetization per subscriber is.
Your takeaway: The moment right after signup is the highest-attention moment you'll get. Most newsletter operators spend zero effort on it. Paulson built a $41M business off it. You don't need his scale to start. Even a single affiliate offer or co-registration step on your thank-you page is worth testing this week.
🛠️ Tool of the Week
Why You'll Love It: GlueLetter plugs into your existing ESP (beehiiv, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and a dozen more) and surfaces the metrics that actually matter for publishers: which content topics drive conversions, how each newsletter section performs, ad click and impression tracking, list growth by source, and benchmarks against other publishers in their network. Reports push automatically to Slack or email so your team gets the data without logging in anywhere.
Best For: Growing newsletter operators and news publishers who are running multiple issues per week, selling sponsorships, or trying to convert readers into paid subscribers and whose ESP's native analytics dashboard just isn't telling them enough.
🧪 A/B Test of the Week
Test: Your publication name vs. a personal "from" name in your sender field
What it is: Version A sends with the "From" name set to your newsletter name (e.g., HeyNews). Version B sends with a personal name + publication (e.g., Eren from HeyNews). Split your list 50/50 on your next send and track opens, replies, and unsubscribes separately.
Why it works: Creator newsletters run on personal trust. A name in the from field signals a person, not a broadcast. Inbox providers also weigh messages that get replied to, and a personal name makes a reply feel more natural, which feeds your sender reputation over time.
Expected result: 3–8% open rate lift on the personal-name version, with the biggest gains in creator and B2B niches, where the relationship with the author is the main reason people stay subscribed. Test for at least three sends before drawing conclusions; one send is noise.
Takeaway: If you've never tested your from-name, this is one of the fastest wins you can run. Set it up in your ESP settings, schedule the split, and let it run. You'll have data within a week.
Don't keep us a secret: Share HeyNews with a fellow newsletter nerd.
🔗 Quick Links
Questions? Just write a comment below. I read all the comments and respond to them.
Thanks for reading,
Eren Daskesen