Are newsletter ads worth it?

Wanna start advertising in newsletters?

In this post, we'll talk with a guy who both:

• Has a newsletter that's monetized via newsletter ads
• Acquires subscribers via advertising "swaps" with other newsletters

Emanuel Cinca is the founder of Stacked Marketer, a daily marketing newsletter. Every day, they report on what's new in the marketing world (Facebook releasing a new feature, Google doing a new ad format, and so on).

Emanuel, what's the fuss with newsletter ads? How do they compare to social media ads on TikTok, FB, Instagram, etc.?

They are high-intent, even though certain targeting features aren’t available.

When someone is reading a newsletter on marketing, they are looking for things to help their marketing. They are close to peak intent. Maybe just Googling could show higher intent.

It doesn’t matter if you also reach them on Facebook. Their intent there is not the same.

So, in general newsletter ads tend to be more expensive on CPM and perhaps CPC too, but provide higher quality visitors who are more likely to convert.

The important part is making sure to advertise in the correct newsletters for your target customer.

What's the #1 objection advertisers have before starting with newsletter ads?

They aren’t used to the fact that they can’t spend just $50-$100 to target someone who is based in a certain neighborhood of New York who likes dogs.

So they often try to associate it with the type of advertising you do on paid social and search.

Common objections will come from that, usually among things like:

• Your minimum recommendation is higher than my test budget.
• I only want USA.
• Or I only want “segments that make $50M per year.”

Do newsletter advertisers come back after advertising for the first time? If not, why? If yes, what's the primary reason?

Yes, it’s common to have regulars, almost so much that you could consider it a “recurring revenue” arrangement.

It’s not uncommon for 33-50% of the available slots to be booked by returning sponsors.

...and for advertisers who don’t come back, what is the biggest reason?

In one word, the biggest reason is the ROI.

But the reason they don’t get an ROI varies. The most common two are:

1. The audience is not a fit. They test it out but the amount of leads, and the type just doesn’t fit with their ICP (ideal customer profile). And this is a reason regulars also stop advertising sometimes: they adjust their ICP and it doesn’t fit anymore.

2. Brands are bad at following up. They expect that after someone sees their ad, they instantly become a customer. This only works for free or extremely cheap products that are impulse buys. Business decisions have a longer timeline, yet many brands have a convoluted and undefined sales process, so they don’t close leads.

What's the expected CTR that newsletter advertisers should expect from newsletter ads (from your experience)?

It varies a lot, and it really depends on how clean the list is.

Let’s first make sure we have the same definition of CTR: Unique clicks divided by the total number of recipients.

Secondly, the size of your newsletter matters a lot. The smaller it is, the more likely it is to have a higher CTR, and the more likely that your audience is made of superfans that engage with everything.

If you are over 25,000 subs, I think over 0.50% CTR on your primary placement is pretty good, but you can definitely get it to 1%.

Then smaller placements drop much lower in CTR, as expected.

What's the expected CPC (cost-per-click) for newsletter ads? How does it compare to other channels?

This depends on what you’re targeting. Let’s assume it’s an audience with at least 70% US, CA, UK, and EU.

In this case, if it’s mainstream and broad, you can get around $1 CPC, maybe even lower.

Once you move into B2B, anywhere from $3 to $10 can make sense. It especially depends on what you’re presenting as the offer.

If you want people to buy a $50k/year SaaS subscription, $10 CPC is probably great. If you are giving away a free lead magnet, you probably want to get under $3 even.

What's the biggest mistake that people do when they start advertising on newsletters?

Unclear quality of readership.

Properly cleaning your newsletter subscriber list is vital, but I don’t know of a total of 5 newsletters who do it properly, that’s counting all three newsletters we own.

So very often you can be presented with very impressive numbers like 55-60% open rate and 1.5% CTR on the ad.

In reality, the opens are 30% Apple Mail Privacy Protection users and the 1.5% CTR is actually 1.5% CTOR (based on opens, not on recipients).

And to top if off, a bunch of those clicks will be from corporate firewalls. I only know of us to actively clean up such subscribers, and talk about it.

Others are either not doing it or not talking about it, or both.

We’ve had first hand experience in this when doing swaps, partnerships, and sponsorships with other industry newsletters.

Our 58,000 readership outperforms industry newsletters that are 3-4x the size.

Sometimes we send at least as many unique visitors as bigger newsletters (for a lower price), and we generally end up with a better CPC of real users and better ROI for advertisers.

How can advertisers get in touch if they wanna advertise on Stacked Marketer?

You can either reach out directly at sponsor@stackedmarketer.com or you can check out this page that has more info about us too.