Cross-promote to grow. But do it wrong and you'll hurt your deliverability.

Hey, it's Pavel.

Cross-promotions are one of the oldest growth tactics in the newsletter playbook. Two creators, two audiences, two plugs. You get their readers, they get yours. When it works, it's as close to free subscriber acquisition as this game gets.

When it doesn't work, you end up with a list full of people who don't open your emails. And Gmail notices that.

This issue is about the part most people skip: vetting. Specifically, how to evaluate a potential cross-promo partner before you agree to one, and why getting that wrong is a deliverability problem, not just a growth problem.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more

Every subscriber who joins your list through a cross-promo and then never opens your emails is a signal to Gmail and Outlook that your content isn't worth showing. Inbox providers track engagement at the list level. A flood of new subscribers with zero opens, no clicks, and eventual spam complaints tells the algorithm something is wrong — even if your content is exactly the same as it was the week before.

The specific risk is list quality dilution. You might have 2,000 highly engaged subscribers generating strong engagement signals. You run a cross-promo with a mismatched newsletter and add 400 people who never open anything. Your open rate drops, your click rate drops, and your sender reputation takes a hit before any of those new subscribers have had a chance to prove themselves.

This is why the question isn't just "does this creator have an audience I want?" It's "is their audience going to engage with my emails?"

You can't see another newsletter's internal metrics, but you can learn a lot from what's public.

Niche alignment, not just size. A newsletter about freelancing with 35,000 subscribers is not necessarily a good partner for a deliverability newsletter. A newsletter about email marketing with 5,000 subscribers probably is. Audience size is the vanity metric of cross-promos. Niche overlap is what drives actual engagement from the subscribers you gain.

Their content quality signals their audience quality. Read their last five issues. Are they writing for an audience that takes email seriously? Do their readers seem like the kind of people who would also want your content? If you can't genuinely say yes, the cross-promo won't produce engaged subscribers — it'll produce warm bodies that drag your metrics down.

Ask about their engagement, don't just guess. When you reach out, you can ask directly. Most serious newsletter operators are willing to share a rough open rate or click rate range. If someone won't tell you anything about their list health, that's worth noting.

Check if they have a meaningful unsubscribe rate pattern. High unsubscribes after promos often mean the newsletter's existing audience doesn't trust or act on recommendations. Those are the people who will sign up for your newsletter and immediately go cold.

That last one matters more than any metric. If you're recommending something purely because it benefits you, your readers will sense it. And the subscribers you gain from a hollow recommendation will treat your emails the same way.

Within the first two to four weeks after a cross-promo, you want to see whether the new subscribers actually engage. Look at opens and clicks segmented to just the cohort that joined through the promo. If they're opening at or near your list average, the partner was a good fit. If they're sitting well below it, you now have a disengagement problem to manage before it compounds.

The action to take is the same one you'd take with any cold segment: send them a short re-engagement sequence, give them a clear reason to stay, and suppress the ones who don't respond before they pull your reputation down further.

Cross-promos are worth doing. When the niche overlap is real and both creators have genuinely engaged lists, they're one of the most efficient growth levers available — and unlike paid acquisition, the subscribers you gain tend to be self-selected people who actually read newsletters.

The mistake is treating a cross-promo as a numbers game. Two thousand new subscribers who never open anything is worse for your deliverability than two hundred who do. Gmail doesn't care how many people are on your list. It cares what those people do when your emails arrive.

Vet the partner. Track the cohort. Suppress quickly if engagement doesn't show up. That's the full loop.

What I'm actually recommending right now

Since this issue is about cross-promos and vetting partners, it's worth being transparent about who I'm currently recommending to Send Point subscribers — and why each one passed my own checklist.

All About Email — Exactly what the name says. Solid, practical email content that overlaps cleanly with what Send Point covers. If you're reading this newsletter, you'll find value there too.

Email Advice in Your Inbox — Another email-focused newsletter. The niche alignment is obvious, which is precisely why it's on the list.

Get Shit Done Newsletter — A bit broader, but the audience is operators and creators who take their work seriously. That's the same person who cares about whether their emails land in the inbox.

All three are newsletters I'd read myself. That's the bar. If I wouldn't recommend it to a friend, it doesn't go in the recommendations slot because a bad recommendation doesn't just waste a subscriber's time, it erodes the trust that makes any cross-promo work in the first place.