Return to All Resources Marketer of the Moment: Lainna Fader, Forbes 7 Minute Read Clients Recommended for you 3 things keeping brand executives up at night in 2025 5 unexpected ways tariffs are affecting retailers (and 10 actions you can take next week) Lessons from Shoptalk: How AI is redefining the retail marketing funnel CordialSend a better message. Marketer of the Moment: Lainna Fader, Forbes Introducing Marketer of the Moment, where you’ll meet the innovators redefining what’s possible in marketing. Each month, we’ll sit down with a standout marketer to discuss their professional journey, strategies that have driven their success, and insights they’ve gained along the way. For our first installment, we’re thrilled to introduce Lainna Fader, Director of Consumer Revenue & Growth, Newsletters at Forbes. Lainna’s expertise in audience development has been instrumental in growing Forbes’ newsletter portfolio while driving substantial revenue. In her role, she bridges editorial, product, marketing, and revenue teams to create newsletters that resonate with readers and deliver value to advertisers. Let’s dive into our conversation with Lainna: How has your role at Forbes evolved? I have been much more involved with the revenue-driving aspect of the newsletter business. Previously I was primarily responsible for growing our editorial newsletter portfolio, but now my role also includes the monetization of that portfolio. I provide audience insights and data to tell the story about who our readers are and how influential they are, which has helped our revenue teams build a big business around newsletters. I have enjoyed working across these different teams—editorial, product, revenue, marketing—to collaborate on audience growth and monetization. What’s your approach to managing cross-team collaboration? I have spent my career in bridge roles, connecting editorial, product, and marketing for audience growth. I came into the role with a lot of experience and comfort working cross-functionally, trying to understand the goals and needs of each team, and having strong project management skills. I’m particularly lucky to have a really strong relationship with our editorial team, who are ultimately responsible for our success in the newsletter space. Our senior editor for newsletters just happened to start on the same day as me, so we were paired up from the start, and we’ve been in lockstep ever since. It’s a perfect partnership as we collaborate on building great new email-based products that our readers love. How do data insights power your revenue strategy? We’ve built a very large and rapidly growing newsletter business because we’ve been able to demonstrate that our newsletter readers are a valuable audience. We’ve done a lot of work to understand the habits and interests of our most loyal readers. In addition to being incredibly loyal, we’ve learned that they are affluent, and that’s been really attractive to advertisers. What types of advertisers appear in your newsletters and how do you target them? We have a large number of very high-level advertisers who’ve been working with us to sponsor editorial newsletters. But we also have a business where we can send custom, dedicated emails on behalf of a sponsor, and that’s where audience targeting becomes really important. For targeting sponsored ads in our newsletters, we rely on geo-targeting that Cordial has helped unlock for us. For the custom, dedicated emails, we’re able to identify very specific audience segments that an advertiser wants to reach because Cordial has such sophisticated targeting capabilities. What newsletter strategy has been most transformative since implementing Cordial? In addition to the targeting capabilities, one of the most important things for us has been Cordial’s automation capabilities. We use automations for triggered messages based on reader behavior for things like onboarding and re-engagement flows. We also use automation to power our newsletter courses, which are time-boxed pop-up newsletters. Having sophisticated targeting and automation capabilities has been really important for our success. Q: What’s your go-to productivity hack? I think the key is to just be extremely organized. I basically live in Google Docs. I have docs and spreadsheets for pretty much everything from process documentation to short-term to-do lists to longer-term roadmaps. I’ve also set up a lot of automated reporting that I rely on for the big picture snapshot of all of our products, as well as deeper dives into individual newsletters, acquisition sources, and revenue. So just being incredibly organized, detail-oriented, and setting up a lot of automation. How often does your team iterate and test to optimize? We have a weekly meeting with all of our stakeholders across departments, and we do a lot of reporting on results, but also that’s where we discuss collaborative efforts to grow and try new things. That’s the primary brainstorming session, but we’re constantly discussing what the data is telling us, what we should try based on it, and then closing the loop, reporting back on how successful those efforts are. What newsletter trends are you excited about for this year? We’re very interested in personalization. I know a lot of publishers are playing in that space right now, and Cordial just introduced some tools to make that possible for us. I want to be able to show readers more of what they’ve already signaled that they’re interested in, but also surface some of our best stories that they may not know they’re interested in yet, stories that readers find valuable and tend to drive them to become members. Personalization is also really important for how we market our memberships to our newsletter readers. We’re constantly testing and iterating on the messages that we send to readers about our membership program. We have dynamic blocks that we use in our newsletters based on different targeted segments. So I think dynamic content in general is going to be increasingly more important for us. How do you collect feedback from your newsletter readers? We have done a number of surveys. We’ve done general satisfaction surveys. We’ve also done surveys related to specific editorial strategies that we want feedback on. We’re trying to implement surveys at a more regular cadence. We get the feedback in terms of data for what people are clicking on and how they behave, but getting the more personal feedback, the open-ended feedback, is really important for helping us develop new ideas for things to test and things that we need to change based on reader preferences. We have the data, but we don’t always know the intent behind it, and so surveying our readers regularly is really important. What’s the most powerful metric for newsletter engagement? It’s tricky, because as I’m sure you know, open rates and click-through rates have become less reliable over time. So we look at a number of metrics to see directionally how engaged our audience is. We do look at traditional metrics like open rates and click-through rates, but we also look at conversion to memberships, traffic driven to the site, feedback we’re getting from readers. We also think about retention a lot. So there isn’t a specific North Star metric, but we focus on loyalty as the key umbrella metric. What would you be doing if you weren’t in media and publishing? I really love art and design. I think it would be really cool to do similar audience development work in the art world. I grew up taking art classes. Whenever I travel, I try to go to museums in that city. I’m really passionate about interior design, and I try to collect art from independent artists when I can. So I think my two passions are generally media and publishing and art. But if I were to go in a totally different direction outside of audience development, I would want to work with animal shelters and rescues to find homes for dogs. I really love dogs. I have two, and I’ve also been volunteering at a local animal shelter, so that’s been incredibly rewarding. We hope you enjoyed this first installment of our Marketer of the Moment series featuring Lainna Fader. Stay tuned for next month’s spotlight, and if you’re interested in learning more about how Cordial can help elevate your personalization strategy, contact us today. Our best content to your inbox, every month Picked For You Article Modernizing your messaging programs (without the overwhelm) You don’t need to send more messages. 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