How should I sell sponsorships for a newsletter with 50k subs?
The owner of a flight deal newsletter with 50,000+ email subscribers (global, not just US) reached out to me and asked if I’d help sell ads/sponsor slots for his newsletter.
I’ve had success finding sponsors for a 5,500+ subscriber email list of my own, but am having trouble doing the same for him.
So far, I've used two tactics:
-find companies that have advertised in other travel newsletters and ask them if they'd like to sponsor this.
-find DTC/travel-oriented brands and do the same.
That hasn’t been working.
Even with the effect of COVID on ads, I feel like I should be able to sell sponsorships, considering this has over 230k email sends per week and 50k subscribers. I’ve offered CPMs between $1-2 ($1,000 to sponsor for 4 weeks), but still no bites.
So, I'm looking for new ideas.
What would you do to sell sponsor slots for an email list with 50k subs?
Thanks @cohoist.
I think it's pretty normal in this current context @bdawson. We are entering a time where "Resilient Sponsorship" is the only way to survive when you are monetizing your work thanks to sponsorship.
It means that only proposing a visibility is not enough. You need to have a "Co-Creation" approach and clearly communicate about the "core essence" of your project.
What I mean by this is that at this stage, among the poll of potential "sponsors", you would have:
What you want to focus on first is the 🔴Red sponsors and the ⚪White sponsors. Why ? Because they have something to win or better, something to lose at this stage.
❓But why is it a co creation process ?
➡ Because at this stage, they want something pretty clear: get back to market ASAP. And you can help with that.
❓How you can help ?
➡ Build great Newsletters clearly branded around the angles that may interest your sponsors and still create value for your audience. For that you need to learn more about your target sponsors Covid Responses and strategy and try to build an offer around it.
For example:
🏦As a company, I have set up offered around the destination with open borders for this summer
📧As a newsletter, you will gather the best destination with open borders AND offer me a discount with the sponsor of your newsletter.
The same can be done with a lot of different angles (where can I go locally? Where can I go in 6 months? What gears would I need if I go in this specific place?).
👆Where to start?
➡ Start by listing the company you target as ⚫, 🔵, ⚪ or 🔴 sponsors. Do some research on their Covid Response and enter a discussion with them to learn more about their strategy. Then do a bit more than usual and build a sponsorship proposal around the differents angles you defined (you can use https://sponseasy.com#ih for that).
What you have to keep in mind is that more than ever, you need to enter a discussion and focus on the sponsors goals and the value creation for the audience. Each sponsor's dollars spent at this stage is carefully questioned internally.
Hope this help!
Thanks @Jordan971, this sounds like a solid approach to try. Hadn't considered doing co-creation of content but that opens up new possibilities.
Really appreciate you taking the time to share this knowledge.
Sponseasy looks great btw!
In my country (India), airlines have just started operating and I see a lot of messages from them about how safe it is to travel even in the midst of this pandemic. I would look at the dominant nationalities in the newsletter list and try to reach out to airline companies .
Travel is not in vogue right now. But these are still people with enough money to spend. What else would they like spending money on? Home office desks, video conf apps, wifi extenders - you can reach out to all these businesses that are still spending money on ads.
2 good points - thanks.
Plan:
Search for these keywords on google and make a list of ads. Contact those advertising companies directly and say they can save 30% etc if they send emails in your newsletter. Share the above numbers with them.
Really like this idea - going to try it out.
Let me know how it goes.
This is a great question @bdawson. I don't have a huge amount of experience with Newsletter advertising myself, but I know @witsuma has been working on some things in this realm recently.
Thanks! This is a nice post. So the process always starts with demand. What the subscribers' demand and the sponsor's demand. Get something that match you have a winning combination.
People are still buying a lot of travel products. Hotel vouchers and AirBnB are in. Flights are still in the air.
This might be something @Jordan971 could help with.
Hey. I’d be interested in talking about sponsoring. Sent you a message on telegram a couple of days ago.
Hey Paul, just saw this (and your message in Telegram). Messaged you back there.
At this particular time its hard to sell ads across the board. And I would expand your outreach set.
Also there seems to be a big gap in ad buyers. Once you get over $300 for a single ad. Its so hard to sell.
I saw this as I got over 6k subs and increased prices. And spoke with others from 6k to 20k subs.
Interesting that you've seen that threshold play a role. I may try selling in smaller packages and see if that helps.
I heard about the barbell effect (lots low and lots high, very few in the middle)
And then I experienced it.
Everyone's different.
Classifieds seem to work well. Lower cost, just a single line of text or two and a link. You can sell many of those.
I'm moving into that territory now. I use to have 3 different ad types. Top and Middle.
Now I have 1 and selling it for $99. Plus, I have $1k packages. (see... to get around that middle part)
Also, self-promo: I co-founded HypeLetter.com to help anyone who is actually trying to do sales. It helps manage the inbound at the moment.
Interesting - I created a "classifieds" section for my own newsletter (around 5k subs) after seeing it in Dense Discovery. Might suggest it to the newsletter owner of this one.
Is there a way I can learn a bit more about HypeLetter before creating an account?
We started hypeletter to do sales for newsletters. Realized the challenges there and thought it better to empower writers to sell their own ads. We made adman, an embeddable sales page. It makes it super easy to sell any type of ad, and manage the process pre/post sale.
Gumroad for selling ads.
And our pricing is similar to gumroad too. Free to use. Only take a fee on ads sold.
We are actively working hand in hand with early users. Just got the first few newsletters selling in the past couple weeks.
More can be seen here https://adman.hypeletter.com
Thanks Andrew, I'll see if the owner of this newsletter is interested in using this. Definitely see the need for products around helping people with selling sponsorships.
What's the adman take rate?
Right now total 12% includes stripe fee.
Very similar to Gumroad, 8% plus stripe fee.