How newsletter sponsorships can supercharge your marketing plan

Advertising has changed a lot over the years. Gone are the days of promoting your business with a few commercials or well-placed billboards. Now, with the rise in digital advertising, it’s getting harder than ever to compete with high-budget brands.

That’s why many advertisers are turning to newsletter sponsorship campaigns to stand out from competitors. With newsletter sponsorships, you can reach your audience directly in the inbox, bypassing ad blockers and achieving higher engagement.

What is a newsletter sponsorship?

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

Benefits of running a newsletter sponsorship

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

Reach audiences directly

When you send out an email newsletter, you’re dropping it straight into subscribers’ inboxes. That’s why, unlike with social media posts, readers can’t just scroll past them. Instead, they need to take action to handle their messages as they come in. According to a survey by Adobe, this happens frequently, with consumers spending approximately five hours a day in their personal and work emails combined.

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

Leverage built-in targeting

Many newsletters center on specific interests or identities. For instance, you can find plenty of publications about niche topics like freelance writing or single parenthood. As such, companies can tap into existing communities by launching a newsletter sponsorship. With that, advertisers can reach their target audience without using third-party cookies. As the industry shifts toward an emphasis on privacy, this will become an increasingly valuable asset.

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

Connect with engaged audiences

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

Launching a newsletter sponsorship campaign: Five must-know tips

1. Targeting your audience

Choosing a partner is one of the most pivotal decisions in launching a newsletter sponsorship. To find the right fit, start by looking for newsletters in your industry. For instance, if you run a high-end clothing brand, search for luxury or fashion newsletters. From there, you can also request readership demographics from the publisher to check if they align with your target audience.

2. Calculating the right price

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

The problem with CPM is that it only considers email list size while neglecting other factors like engagement. To get a better idea of how your sponsorship will perform, we recommend calculating the CPC, or cost per click. For that, you can ask the publisher for their average sponsorship clicks from past campaigns, then divide that number by the cost of the sponsorship.

3. Designing creative 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, therefore attracting more attention from viewers. In fact, an eye-tracking study found that participants looked at native ads more frequently than display ads. With this in mind, try to build a placement that sells your brand while also fitting into the overall design of the newsletter.

4. Tracking performance

In order to know whether your newsletter sponsorship is working for you, you’ll need to track your results. Talk to the publisher beforehand to discuss the data you want reported back after the campaign, such as clicks and open rates. You can also track conversions on your own by inserting a tracking pixel onto your website.

5. Scaling your campaign

Newsletter list size can vary widely, from hundreds to millions of subscribers. Oftentimes, running a single newsletter sponsorship in a niche publication won’t get you in front of a big enough audience.

However, try to refrain from partnering with a more generalist newsletter purely because of its size. Instead, test out more newsletters in your niche until you find enough high-performing partners to fill your target reach.

Join a marketplace

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

• The Paved Marketplace: an exclusive marketplace of top newsletters across every niche, from business to lifestyle
• The Paved Ad Network: an easy-to-use tool where you can run programmatic native ads to targeted audiences based on specifications including location, job title, interests and more
• A one-stop communication tool that allows you to coordinate with several publishers in one place
• Automatic performance tracking on every campaign you run.