Growth Through Newsletter Sponsorships (w/ Alaina Thompson & The Juice)
Growth Through Newsletter Sponsorships (w/ Alaina Thompson & The Juice)
Learn how Alaina helped a B2B marketing-tech company render their digital ad channels obsolete by scaling out a profitable email newsletter sponsorship program.
Meet Alaina, Head of Growth
In 2021, Alaina was the only growth marketer at The Juice, a martech company. Alaina was tasked with helping The Juice acquire new users for their B2B content curation platform.
Though Alaina’s background was in paid media (Google, Facebook, etc.), she found that new users acquired via paid media were not high enough quality for The Juice. As a test, she wanted to try newsletter sponsorships instead.
One-time newsletter placements feel risky to a seasoned paid media pro used to building and optimizing campaigns over time. Even so, Alaina had it on good authority that her ideal users for The Juice were likely reading B2B content newsletters on a regular basis. In short, she decided they needed to “Go where the audience is!”.
She hoped to achieve a comparable CPA to paid (or at least LinkedIn) while improving the quality of users signing up.
The Juice’s Email Sponsorship Results
Average Cost Per Acquisition for all of 2023 was 50% lower than their best month with LinkedIn Ads, their next best channel
The user quality was above average for the volume newsletter sponsorships were producing
How The Juice Tested Email Sponsorships
Alaina’s testing strategy evolved over time, but a few steps stayed the same from day one.
Doing the Math: Alaina had CPA goals she needed to hit, so she was diligent on making sure she knew the ad placement CPMs and CTRs of the newsletters she was sponsoring. When the math didn’t add up, she looked elsewhere. She used historical website conversion rates to come up with a projected CAC for each newsletter, before moving to average conversion rate from traffic from sponsored newsletters exclusively
Asking for Guidance From the Newsletter Creators: They know their audience better than you. If they say testimonials do really well with their audience, make sure to include one. If they say that imagery or demo links have worked well in the past, start there.
Transparency Around Required Results: Alaina was very clear about what results she needed to produce from the sponsorship. She found that most email newsletter partners or agencies are flexible and can adjust the campaign, placements, and other variables to help you hit your goals
How The Juice Scaled Email Sponsorships
After starting testing in 2021 with a handful of smaller newsletters, Alaina expanded her email sponsorship efforts in 2022.
By the end of the year, newsletter sponsorships had proven to be The Juice’s best user acquisition source in both user quantity and quality. Her team spent the year learning what makes a great email newsletter partner and how to best manage agreements, pricing, and sponsorship accounts.
With this foundation, Alaina has reallocated nearly her entire audience acquisition budget to newsletter sponsorships for 2023, enabling her to make even bigger bets.
Now, she has a handful of reliable, wonderful newsletter sponsorship partners, and continues to test new ones to avoid over-saturating key audiences and negatively impacting her cost per acquisition.
How You Can Increase High Quality Leads with Email Sponsorships
Know Your Audience and Go Where They Are: Email sponsorships may not make sense for everyone, but there’s likely an email newsletter worth sponsoring for almost every B2B company.
Keep Testing: Not every newsletter sponsorship is a winner. Sometimes it’s an off-day for email opens, sometimes the traffic doesn’t convert, but that doesn’t mean they won’t work eventually. Keep trying new copy, offers, visuals, and pricing structures while looking for trends across all of them to see what’s working.
Use Test Data to Kickstart New Partners: Tests aren’t useful in a vacuum. Broadly sharing your learnings with the next sponsored newsletter partner helps you avoid starting from square one each time. Many email newsletter authors are relatively new at the advertising side of the business, and are very open to setting up ads based on what you’ve seen work with other email sponsorships.
Track Down-Funnel Performance: Make sure you have access to the lead data and can report back to your team on quality. Email sponsorships aren’t as consistent and scalable as paid, but knowing the lead quality is essential in deciding how to allocate media budget between new and legacy ad placements.
Communicate Results Internally: You need to be able to monitor and report on your email sponsorship campaigns to your team to prove if it’s working or not. Be able to point to the quality of brands, revenue impact, and whatever else you can get your hands on that supports the bottom line. Alaina keeps access to her user data via her product analytics platform and reports the quality of her users to her team regularly.
Alaina is currently Head of Growth at The Juice, a content curation and organization platform for marketing and sales pros . Connect with her on LinkedIn.