The first time I heard about Refind ads was in mid-2023 from another newsletter operator who had been trying out their ads platform.
They had said it was working really well, but at the time I was about 4 months into the newsletter and not really sure how to monetize it. So spending money growing the thing was kind of out of the question.
But now, I have a little bit better of an understanding of the monetization here, so I have been considering running some ads to grow it and see what happens.
Since I had heard some great things about Refind, I had been wanting to test it out for myself. Around the same time, Dominik, who runs Refind, reached out inquiring about sponsoring the newsletter.
It felt like the perfect time to test these Refind ads for myself, and get paid to test it 🙂
So yes, this experiment is sponsored, but I made it clear that I was going to share everything – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Also, I did pay for my own ads.
Alright, so let’s get into it. But first, let’s answer the question that many of you might have.
What the Heck is Refind?
Refind is, first and foremost, a newsletter and content discovery platform of its own where subscribers can find interesting ideas and news happening around the world.
After you sign up, they ask you to choose which topics you’re interested in. These range from:
- Product Design
- Leadership
- Entrepreneurship
- Finance
- Venture Capital
- Psychology
- Future of Work
- TV & Film
- Sports
- Gardening
And about 100 others that I can see. Refind then uses these to curate the articles they send you.
Not only is it customized to your interests, but they also let you choose the time of day you receive the emails, as well as the article length.
If you’re someone who loves long-form writing, then you can select that option. If you want to use Refind to get the shorter, more punchy articles, you can do that as well.
Here is what a typical Refind email looks like:
I tell you all of this to give you some background into how Refind publishes the ads you end up buying from them.
The ads show up in their newsletter and in some of their discovery areas. Here is an area in their newsletter suggestions page that has a few ads in it:
Why Refind Ads?
I had never run paid ads to get subscribers for Growth In Reverse, so I had a few requirements for choosing an ads platform.
Let’s walk through some of the reasons I chose Refind.
1. Easy Setup and Maintenance
The first reason I felt excited to start with Refind, was the setup and maintenance side of things.
Facebook & Instagram ads are great, but they can take a lot of tweaking and experimenting to get right.
And not only did you have to create these assets, but you then had to test them over time and figure out what’s working and what’s not.
Are they effective? Yes. But it’s a lot of work that I wasn’t ready for.
People pay agencies thousands of dollars a month to have someone else manage and create ads for them – which should be your first clue that they can be a lot of work.
With Refind, it’s much faster to get up and running, and the maintenance of tweaking ads and placements just isn’t there.
You set up a headline and description, and you’re off to the races. And honestly, you didn’t even have to create those, as the Refind team does it for you.
Sure, you can change them to be more robust and on-brand, but they actually did a pretty good job upfront.
One interesting part about this process was you can’t just go in and tweak these every day. The Refind team (i.e. the owner Dominik) manually updates the ads for you.
You might not like the sound of that, but I think it helps with quality. And to be honest, he is hyper-responsive with making changes and answering questions.
It was nice to feel like I’m actually working with humans and supporting a small business, instead of a super tech-forward social platform that makes it practically impossible to reach a human unless you’re spending a million dollars a month (I‘m looking at you, Meta).
2. You Only Pay for Engaged Subscribers
One of the qualms I heard from people who had tried Refind in the past was that the subscriber quality wasn’t there.
When I talked to Dominik, he told me that they changed their workflow a few months ago to where you only pay for engaged subscribers, i.e. subscribers who are opening your emails.
How do they know this? Well, they can either link up to your email service provider’s API, or they just ask you.
They can automatically link with Beehiiv to see which subscribers are opening and which ones aren’t.
While they don’t auto-sync with Kit (sadly, because that’s what I use), you have to tell them which subscribers haven’t opened your emails.
It’s a quick copy/paste, and I’ll show you how to do this towards the end of the post.
3. Straightforward Costs
You set the budget of how much you want to pay for each engaged subscriber and how much you want to spend per day.
And whatever you set as your cost per engaged subscriber is exactly what you’ll pay.
With other platforms, you set a daily budget and hope you get any subscribers, let alone ones that open your emails.
With Refind, you’re really only paying if someone is opening emails, which I like.
But this can be good and bad, and I’ll show you what I mean in a bit.
The Experiment 🧪
Now that I had a platform to run ads on, it was time to get started.
I’ll quickly share the process of creating these ads and then share what I liked and didn’t like, and the results.
Creating Refind Ads
There are 4 steps in the process to set up Refind Ads.
To start, you fill out a quick form on their site. Dominik reviews it and will approve you if it’s a good fit.
After you’re approved in the system (which doesn’t take long at all), you’ll then have to choose your budgets, connect your email provider, and add a payment method.
These are straightforward and don’t take long to complete, so I won’t bore you with the details.
My Experience Running Ads
I started running the Refind ads on October 7th. When I started, I had the budget set at $1.50 per subscriber and a $60 per day budget.
That got me 4 subscribers on the first day.
Why? The ads work the same as other platforms in the sense that if you’re not bidding enough, your ads might not show as often.
If someone else is willing to spend $3 to get a subscriber, and you’re only willing to spend $1, their ad will show before yours does. After all, that’s how ad platforms make money.
The next day I increased the CPA to $2.50 because I wasn’t getting much traction at all. That definitely helped and I started seeing some more subscribers come in.
October 8th, I got 24 subscribers, which is exactly $60 at $2.50 per subscriber. So I was hitting the budget cap for the day.
But after that first day of hitting the budget cap, I didn’t hit it again.
So maybe my bid of $2.50 per wasn’t enough. Or maybe the ad copy wasn’t refined enough, which is totally possible.
Either way, I didn’t want to increase the budget or CPA until I saw the quality of subscribers I was getting.
So I left it there for the remainder of this experiment.
The Results
I hit 500 subscribers on November 12th, around 35 days after starting, and since I like even numbers I paused the campaign at that point.
- Total subscribers: 500
- Engaged subscribers: 170
- Total cost: $425
- Total cost per engaged subscriber: $2.50 (you pay what you bid per engaged subscriber)
- Total cost per subscriber (all of them, not just engaged ones): $0.85
Are They Good Subscribers?
So those were the main numbers of engaged subscribers who have opened an email.
But what I’ve been more interested in lately is hyper-engaged subscribers.
And what I mean by that is the number of people who actually click my emails. Open rates are pretty unreliable these days.
Apple Mail auto-opens emails. Hey.com hides all opens. So you really never know if someone is interested in your stuff unless they’re clicking emails. Even then it’s not perfect, but I feel like it’s a better metric.
Plus, after launching the GIR Pro community, I’ve realized that 99% of the people who joined, had clicked something in almost every email I send.
They are what I call “hyper-engaged” subscribers.
Because I’m not trying to monetize solely based on sponsorships (in which case I would be happy with more opens), I’m optimizing for the people who click.
The true fans who really like what I’m creating.
Were They Hyper-Engaged Subscribers?
This was the burning question in my mind after seeing 170 engaged subscribers.
My email service provider, Kit, doesn’t allow you to set up a segment of people who click your emails (come on guys! 🙂 ).
So I went through the painstaking process of manually figuring this out, and setting up tags for people who clicked any link in my emails.
This allowed me to set up a few segments to see how many Refind subscribers were clicking my emails:
Out of 174 engaged subscribers (i.e. people who opened an email), only 23 of them have clicked anything so far.
And 3 of those are school district email addresses, which have firewalls that open and click every link, so I don’t really count those 3.
So we’re at 21.
And 5 of those 21 were actually on my email list before I started running ads, so they just kind of found me again and clicked through.
I dug into those 5 a bit more and found that:
- 1 was someone who had unsubscribed in February and is now reading the content again – super cool!
- 3 were subscribers who hadn’t been very engaged in a while but now are reading and clicking every email – which is a win for sure.
- 1 is someone who has been a hyper-engager and I guess wanted to make sure they were signed up again? 😂 Not sure here lol.
Since the numbers were small, I went through each subscriber to see their behavior.
The good news is a number of them are opening most emails and clicking quite a few, which leads me to believe they are excited about the content.
Here is one example.
I like seeing what looks like *real* engagement from some of these subscribers.
The Giant Caveat 👹
While only 21 actually clicked an email, that doesn’t show the full picture.
I stopped running ads on November 12th (around 12 days ago), so some of these subscribers have only gotten 1-2 other emails from me.
That said, it’s way too early to tell if they are “good” subscribers or if they will eventually buy something from me.
So don’t take these numbers as the end-all ones as I’m sure it will evolve over time.
The Good & The Bad
So if we look at what I spent to get the 21 hyper-engaged subscribers, it comes out to around $20 per subscriber.
Not great, but again it’s super early.
But here are some of the things I’ve learned that I think can help you decide if these are right for you.
The Good
In all, I enjoyed the Refind ad dashboard. It was easy to navigate and super fast. No glitching or confusing data like you might find elsewhere.
Things I like about Refind ads:
1. Easy to setup and maintain
I blabbered about this above, so I’ll keep it short. Everything was simple and straightforward.
2. The small and responsive team
I love when I can email a company with a question and they get back to you within a few hours. Was Dominik extra responsive to me because he was sponsoring the newsletter? Maybe.
But I heard this from other people who weren’t being sponsored, so I don’t think so.
3. They work with many ESPs
Here is a list of all the email service providers (ESPs) they work with right now:
- AWeber
- Active Campaign
- Beehiiv
- Campaign Monitor
- Constant Contact
- ConvertKit
- Customer.io
- Drip
- Hubspot
- Klaviyo
- Mailchimp MailerLite
- Marketo
- Ongage Postup Sailthru
- Salesforce
- SendGrid
- Zapier (not an ESP, but this probably covers every other ESP they don’t natively work with)
4. You only pay per engaged subscriber
Of course, this is a good and bad thing I think. Yes, you are essentially guaranteed to get subscribers who at least open your emails, which is great.
It’s very easy to figure out how much you’re going to be paying at the end of the month and how many subscribers you’ll get.
But on the flip side, you have to pay for every engaged subscriber.
If you’re able to figure out Facebook ads and get 1,000 subscribers from your $1,000 ad spend, then you only pay $1 per engaged subscriber. Whereas if you set your CPA in Refind to $2.50, and got 1,000 subscribers, you’re paying $2,500.
So if you’re able to figure out Meta ads, it scales much more nicely.
It’s just a different model, which isn’t solely bad or good.
The Bad
And of course, a few things I didn’t like:
1. You can’t see which placements led to subscribers.
Did these people come from suggestions lists like this one, or directly within Refind emails, or somewhere else?
I would love to be able to see that to help me tweak ad copy per placement.
2. It seems hard to scale.
If you’re able to get Refind ads working for you, it seems like it might be kind of hard to scale it profitably.
Refind has 500k subscribers, but not all of those people are into the same interests. Some like gardening, others like business, and maybe a few are into your niche thing.
Unlike Meta which has millions billions of daily active users (fact-checked myself) who might see your ad, Refinds base is a lot smaller. This isn’t a bad thing, but if you’re looking for scale, I doubt you’ll be able to use Refind as your main paid channel of subscribers.
3. Only 34% opened any emails.
Even though I’m only paying for the people who opened emails, that means that the other 274 subscribers are unengaged and sitting on my email list.
While this isn’t by itself bad (some of these people might wake up and start engaging), if you don’t have an automated method to unsubscribe people who aren’t reading your emails, your list is going to get “sick” really fast.
When I say sick, I mean your open rates will drop because you’re still sending emails to unengaged subscribers. So you have to make sure you’re unsubscribing people who aren’t engaging.
👉 This is a problem with every paid ads channel, but I wanted to call it out.
4. The engagement metrics are only for 7 days.
As a reminder, Refind uses a 7-day timeline to see if someone is engaged or not.
If you send a weekly email, these metrics aren’t really showing you the full picture. Here’s what I mean.
Let’s say someone subscribes via Refind on a Sunday afternoon. They’ll get my welcome email, and then they don’t get another email until the following Sunday.
Technically that’s day 7. Maybe they didn’t open the welcome email, and they didn’t open that first email until Monday because they were busy (it’s the holiday season after all).
On the good side, you’re not going to be paying for that subscriber even though they might open every email you send after that.
But on the downside, the Refind platform looks at that person and says they aren’t a great subscriber, so don’t find more like that.
Sure, you can argue that if someone doesn’t open and engage with the first email, they shouldn’t be a subscriber. But I’m not a fan of that thinking.
But there are ways to get around that, which I’ll get into next.
How to Make Refind Ads More Effective
As I mentioned above, if you’re a weekly email, this can get tricky. But there are workarounds.
Create a Welcome Sequence
Most obvious (and I’m sure some of you were screaming at me while reading the note about the 7-day window above) would be to create a welcome sequence.
I know it might seem obvious, but I haven’t really set up a welcome sequence.
But that would be a good option because you’re then sending people 3-4 emails in that first 7 days to get them to engage, instead of just 1.
This is probably best practice in general to get “cold” email subscribers to learn more about you and what you create so they can unsubscribe if it’s not for them.
Use Unique Headlines and Descriptions
One thing you want to make sure of is that your headline is unique.
I got a Refind email with a duplicate ad that said “Keep up with tech in 5 minutes” and at first, I thought this was a glitch in the Refind ad platform.
After clicking through on both, it looks like these two newsletters were just using the exact same tagline:
Techpresso has since changed their headline to include “AI & tech” but I wanted to call that example out.
This is not a platform where you want to just copy word for word the ads you think are performing best, as I’m sure that impacted results for both newsletters until it was changed.
And in the more macro sense, if someone else can copy the same headline and have it make sense for their content too, you should probably write something more unique.
Who Refind is Best For?
After learning more about this platform and running my own ads, I think it’s best suited for more B2C types of newsletters and/or daily newsletters focused around sponsorship revenue.
Think the Morning Brew’s or The Neuron’s of the world.
In short, if you’re looking to build a big newsletter based on sponsorship revenue alone, this can be a great channel to add into the mix.
If you’re a smaller publisher who is trying to get a small number of subscribers to buy your own products, I’m not sure it’s the best platform.
You definitely can get better results with a more robust onboarding for your subscribers that come from Refind, but it’s going to take a little bit of work.
Will I Be Continuing to Use Refind Ads?
Yes, I’m going to give it another go.
I’m working on launching a new lead magnet soon and I’ll create a welcome sequence to go with it, so I might try it again when I have that.
I will probably restart ads after that is live and I have some data from organic subscribers coming in.
And at that point, I can share an update on how it’s performing (along with if those 170 engaged subscribers turn into hyper-engaged people).
Do I think it’s worth a test? Yes.
But make sure you set yourself up for success first.
