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👋 Hey!
Two emails sitting one line apart in an inbox. One arrives from a software company. The other arrives from Mary at Vantage. You have never met Mary, and you open her email anyway, because ignoring a person costs something that ignoring a logo never does.
This week: Beehiiv can now start an automation the second a reader clicks one link. And a domain breakdown from a real list put 60% of its addresses inside Gmail, which is a useful reminder that "everyone" was never an audience. Plus, the follow-up email that turned leftover clicks into sales, a sports newsletter that found a million readers nobody was writing for, and what 1,500 advertisers said about the ads they rebooked.
Ready to name a reader? Let's dive in! 👇
Meme of the Week
This Week's Hot Takes
Nobody signs the company newsletter, and your readers notice. The missing byline is structural. Every approval pass makes the draft safer and less attributable, until nobody has to mean it.
beehiiv can start an automation the moment someone clicks a link. Click Triggers match an exact URL or a prefix. The same release adds a Send API, custom group deals, and random cohort sends.
Ghost now shows how every welcome email performed. Sends, opens, clicks, and top-clicked links appear on each step inside the automation canvas. Enable Automations under Settings, then Labs.
Gmail holds 60% of one real newsletter list. A domain breakdown from an advocacy sender: Yahoo properties take another 19.9%, Microsoft 4.7%, Apple 2.6%.
Growth Hack of the Week
Email the people who clicked and did not buy
How: Pick the one link in your issue that carries money, a product page, a paid tier, a booking page. Build an automation with a "clicked a link" trigger and point it at that exact URL, or at a prefix if the link carries parameters. Wait 24 hours, check whether the person actually bought, and send the ones who did not a short personal note that reads like a reply rather than a campaign. Everyone else drops out of the sequence. On beehiiv, this is the new Click Trigger, available on Max and Enterprise plans.
Why: beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk ran exactly this on his own list. He built The Newsletter Playbook for Founders, promoted it in one edition, and the link pulled thousands of clicks while only a few hundred people bought. The click trigger let him reach every clicker who had not purchased, and he says the follow-up drove hundreds more sales. The interesting part is that the buying intent was already sitting in his click data, unread.
Expected Result: A second, warmer shot at the highest-intent slice of your list, without touching anyone who already converted or anyone who never cared. Track revenue per clicker instead of open rate here, because that is the number this play moves.
Spotlight: The Gist by Ellen Hyslop, Roslyn McLarty, and Jacie deHoop
What works:
They researched the gap before writing a word. The three founders met studying commerce at Queen's University and were working in insurance, consulting, and accounting when the idea landed in February 2017. They spent most of that year on market research before launching anything.
The numbers told them who was being ignored. Hyslop points to the sports media landscape at the time: roughly 18% of sports journalists were women, under 5% of coverage focused on women, and more than three-quarters of ESPN's viewership was male.
They didn’t narrow to women's sports. The Gist covers men's and women's sports, employs women to make the content, uses a plain and accessible voice, and shows up on the platforms its readers already use. The differentiator is the voice itself.
The newsletter became the foundation for everything else. Today the company runs past 1 million newsletter subscribers and nearly 750,000 social followers, plus a podcast, its own games, a paid community, and brand partnerships. Advertisers get access to fans they had struggled to reach.
Creator quote: Hyslop on the gap they found, "what a great business opportunity, because they're leaving out so many women."
Your takeaway: Write down who your newsletter is not for. If that list is empty, you have a distribution problem. The Gist didn’t out-report anyone. It spoke to people the incumbents had already decided were not the audience, and that decision is still sitting there in most categories, waiting.
Tool of the Week
Interactive Offers: programmatic email ads for money-minded audiences
Why You'll Love It: Interactive Offers is a programmatic ad platform built around financial advertising, connecting publishers with investor-facing brands and filling placements automatically instead of one hand-sold slot at a time. Ads are formatted to sit natively in your content rather than land as an obvious external banner.
Best For: Newsletters with finance, investing, business, or personal-money readers who want a monetization layer running in the background while they chase the direct sponsorships that pay best.
A/B Test of the Week
Test: Your next sponsor placement, written two ways across a split. Version A is the narrative ad read your advertiser sent you, three paragraphs building to the point. Version B is the same offer cut to the benefit in line one, then bullets, bold, and a link, laid out to match the rest of your issue.
Result: Paved pulled every sponsorship delivered through its marketplace in 2025 and surveyed more than 1,500 advertisers on how each placement performed. The ads that earned four and five stars kept repeating the same three traits: short skimmable copy, the benefit stated in the first line, and a layout that reads native rather than bolted on. Rebooking intent across the marketplace grew 53% year over year.
Takeaway: Your click rate decides this month's invoice; the rebook decides the quarter. Judge each placement on whether the advertiser came back, keep the winning ad structure as a house template, and hand it to every sponsor instead of running whatever copy lands in your inbox. You can always try AdApt to get more clicks from your ad placements.
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Thanks for reading,
Eren & Cagri