What is it?
If you're already familiar with how SparkLoop paid recommendations work, beehiiv boosts will be easy to understand.
Exclusive to newsletters on beehiiv, you can pay other beehiiv newsletters to recommend you to their audience. Both in emails, and via their recommendations widget.
You pay a fixed price per "confirmed" subscriber.
In practice, this means you pay for most subscribers who open your newsletter at least once and don't unsubscribe themselves within the first few days.
You can approve which newsletters can recommend you, and set caps on how much you want to spend.
The Good and the Bad
- quick and easy to set up
- you decide what to pay per subscriber
- no real quality controls (average open rates only 37%)
- have to pay the full amount in advance — which can then often be tied up for months before being released
- need to be using beehiiv to take part
Examples of how to crush it
As the Beehiiv newsletter platform is still quite small and heavily dominated by niches like crypto and AI, newsletters in these niches seem to be the only ones that do well with boosts.
Rundown AI
The Rundown AI has grown by over 10,000 subscribers using Boosts, paying an average of $2.00 per subscriber.
Ben's Bites
Ben’s Bites — another AI newsletter — has also grown by over 10,000 subscribers using Boosts - and he says it's a really hands-off growth strategy.
