Newsletter Advertising: $8,521 Spent. Here's What I Learned

To promote our new freemium B2B marketing tool, I invested over $8,000 in advertising through 24 different newsletters. After some mistakes and successes, here's what I learned (and you'll find my results at the end of the post!)

Quick background

My company, Plezi, is launching a new freemium tool called Plezi One. This tool allows you to create lead generation forms and analyze your traffic and conversions. As we’re a French company, this is also an opportunity to find international users.

So we had to find acquisition channels that would allow us to attract users for our new free tool, quickly, internationally and at a low cost.

Why newsletters?

I'm a big newsletter fan. I subscribe to more newsletters than I have hours in my day, and I sometimes (all the time) have trouble reading them all, which doesn't stop me from wanting to discover new ones. So I started newsletter sponsorship already convinced that it could be a relevant channel for our campaign.

Newsletters readers are engaged. The personality of newsletter authors is reflected in its content. And because of their format, newsletter creators have to rely on their community to get known through word-of-mouth. This constraint allows them to build a loyal and committed reader base, who will pay attention to the author's recommendations, sponsored or not.

Newsletters are also a good lever to enter a new market, since we're validated by someone already established on this market. And above all, they are numerous, with communities of very different sizes and niches: it is a golden ground for experimentation.

Advertising in newsletters

There are generally three types of placement in newsletters, from the most expensive to the least:

• Main sponsor: a visual and text in the intro of the newsletter
• Sponsor: a visual and text integrated in the body of the newsletter
• Sponsored Link: a link to your site in a "useful links" section of the newsletter

I mainly targeted Sponsor and Main Sponsor placements.

Newsletter advertising is affordable

You don't need a big budget to start being featured in reputable newsletters. Prices are accessible and it’s not mandatory to make a long-term commitment with the creators (contrary to podcasts where the agreements are generally for several episodes).

In 90% of the cases we met, the creators are transparent about their prices and their statistics (openings, clicks, etc.).

Here are the prices paid on average according to the number of subscribers of the newsletters:

• Less than 1000 subscribers: 240$
• Between 1000 and 5000: 274$
• Between 5000 and 10 000: 253$
• More than 10 000: 807$

Besides the number of subscribers, what influences the prices of the sponsorships is the readers engagement according to the creators. Some of them state directly the number of clicks and conversions estimated by sponsors in their media kit.

Work on your landing page again and again

Probably our biggest mistake when we started: our landing page wasn't quite finalized yet.

It was online and had a form, but our value proposition wasn't very well defined yet (fortunately I was able to get a lot of great feedback from communities like IndieHackers!)

Because newsletter ads are very short (rarely more than 300 characters), the ad must be punchy while the landing page must develop the value proposition. If the page is not ready, your ad alone won’t be enough.

That's also why I recommend taking it one step at a time. Instead of investing in 10 newsletters at once, work with one or two each month. That way you'll have time to see how your ad and landing page perform.

Tailor the message to the audience

While newsletters may share a common theme, they all have a unique twist. For example, for Plezi One, we targeted digital marketing newsletters and then adapted our value proposition based on the specificity of each newsletter.

For instance:

• For a conversion-oriented newsletter, we focused on form creation and automated emails.
• For an SEO-oriented newsletter, we talked about dashboards and reports on site performance and traffic acquisition.

For each ad, I also recommend keeping track of your ad and its performance. This will save you time in your next campaigns.

Leave creative control to the authors

Creators know their audience and what will make them respond better than you do. Some will even offer to write your ad for you. This is really the best option as it guarantees the most natural placement possible.

If this is not offered, don't hesitate to ask the creators to edit your ad and adapt it to their tone. In 100% of the cases, they were happy to do it and we saw better performance compared to when we didn't ask.

Bigger doesn't necessarily mean better

As is often the case in advertising, audience size doesn't necessarily correlate with better performances. That's why, when choosing partners, focus on their average open rate and click-through rate (even better if they are transparent about the click-through rate of their sponsored placements).

The key is to find the sweet spot between engagement and volume. Newsletters with an audience between 5000 and 10000 subscribers have brought us the most leads on average, with the lowest cost per lead. After this first phase of testing, I will focus on these newsletters.

Take the time to qualify and read the newsletters before committing

I encountered a few failures during these tests, with some high cost newsletters that underperformed due to a lack of qualification on my part.

I committed to some newsletters that I didn't subscribe to or read very little. So I came across sponsored placements that missed their audience or were ultimately only slightly promoted by their creator.

Don’t run the same ad twice in the same newsletter!

Finally, some newsletters offer packages of several ads spread over several weeks. If this can be interesting, take the time to write different ads for each broadcast.

Due to lack of time, I ran the same ad twice only three weeks apart in the same newsletter, and this second run only brought us one conversion, vs. 20 the time before. I clearly missed an opportunity - and money - on this one.

Our results

For $8,521 invested, we were able to generate 162 new direct users, or about $52 per user. Here is a breakdown of our performance by subscriber size:

Keep in mind that our campaign was aimed at generating users for a marketing tool, so it's a pretty engaging act from newsletter readers. I think that to promote an ebook or another newsletter, the cost per lead would be much lower.

Overall we are happy with the results, even if I have encountered some failures, I now know what type of newsletters and placements to capitalize on and will focus on that for the future!

Have you tried or will you try sponsoring a newsletter? I'd be curious to hear about your experience or best practices!