Tyler Denk of beehiiv on audience engagement and scaling newsletter readership

Newsletters have always been a big deal for the Splice community.

As the community manager for Planet Splice, the hopping global media community on Slack, I’m always looking for engaging topics and experts.

So when Ankhbayar Tserenvandan from Inside Mongolia mentioned beehiiv as an emerging newsletter platform to enable creators to create, monetise, and grow their audience, I asked their founder Tyler Denk if he would agree to do the first-ever Planet Splice AMA.

Ask and you shall receive, they say. They were right: two simple asks got us this wealth of newsletter wisdom.

Enjoy!

Before beehiiv, Tyler was at “previously the 2nd employee at Morning Brew and built the infrastructure to grow and scale that into millions of subscribers and revenue (website, email template, CMS, referral program, ad platform, etc.)” He is also a self-taught developer and worked at YouTube Music in a product role. Photo supplied by Tyler Denk

Questions asked by different people have been aggregated. Everything is lightly edited for spelling and grammar, but this is pretty much how it all happened.

---

For someone starting a newsletter today, what are 2-3 things they should look for in a newsletter platform?

1. Scalability — will the platform grow with you (in costs, incentives, flexibility, data, etc.) ?

2. Complexity — Milk Road started on beehiiv with 0 subs 4 months ago. They're over 130k now. They didn't need to build a world class website with video embeds, or overcomplicate things with tons of integrations and bells and whistles. Instead they plugged into our tech and let us handle web hosting, emails, data, deliverability, styling, referrals, etc. Their time is better spent writing good content.

   
   I think far too many people waste time spinning their wheels on things that don't matter. I'd say, understand your competencies and maximise those, and find a platform that abstracts the rest.

What can newsletter platforms to do help distribute and market newsletters to other readers on the same platform? Is there a way to improve organic discovery?

So where beehiiv sits on this spectrum is purely on the Shopify / infrastructure side of things, not on the aggregator side. For example, when you shop at a shoe store hosted on Shopify they don't tell you "you can also check out these 10 other shoe sites on Shopify" or "maybe you'll like these shoes too!"

beehiiv is similar in that we provide the infrastructure and tools for you to spin up a top-of-the-line newsletter. Best-in-class deliverability, data analytics, subscriber attribution, etc. We also have a fully-integrated referral program to help you scale and incentivise readers to share and help you grow.

That being said, we're not an aggregator. We're not a destination for casual readers to find 15 different crypto newsletters. I actually think that part is solely on the creator/newsletter. I think you get in trouble as an aggregator suggesting certain types of content over others.we're building tools for newsletters to connect with other newsletters and cross promote each other in some capacity, but that'll come from the newsletters themselves, not beehiiv as a platform.

What advice do you have around pricing a newsletter subscription?

1. What's a standard subscription cost for media / information / entertainment going for? In the US most subscriptions from music streaming to video range in the $8 - $15 range, so as a comp, that's a decent place to start

2. How competitive is the space? For example, are you providing political insight that literally no one else is covering? If so, you could probably warrant a much higher price for that information because you're a 1/1 (or at least 1/few). Alternatively if you're just providing tech analysis, there's a dime a dozen. Ben Thompson does a tremendous job, sending 3-4x a week, and charges $11 /mo, I believe. What's the value and insight you're providing relative to that?

3. Who's paying for it? Is it consumer facing where individuals are pulling out their cards to pay, or is it b2b and for work? If the latter, if your newsletter provides value in a work function, it's possible the employer will pay for it, so you can charge a lot more.

4. What's the end game? Is subscription revenue your only revenue, or are you also selling ads? Are you selling courses? Are you cross promoting into different products? If you still want scale, but think you can warrant subscription revenue, maybe you intentionally price lower because you want to cross-sell other things.

How reliable are open rates given Apple's privacy restrictions?

The short and easy answer is less reliable, but still mostly directionally correct and I wouldn't over-index on stressing on it. The industry will adapt, and everyone's playing on the same playing field really.

What should be the key metrics to track the success of a newsletter? Is it just open rates?

Depends on the type of newsletter. If you're selling premium subscriptions, it might be the number of people who upgrade from free to paid, and the churn rate of your paid (you want to obviously minimise churn).

If it's a free newsletter, then unique opens is probably important for you to monitor. Factor in unsubscribe rate, and lifetime value of the reader as well.

Also, if you're selling ads, you'd probably prefer people who click and engage on ads more, because it makes your newsletter more attractive to advertisers (because they're seeing success).

That's a whole jumble of answers but truth is there aren't a ton of metrics in email to start with, so know what moves the needle for you and optimise for that.

Have you seen any recent examples of unique/creative rewards for referrals beside the usual branded merchandise? Who does this well?

Going back to Milk Road as an example: they only have a single reward at 1 referral (an ebook) and they have over 10k referrals. They made it super simple, attainable, and it's a slam dunk. Matthew Berry Fantasy Life is another fantasy football newsletter in the early stages of spinning up a referral program. They are offering unique fantasy insights and tips, and opportunity to speak with Matthew Berry.

What's important is understanding your audience and aligning with what they want. It's probably not another t-shirt or mug.

I run a local newsletter (on Substack, so no referral program) and think about some form of physical branded merch like coasters with QR codes to get subscribers. Any thoughts or successful examples of such campaigns? We're short on resources and not sure the ROI is worth it.

I think most gimmicky things often don't work. I'd do a few things:

1. Survey your audience: just ask them straight up what they want and give a bunch of options

2. Think about what your content delivers and why they signed up in the first place, and work backwards from there

3. Try digital goods first because you can fail and it won’t cost much (or anything)

How would you go about growing a local newsletter email list on a tight budget?

• Great sharable content

• Cross-promote with other newsletters

• Experiment with incentives and rewards

• SEO

• Any sort of collabs in the community

• Partner with local businesses, if possible

How does beehiiv work in segregating and teasing content for paid and non-paid subscribers?

Similarly to Substack, you can have a premium-only post. Alternatively, you can send a newsletter to both free AND premium, but drop a teaser line in the content so anything below the line is only accessible to paying readers, otherwise free readers are hit with an upgrade nudge.

How does it or work with payment modules to allow readers to pick and choose or customise between multiple products under one brand, I.e various newsletters?

Great question—right now each publication lives independently and you can pay either monthly or annually for the publication's premium subscription.

We plan to introduce additional tiers that publications can offer sometime in the next couple of months. As for organisations with multiple publications, giving access to a single plan across publications isn't currently possible but something on our roadmap (truthfully, just less frequent of a use case so haven't prioritised yet).

In terms of engaging an audience, what are the challenges when the scale is so big? How do you keep the intimate flow of the conversation that characterises a newsletter when the audience is so massive? Is that even possible?

One of hardest problems for a ton of businesses is scaling "exclusivity" or "intimacy". I’m not trying to intentionally tie everything back to beehiiv, but this is something we've thought a lot about.

It's not a perfect solution but it's something: we're looking to launch 1-click polls in the coming weeks, essentially making it super easy to collect info and data on your readers.

It could be something as silly as "chicken sandwich vs burger?", but being able to then take the results and share them in the next newsletter is, I think, a cool mechanism for that independent reader reading in a silo to feel somewhat connected with other strangers reading the same thing.

The comment section is another, although I have mixed feelings about it. I think most online comment sections are mostly spam and not productive, but there are instances of great comment sections that I do think drive engagement.

Q: How is the transition for paid newsletters from Substack to beehiiv (I'm considering it)? Do you have any mechanisms for potential subscribers to discover newsletters?

Something we prioritised early on was that you can migrate over from Substack in just 3 steps (~5 minutes)

1. import CSV of subscribers (exportable from Substack)

2. drop URL of Substack and we'll pull over all your content

   • alternatively, if some of your content lives behind a paywall, you can import a zip file of your content (exportable from Substack)

3. migrate premium subs (we have a mechanism to do this and our CTO will even white-glove and do it with you)

• readers don't get notified of any change

• their billing cycle and payment method remains the same

• no disruption to existing subs

Some of the smartest people in global media subscribe to the Splice newsletters. Sign up here.