I tried beehiiv boosts to grow my newsletter. Here's how it went.

I’ve never been a viral sensation.

I’ve tried the full gamut of ways to grow a newsletter list for free. This list grows by 200-300 new readers every month thanks to channels like writer recommendations, LinkedIn and Google.

But, what if I want to move faster?

Then, it’s time to crank up the speed with a little paid subscriber acquisition!

Right now, I’m testing three kinds of paid ads: Facebook ads, newsletter sponsorships and beehiiv boosts. And I’m sharing it all with you.

First up: beehiiv boosts. Boosts is a built-in ads network for writers using beehiiv. It’s like training wheels for ads and it’s by far the easiest way to get started.

In today’s issue, you’ll get a look inside my beehiiv boost experiment so you can decide if it’s worth your time and money too 🧪 

P.S. Coming up on February 27, I’m hosting a live training on Getting Started with Outpost. If you’re using Ghost or thinking about switching to Ghost, you’ll learn three ways Outpost can boost your revenue. See you there! It’s free!

How beehiiv boosts work

Boosts are sponsored recommendations that appear either after someone subscribes or inside their newsletter as an ad.

The most annoying part of ads is having to manage all the moving parts: the spend, the audience target, the creative, the tracking, the return. You can be wrong about so many things and pulling that apart is tough. Boosts cuts a bunch of that hassle out.

You just have to choose the right partners.

beehiiv also has a free option of this feature which is just called Recommendations. Boosts and recommendations sit together post-subscribe like this 👇️ 

My boost experiment

🎯 Goal: Acquire new subscribers for less than $3 and keep paid acquisition at less than 30% of my overall list growth.

🤔 Prediction: I’ll acquire 35 new subscribers per month from boosts based on a monthly budget of $100.

🧪 Methods: Set offer price at $2.75. Approve as many publishers as possible with journalists/writer target audience in the United States and Canada who have high quality ratings in beehiiv’s system. Use beehiiv Slack and Bluesky to find relevant publishers.

📊 Metrics:

• Return on ad spend

• Number of new subscribers per boost partner

• Number of relevant partners that I can find/approve

• Open rate for new subscribers from each boost partner

• Unsubscribe rate for new subscribers from each boost partner

My boost results

Overall results: ✅ Winner

My beehiiv boosts worked as expected. I’ve spent about $100 a month to get 190 new subscribers since September and most of those subscribers have stuck around.

✅ That’s 38 new subscribers per month from boosts, close to my prediction.

But it’s not just about new subscribers. It’s about how much revenue each new subscriber will yield me.

Did beehiiv boosts pay me back?

Yes, and here’s the math.

With paid ad channels, you want to know if you’re making money from the new people you brought in.

Two common ways to slice that:

• Cost per acquisition (CPA) = cost to get a new subscriber

• Return on ad spend (ROAS) = cost to get a new subscriber factoring in how much money you make from new subscribers (through any revenue stream)

But in beehiiv’s case, I set the price so CPA is what I chose to pay:

• Cost per acquisition (CPA) = $2.75 (my boost price)

• Return on ad spend is harder to calculate since I’ve only added revenue streams here in the last 3 months, but some rough math…

  • I make about $1.50 per subscriber from paid partnerships.

  • 1 in 20 new readers becomes a paying subscriber at $9/mo.

  • If a subscriber stays 1 year, that’s $5.20 (dividing that one subscription by 20 to get average revenue and subtracting Stripe’s fee).

  • Total approx revenue per new free reader = $6.70

$6.70 is more than $2.75, and by that math, I’m getting a 250% return on boosts.

There’s more to the ads story too. I get opportunities like paid speaking gigs, higher sponsorship rates and more free word of mouth from having a bigger newsletter that reaches more journalists.

Marketers tend to over measure some stuff that can’t be measured, and especially at this ad spend, I’m not mad about a 250% return but I will keep testing ads to see if I can lower the cost of acquisition.

What’s next for my beehiiv boosts experiment?

I’m going to keep boosts running.

I’ll keep adding $100 to the funds each month and I’ll add more great partners into the mix as I find them.

With boosts, you also want to look at each partner to see if those new subscribers are sticking around, opening, and clicking.

To put that into numbers:

• Open rate should be same or higher.

• Click rate should be same or higher.

• Unsubscribe rate should be same or lower.

In the boosts dashboard, you can see these metrics by partner. How handy!

A quick glance at the open rates looks good.

You can also go to Analyze → Subscriber Report to see way more detail on this and to compare it to your other sources.

It’s kind of hard to see organic sources altogether so I’m just quick referencing my own website here. Subscribers who come from my site have open rates between 53-66% (good enough) and unsubscribe rates of 12-19% (super high!)

My boost partners are mostly beating that!

There’s a couple that have slightly lower open rates which maybe I should pause. Nothing against those partners—sometimes it’s just not as close an audience match as we thought.

How to try boosts for yourself

You’ve got to have a beehiiv newsletter to use Boosts. If you do, open up your beehiiv dashboard:

1) Go to Grow → Boosts in the left navigation
2) Follow the prompts to create your offer
3) Set your cost per subscriber (if you’re not sure what to choose, check out the other offers in the Boosts marketplace and look at newsletters with similar audiences)
4) Load in some funds (I recommend $50 to start)
5) Send the link to a couple potential partners and ask them to apply

When you’re pricing your boost, remember that beehiiv takes a little cut. I pay $2.75, beehiiv takes $0.55 and the writer boosting me gets $2.20 per subscriber.

Tips for running boosts

• Find your own partners, don’t wait for people to apply. I made a list of journalists using beehiiv to give you a head start.

• You can also apply to boosts and get paid to boost others under the Monetize tab. Reach out to those writers to make sure they see your application.

• Use beehiiv’s Slack as a place to find partners. They have a whole channel for it called #cross-promo.

Want to know how to calculate your return on ads? I’m coming out with a simple spreadsheet. Look out for it as part of the Paid Sub Playbook this month.

👀 Coming next week in our ad-ventures: sponsoring other newsletter creators…

Get The Paid Sub Playbook