How much to charge for newsletter advertising?
I am planning to role out opportunities for sponsors and advertisers to display in our B2B dashboard and weekly email newsletters to my platform's membership. How do others doing a similar thing calculate the appropriate fees to charge advertisers?
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Hi Steve,
disclaimer: I work at Paved .com
when I ran a newsletter, pretty much B2B advertisers, I could charge roughly 5 cents per sub, or 20 cents per open. Now that's a good starting figure. raise and lower as you see fit. For example, I gave 20% discount to any advertisers who bought more than 1 ad spot at a time.
I would raise the price often because I was also growing. If you're not growing the subscriber count then lowering the price might work for repeat advertisers. if your list is growing and the open rates go down, you can recalibrate from cost per sub to cost per open. and vice versa.
When I was running my newsletter, it was not common for marketplaces and networks. I'm happy to help you out talking over prices on a call. no pressure to join but also we're non exclusive at Paved so you can join the marketplace and also sell your own ads direct to advertisers who you get on your own.
I can also link to a paved blog post about pricing that has a slightly different take, if you are so inclined. Just the above is from my own perspective selling ads on my own. On Paved we have a few different options, can do CPC or CPM.
Thanks Andrew, really useful and I will definitely re-visit once I start looking more seriously at ads. For now I've switched on my crowdfunding campaign at www.venture.cards, so it's all go on that! 😊 Steve
I think it varies a lot Steve depending on what your audience is worth to the target advertiser. Is the advertiser the startup?
The advertiser would be various businesses who wish to target the startups. it does seem quite hard to figure a starting number to negotiate from.
I've never been in the position of charging for the advertisement, but I have been in a position of paying for the advertisement. Often it's bundled with some other form of advertisement, which in my experiences I thought in hindsight was because they knew that the results for the advertiser weren't great.
If it's an established publisher with a five figure, niche audience, I've been quoted between £1-2k. For example, https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/ - was £2k for daily newsletter, one week.
But it doesn't really matter what other people charge I don't think. What matters is, what is the placement worth to your advertiser.
The buyer is going to ask the question, what value does this ad have for me? They'll want your numbers (how many people will be on the dash/newsletter), open rates, CTR, etc.
In the example of an architect, that's a high value individual. It's B2B with an audience that specifies £millions of materials each year, so plenty of advertisers want to reach them and one conversion is worth a lot. So, the audience size could be relatively small, provided open rates and CTRs are decent.
Meanwhile, if your advertiser is a SaaS selling $15mthly product, they'll want to 10,000s of subscribers to make it worth their while, I would have thought.
I think when Harry Dry got to around 10,000 subscribers he had 2 sponsors and was getting $2,500 MRR - https://www.indiehackers.com/product/marketing-examples/reached-2-500-mrr--LuWrkBhDB0K9pIPlAoo
really helpful, thank you 😊