Kathleen Booth | Tradeswell
This week I’m changing things up and don’t have a guest. Instead, I thought I would talk about something I’ve been working on and am particularly excited about — newsletter advertising.
Beginning in 2018, when I was at IMPACT and worked with the team there to launch The Latest newsletter, I’ve seen the potential of newsletter advertising to reach new audiences. Since the, I’ve used this strategy at a variety of early stage startups to test messaging and drive new leads.
In this episode, I’m sharing exactly how I’m using newsletter advertising, the different types of ads and how they perform, along with what you can expect to spend.
Resources from this episode:
Kathleen (00:03):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week I have a little bit of a different kind of an episode. And my guest is going to be me. No, I'm not gonna interview myself, but I am gonna share some things that I've been working on on lately. And some things that I am excited about specifically focused around newsletter sponsorship. So this is something that I've been experimenting with for a few years now. And as many of you may or may not know, I am, I've worked for the last three years as the head of marketing in a series of different early stage mostly B2B technology startups generally in the Series A stage if they're venture backed. And so I don't have the hugest budgets in the world, but also the Series A stage is a time when you're learning.
Kathleen (01:07):
There isn't a proven marketing funnel in place and there isn't well crafted messaging. Very often there hasn't been a marketing team before I join. And so that time from Series A to series B is a time of experimentation and nailing product market fit and really refining messaging and identifying channels that are gonna work well. And that are gonna scale well at a reasonable cost of customer acquisition. And so it's a time of a lot of experimentation. And one of the things that I've learned through many experiments is a really effective way of not only refining messaging, but actually getting some nice early results in marketing is through sponsoring newsletters. And when I first looked into this it was really inspired by my time at impact, which is a few years ago, back in 2017 to 2019, where we built an email newsletter called The Latest that we grew to a subscriber list of more than 30,000 people.
Kathleen (02:17):
And one of our goals there was to monetize our marketing. We were very much inspired by the books written by Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute, Killing Marketing and Content Inc, where he talked about the fact that marketing doesn't need to be a cost center. It can actually be a profit center and, you know, if you're successful enough in building an audience, you can monetize that audience. And so we built The Latest and it was an awesome newsletter written by the, the amazing Liz Murphy. If you haven't ever read her stuff, you should definitely check her out. She's since moved on, but she is a prolific content creator herself now has her own newsletter. And we grew the latest. We were able to then take sponsorship and, and people paid us to mention their content in the newsletter to promote things they wanted to promote anyway.
Kathleen (03:07):
So I did that for two years. And then when I went in-house, I, I recognized the value of newsletter sponsorship, but you know, a lot of people, when they think about newsletter sponsorship, they think about bigger newsletters. Like the ones we all read. I, you know, I'm a big fan of Morning Brew and The Hustle and Axios, and absolutely those are all great options for sponsorship, but they tend to be more expensive. And newsletter sponsorship generally is priced based on the number of readers. And usually the metrics you wanna look at when considering newsletter sponsorship are things like the, the subscriber list, the open rate, the click through rate, et cetera. So those, those options tend to be more expensive, but they're perfectly viable options. And I should back up and say that when it comes to newsletter sponsorship, there's a couple of different formats for it.
Kathleen (04:01):
There's what I would call the takeover format, where, you know, you get your newsletter and right at the very top it's you know, like morning brew newsletter brought to you by XYZ brand and your logos right at the top. And you're very prominently placed. And then, and those are really good for brand over awareness place. And then there is native content placements within the newsletter, and generally there's different levels of those. So a lot of the newsletters I've sponsored will have like a premier placement where it's close to the top of the newsletter. You have a lot of real estate where you might have an image, but you can also have like, you know, up to a paragraph of text of, well as a call to action. And then there are smaller native placements in some of these newsletters where it could be as short as a bullet point could be closer to the bottom in the newsletter.
Kathleen (04:49):
And so obviously pricing will vary depending upon your placement and the visibility of it and the amount of content. So you have a lot of options. And then you also have options where certain newsletters will ask you to provide the content, whether that's images or copy. And others will say, you can provide lots of talking points, but we are gonna write it. The difference between those that I think is significant is, you know, people tend to, in a lot of cases, the people who follow newsletters and, and are the most avid subscribers because they feel some kind of a connection to that newsletter. And very often that connection has to do with the voice or the tone of the person who writes the newsletter and how they tend to write. And so, you know, it's important for the creator to make sure that any content that appears in their newsletter feels like it belongs there and that there's no jarring kind of you know, ad that doesn't, that doesn't go with everything else.
Kathleen (05:49):
But it's also to your benefit, honestly, as an advertiser for your content to feel like it goes there and to match the voice and tone of the author, because that the reason people are subscribing in the first place is because they're drawn to that. Right? So these are all, some of the things that I keep in mind when I look at newsletter sponsorship. Now I talked in the beginning about how there are the bigger newsletters that you can sponsor. And if you have the budget, you know, they can cost anywhere from 10, 15, to sometimes $30,000 to sponsor, just because of the audience size, where I've really gotten excited, particularly given my smaller budgets and the stage of company I'm at is the smaller newsletters. And it's not just because I can't afford the big ones. It's because if you are gonna of money on a large newsletter sponsorship, you better have your messaging really buttoned up.
Kathleen (06:45):
Because you're putting a lot of money in, and you've only in, you know, in some cases you might only have one shot. So I like to go for the smaller newsletters. And in some cases, these are, you know, smaller newsletters put out by publishers, but actually what I'm getting more and more excited about these days is smaller newsletters put out by individual creators. And this is reflective of a larger trend that's happening in this world anyway. And so some of you may have heard of Substack, which is a great platform that a lot of creators use to put out their newsletters and to monetize them. You know, and, and Substack is, is a fascinating platform. You should definitely, I think, browse through it and see what's out there. But what I found is that there's an increasing number of individual subject matter experts or operators, people inside companies who are creating these newsletters to share what they're learning.
Kathleen (07:47):
And some of them, it's building in public, you know, like people who run paid ads for e-commerce brands who have newsletters about what they're learning through their paid ads experiment. Other people who are in my case, like conversion rate, optimization experts. These are the types of newsletters I've been looking at other people who are in specific industries and writing about like trends in those industries. So there's a million different types of Substacks and not all of them accept sponsorship or advertising. So that's number one, you have to, if you're interested in doing these kind of paid placements, you need to check out the newsletter first, get a sense for the, the, what they're writing about the content, as well as the author. And then look to see if they've ever taken a paid placement before now, just because they've never accepted paid placement doesn't mean they wouldn't do it so often to, I will reach out directly to the author of a newsletter that I think has a really good fit with the interest areas of my audience.
Kathleen (08:48):
And if there's no advertising, I'll say, Hey, I love your newsletter. Here's why just curious if you've ever taken advertising or sponsorship. And sometimes they say, you know, I've been thinking about it and I would love to let's talk other times they say, I'm not doing it right now. So it's worth a shot. If you find one you love other times, you'll see that they do take advertising and sponsorship. In which case, you know, you can just reach out to them directly and ask for pricing. Why go with the smaller Substacks? I wanna break this down a little bit, cuz it's, I, I, I get really excited about this and I've seen some phenomenal results. There are a couple of reasons. Let me start with messaging. If you've never done newsletter advertising before, or if you feel like you don't have, or you haven't really nailed the messaging for whatever it is, you're marketing, the smaller sponsorships are phenomenal for getting to a point where you feel more confident.
Kathleen (09:50):
So what I mean by that is this, I'll give you an example. The company I'm at right now, Tradeswell, I joined three months ago and we're really still in the process of figuring out exactly how we wanna message what we do. And I've done some website message testing on the hero the hero module of my website homepage, but I wanted to start getting the word out more. I found a series of very small Substack newsletters from creators who are really well known in the e-commerce space, which is the audience that we're targeting and that I would call them. I wouldn't say really well known. I'd call them up and coming influencers or very niche influencers who are focused on very tiny topics with an e-commerce and I'm doing advertising with them. And I will buy a package that gets me multiple issues of their newsletter.
Kathleen (10:45):
And generally that's either two or four a month. So let's say a half a month or a month if they're weekly newsletters. And I usually would like to buy a type of sponsorship that allows me to include a couple of sentences up to a paragraph of copy. And then what I do is I approach it like a message test. So I will give them copy for the first newsletter and I'll see how it goes. And I always ask them to look through it and say, Hey, you know, you know your audience better than anybody check to see if you think that this is gonna resonate. I, and if they don't, I'll adjust it. But I, I work with the creator. I get to a point where I'm pretty happy with the messaging and we run it and then we see what happens. And if we don't get good results, then I adjust the copy for the second one and so on.
Kathleen (11:33):
And so on until I land on something that seems to resonate. And then the beauty of this is what I can do is take that messaging and apply it in other places. I can test it in my paid ads across social, across, you know, Google, I can test it on my website. I can use it in my emails. So it's a very effective way of quickly figuring out what messaging is gonna resonate. That is that's number one. And, and the smaller Substacks to just give you a sense of pricing. I have one newsletter that I'm sponsoring that is $250 per issue to sponsor total, no brainer. It's a list of probably 5,000 recipients that are, it's very niche it's in the conversion rate optimization space. So it's very focused. I know exactly the type of person that's getting my ad and the price is amazingly low.
Kathleen (12:37):
And what's great about some of these niche Substacks, especially if they're really focused in their topic area is that they tend to have really high open rates. So like this particular one that I'm talking about 5,000 recipients on the list and generally has a 40% plus open rate and a very high click through rate. So, you know, that's the equivalent of sponsoring a 20,000 member recipient list newsletter. I think I just garbled that that has a, you know, a much lower open and click through rate. So the metrics are important and the engagement of the audience is important. And again, this is one of the reasons I love Substacks is that because they're put out by people and not brands, they do tend to have stronger performance and better metrics. They tend to have higher open and click through rates and the more niche, the topic area, the more so that's true in my experience, so that's one example, message testing, super effective, great way to do it.
Kathleen (13:42):
The, the other thing I would say is, is for conversions, right? Like one of my goals is to, is to get people, to request free trials of our software. And in this case you can, you have two choices. You can either put out an ad, that's very bottom of the funnel in a newsletter, like, Hey, do a demo of our software. Or you can put out something that's a little bit more middle or top funnel, which is promotion of a piece of content or a case study or something. I've tested both and definitely the middle and top of funnel content gets more clickthroughs and conversions in my experience. You know, but if you're gonna go that route, you need to have some marketing in place. That's going to pull those people further down funnel and get them eventually to that free trial or that demo or whatever that thing is that you're ultimately looking for them to do.
Kathleen (14:33):
So I've tended to actually shy from the top of funnel and middle of funnel stuff, because even though it performs better, at least at first glance, I find it. I don't find that nurturing works all that well. So, you know, if you look at the final number of people that actually convert and turn into free trial or demos, it's, it's quite low and it's lower than if I had just done a demo kind of promotion in the first place. The better solution is there are some Substacks out there that, and by the way, when I, I say Substack, just take that to mean in generic term for creator newsletter, cuz there are certainly other platforms people can publish just happens to be one of the largest what I've been experimenting with in the last few weeks, which I'm really excited about is a form of native newsletter advertising, where the author actually writes the copy.
Kathleen (15:32):
And so this is a little bit like when you do a podcast ad and the host reads the ad not, and, and, and the ad is not supplied by the advertiser it's in podcast advertising, it's sort of a well known thing that host read ads are much, much more effective and for the exact same reason, right? Like the audience is drawn to you, the host or you the author in the case of a newsletter. So of course it's gonna be more powerful if the message comes from you. So I just did another Substack ad where I supplied a ton of background information to the newsletter author and he actually wrote the copy, put it in his own words, talked about why he was excited about it. And I got fantastic results. So I've used this for two different things lately. One was for free trials of the product that I'm working on right now.
Kathleen (16:25):
And he talked about like why he thought the product was interesting, what it could be used for like who it was right for. And I had people writing to me saying, wow, I bet your inbox is busy today. This was great. So that was super exciting. The same Substack author, I did a different type of an ad where trades will just launched a new media site this past Monday called the current, which is a literal really a digital media kind of news site for e-commerce and the URL. If anyone wants to check it out at thecurrent.media. And so I did another ad with the same guy where he talked about having seen the current, found it useful, encouraged people to subscribe. And I am not kidding you. We, I think have gotten 50 plus new subscribers in like 24 hours.
Kathleen (17:18):
And this is for a newsletter where I think I might have paid, you know, $500 per issue to subscribe. So $500, 50 new subscribers, like, is it worth it to pay a hundred dollars for a subscriber? Well, given that this is a publication that launched on Monday, so we don't a known brand, you know, we're starting from scratch to me, that was a home run. You know, and those are all audience members that at some point someday when we do take advertising on our site, we'll be able to monetize. So, you know, there are a lot of different ways you can use newsletter advertising, but I guess what I wanted to really zero in on today was thinking beyond the larger newsletters that are more expensive, certainly do that. If it makes sense for you, but if you haven't done newsletter advertising before consider starting smaller with some of these creator newsletters.
Kathleen (18:09):
And what you might find is that you actually get a better result in terms of cost per lead or cost of customer acquisition. Just because the audiences that these newsletters tend to have are in many cases, so much more loyal and so much more interested in the content. And as a side benefit, and this is kind of interesting, it's, it's a little bit of a side door influencer strategy. So not only are you benefiting from the halo effect of the reputation and audience of the creator, but you're building a relationship at the same time with that creator by sponsoring their newsletter. And if that person is influential in their space, you know, odds are, they will spread the word about what you're doing. So there are a lot of different reasons to do this. How do you get started with Substack is probably your next question.
Kathleen (19:06):
If you're listening and you find this interesting you know, there are different ways you can certainly reach out to authors directly. I've, you know, a lot of Substacks they'll provide the author's email address, or you literally just reply you subscribe to the newsletter and hit reply. That's one way. But there's some other beginning to be at least some other more marketplace solutions to facilitate this. And one that I gun to test out is called Swapstack - S W A P S T A C K. And this is literally a marketplace for Substack advertising. And so you go in, you set up your profile as an advertiser. You say the type of newsletter you're interested in advertising in, and then you can browse their marketplace of Substack newsletters and reach out to the authors through that marketplace. Or they can actually pitch you if they're interested.
Kathleen (20:01):
And they think there might be a fit there. So lots of different options for how to connect with these newsletter authors. But honestly, pricing wise, so reasonable, like I said, I think the least expensive one I've ever done was $250 an issue, the most expensive talking to somebody right now who charges I wanna say it's $12,000 an issue, but this is a super well known influencer within an industry who has a very large list. So you can always find somebody to match, you know, your kind of price range. You just have to do a little bit of homework. So hopefully that was useful to you. This is a little different type of an episode. It's been a long time since I've done an episode where it's not me interviewing somebody else and I just thought this might be kind of a nice way to change it up.
Kathleen (20:56):
And it's something that I've been experimenting with a lot lately and learning a lot from and seeing success from. So I did wanna share it with you guys. I'd love to know what you think of like, should I do more of these where I'm sharing what I learn or do you like the episodes where I have a guest? I'd love to hear what you think. And I think the easiest way to let me know is to tweet me. I have a new Twitter handle. I updated mine to at Kathleen El booth. So shoot me a tweet. Let me know what you think. And if you want me to do more of these, let me know if there are particular topics that you want me to talk about. And if so, I will pepper some of those in, so that is it for this week.
Kathleen (21:43):
Thank you so much for joining me. And if you know somebody else who should be a guest, tweet me at @Kathleenlbooth. I'd love to have them on the show. Finally, if you haven't already done. So, and you've been listening to the podcast for a while. Can you do me a favor and head to apple podcasts and leave a review? I've been doing this podcast for a long time, over five years, and I would love to see you your words about what you find valuable. It, it helps me understand how to make this better, you know, maybe maybe adjust and evolve the format. I don't know, but let me know in a review, I'd love to hear it in the meantime. I hope you're having a fantastic spring and that wherever you are, you're safe, you're healthy. And you're having a great year. Thanks for listening.
