Newsletter growth is hard, but you can make it a lot easier with some simple optimizations.

Today, we’re breaking down how newsletters from 68k to 1.5M subscribers have optimized their landing pages and websites to convert more of the traffic they’re already getting.

Creators like Dru Riley, Eddie Shleyner, Harry Dry, and Dan Ni all understand the power of optimizing traffic for conversions.

But newsletter optimizations aren’t limited to the sign-up process.

So this is the first of a 3-part series sharing some of the best optimizations I’ve seen over the past 2 years of researching the biggest newsletter creators.

The series will focus on three specific areas you can optimize:

1. Traffic to your website, landing page, and social profiles (get more subscribers from the same amount of traffic)
2. Engagement in your onboarding process and in your newsletter editions: get more subscribers engaging with your emails and sticking around
3. Growth on social media platforms with the content you share, promoting your newsletter, and optimizing your profile/bio.

Let’s get into it.

The Power of Optimization 🦾

It’s a heck of a lot easier to improve your conversion rate than it is to get more traffic.

For example, let’s say you want 100 email subscribers each month.

Your page converts at 1% and you get 5,000 people to that page every month.

To improve your numbers from 50 to 100 subscribers, you can either increase traffic or increase your conversion rate:

By increasing your conversion rate from 1 to 2%, you can reach your goal without having to go out searching for new traffic methods.

To get the same returns by increasing traffic, you’d have to double your traffic, going from 5,000 to 10,000 people on your site every month.

That’s very hard to do, especially up front.

If you can optimize the subscription process, you’ll get the most out of the traffic coming your way.

The benefit is super tempting: you get more conversions without having to do more work.

Who Should Be Optimizing Traffic?

Short answer: everyone.

A more nuanced answer: everyone, but especially those who don’t have the time or the desire to drive more traffic to their website or landing page (more isn’t always better, anyway, right?).

Some newsletter creators enjoy creating and posting daily content, going on podcasts, doing Shorts & TikTok, etc — but for some of us introvert creators, we’d rather fine-tune our system to get the most out of it.

So if you’re like me and other introverts, making these traffic optimizations is really important to help with social media anxiety, burnout, and overwhelm.

And here’s how you can do it.

Optimizing Your Landing Page

Getting new eyeballs (i.e., traffic) to your sign-up page or website is half the battle.

So you want to make sure as many of those visitors as possible subscribe.

Nobody gets that more than Dru Riley.

Testing & Improving Your Landing Page

Dru Riley from Trends.vc has tested so many aspects of his newsletter.

But the most extensive thing I’ve seen him test is his newsletter’s sign-up page (which is also his website’s homepage).

Dru ended up testing the homepage for Trends.vc for months years.

He started iterating on his homepage in June of 2020. I tracked 17 iterations through 2 years.

And here’s where it stands now:

Here are all the elements Dru has tested on Trends.vc’s sign-up page:

• Images
• Headline
• Subheadline
• Logo placement
• Button color
• Button text
• Social Proof:
  • Number of subscribers
  • Subscriber images
  • Product Hunt badge

If you’re keeping track, that’s pretty much every element on the page, minus the background color 🙂

Distraction-Free “Minimalist” Landing Pages

Another important thing to note here.

Dru keeps his traffic completely focused on doing ONE action: subscribing to Trends.

There’s no other action you can take. You can’t scroll, there’s no navigation menu, nothing.

He optimized this page with 100% focus on getting visitors to subscribe.

Dan Ni of the TL;DR newsletter has the same minimalist landing page strategy with his 16(!!) tech-focused newsletters. Nearly all of their landing pages follow a similar format, and it’s completely intentional.

Each sign-up page follows the same template:

1. Distraction-free, black, non-scrollable page
2. No navigation menu
3. Nothing to click (except a link to a recent edition linked in the “one daily email” copy)

How well does this work? Dan shared why he’s using this strategy on an Indiehackers post:

“I used to have the full latest issue of the newsletter on the landing page and that performed a lot worse than the current signup page because people would get distracted clicking on links and never come back.” Dan Ni, Indie Hackers post

Did I mention Dan’s TLDR newsletters have over 1.5M subscribers?

When a newsletter with millions of subscribers repeats the same template for over a dozen newsletters, I’d take it as a strong signal of an effective landing page.

How To Test & Optimize Your Landing Page (Like Dru & Dan)

It’s tempting to test every aspect of your landing page—and you can!

But please read below before donning your lab coat and marketing goggles to try all the experiments.

It’s important to only test ONE element of your landing page at a time. Otherwise, you won’t know which change impacted conversions (for better or worse).

Meaning, set your existing conversion rate benchmark and note what you’re about to change, and when you’re changing it.

For example, to test a new headline, you’ll want to take the following steps:

1. Write down your current headline
2. Log the conversion rate of that headline
3. Write down the new headline
4. Log the date you’re making the change
5. Set a test duration
6. Log the results

Repeat over and over again until you’re happy. 🙂

When Dru ran these experiments, he was aiming for around a 50% conversion rate.

Optimize Your Website To Convert More Visitors

Eddie Shleyner learned this lesson the hard way.

We wrote about how Eddie drove thousands of visitors to his website (thanks to a “guest starring” strategy with Hubspot) but failed to capture their email addresses.

He let hundreds—if not thousands—of potential subscribers fall through his fingertips simply because he didn’t have a ‘Subscribe’ form or CTA on his website.

Thankfully, Eddie learned from his mistake and never looked back and now boasts over 68k subscribers, earning him over 7 figures.

Harry Dry has also optimized his website to make sure no visit is wasted. He knows it’s a lot easier to improve your conversion rate than it is to get more traffic.

And it’s translated to 130k newsletter subscribers.

Here are the steps Eddie & Harry have taken to optimize their websites to ensure no visit is wasted.

The good news: you can do the same!

1. Overwhelm with Social Proof

Eddie has a ridiculous amount of social proof on his homepage. Towards the top of the page, you see quotes and features from big brands:

Below that, he includes a subscribe option and talks about his lead magnet. But then goes right back to more social proof.

But these are testimonials from other well-known industry copywriters:

There are 12 of these that you have to scroll through, which feels like the perfect number before it becomes obnoxious. Then there is a “load more” button you can click and it just keeps loading more and more testimonials.

At this point, you’re thinking, “Okay he knows what he’s doing and is respected by his industry peers.”

Then there is a giant “Subscribe” button, and can you guess what’s below that?

Yep, more testimonials from industry peers, but this time they are videos.

Harry Dry is less “in your face” with social proof on MarketingExamples.com. But he makes sure to include several social proof elements right inside his pop-up form.

Harry’s social proof includes…

1. A mention of being the #1 marketing newsletter as voted by “marketers” (including a link to the #1 ranking for good measure).
2. A casual mention of “130k people enjoy it” — compelling evidence the newsletter is valuable.
3. A scrolling list of one-sentence testimonials + subscribers’ faces.

2. “They Can’t Say No” Lead Magnet

If the social proof alone hasn’t convinced someone, this next piece will.

When you sign up for his newsletter, Eddie gives you 6 micro-courses about copywriting….for free.

That’s one helluva lead magnet if you ask me.

Even if he had no social proof on this page I’d sign up for the newsletter purely to get these.

3. Multiple CTAs

At the very top of each article, Eddie includes a subscribe button:

And then at the bottom of each one (remember, these are not long posts), he includes another, along with that same social proof we saw on the homepage.

Harry does something similar. His website is full of ways you can sign up.

The big takeaway when reviewing these two websites:

→ Make it easy for people to subscribe.

No one should ever be searching for a way to join your newsletter.

On Harry’s site (MarketingExamples.com), he has 4 ways to get people to sign up:

1. Navigation bar at the top where you can enter your email and subscribe.

2. Sidebar clickable image that links to the overlay you see above.

3. At the end of many articles, he asks people to subscribe.

4. A pop-up that appears if you’ve been on the website for more than 60 seconds

Love them or hate them, his pop-ups are wildly effective. To the tune of around 50% of his subscribers have joined his list from them.

Think about that. If he had just not tried a pop-up, his list would be HALF the size it is today.

And he’s doing it tastefully. He’s not loading the pop-up 5 seconds after you’ve been on the page. He makes sure you’re really interested before asking if you want to subscribe.

Here is a breakdown from one of his articles showing the percentages of where people signed up.

Other Landing Page & Website Optimizations

I came across these other optimizations I saw Dan Ni using that you can try.

They’re not must-do’s but they’ll only help improve your conversions.

(Some of these require some tech know-how, but I’ve included resources to help.)

1. Make your website lightning fast ⚡️

Dan Ni mentioned in posts and on podcasts that he wanted his landing pages to load lightning-fast.

There are a ton of benefits to doing this, namely improving your audience’s experience, but also improving your sign-up rate.

An easy (and free!) way to get started with this is using Cloudflare. There is a little bit of technical stuff required to set this up, but it’s not hard. And there are tons of YouTube videos on how to do this.

2. Adding OAuth signup buttons

Have you ever signed up for a website or software, and they give you the option to create an account with Google or Twitter? Those are OAuth buttons.

Dan implemented this on his landing page and said that over 50% of mobile visitors used those buttons to sign up. Instead of having to type their email, they could just click a button to sign up with Twitter, and then Dan can add that email address to his subscriber list.

This is much more technical, but it’s doable. I looked at the directions and it seems a little intense, but I’m adding it to my future list of things to try.

Sidenote: there’s no way to currently add OAuth to landing pages created with tools like Beehiiv, Substack, and Kit.

Another side note, Dan has since removed those buttons. Since he was optimizing for these pages to load fast, OAuth may have slowed the page load speed down too much.

3. Autofocusing the Cursor

This one sounds super technical, but it seems easy enough to implement.

You can add a piece of code to your email signup forms so that when someone visits the page, their cursor is already in the email box.

While this might sound like overkill, any way you can remove friction for the people visiting your page, the better.

This only works on Desktop but seems like a no-brainer to try out. Here are the directions I found that were the most helpful.

Traffic Optimization: Your Secret Growth Weapon

After diving deep into how these newsletter experts optimize their traffic, one thing’s crystal clear: the difference between a good conversion rate and a great one lies in the details.

Think about it…

Eddie Shleyner went from missing thousands of potential subscribers to building a seven-figure business, in large part by optimizing his website for conversions.

Dru Riley made small tweaks consistently for years until he got his conversion rate to a point he was happy with.

That’s the power of getting the little things right.

Here are the biggest takeaways:

1. Minimize Distractions: Follow Dru & Dan’s lead with focused, single-purpose landing pages

2. Maximize Social Proof: Stack it high like Eddie & Harry – testimonials, success stories, and social validation

3. CTAs Everywhere: Put your CTA everywhere on your website. Make it stupidly simple and obvious you have a newsletter and how to sign up for it.

4. Optimize Technology: From lightning-fast load times to frictionless sign-up processes, every second counts.

It’s also important to remember that these optimizations aren’t a one-and-done deal. It’s an ongoing process of testing, measuring, and improving.

The beauty of optimization is that it makes everything else you do more effective.

Every visitor becomes more valuable.

Every marketing effort yields better results.

Those are the kinds of gains I think we’re all after.

Which one of these optimizations are you going to try?