📩 Paying more for leads can win

A newsletter team was proud of their low cost per lead. The list kept growing. But the business felt stuck. Sponsors weren’t seeing clicks, product buyers were rare, and churn quietly climbed.

So their growth partner suggested something that sounded backward: raise cost per lead by 30%.

Revenue jumped 10x.

Nothing magical happened. They just changed what the ad platform was being asked to find. Instead of optimizing for “email submitted,” they optimized for signals that looked like a real reader: opens, clicks, and downstream purchases. The price per signup went up, but the value per new subscriber exploded.

In partnership with

The Lithium Boom is Heating Up

Thanks to growing demand, lithium stock prices grew 2X+ from June 2025 to January 2026. $ALB climbed as high as 227%. $LAC hit 151%. $SQM, 159%.

But the real winner may be a stock not listed on public exchanges, EnergyX.

This $1B unicorn’s patented technology can recover 3X more lithium than traditional methods. That’s earned investment from leaders like General Motors.

Now they’re preparing for commercial production just as experts project 5X demand growth by 2040. They’ve announced what could be one of the US’ largest lithium production facilities and have rights to approximately 150,000 lithium-rich acres across North and South America.

Unlike public stocks, you can buy private EnergyX shares alongside 40,000+ other investors. Invest for $11/share by the 2/26 deadline.

Invest in EnergyX Today

_{This is a paid advertisement for EnergyX Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.energyx.com. Under Regulation A, a company may change its share price by up to 20% without requalifying the offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission.}

Why CPL lies to you
A $2 subscriber isn’t “better” than a $3 subscriber. It’s only cheaper.

If the $2 person never opens and disappears in a month, while the $3 person clicks, buys, and sticks around, the math is brutal. You saved 33% on acquisition and gave up most of the upside.

What matters is what you earn per engaged reader, not what you pay per raw signup. Track it by source and by cohort, because averages hide the truth.

Your creative is the targeting
The old playbook leaned on interests and tiny audience tweaks. That’s not the lever anymore.

Your ads teach the algorithm who your reader is. If your creative is generic, the platform will happily find generic people who do generic things, like sign up and vanish.

Make the creative specific enough that the wrong person scrolls past instantly.

Bad: “Grow your business with better insights.”
Better: “Agency owners: stop losing renewals because your follow-up is chaos.”

One clear audience. One painful problem. One promised outcome. That’s the targeting.

Deliverability is the multiplier nobody wants to look at
A big list with a lot of “zombies” is not neutral. It’s harmful.

When a large chunk of your audience never engages, inbox providers learn that your mail is less wanted. That can drag down placement for the people who actually like you. You end up hurting your best readers to keep sending to your worst ones.

The fix is boring and powerful: segment, suppress chronically unengaged addresses, and watch performance by inbox provider. Protecting inbox placement makes every other effort work better, including paid acquisition.

Stop typing prompt essays

Dictate full-context prompts and paste clean, structured input into ChatGPT or Claude. Wispr Flow preserves your nuance so AI gives better answers the first time. Try Wispr Flow for AI.

See a demo

*Ad

What strong operators measure
They don’t obsess over list size. They run a tighter scoreboard:

• Revenue per engaged reader

• Engagement by source and cohort

• Churn patterns in the first 30 to 60 days

• Send strategy that favors engaged segments

• Monetization depth, not just ad slots

Here’s the real advantage: when your average subscriber is worth more, you can afford to pay more to acquire them and still win. That’s how you outbid competitors without lighting your margins on fire.

The reframe
Most teams think the problem is “How do we grow faster?”
The better question is “How do we make each new subscriber matter more?”

Solve value first, and growth gets easier. Solve growth first while value stays weak, and you just build a bigger, noisier version of the same problem.

How To Generate Quality Images With AI

These prompts will transform how you create with AI.

Get 100+ pro-level assets in minutes with our AI prompt workflow.

Inside you’ll discover:

• The exact AI workflow used to generate 100+ quality assets

• How to save hours creating marketing images with AI

• A smart prompt system used to help scale creative and save on production cost

Download your creative workflow today.

Get The Workflow

*Ad