Newsletter Ad Observations

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Yesterday we wrote about placing ads in a newsletter. After sending the email and looking at how many subscribers received the email, we were confused.

Using Boosts to promote this newsletter, we thought we could send to both pending and active subscribers, however it only sent to active subscribers.

Apparently only active subscribers receive emails and no matter your opt in settings in your newsletter (single opt in or double opt in), all subscribers we received through Boosts have to click confirm to an email confirming they want to receive emails from Best Ad Strategy Inc (double opt in).

Not realizing that Boost subscribers are double opt in, we didn’t have double opt in turned on on the newsletter. Double opt in needs to be turned on for the newsletter to turn on “Smart Nudge”, where BeeHiiv sends new subscribers a reminder email 48 hours after they opt in if they haven’t confirmed their subscription yet.

Before running Boost promotions, in your publication settings make sure to enable and edit the Welcome Email. Also, view and update the Confirmation Email. We’re now testing double opt in and smart nudge and will update based on how it goes.

Not seeing any way to manually resend a confirmation email to subscribers who are pending (even those from a week or more ago) is frustrating. It might be possible, we’re still looking into it and will update this post if it’s possible to show how.

If these pending subscribers are just sitting there unable to be contacted, there are two strategies we will be using

Strategy 1: Collaboration
We plan to collaborate with the newsletters sending us subscribers to hopefully get them to promote posts of ours in their newsletter that encourage opt in or require opt in before receiving a template, a resource, something of value so if these subscribers they are getting paid to refer to us have to opt in again/log in, they should receive another confirmation email or be confirmed.

These other newsletters don’t get paid unless the subscribers they send are confirmed and we think and will see and will update this post accordingly that within 21 days of a subscriber being stuck as “Pending” the funds held to pay for that subscriber are released and available again to pay for more subscribers and that old pending subscriber is not able to be emailed through BeeHiiv unless they confirm their email subscription or opt in again at some time in the future.

Strategy 2: Remarketing/Retargeting Ads
We use and recommend Plai for online advertising because their AI helps easily and quickly create ads for and manage budgets for multiple ad platforms automatically (starts at $97/mo - use coupon code BESTADSTRATEGY10 to save 10% off your Plai subscription). Plai offers really good support and lets you schedule Calendly calls at no additional cost with ads specialists to help you with the set up and strategy of your advertising campaigns using Plai.

You can easily link various ad platforms and use their AI to create ad text/images/variations and publish ads to these platforms. Plai’s AI will optimize the ad targeting and variations of ads and can even dynamically allocate your total daily budget across ads and ad platforms to get you the most results for your budget.

Plai supports uploading custom audiences so these pending subscribers can be uploaded into Plai:

Then the pending subscribers that match to users of that platform can be advertised to using Plai.

If resources are advertised that require email opt in, more confirmation emails can be generated, and more of these Pending subscribers can become active subscribers.

With all of this in mind, no other platform we are aware of allows for so many growth and monetization opportunities this is why we use and recommend BeeHiiv for email newsletters.