How To Prospect for Newsletter Sponsors

When you’re selling newsletter ads, prospecting is a way of life.

From morning until night, you need to have your antennae up: Who might want to sponsor my newsletter?

Some ideas may be obvious. Some will be less so. But to fill your inventory, you will need a process to find new prospective buyers for your ad space.

What is prospecting?

What do we mean by “prospecting”? The concept of prospecting is simple: It’s finding potential customers for your ad space—like a Yukon gold miner with a pickaxe looking for nuggets.

That potential customer is called a “prospect.” And you’ll need lots of prospects to fill your sales pipeline, with the hope of ultimately turning some of them into customers. (And eventually repeat customers.)

Even in a well-operated sales pipeline, it’s usually a tiny minority of prospects that will eventually buy. So, finding lots of prospects is key.

Finding Your First Prospect

If you’re just starting out, the first place to look for prospects is often on your very own email list. Say you run a newsletter for software developers. There’s a high likelihood that people from companies that would love to reach your audience are already in the audience themselves.

Best of all, they’re already fans of the newsletter—otherwise they wouldn’t be there!

So, a first step to bring prospects out of the woodwork is often a simple call-to-action to your audience to sponsor your newsletter. Chances are your first prospect is already reading.

Finding Your Core Prospects

Of course, looking to your own audience for prospects is just a first step. Perhaps it will land you your first advertiser and give you the social proof you need to start pitching other prospects.

The challenge now is to find that rich vein of prospects you can go back to again and again to keep your pipeline flowing.

To find the most-likely-to-buy prospects in your newsletter’s space, start with two questions:

1. Who wants to reach an audience like mine?
2. Do they currently buy in the newsletter space?

To answer these questions, you’ll want to subscribe to every newsletter you can in your space, as well as in adjacent spaces. (Say your newsletter is about personal finance—you’ll probably also want to follow newsletters in the general business, investing, finance, and crypto spaces, for a start.)

Then, you want to see every company who’s advertising in any of those newsletters—whether it’s a logo sponsorship, a secondary sponsorship, or even a sponsored link. (You can ignore ads from networks like LiveIntent; those are generally advertisers paying bottom-of-the-barrel programmatic rates who are unlikely to make a direct buy from a publisher).

It’s important here that you’re limiting the prospecting to advertisers already appearing in newsletters. In our experience prospecting for potential buyers of newsletter ad space, there’s a world of difference when it comes to speaking to companies that have bought on newsletters before and those that haven’t.

Buyers already familiar with newsletters—and buying regularly on email—are enthusiastic about the space, understand its value, and understand its metrics and quirks.

That’s not to say buyers who’ve never been in email newsletters before won’t buy, eventually; it just means the sales cycle with those buyers will be longer and more involved. (Basically, you won’t just need to sell them on your newsletter, you may need to sell them on newsletters as a marketing category as a whole.)

And here we should flag—in full disclosure—that this is the sort of prospecting Who Sponsors Stuff was built to facilitate. We actually started the database as an internal tool for prospecting on behalf of our publisher clients; when we realized how valuable this data was to anyone looking to sell newsletter ads, we turned it into our core product. We now track 250+ newsletters, in a wide range of spaces, tracking every company that appears as a sponsor (about 4,000 companies, so far) and delivering this prospecting data to clients.

You can get in touch about our paid product, Sales Pro, here.

Tapping into this core vein of email newsletter prospects is enough to fill the pipeline of virtually any newsletter creator or publisher.

How To Prospect Further Afield

Of course, no one should rely on one tool or vein of prospects to keep their pipeline full. When you treat prospecting as a part of how you see the world, you’ll find lots of other creative ways to go about it.

One of our favorite additional methods of prospecting is harnessing your social feeds to get retargeted by brands advertising in your newsletter’s space.

Say you’re running a newsletter about pets. Your Instagram and Facebook accounts (presumably linked to each other) should follow all of your competitors in the space, plus any big, related types of accounts you can find. So, for instance, you wouldn’t just follow The Dodo (an established animal publication with 10M+ followers on Instagram), but you’d also follow a bunch of meme accounts about animals and pets. Also follow a bunch of pet food companies, pet subscription box companies, and pet accessory accounts.

The idea is that you want to get retargeted by the advertisers trying to reach consumers in your space. Then, just note down any plausible companies you start seeing running ads in your feed.

We’ve found an easy method is to have a Slack channel where you can share the links to those ads (or screenshots) as they come up throughout the day. And it’s not just sales people who should be doing this! Chances are that lots of people in your company (or, if you're a solopreneur, in your family or friend group) are seeing relevant advertisers.

Also: If you live in a city, don’t ignore the ads you’re seeing in the subway, and on top of cabs, and on billboards. Snap a pic and send them to your dedicated Slack channel (or wherever you’re collecting prospecting research).

If they’ve bought a billboard in Times Square, they’ve got a marketing budget!

And, speaking of marketing budgets, you’ll also want to keep an eye on companies that have recently raised money in relevant spaces. (Crunchbase, of course, is a great resource for that.) A company with a nice, big Series B in its pocket may be ready to spend to scale.

Leave No Stone Unturned

From your morning Spotify playlist to your evening YouTube wind-down, you’re never far from advertisers trying to reach customers like you. Your opportunities to prospect are limited only by your ingenuity.

We’ve given you some core ideas here about how to find your next newsletter sponsor. The rest is in your hands.

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For more coverage of the email newsletter market, see Email Intelligence.

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