Newsletter sponsorship is an advertising opportunity not all businesses consider, and can come with some unique advantages. This branch of email marketing allows you to get in front of dedicated audiences that trust the source. You can use that trust and brand loyalty to your advantage to grow your own audience.
A prime spot to advertise
So why do users subscribe to newsletters in the first place? The most common reason is that the user doesn’t want to miss anything from the company. Between news updates, sales, or events, a newsletter offers valuable information delivered to an inbox. Users don’t need to dig through the clutter of the internet.
It’s this very idea of avoiding the clutter that makes advertisements in email newsletters so valuable. People get bombarded with ads on many sites that they visit today. It can certainly be cheap and affordable to purchase a small ad spot on a website. That space is unlimited and always available.
But newsletter sponsorship provides premium brand placement that locks in the reader’s attention. This ensures you aren’t competing with a dozen other ads on the same page of content.
Readers have a positive perception of sponsors
As with any sponsorship opportunity, the perception audiences take away from your ad is typically more positive than a traditionally placed advertisement.
Depending on how highly the reader thinks of the company delivering the newsletter (being subscribed to a newsletter in the first place means they probably like the company), they are likely to see your sponsorship as a sort of endorsement.
Consumers are becoming more aware of these types of B2B relationships thanks to things like social influencers and podcasts. But the effect trusted endorsements have on audiences is still powerful.
When the reader trusts the source, like New York Times newsletter readers do, they are much more likely to spend time and money invested in what they’re reading in their inbox.
Block the ad blockers
With more than 615 million devices out there using some form of ad blocking software, strategies need to be built around this. While technologies are being applied to detect and work around ad blockers, email sponsorship is a strong way to ensure you’re appearing in front of the audience you pay to reach.
Of course, a popular approach to avoiding being blocked is to create native content pieces to market yourself online. This remains effective, and resonates well with younger audiences, but it does take up either more time or money from a marketing campaign.
If you already have a digital advertising campaign created, including artwork and trackable links, you can simply take that content and adapt it to a newsletter sponsor spot. Sometimes the work might even be as easy as providing your logo to be placed under the newsletter’s logo with a “sponsored by” tag.
Find the right audience
Some organizations offer a variety of newsletter topics to their audience, allowing you additional targeting tools.
A company with a large, dedicated audience will likely have a few different newsletters to sponsor. This means that the user respects the organization and trusts it as their go-to source for information on a certain topic. They chose that company over another dedicated entirely to that topic.
At The Post and Courier, we are launching a newsletter focused on South Carolina military updates. This Military Digest newsletter opens up new targeted opportunities to reach an audience that craves military news and content.
The benefits of being a sponsor for content like this are unique to broad appeal newsletters. The open rates will likely be higher percentages than general newsletters since the readers are specifically seeking out that content. This means they will also have higher trust in the content of the email. This makes your brand stand out even more.