How Newsletter Sponsorship Can Boost Your Marketing Plan

Advertising has changed a lot over the years. Gone are the days of promoting your business with a few well-placed advertisements or billboards. Today, with the rise of digital advertising, it is becoming harder than ever to compete with big budget brands.

This is why many advertisers are turning to newsletter sponsorship campaigns to stand out from their competition. With newsletter sponsorships, you can reach your audience directly in the inbox, bypassing ad blockers and getting higher engagement.

What is newsletter sponsorship?

A newsletter sponsorship is paid advertising in an email newsletter. Compared to an online or social media ad, a newsletter sponsorship tends to be more natively integrated into the reader’s experience. In fact, some publishers will even tailor their organic content to each referral partner. However, sponsorship formats can vary widely depending on the publication.

Benefits of Managing a Newsletter Sponsorship

Incorporating newsletter sponsorships into your advertising strategy is essential to achieving your marketing goals. By providing access to an engaged subscriber base, running a newsletter sponsorship gives you a leg up on the competition in several ways.

Reach the public directly

When you send an email newsletter, you deliver it directly to subscribers’ inboxes. That’s why, unlike social media posts, readers can’t just skim through them. Instead, they must take steps to manage their messages as they arrive. According to an Adobe survey, this happens frequently, with consumers spending around five hours a day in personal and work email combined.

Another benefit of running a newsletter sponsorship is that you don’t have to worry about ad blockers intercepting your message. Since your location appears in the body of the publisher’s email, it is integrated into the newsletter as content. And as long as you associate yourself with a trusted publication, spam filters shouldn’t be a problem either.

Take advantage of built-in targeting

Many newsletters focus on specific interests or identities. For example, you can find plenty of posts on niche topics like freelance writing or single parenting. Thus, businesses can tap into existing communities by initiating newsletter sponsorship. Thus, advertisers can reach their target audience without using third-party cookies. As the industry emphasizes privacy, this will become an increasingly valuable asset.

For marketers not quite ready to give up demographic targeting, programmatic email advertising offers a close alternative to traditional newsletter sponsorship. With platforms like Paved Ad Network, advertisers can target a specific audience to run their sponsorship across multiple newsletters at once. This allows them to leverage the direct reach of email while achieving the same level of targeting as other digital channels.

Connect with engaged audiences

Think about all the messages you receive in your inbox, from business correspondence to shipping confirmations. Unlike entertainment-focused platforms like social media, emails often require your full attention. Likewise, reading a newsletter involves consuming valuable informational content. Once a reader stumbles across your newsletter sponsorship, they’re already in the right frame of mind to pay attention.

Launching a newsletter sponsorship campaign: 5 essential tips

1. Targeting your audience

Choosing a partner is one of the most crucial decisions in starting a newsletter sponsorship. To find the right person, start by researching newsletters in your industry. For example, if you run a high-end clothing brand, look for luxury or fashion newsletters. From there, you can also ask the publisher for readership demographics to check if they match your target audience.

2. Calculate the right price

Newsletter sponsorship pricing is a bit different than advertising pricing for PPC or social media ads. Instead of charging per click or per impression, newsletter referral rates are usually based on CPM or cost per thousand subscribers.

The problem with CPM is that it only considers email list size while neglecting other factors such as engagement. To get a better idea of ​​your referral’s performance, we recommend calculating CPC, or cost per click. You can do this by asking the publisher for their average referral clicks from previous campaigns and then dividing that number by the referral cost.

3. Designing a creation that works

When it comes to designing your newsletter sponsorship, the more native the better. Marketers often find that native ads are less disruptive to the user experience, thereby attracting more viewers’ attention. In fact, an eye-tracking study found that participants viewed native ads more frequently than display ads. With that in mind, try to create a placement that sells your brand while fitting into the overall design of the newsletter.

4. Performance Tracking

In order to know if your newsletter sponsorship is working for you, you will need to track your results. Speak with the publisher beforehand to discuss what data you want after the campaign, such as clicks and open rates. You can also track conversions yourself by inserting a tracking pixel on your website.

5. Scale your campaign

The size of the newsletter list can vary greatly, ranging from hundreds to millions of subscribers. Often, running just one newsletter sponsorship in a niche publication won’t get you in front of a big enough audience.

However, try to refrain from associating yourself with a more general newsletter just because of its size. Instead, test more newsletters in your niche until you find enough successful partners to reach your target.

Join a marketplace

Ready to launch your first newsletter sponsorship? Register as an advertiser with Paved to access a set of exclusive features that will help you through the process:

• The cobblestone market: an exclusive marketplace of the best newsletters in every niche, from business to lifestyle
• The paved ad network: an easy to use tool where you can deliver programmatic native ads to targeted audiences based on specifications such as location, job title, interests, etc.
• A unique communication tool that allows you to coordinate with multiple publishers in one place
• Automatic performance tracking on every campaign you run.