Congrats! Awesome to see some others from the newsletter world here. I'm a bit earlier than you are along the process, I have a crypto based newsletter which has about 1200 subscribers, ~50 editions sent, and just started conversations with interested sponsors (we also had inbounds which we have not really engaged with). Our SEO is doing pretty well, we get roughly 3500 people coming to the site per month, and when something in crypto world blows up we double that.
I have 2 tactical questions for you:
1. That seems like a relatively high CPM for your niche, how did you structure your sponsorships to get there? To be more specific, what are the normal sponsorship lengths, do you do a short term and then renegotiate after they've seen click throughs, does click through come into play in your negotiations, etc.
2. Your open rate is amazing. We used to maintain an open rate in the 40%'s, but we saw a dropoff and have been struggling to get from mid 20s back to mid 40s for a while now. I know this is because we end up in promotions, but can't quite arcane how to get out of those folders. Did you do anything in particular to maintain your open rate?
1. The $250 is a flat rate for one newsletter edition but also ends up on the blog portion which is then shared on Twitter. Some of these tweets do 50,000+ impressions on Twitter. This isn’t guaranteed but is something the sponsors are considering when placing an ad. We typically don’t even get into CTR before or after the slot but can if a specific sponsor or potential sponsor wants to. The main metrics they’ve asked about is newsletter size and open rate.
This might have to change if I look to increase prices.
2. My “welcome to the list” email reminds people to add the newsletter to their primary inbox. Once a month or so I also add a short note to kick off a newsletter reminding people to ensure we are in their primary box. I don’t know if this has helped with anything at all but it’s worth doing IMO.
Awesome, thanks for the answers! I'd also love to hear an update on what trending on HN does for subscriptions, we've had some articles trend on here before and it's a pretty nice bump, but people were clicking primarily for a story not a newsletter. This got me to sub at least!
I have 2 tactical questions for you: 1. That seems like a relatively high CPM for your niche, how did you structure your sponsorships to get there? To be more specific, what are the normal sponsorship lengths, do you do a short term and then renegotiate after they've seen click throughs, does click through come into play in your negotiations, etc. 2. Your open rate is amazing. We used to maintain an open rate in the 40%'s, but we saw a dropoff and have been struggling to get from mid 20s back to mid 40s for a while now. I know this is because we end up in promotions, but can't quite arcane how to get out of those folders. Did you do anything in particular to maintain your open rate?