Latest / The Newsletter Podcast with Fexingo: Substack, Beehiiv, and Email Newsletter Business / How Newsletter Writers Use Dynamic Content to Boost Engagement
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a statistic that's been bouncing around my head for the past few weeks: a B2B SaaS newsletter segmented its free subscribers by job role — just three buckets, manager, individual contributor, executive — and saw a 27 percent higher click-through rate on their call to action. And paid conversions jumped 40 percent. Luna: Forty percent from just three segments? That seems almost too clean. Was the content different in each version? Lucas: It was. The dynamic part was a single paragraph near the bottom of the newsletter. For managers, it highlighted how the tool saved their team time; for individual contributors, it emphasized workflow automation; for execs, it focused on ROI and reporting. The rest of the email was identical. Luna: So the lift came entirely from that one personalized paragraph. That's actually pretty low-lift. Lucas: Exactly. And that's what I want to get into today — how newsletter writers can use dynamic content without rebuilding their entire workflow. You don't need a full CRM or a marketing automation platform. Substack has custom fields. Beehiiv lets you create dynamic content blocks based on tags. Even a simple Mailchimp list can do conditional content with merge tags. Luna: Right, but the hard part is collecting that data in the first place. How do you segment people on a free newsletter list without asking for too much upfront? Lucas: That's the key question. Most writers make the mistake of asking for everything during signup — job title, company size, industry — and then five percent of visitors actually subscribe. The smarter approach is to start with one piece of data: maybe just a preference question. 'What's your main goal: save time, increase revenue, or learn something new?' You can collect that via a welcome survey or a simple link in your first email. Luna: And then use that single answer to trigger a dynamic subject line or a content block. I've seen newsletters that change the lead image based on the reader's industry. It feels like magic, but it's just a conditional tag. Lucas: Yeah. And the tools are getting easier. Beehiiv recently added native support for dynamic content blocks where you can write a default version and then override it for specific segments. Substack has custom field variables you can drop into any email. The technical barrier is almost zero. Luna: So let's say I'm a writer with a 10,000-subscriber list. Where should I start? Should I segment the whole list or just target a small test group? Lucas: Start small. Pick one segment that you already have data on — maybe people who clicked on a specific link in the past month. Then write a version of your next newsletter that changes the call to action for that segment. Send version A to the segment, version B to everyone else. Measure click-through rate. You'll know within a week if dynamic content is worth the extra effort for your audience. Luna: That's a clean test. What about writers who don't have any data yet? They're starting from zero. Lucas: They can start even simpler: use a dynamic subject line based on the time of day the subscriber opened the previous email. Or use location if you have it. One writer I know uses 'Good morning, ' based on IP. It's a tiny personalization, but it increased open rates by eight percent. Luna: Eight percent is significant. And it's essentially free if your email provider supports dynamic fields. Lucas: It is. And that's the thing — the biggest wins often come from the simplest changes. You don't need to build a machine learning model. You just need to ask yourself: 'What's the one thing I know about my reader right now, and how can I reflect it in this email?' Luna: So if today's episode gave you one idea you're planning to test, honestly, that's exactly the kind of thing that makes this show worth doing. If it was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, listener support is what keeps this ad-free and focused on tactics that actually work. No pressure at all, but if you've ever wondered how to help the show, that's the simplest way. Luna: And we really do read every message that comes through there. It helps us decide what to cover next. Lucas: Alright, back to dynamic content. One pitfall I see a lot is over-segmentation. Writers create ten different versions and then each segment only gets fifty emails. The sample size is too small to draw any conclusions. Luna: So you need at least a few hundred subscribers per segment to get statistically significant results? Lucas: At least. I'd say a minimum of 300 per segment for a conversion metric. For click-through, you can get away with a hundred or so. But the real danger is that you spend three hours writing variations and then the test is inconclusive. Better to start with two segments: one personalized, one control. Run it for a month, see what happens. Luna: What about automation? Can you set up dynamic sequences based on behavior? Like, if someone clicks a link about pricing, they get a different follow-up email? Lucas: Absolutely. That's the next level. You can build a simple behavior-based automation: subscriber opens email, clicks on a specific link, gets tagged, then receives a sequence tailored to that interest. Beehiiv and ConvertKit both support this natively. I've seen a newsletter go from a 2 percent paid conversion rate to 5 percent just by adding a three-email follow-up sequence triggered by a click. Luna: That's a one-hundred-fifty percent increase. Are there any particular types of newsletters that benefit most from dynamic content? Lucas: In my observation, educational and B2B newsletters see the biggest lift because their audiences have distinct job roles or knowledge levels. A finance newsletter that treats 'retail investor' and 'institutional investor' the same way is missing a huge opportunity. But even a lifestyle newsletter can segment by interest: you read three cooking posts, you get more recipe content. Luna: So the principle is: meet the reader where they are, not where you wish they were. Lucas: Exactly. And the technology is finally easy enough that any writer can do it. The only real cost is the thinking time upfront. But once you set it up, it runs on autopilot. Luna: What about AI? Are we seeing writers use machine learning to generate dynamic content on the fly? Lucas: A few early adopters. I know of a Substack writer who uses GPT to generate alternate versions of their opening paragraph based on the reader's past engagement. But it's still early. The risk is losing your voice. I'd recommend sticking with human-written dynamic blocks for now and only using AI to suggest variations you then tweak. Luna: That makes sense. The personalization still needs to feel like the writer, not a bot. Lucas: Right. And that brings me to one final thought: the best dynamic content doesn't scream 'look, I personalized this.' It just feels relevant. The reader should think, 'huh, this exactly addresses my situation.' That's the goal. Luna: I think that's a great place to leave it. If you want to share your own experiments with dynamic content, we'd love to hear about them. Lucas: Yeah, drop us a note. And for those who want to take the next step, start with one segment, one dynamic block, and one metric. That's all you need to get going.