What You Need to Know Before Starting a Paid Newsletter

Table of Contents

• How Do I Start a Paid Newsletter?

• What Should I Know Before Starting a Newsletter?

• What Are the 3 Pillars of a Newsletter?

• What Are the 5 Elements of an Effective Newsletter …

• What Should Be Included in a Paid Newsletter?

• How Do I Start a Paid Subscription?

• Monetize Your Audience with a Paid Newsletter

Paid newsletters are a great way to engage your audience and create a recurring revenue stream. They’re a win-win: readers get great ad-free content, and you get consistent recurring revenue.

While creating a newsletter is easy in theory, starting a paid newsletter the right way–with content valuable enough for people to fork over their hard-earned cash–isn’t so simple.

But don’t worry–we’ve got your back. Here are the questions you need to answer in order to build a brand your audience will value, with crave-able content they’ll keep coming back for.

How Do I Start a Paid Newsletter?

Many people happily pay for newsletters to avoid ad-filled content. Starting one is easy with beehiiv–but it’s also a commitment.

We’ve included below five steps to starting a paid newsletter. This should get you well on your way to monetization!

1. Choose A Newsletter Platform

The first step in starting a paid newsletter is to choose a newsletter platform. There are many platforms out there with different features and benefits tailored to a range of projects and ideas.

A good place to start is by signing up for free with beehiiv. The beehiiv newsletter platform allows you to store up to 2,500 subscribers free of charge. Plus, you’ll get access to a host of great benefits on our free plan alone.

If you really want to benefit from monetization, check out our Grow plan. This allows you to offer your subscribers premium subscriptions, which is a key method of making money from your newsletters. More on this later!

2. Select Content

Next, you’ll need to select your content. Content is key when it comes to successful newsletters, especially ones you’re looking to monetize.

Make sure your content is engaging. Good-quality copy and graphics will keep your newsletter looking fresh. Remember that your subscribers are likely to receive many emails a day, so go the extra mile to ensure yours stands out.

3. Research Competitors

Competitor research is one of the most important steps in creating your first paid newsletter. It may seem strange to engage with your competitors; however, it’s likely that you share a similar audience. Why not gain inspiration from a few of their ideas to shake your email marketing up a bit?

Sign up for a few of your competitors’ mailing lists and see what kind of content you get through. This is a great way of getting some new ideas for your brand, especially if it's from competitors that you know are good at what they do.

4. Choose Template

Another key step in building a paid newsletter is to choose a template. Most email platforms will have a range of pre-made templates for you to choose from; however, you may have designers in-house that will be producing your email template.

Whichever way you choose to do this, make sure your template is clear, engaging, and unique. For some inspiration on successful newsletter templates, check out our blog!

5. Build A Subscriber List

The last step in creating your first paid newsletter is to make sure you’ve got a high-quality subscriber list to send your email to. The last thing you want is to come up with a beautiful design, and then see your email flop because you have next-to-no subscribers (or a long list of subscribers who never open your emails).

The best way to build a subscriber list is organically. Use your current audiences on social media to generate subscribers by offering freebies/discount codes in return for an email address. Or, set up a referral scheme to encourage existing subscribers to recommend a friend to sign up, too.

What Should I Know Before Starting a Newsletter?

Asking the following questions now will save your future self a lot of time and headaches:

1. What Is the Problem I Am Solving?

Make sure you’re solving a problem that people want to pay for. If you’re an expert, insider, coach, guru, or trusted authority, you are already solving problems for your audience. For example, Going is a paid subscription service that helps people find cut-rate travel deals. If you aren’t giving away solutions for free, your audience will be happy to pay.

2. Do I Have an Existing Audience?

You need an existing audience who already knows and trusts you. You can gauge the potential success of your paid newsletter by the level of engagement with your existing newsletter. Only 5-10% of free subscribers will convert. That may not sound like much, but this can grow exponentially.

3. Is My Audience Willing To Pay for a Newsletter?

If your audience is used to high-value free content and you’ve never asked them for anything, you’ll need to convince them to pay. However, many people are sick of being bombarded with ads everywhere they go for information. More and more are willing to pay for quality ad-free media.

Marketing your paid newsletter to your free subscribers could be as simple as taking advantage of a cool beehiiv feature that lets you send a single newsletter to both your free and paid subscribers, and beehiiv will deliver the relevant version to readers based on their subscription tier. Using a paywall is a convenient way to gain new subscribers without having to write two versions of a newsletter.

4. Can I Generate Content I Can Monetize?

You will need to regularly and consistently offer your paid subscribers something new and high-value, not just “more of the same.”

For example, if you’re a designer, instead of more “how to style the perfect kitchen” newsletters, your paid content could feature “Case studies: challenging kitchen spaces through the eyes of four top designers,” which shows that you care about solving your readers’ problems. It also shows you’ve taken the time to reach out to other professionals for ideas and solutions–a good reason to hand you their credit card.

5. Am I Pricing the Newsletter Correctly?

Look at your competition’s paid newsletters. Pricing will depend on what you offer (much more in-depth and/or completely fresh) and how often. Most paid newsletters cost between $2 and $15 monthly, with discounted annual plans.

6. How Much Time Do I Have?

How often will you serve your paying audience? Once a week may be ideal for you, although you could also offer longer magazine-style monthly issues or a daily “insider report.”

How much time does it take to create each newsletter? The beehiiv paywall feature is a massive time-saver. You only write one piece of content, with premium material hidden from free subscribers. If writing takes a lot of your time, you may want to delay the launch until you have a lot of high-value content ready to go.

You could also explore co-hosting a paid newsletter with another creator, sharing the expenses, profits, and content creation tasks.

7. Is It Worth It?

If you have a large, engaged audience, and you have the time to curate exceptional premium content, then absolutely it’s worth it!

A paid newsletter isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it source of passive income, however. If you think regularly creating free content is hard, now you have to regularly create premium content that you can monetize. Your paying audience will have higher expectations. It’s truly next-level newsletter writing.

What Are the 3 Pillars of a Newsletter?

Remember to focus on the three pillars of a newsletter: content, personalization, and segmentation. Let’s go through each together.

Content

Content is king! Without good content, you can’t expect your subscribers to engage and interact with your content

Think about the number of emails you receive in your inbox every day. Without good content, there’s no way your brand will stand out, and you’ll be very unlikely to successfully monetize your newsletter.

Take a look at how your competitors use content to engage their audience. We don’t just mean copy and text. Make sure your graphics are high quality, and include some different types of content, like polls and videos. This will keep your newsletter fresh and your subscribers interested.

Personalization

As we mentioned above, your subscribers will receive many emails a day, so personalization is a great way to make your newsletter stand out.

Try using your subscribers’ first names at the start of an email. This will make your subscribers feel like you’re talking to them personally, which is a great way to increase engagement.

You could also include your subscribers’ names in the subject line. This is perfect for increasing the click-through rate (CTR) of your newsletters - who wouldn’t open an email that directly grabs their attention by including their first name in the subject line?!

No matter how popular your newsletter is, everyone should feel like you’re speaking to them directly. Check out this post on how not to destroy your email’s mojo for more personalization tips and tricks.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the art of breaking a big audience down into niche audiences, to fine-tune your future newsletters to specific groups, or segments, of readers.

Here’s an example. You own a clothing brand and sell both men’s and women’s clothing. If you segment your audience by sex, you’ll be able to send newsletters about women’s clothing to women, and men’s clothing to men. This will no doubt provide you with a higher engagement rate and ensure that your emails are directed at people who will actually open them.

You can segment your lists by requesting more information from your subscribers. In addition to demographics, you can ask questions to determine what kind of content they’d be interested in receiving. This information could be obtained at sign-up or via surveys. Either way, it’s important to know who is reading your content, and what kind of content they’re looking to read, to improve your targeting.

What Are the 5 Elements of an Effective Newsletter?

Ultimately, the purpose of a newsletter is to get your audience to do something. You’ll need:

A Catchy Subject Line

Great subject lines lead to opened emails. Tell your audience in a catchy way what to expect when they read your newsletter, and increase the open rate of your emails. Need some inspiration? Here’s our master list of professional subject lines.

Great Content = Great Marketing

Newsletters keep your brand top of mind. Good content will engage your readers and help them, not to sell them. Keep it concise, and relevant, and sprinkle in some fun!

Know Your Audience

Ask plenty of questions so you know exactly what they want to hear. beehiiv makes this easy with survey integration - check out our Grow plan for all the details.

Good Layout

Use a consistent layout, style, and location of CTA buttons or special information. Ensure that your formatting works across all devices to keep your audience engaged whether they’re using their phone or laptop to read your newsletters.

Contact and CTA

Always provide contact information, your website link, and a call to action. If your audience can’t engage with you once they’ve read your newsletter, what’s the point?

Make sure to also show them where they can access other content (including paid content). Make it easy for them to engage with other content you produce, such as blog content and social media posts.

What Should Be Included in a Paid Newsletter?

A paid newsletter goes above and beyond a free newsletter with unique value. Successful paid newsletters often include case studies, interviews, learning material, exclusive member-only events, personalized coaching, white papers, and insider forecasts.

Be sure to include:

• Value: How can you solve your readers’ problems and make their lives easier?

• A unique solution or perspective.

• Fill a content gap: share information that isn’t readily available.

• Increase engagement with “edutainment.”

How Do I Start a Paid Subscription?

1. Decide on the problem you’re solving and the type of content you will feature.

2. Decide on your pricing structure.

• Monthly subscriptions: lower price, but a high risk of month-to-month unsubscribes.

• Annual (discounted) pricing: higher perceived value; more guaranteed recurring income; fewer month-to-month unsubscribes.

3. Create several months’ worth of content so you’re ready to go with your first subscriber. Check out this blog post on content ideas.

4. Set up a paid newsletter with beehiiv. Go to the Publish tab to find step-by-step instructions, templates, and user-friendly tools. Here’s a handy tutorial on how to set up Stripe to process payments.

5. Create a publishing schedule. Let your audience know when they can expect the next issue.

6. Make it easy to subscribe. Set up a landing page, add a subscribe button on your website, or embed a subscribe button in your free newsletter.

7. Migrate an existing newsletter to beehiiv in just five minutes so your entire audience is in one place. Check out how it’s done here.

Monetize Your Audience with a Paid Newsletter

In this article, we’ve answered the questions you need to ask before starting a paid newsletter.

A paid newsletter is a great way to generate extra income by sharing what you love to talk about anyway–and it’s never been easier. With beehiiv’s comprehensive suite of email marketing tools to help you craft high-value newsletters and monetize your audience, you’ll be on your way in no time. Sign up today to get started!