Use the 20% Rule to Find Ideal Newsletter Sponsors
Landing sponsors is hard. Keeping them is even harder.
Why? Because 80% of newsletter sponsorships fail to deliver the results brands want.
Now, that may sound depressing, but this statistic reveals the secret to sustainable sponsorship revenue.
You see, most publishers spend time and money chasing the wrong sponsors. They invest in sales before knowing who their ideal customers are.
But smart publishers understand the 20% rule.
You see, only around 20% of sponsors are likely to succeed with your newsletter, so you need to do the work to find out exactly who those sponsors are before investing significant resources in sales.
If you don't already know what kind of partners will perform well, you need to be testing lots of different advertisers quickly (which, by the way, is a lot easier with a platform like Wellput, but I digress...).
As you gather data on which sponsored placements consistently hit their goals (and which don’t), look closely at what they have in common.
Try and spot the patterns:
What industry are they in?
What price point do they operate at?
What type of offer converts best?
What customer profile are they targeting?
Through this exercise, you’ll be learning exactly who your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is, and with that ICP established, you can start to scale what works by:
Focusing your outbound sales efforts on similar companies
Re-investing the revenue into growing your subscriber base
And THEN hiring dedicated sales support or services
Only at this point does investing in sponsorship sales make sense – when you can point to actual performance data that shows why certain sponsors succeed with your audience.
With this data, you're not just selling ad space – you're showing sponsors a proven path to success.
New sponsors will trust you more, and existing ones will stick around longer.
Bottom line? The work you put into finding your ideal sponsor profile now will pay off in every sponsorship conversation you have going forward.
Your future self (and your future sponsors) will thank you for doing this foundational work first.
See you next week,
Craig
P.S. Ready to start finding your ideal sponsor profile? That's exactly why we built Wellput.
We help publishers test different sponsor categories quickly and systematically so you can spot winning patterns faster. Stop guessing which sponsors might work and try Wellput today.
