Marketers are often left scratching their heads when they push out content to large audiences, only to watch engagement bottom out after the next algorithmic shift.
But as marketing and communications splinter across more platforms and technologies, reaching your audience only gets harder, beehiiv COO Daniel Krenitsyn said during an onstage conversation we had at ±¬ÁÏTV’s summit.
Meanwhile, email marketing strategies have outlived nearly every major content trend, despite what the marketing experts predicted. It’s grown into a thriving ecosystem that marketers can use to repurpose content and build lasting relationships with their audience.
"It survived every algorithmic shift, every platform collapse, every privacy hurdle that's been thrown at it," he said. "I affectionately refer to it as the cockroach of marketing and comms. It has survived it all."
Newsletters have become table stakes for brands, but simply having one isn’t enough.
In this session, Daniel broke down how beehiiv's customers like Ramp, Brex, and Kalshi have used newsletters to grow and engage audiences, and more importantly, gain a foothold in their markets.
Email newsletters allow brands to hedge their bets against major algorithm changes that stifle reach and engagement.
That's why they're one of the "core vectors we've built towards as we build the future of the content economy and empower creators, publishers, and brands to own their relationship with their audience," Daniel said. He added that the growing number of creators and independent journalists with millions of followers has blurred the lines between what would be considered a true media company vs. a brand or creator.
Instead of simply checking the box to say that you have a regularly distributed newsletter as part of your marketing strategy, you can map the effectiveness of your newsletter content to ROI.
Daniel has seen brands design creative ways to drive ROI from their email newsletter program. Here are some examples he mentioned:
Rally Road — As a collectibles marketplace selling all kinds of things, Rally Road has virtually limitless amounts of cool content it can build, Daniel said. Together with Rally Road’s growth and data science team, beehiiv dug into the brand’s newsletter data to see what was producing results and found that people who opened and read the newsletter regularly invested around 2-3x more than those who didn't. The newsletter was also a huge lever to drive app downloads. Daniel said he thinks they found success because the content focused on products in the marketplace that were cool enough to get people to check out, rather than pushing a promo code to buy now.
Kalshi — Instead of directly pushing bets on the prediction trading marketplace, Kalshi's newsletter drives wager volume on the platform by showcasing events happening in the news. By highlighting and digging into news stories of the day, the brand is resonating more with its audience while keeping them informed, and also hinting that there is a market for whatever event is going on.
Brex — The team at Brex uses their newsletter for storytelling and narrative-building. But as a finance platform that aims to reach decision-makers in the startup ecosystem, like CFOs and VPs of Finance, they use their newsletter to drive RSVPs to the roughly 550 events they throw a year. Daniel said that tying the newsletter-driven RSVPs to actual marketing-qualified leads and revenue is a little more difficult to show in the short term, but it does provide longer-term results.
The power of the newsletter is now well-established with marketers, but so many brands do a hard launch only to sputter out and come to a stop eventually. So what differentiates the ones with longevity and success from the rest? Here’s what Daniel said to avoid.
"There was this time where you could just run an arbitrage business, spin up a newsletter and have Claude write it for you. I think that a lot of that will go away," he said.
If your content is not providing value to the reader or end consumer, you'll see that reality reflected in your engagement metrics — so what's the point?
Writing "Top 10" stories about the ways Ramp users spend their expense funds might keep your audience vaguely interested. But Daniel said that most brands now are sitting on so much interesting proprietary data to build an interesting narrative around.
"If I'm Ramp and I've been collecting corporate spend data for the last five years — there's probably some really interesting insights that I can pull from that that a reporter from the New York Times is just not going to be able to do," he said.
Writing those data-driven stories in-house and sharing them on your newsletter provides the opportunity to control that narrative without making a blatant direct sell that users might scroll past.
As algorithms rise and fall, brands that treat their newsletter as owned territory — built on the foundation of proprietary data and real value rather than recycled AI content — are the ones that will still be standing when the next platform shift hits.
is the CEO of ±¬ÁÏTV, the first content distribution platform built for earned reach. He's led the company in redefining how brands and publishers collaborate, with over 4,000 news outlets using ±¬ÁÏTV to enhance coverage. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Noah previously helped scale Graphiq, later acquired by Amazon.