You’re either in(box) or you’re out.
In recent years, an increasing number of brands have been creating editorial newsletters on platforms like Substack and Beehiiv. Some, like American Eagle and Madewell, have grown quiet since launching, while others, like The RealReal and Shopify, continue to publish content regularly. The marketers behind some of these newsletters tell us that there are a range of benefits that a sustained newsletter strategy can provide, including building community and increasing sales.
But not every brand is built to operate a newsletter, Carrie Marks, head of lifestyle at Substack, told us.
“It’s really, really important that the brand has a strong editorial point of view and has something interesting that they want to say,” Marks said. “You really have to be doing something a bit different, a bit more intimate, a bit more conversational on Substack that you’re doing on other platforms.”
We spoke with Marks and the minds behind some of Substack’s top brand newsletters about their experiences on the platform and tips for other brands seeking to make an impact on customers’ inboxes.
Read it and shop?
Women’s apparel brand M.M.LaFleur began producing its newsletter, The M Dash, a year after its launch in 2013 as a way to build community and brand awareness, Maria Costa, senior director of marketing at M.M.LaFleur, told us. The newsletter now has more than 80,000 subscribers on Substack, and while the look of the product has “evolved, the core of it has not changed,” Costa said. The newsletter regularly features articles ranging from style guides to in-depth profiles to promote products and encourage brand discovery, she told us.
“We can only hit [our customer] with so many mass marketing emails before she’s like, ‘I literally can’t stand hearing from you,’” Costa said. “But if we give her something new and interesting to read about, she stays engaged, and she might be more open to opening that marketing email.”
The M Dash first began on WordPress, and Costa said the brand switched to Substack last year in part because of its discovery feature. Today, more than 70% of new subscribers have come from Substack’s recommendation feature, while around 12% come from the brand’s site, she said. Her team also cross-posts certain newsletter editions on LinkedIn, which helps drive additional views, she said.
The ability to form a brand community seems to be a common theme among the brands joining Substack. E-commerce platform Shopify joined Substack last fall as a way to do just that by highlighting some of the entrepreneurs that use its platform, Anita Little, storytelling lead at Shopify, told us. Little declined to share subscriber numbers, but she said the “high level of engagement with the founder community on Substack really aids [Shopify’s] visibility in an organic way.”
Trusted voices
Working with known Substack writers has been a key way that M.M.LaFleur has found success on the platform, Costa said. The newsletter features paid guest posts from writers like Maayan Zilberman, which Costa said often lead to direct sales impact, tracked through UTMs and sites like ShopMy. Maintaining a strong editorial voice can help prevent the brand from feeling overly sales-focused, Costa told us; styling guides like those from Zilberman tend to drive the highest open rates, she added.
“Our audience would start to lose trust in us if we just ran listicles or roundups or something that felt like paid content,” she said.
The RealReal takes a more covert approach with its newsletter, which is penned by an anonymous (but real) Substacker who goes by “The RealGirl” when writing for the brand’s more than 9,000 subscribers, Sarah Leon, editorial director at The RealReal, told us.
“We were looking for somebody who authentically knew and loved and could be critical of The RealReal and would approach the creation of the content in a really deeply natural way,” Leon said.
Over the last two years, Leon said, the newsletter has allowed The RealReal to participate in conversations that were already happening about the brand on Substack and tap into various cultural moments, including creating a shopping guide of looks from The Devil Wears Prada around the time of the sequel’s release this spring.
Perhaps most notably, Substack has driven more than $334,000 in sales for the brand, Leon said.
“The fact that it has made that money has been a really nice surprise, but was not the primary intention,” she told us; the main purpose of the newsletter at the outset was instead “to build community.”
Shopify often taps founders to pen its newsletters, which Little said helps achieve a sense of “candor over polish” at a time when AI-generated content is proliferating. (Marks said she advises against taking an all-AI approach to a newsletter on Substack; the platform recently rolled out an AI-detection tool in partnership with Pangram.)
“The human voice, I think, is really what separates us from the slop that people are scrolling by in their feeds,” Little told us. “I think people are getting increasingly immune to that and allergic to that.”
Consistent communication
When it comes to cadence, marketers agree that it largely depends on the type of content, but consistency is important above all. The RealReal, for example, alternates its weekly publishing schedule with posts from The RealGirl and creator collabs with notable figures like Lena Dunham, Leon said.
“The continuity,” she added, “keeps people coming back.”
Regular sends not only help build anticipation among readers, but it also gives the team flexibility. When M.M.LaFleur took a brief pause from weekly sends in the spring after a staffing change, Costa said engagement and open rates didn’t change, something she attributed to the newsletter’s more than 10 years of consistency.
Hinge has posted annually on Substack for the last two years as a part of its “No Ordinary Love” campaign, working with popular newsletter writers like Hunter Harris. Even with just a handful of issues under its belt, Hinge CMCO Tamika Young told us that the platform has provided the brand with “really honest takes on how [its] consumers are feeling” and helped it connect more deeply with its audience.
One way to maintain a steady line of communication outside of newsletter sends is through Substack’s more informal features. Little said Shopify used the Notes feature last Black Friday–Cyber Monday to maintain a 96-hour live blog, which “created a lot of excitement and energy” with readers.
Marks said using the comments and the platform’s Notes feature is a best practice to show your audience that their thoughts are being considered.
Leon said utilizing both features and being linked to by other Substackers has “driven the most growth for us” over the last two years.
“All these posts are to start conversation,” she said. “It’s just part of like participating in the social channel, and honestly, I’m excited to do more of that as we move forward and continue to expand the content we’re doing in the channel.”
