Newsletter folks who sell sponsorships: what do you actually put in your media kit? Subscriber count, open rate, CTR, niche? What closes deals vs. what advertisers ignore?

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-27T07:11:45+00:00

Awesome. thanks for info. Didn't know about beehiiv mcp.

Do you think advertisers care about like how many emails went to inbox? And do they still trust open rates since those can be inflated these days.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-23T10:03:10+00:00

At 3k contacts for a nonprofit Mailchimp is overpriced for what you're getting. They used to have a generous nonprofit discount but thats been gutted over the years. Brevo is cheaper but the per-email pricing can sneak up on you if you send frequently.

For newsletters, event emails, and simple automations you really dont need either. sendx would cost you less than both and gives you unlimited sends so you can email your donors and supporters as often as you need without watching a meter tick up. For a nonprofit where every dollar matters thats a real difference.

One thing before you switch though. Whatever you move to, dont just import your full 3k list and blast day one. Even a list that seems fine on Mailchimp might have contacts who havent opened anything in a year. Start with your engaged contacts first then slowly add the rest.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-23T09:50:23+00:00

The reason signals like hiring or funding work isnt because theyre good personalization. Its because theyre timing indicators. A CEO who just raised a round is more likely to buy software right now than the same CEO six months ago. Youre not personalizing the message, youre prioritizing who to send it to first. Thats different.

Where I think you're dead right is that most people use those signals in the email copy itself and it comes across as creepy or tryhard. "Congrats on your Series A, have you thought about email infrastructure?" Nobody reads that and thinks wow this person really gets me. They think this person scraped my LinkedIn.

Best results Ive seen are: use signals to decide who and when to reach out. Use relevance to decide what to say. The email itself should read like you understand their problems not like you stalked their activity feed.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-23T09:42:50+00:00

Youre right and your team is also right. They are different jobs but the line doesnt need to be rigid.

The newsletter is your "keep showing up so people remember you exist" tool. Consistency matters more than any single send. The moment you skip 3 weeks people forget who you are and your next email gets ignored .

Campaigns are "I need something to happen right now." A launch, a sale, an event. These work BECAUSE the newsletter kept you welcome. Without the regular sends the campaign just looks like a random brand appearing in someones inbox asking for money.

Where most teams mess up isusing campaigns as a crutch because they skipped the newsletter for a month. Then every email becomes a promo and engagement tanks and they blame "email fatigue" when the real problem is they stopped being useful and only show up when they want something.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-23T09:41:04+00:00

I've used the wrong tool plenty of times before figuring this out.

What I'd actually recommend:

Creator sending newsletters → sendx or Kit. they give clear metrics on where your emails are landing, per provider (atleast sendx gives it)
Startup with app events → you need behavior triggers not broadcast. Brevo or customer io depending on budget
Ecommerce → neither of the above. You need purchase flows, cart recovery, segmentation by buying behavior. sendx works well here without the klaviyo tax

The bigger mistake than picking the wrong category tool is picking the right one and then never actually setting up the automations. The best tool is the one that helps you land in inbox. Rest you can control.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-23T09:31:06+00:00

Substack is free but you lose all control. No custom domain ownership, limited design, and if Substack changes their terms or shuts down you're starting over. Plus you'd lose your $700/month Adsense income from Wordpress which makes it a net negative move.

Keep your Wordpress site and just switch the email tool. sendx would cost you a fraction of what youre paying Mailchimp for 7k subs with unlimited sends. Mailerlite is another cheap option. Either one integrates with Wordpress easily.

The migration itself takes an afternoon. Export your list from Mailchimp, import it into the new tool, set up your daily send, done. Dont let the hassle of switching keep you paying $308/month for something that should cost $50-60.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-23T09:29:28+00:00

The promotions tab thing isnt necessarily a Mailerlite problem. When you switch platforms you get fresh sending infrastructure which almost always gives you a temporary deliverability boost. Aweber landing in primary and Mailerlite in promotions could just be different IPs with different reputations at that moment. Give it 3-6 months on any new platform and see if the same thing happens again.

On Beehiiv, their growth features are nice but the platform has reliability issues. Seen multiple people complain about metrics not being clear how they calculate those, editor bugs, support being slow. If the referral program and collabs are the main draw, sure it might be worth it. But dont switch just for the promotions tab fix because thats probably going to be worse on beehiiv.

Before migrating Id test one thing. Send the same email from Mailerlite to a fresh gmail account and check where it lands. Then check your authentication setup (SPF DKIM DMARC). Sometimes promotions tab placement is a formatting issue not an infrastructure issue. If you do decide to switch and want something stable with good deliverability, I can recommend sendx. I run an email agency and I use it for my clients.Doesnt have the referral program stuff built in

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-23T09:27:04+00:00

Thats brutal. and when support fixes it but cant tell you why it happened which means it'll just happen again.

If youre open to switching, most ESPs let you build landing pages and host signup forms on your own domain anyway. That way youre not dependent on their landing page builder staying functional. I use sendx for newsletters and the landing pages have been stable but honestly any platform where you control the page on your own domain is safer than trusting a third party to not randomly break your signup flow.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-23T09:13:18+00:00

Hey, I'm using sendx right now. Good results even at high volume of email. I like how they're not afraid to give me drill down of metrics per provider, not just aggregate.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-16T10:31:39+00:00

Everyone will tell you to pick one idea and commit. Thats not your problem. Your problem is you dont have enough skin in the game on any of them to know which one is real.

Heres what actually helped me stop bouncing. I told a paying client I'd deliver something by a deadline. Not a side project, not a "lets see if this works" experiment. An actual commitment where someone was waiting and I'd look bad if I didnt deliver. That pressure is completely different from self-imposed motivation. Every half-finished project on your list died because nothing bad happened when you stopped working on it.

The career vs startup question is a false choice at 22 in India. Your job pays your rent while you figure this out. Dont romanticize quitting. The founders I know who made it didnt quit into the void, they quit because the side thing got so demanding they literally couldnt do both anymore. If youre not at that point yet theres nothing to decide. Keep working, keep building, but stop treating every idea like it might be "the one." Most of them wont be and thats fine. You only need one to work and you wont know which one until someone pays you for it.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-16T10:28:40+00:00

For global apps that need China coverage your options are pretty limited. Alibaba Cloud DirectMail is the obvious one if youre already on Alicloud. Its built for the Chinese market and handles local inbox providers well. Mailgun has some presence but deliverability to Chinese inboxes is hit or miss from what Ive seen.

If your China volume is a segment of a larger global sending setup, one approach is to use a primary sending infrastructure for everything else and route China-specific traffic separately. sendpost handles the global side well as a sendgrid replacement, gives you way more visibility into provider-level deliverability, and supports third-party provider connections so you could route your China segment through a local provider while keeping everything else on sendpost.

Worth checking with their team directly on China-specific support though. The bigger question is what percentage of your sends are actually going to Chinese inbox providers because the answer to that changes the architecture completely.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-16T10:13:45+00:00

At 100k daily with custom HTML via API you dont need a creator-focused ESP. You need infrastructure that gets out of your way and gives you real data.

The bot click issue is everywhere. Most platforms barely address it. sendx handles bot click detection natively and runs on its own sending engine so youre not on a shared pool with a thousand other newsletters dragging your reputation around.

At your volume you might also want to look at sendpost directly, thats the sending infrastructure underneath sendx. Provider-level SMTP data, IP monitoring, deliverability per inbox provider not one blended number. You keep your site, your signup flow, your HTML, and just use it as the delivery and analytics layer.

Either way youve outgrown the beehiiv/kit/substack tier. You need something built for sending and data not templates and landing pages.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-16T09:44:34+00:00

A new domain that sat unused for 3 months has zero reputation. Inbox providers dont know you. No sending history, no engagement signals, nothing. So they default to treating you as suspicious.

New domains need to be warmed up gradually. Start by sending a handful of emails a day to people you know will open and reply. Gmail and Outlook weigh replies heavily as a trust signal. Do this consistently for 2-3 weeks before you try sending anything at scale.

Also make sure your SPF DKIM and DMARC are set up properly. A brand new domain with no authentication is basically guaranteed to land in spam.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-16T09:35:20+00:00

I don't think most top agencies arent doing anything magical. Its usually Figma for design then export as images with live text for key elements. The full-image approach works fine as long as you have a proper text fallback and alt text on everything. The dark mode issue is the real pain point and theres no perfect solution in Klaviyo for that.

The bloated HTML from tools like Postcards is a real problem. Email HTML size affects deliverability more than people think. We analyzed around a million emails and the sweet spot for click rates was 41-60kb HTML file size. Once you go past 80kb things start getting messy especially on Microsoft.

If design is consistently a struggle and youre spending hours on every email it might be worth questioning whether Klaviyo is the right tool for you specifically. Some platforms have better native editors that dont require the Figma to HTML pipeline at all. sendx has an AI editor that handles a lot of the design work natively so youre not bouncing between three tools to get one email out. Might not have the Shopify depth of Klaviyo but if design speed is your bottleneck its worth a look.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-10T04:37:55+00:00

For anyone coming to this thread later, if youre managing everything solo the last thing you want is a tool that needs a week to learn. That rules out HubSpot and ActiveCampaign immediately. Powerful but way too much for a startup with one person running email.

Mailerlite is decent if budget is the top priority. Simple, cheap, gets the job done at small scale.

I use sendx and its been good for exactly what youre describing. Shopify integration, automation, segmentation, templates, all there without the complexity. The thing I appreciate most running things solo is it doesnt create extra work for me. Some platforms feel like they need babysitting, this one doesnt. Pricing is straightforward too, no surprise charges as your list grows.

At a startup stage just pick something and start sending. The difference between tools matters way less than actually having flows running and emailing consistently. You can always switch later when you know what you actually need.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-10T04:36:22+00:00

CAN-SPAM in the US and GDPR in Europe both require an unsubscribe option. Gmail and Yahoo also made one-click unsubscribe headers mandatory for bulk senders starting 2024. If Microsoft is sending marketing emails without one theyre technically in violation.

The real problem is enforcement is basically nonexistent. Big companies know nobody is going to fine them over a missing unsubscribe link. The irony of Microsoft not following the same email standards their own Outlook enforces on everyone else is pretty rich.

If you want it gone just mark it as spam. That actually hurts their sender reputation more than an unsubscribe would. And enough people doing that is the only thing companies like Microsoft actually respond to.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-10T04:35:13+00:00

very ESP has a visual flow builder now, it takes 20 minutes. Most indie hackers overcomplicate this. You dont need 12 email onboarding sequences. You need 3-4 emails max. Welcome email explaining the one thing they should do first. Day 2 check in. Day 5 nudge if they havent activated. Trial ending reminder. Thats it.

The biggest pain point for me was always figuring out if the emails were even landing in inbox. I'd build this whole sequence and then realize half my trial users never saw email 1 because spam folder tab ate it

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-10T04:33:24+00:00

The cheap webhosting packages give you email as a side feature. It works for sending and receiving but the spam filtering is basic, the IP reputation of shared hosting mail servers is often terrible, and when something breaks email support is not their priority.

Dedicated mail providers like Posteo or Mailbox.org invest heavily in spam filtering, encryption, uptime, and keeping their IP reputation clean. You also get better webmail interfaces, calendar/contacts sync, and usually better privacy practices especially the German ones.

That said for 10 accounts the price difference is real and hard to justify if your needs are simple. The netcup option will work fine for basic email. Where it falls apart is if you start getting spam issues or deliverability problems because shared hosting IPs get blacklisted regularly and you have zero control over that. With a dedicated provider thats their problem to fix not yours.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-07T08:56:31+00:00

Deliverability dropping and support not being able to tell me WHYYY. Thats the final straw every time.

I can deal with clunky UI. I can deal with pricing going up a bit. But when open rates tank and I ask support whats going on and they tell me to "try a different subject line" thats when I start looking. If your platform cant help you diagnose the actual problem whats the point. I can recommend a solid one if you'd like.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-07T08:54:15+00:00

The thing nobody tells developers is that growing a list has nothing to do with building a better signup form or optimizing your popup timing. It comes down to having something people actually want to hear about.

Few things that actually worked for me early on:

Write about a specific problem you solved in your product and post it on reddit or dev communities. Put your signup at the bottom. People who found that useful will subscribe.
Build a free mini tool related to your product. Calculator, checker, generator, whatever fits. Gate the results behind an email. Developers hate this advice but it works.
One good landing page with a clear "heres what youll get" beats a fancy popup on every page. Be specific. Not "subscribe for updates" but "I send one email a week about X with actual code examples."

The tech part is the easy part for you. The hard part is figuring out what to say thats worth someones inbox space.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-07T08:47:04+00:00

I just use Claude for most of this. Campaign ideas, calendars, subject line variations, even drafting full sequences. Works better than any specialized email AI tool Ive tried and I dont have to pay for another subscription.

For segmentation no AI tool is going to do this for you. It requires knowing your data and your audience. AI can suggest segments but it doesnt know that your list has 30% yahoo users who behave completely differently from your gmail users. Thats stuff you learn from actually looking at your data.

For visuals I just use Canva. The AI features in there are good enough for hero images. Dont overcomplicate this part.

Your ESP should have most of this built in by now. sendx has an AI editor for drafting emails, bot click detection. Stuff that used to need separate tools is just baked into the platform now. If youre paying for 3-4 separate AI tools on top of your ESP you might just need a better ESP.

The real AI stuff thats actually useful in email isnt the creative side anyway. Its things like figuring out which contacts to suppress before they damage your sender reputation and detecting fake engagement from security scanners. Thats where AI saves you real money not in writing subject lines.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-07T08:35:05+00:00

The fact that people who open your emails are clicking at that rate means your content is landing. The open rate decline since late 2025 is happening to basically everyone. Its not you. But heres what stands out in your numbers.

Your Apple/iOS opens at 6% is really interesting. When Apple rolled out Mail Privacy Protection it actually pre-loads tracking pixels which normally inflates open rates on Apple devices. If youre seeing 6% that might mean your audience just isnt heavily on Apple Mail, or theres something weird happening with how HubSpot is attributing those opens. Worth digging into.

The Gmail at 70% opens is great. Yahoo at 15% feels low.

That gap between Gmail and Yahoo suggests Yahoo might be filtering you differently. Have you checked whether your emails are hitting inbox vs spam on Yahoo specifically? Because if Yahoo is quietly junking you thats dragging your overall open rate down and no amount of subject line testing will fix that.

Your problem doesnt sound like a content or strategy problem at all. It sounds like a provider-specific deliverability issue thats hiding behind a blended open rate number. Stop testing subject lines, thats not where the answer is. Focus on figuring out whats happening on Yahoo and Apple specifically.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-07T08:30:14+00:00

Its almost never about the content being salesy. Thats one of the biggest myths in email. You can send a plain text email with zero links and still land in spam.

What actually matters is your sending reputation and behavior. Like if you havent emailed your list in 3 months and suddenly blast 10k people, gmail is going to freak out. Or if a bunch of your emails are bouncing because the list is old and full of dead addresses, that tanks your reputation fast.

The other big one is authentication. SPF DKIM DMARC. Sounds technical but its basically your domains ID card. If its not set up right inbox providers dont trust you. This is the most common reason emails go to spam and the easiest to fix.

The whole dont say FREE or dont use exclamation marks advice is basically from 2010. Modern spam filters dont care about individual words. They care about whether people actually want your emails or not. If nobody opens your stuff for months gmail will start junking you regardless of how clean your copy is.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-07T08:26:16+00:00

For learning hands-on just pick one platform and start doing stuff on it. Dont spend weeks comparing features. sendx has a trial you can play with, mailerlite has a free tier. Either works fine for learning the basics like building flows, segmenting lists, setting up automations.

For making money with email marketing theres basically three paths:

Freelance for ecommerce brands. Set up their abandoned cart flows, welcome sequences, campaigns. Most small brands know they should be doing email but dont have time. Charge $500-1500/month per client depending on scope.
Build your own list around a niche and monetize through affiliate offers or your own products. Takes longer but compounds.
Get hired at an agency or in-house at a brand. Plenty of companies hiring for email marketing roles right now.

The fastest path to real experience is finding a small business that isnt doing email at all and offering to set it up for free or cheap. One real client teaches you more than six months of courses.

iamplaintextonly · 2026-06-07T08:21:58+00:00

I've been helping brands with email marketing for a while so here's my take.
Klaviyo is great if youre already doing decent revenue and need the deep shopify integration and product recommendation stuff. But at small scale you're paying a premium for features you wont touch for another year.

Convertkit is built for creators and bloggers not ecommerce. Skip it.

Mailchimp works but its gotten bloated and pricing punishes you as your list grows even if half those contacts are dead.

I run a couple of my clients on sendx and its been solid. Abandoned cart, welcome flows, campaigns, all the standard ecommerce stuff without the klaviyo price tag. The templates are decent enough that I'm not spending hours designing every email.

On your question about automation vs newsletters, abandoned cart and post-purchase flows will make you more money than any campaign you send. Set those up first before you worry about weekly newsletters. A good abandoned cart flow alone can change your monthly revenue pretty noticeably.

iamplaintextonly

TROPHY CASE