Choose newsletter sponsorships worth buying

Kite finds candidate newsletters from three directions at once: what your buyers read, what your competitors already sponsor, and what your customers tell you. Each source catches newsletters the others miss.

The first source is research on your buyers' work. Kite searches the web for newsletters that cover the problems your customers deal with, written for their job title or industry. For a company that sells payroll software to restaurant owners, that might turn up newsletters about restaurant operations, hospitality finance, and running a small food business. Kite checks that each one is still publishing and when the last issue went out.

The second source is your competitors. Many newsletters list their past sponsors, and sponsored issues usually stay in the public archive. Kite searches for your competitors' names alongside newsletter sponsorships and checks the archives of the newsletters it finds. A newsletter where two of your competitors have advertised is worth a close look.

The third source is your customers. On a website Kite hosts, Kite can add a "How did you hear about us?" field or a short question about which newsletters people read to your signup or demo form. Answers from people who already chose you are the most direct evidence you'll get. You can also paste in notes from customer calls, and Kite adds any newsletters they mention.

Sponsorship marketplaces such as Paved and Passionfroot also list newsletters with prices and audience details. You can browse those yourself, and Kite can research any newsletter you find there the same way it researches the rest of the shortlist.

Related use cases

• Choose which marketing channels to invest in: Decide whether newsletter sponsorships deserve a place in your plan next to search, ads, email, and events.

Kite judges each newsletter by its content, its sponsors, and the audience numbers its publisher shares, because no single one of those is reliable on its own. Together they give a much clearer picture of who opens it.

Content comes first. Kite reads several recent issues and asks whether your buyers would care about them. A newsletter that explains how to forecast labor costs is written for the person who signs off on payroll. One that rounds up restaurant industry news may reach a broader crowd of chefs, investors, and suppliers.

Sponsor history comes next, and it's often the strongest signal. Kite lists who has sponsored the newsletter recently and how often each company came back. Sponsors that sell to your buyers and book again and again are telling you, with their own money, that the newsletter brings them results. A newsletter with a different sponsor every week and no repeats deserves more caution.

The publisher's numbers come last. Kite reads the media kit or sponsor page for subscriber count, open rate, reader job titles, and price. You can upload a media kit PDF in the Kite web app, and when a publisher replies by email to your team's Kite address, Kite reads the numbers from the reply. Kite treats these figures as claims to check against the content and sponsors, and it notes where a number looks out of line, such as a very high open rate on a very large list.

Kite gives each newsletter a score from one to five for how well its readers match your buyers, with a short explanation of why. You see the reasoning, so you can disagree with it.

A newsletter ad is a good deal when the price per likely buyer is lower than what that buyer is worth to you and no higher than your other channels charge for the same person. Kite works the price down to those numbers for every newsletter on the shortlist.

Here's an example. A newsletter has 40,000 subscribers, reports a 45 percent open rate, and charges $1,800 for the main sponsor slot in one issue.

• About 18,000 people open each issue, so the placement costs $100 for every thousand opens.
• If 1.5 percent of those readers click, that's 270 visitors, or about $6.70 per visitor.
• If 4 percent of those visitors book a demo, that's about 11 demos, or roughly $165 per demo.

The click and signup rates in that example are assumptions, and Kite says so. When you've run sponsorships before, or Kite has results from your other campaigns, it uses your real numbers instead. Then it compares the estimated cost per demo with what a customer is worth to you and what a demo costs you through other channels, such as LinkedIn ads.

Kite also checks the parts of a deal that change its value. A main slot near the top of an issue usually earns more clicks than a smaller mention further down. Some newsletters write the ad in the writer's own voice, which readers tend to trust more. A package of four issues may come with a discount, but Kite usually recommends a single issue first, because you don't yet know whether this audience responds to your offer.

Kite records the shortlist, scores, prices, and estimates in a report or a Google Sheet, so you can compare every option side by side.

Related use cases

• Choose which ad platforms to spend on: Compare what a customer costs on Google, Meta, and LinkedIn, so you have a benchmark for newsletter prices.
• Plan your marketing budget and vendors: Decide how much of your budget goes to sponsorships and other tests.

Once you agree on the shortlist, Kite drafts an inquiry for each newsletter and writes the ad that will run. That saves the back-and-forth that usually stalls a sponsorship test for weeks.

Kite finds the right way to reach each newsletter, usually the sponsor page, a booking form, or the writer's published contact address. It drafts a short email that asks about open dates, the current price, the latest open rate, and recent click results for sponsors in your category. You approve the message, and Kite sends it from your team's Kite email address. Replies come back to that address, so Kite reads the answers and updates the comparison.

Kite also writes the ad itself, in your brand's voice and in the newsletter's format. Most newsletter ads have a headline, a short paragraph, and one link, and the best ones read like a recommendation from the writer rather than a banner. When the writer prefers to write the ad, Kite prepares the talking points and the one thing you want readers to do.

Finally, Kite prepares where the click goes. On a website Kite hosts, it can build a landing page for the newsletter's readers that matches what the ad promised. Every link gets its own tracking tags, with the newsletter's name as the source, so each placement's results stay separate.

You book and pay for the placement directly with the newsletter. Kite doesn't hold a company card or sign sponsorship agreements.

Related use cases

• Write and send email campaigns: See how Kite writes and sends email from your team's Kite address, including follow-ups.

After each placement runs, Kite compares what it cost with the visitors, signups, and demos it brought in, and recommends whether to book that newsletter again. The test only helps if you judge every newsletter by the same numbers.

On a site Kite hosts, Kite's built-in analytics records visitors by their tracking source, along with form submissions and other conversions. If your site runs elsewhere, Kite reads the same results from your connected Google Analytics account. Kite also counts answers to the "How did you hear about us?" question, because some readers remember your name and come back days later without clicking the link.

Kite then puts the results side by side. You might learn that the restaurant operations newsletter brought 210 visitors and 9 demos for $1,800, while a larger industry roundup brought 400 visitors and 2 demos for $2,500. The first one earned a second booking, and probably a longer package. The second one didn't, even though it sent more traffic.

Kite records what it learned in your team's knowledge base, including which newsletters worked, which ad angles drew the most clicks, and what each demo cost. The next time you plan a sponsorship, Kite starts from those results instead of from the media kits.

Related use cases

• Shift your marketing budget toward what's working Coming soon Move money toward the newsletters and channels that bring in customers for less.