3 unethical ways (not) to grow your newsletter

Intro

Last week, smart newsletter operators like Matt Paulson and Brennan Dunn took to Twitter with a curious complaint...

Both Matt and Brennan are receiving multiple newsletters sent via beehiiv (a newsletter platform) that they never subscribed to.

And they're not the only ones.

It's likely that millions of people have been opted into beehiiv newsletters that they never wanted or asked for.
​

How did this happen?

The answer is pretty simple: There is a growing number of newsletters — mainly (but not exclusively) on beehiiv — that are quietly using shady tactics to grow their audiences without consent.

In my newsletter growth playbooks, I purposefully don't talk about these "shady" growth tactics.

Yes, they often work. They can drive engaged subscribers at a low cost. But they're also unethical and (often) illegal. I don't recommend them.

That said, you should be aware of what the most common of these "shady" growth tactics are. So you know the red flags to avoid if/when someone pitches them to you.

Let's take a look at the big three 👇
​

3 unethical ways (not) to grow your newsletter

Before we jump in, two quick points:

1. Not all beehiiv newsletters use these tactics. Most of them are awesome reads, written by great people
2. I've left out the links/names for the tools and providers of these services on purpose... please don't use them
   ​

#1 | Website Visitor Identifiers

Imagine how easy growth would be if everyone who visited your website was automatically added to your newsletter...

That's exactly what Website Visitor Identification (WVI) tools do:

​
WVI tools have been big in the ecommerce space for a year or so now, and have finally made their way into the sleazier corners of the newsletter industry.

Here's how it works:

1. You install a pixel on your website from a tool like the one above
2. When someone visits your website, the tool checks their device fingerprint and IP address to see if it matches an email address they already have in their database
3. If it does, they add the email address to your newsletter platform (so you can start emailing them)

These WVI tools don't work 100% of the time, but enough to make a big difference.

The most effective ones have a hit rate of ~30% — meaning if 100 people visit your website and don't sign up, 30 of them will be added to your newsletter anyway.

Of course, you shouldn't just add people to your newsletter without their explicit consent. In most places, that's illegal.
​

#2 | Auto-Adding Email Lists

Want to add 100k marketers to your B2B newsletter? Or 50k people who live in Dallas to your local newsletter?

There are data vendors who already have those email addresses (don't ask how) and are willing to sell them to you at a great price.

So far, this isn't illegal or even that unethical.

You could just cold-email the list you bought, introduce your newsletter, and ask them if they'd like to subscribe.

But instead, a growing number of newsletters are using a service that does something much shadier:

1. They buy a list of "target subscribers" from data vendors
2. They auto-add this list directly to your regular newsletter sends in small batches (so as not to trigger spam complaints) without consent
3. Anyone who doesn't show engagement after a few sends is cleaned (removed from the newsletter)

Here's a case study example from the provider's website:

​
50+ of the most popular beehiiv newsletters have used this service.

Yet — for some reason — not one of them has ever admitted to it when asked to share their growth channels in public interviews...
​

#3 | LinkedIn Scraping

The two unethical growth tactics above are more often used by newsletters in the scaling phase: From 10k subscribers up to 100k and beyond.

But don't worry... it's possible to grow unethically from subscriber #1.

For B2B newsletters, the most common way to do this is to "seed" your starting audience with LinkedIn scraping.

Here's how it works:

1. You buy a browser plugin that can "scrape" the (public) email addresses from your LinkedIn contacts
2. You download the list of email addresses
3. You add them to your newsletter (without consent)

... and boom — you already have hundreds (or thousands) of subscribers before even sending your first edition!

(or, you know, you could just not break the law and ask them if they want to subscribe first)
​

Key Takeaways

• A lot of newsletters are using these unethical/illegal tactics to grow faster
• They do often work — but you shouldn't use them (because illegal/wrong) and because it hurts the entire industry
• Just like steroid use in pro sports, newsletters don't admit to using these tactics publicly. So don't expect that you'll be able to replicate their growth results by copying their "public" growth channels

‍