In the last month, I’ve spoken with several local newsletter operators (including many of you!).
The single most common problem they’re facing is difficulty in selling ads.
A common story: local newsletter operator sent out 250 emails to local businesses, had a reasonable response rate of 40%, but as soon as he presented a price, every business either ghosted or politely declined.
In this article, I’m going to explain where newsletter operators go wrong in selling ads, and propose a solution.
Pretty please?
Why do Newsletter Advertisers Buy Ads?
In order to sell an ad, the advertiser has to believe the cost of the ad is lower than the net profit gained from the ad.
How do you make the advertiser believe this?
One trivial way to do so is to give away free ads.
No advertiser will believe advertising in your newsletter has negative value, so they’d be happy to pay nothing and advertise for free.
Increasing Business’s Belief in the Value of Your Newsletter Ads
Obviously, however, you don’t want to be giving away free ads (though this is more useful than you’d think - read on).
How do you increase a local business’s belief in the value of advertising in your newsletter?
Part of their belief comes from the nature of their business.
99% of the time, a plumber will benefit more from advertising in your local newsletter than will a lemonade stand.
Barry the plumber benefits more from a local newsletter ad than does Kanye the lemonade mogul. Sorry Ye.
However, much of their belief instead depends on your newsletter.
Many local newsletter operators know this, but they make a mistake.
When pitching businesses on ads, they focus on subscriber counts, open rates, click-through rates, and/or demographics.
Of course that matters, but most local businesses are not sophisticated marketers able to interpret these metrics.
Additionally, they’ve probably been burned on advertising in the past.
What’s much more convincing is if you could credibly claim that you’ll drive them $5k in additional revenue over the next month.
How can you credibly make this claim?
Tracking Leads Driven By Your Newsletter Ads
You make such claims credible by tracking leads.
Typically, a local newsletter operator will send links out to the advertiser’s website.
But keep in mind - these are local businesses.
They typically have poorly optimized websites with no SEO and little to no social media presence.
Average local business owner’s website.
So, here’s an alternative: instead of sending links out to the advertiser’s website, send them to a landing page that you host.
On the landing page, implement best practices for lead conversion, write killer copy, and use your endorsement as social proof to increase the likelihood of conversion to a lead.
Then, store the leads in a common location - it could be as simple as a Google Sheet (though there are better options).
What are the Benefits of Tracking Leads?
That sounds like a lot of work… creating a landing page, tracking leads, etc.
What are the benefits?
Keep reading… I’ll convince you you’d be crazy not to track leads.
Benefit 1: Tracking Leads Gives You Real Data With Which to Price Ads
Suppose that you’re able to drive 10 new leads to a personal trainer in a month of advertising in your weekly newsletter.
You follow up with the personal trainer, and five of those new leads convert to clients.
Let’s say on average, a client signs up for 8 sessions, and each session is $75 an hour.
Imagine a future… where Morgan Freeman wants to pay YOU to run ads in your newsletter.
The personal trainer wants their net hourly rate to be $50/hour, and their overhead equates to $5/hour.
That means your maximum ad pricing potential will be ($75/hour - $55/hour) * 5 clients * 8 sessions = $800.
This is a quick back of the envelope calculation - we can easily be more precise.
The important point is that you have a way forward to justify your ad pricing.
Benefit 2: Tracking Leads Helps you Add Value by Improving Local Business’s Funnel
As mentioned earlier, most local businesses have terribly optimized marketing.
Many of them have no social media presence, their websites are a mess, perhaps the business exists only as a phone number.
By creating a well-optimized landing page for the advertiser, you’ll likely increase the number of leads they get relative to ceding to them the full responsibility for capturing a lead.
Benefit 3: Tracking Leads Helps you Sell Ads to New Advertisers
The most important benefit of tracking leads?
By tracking leads, you can now much more convincingly pitch ads to new advertisers.
In my article on local newsletter monetization, I showed that the advertisers which drove the most revenue to the Naptown Scoop were either high customer LTV local businesses, such as surgeons, dentists, luxury real estate agents, or corporations with a significant local presence.
The advertisers which drove the most revenue to the Naptown Scoop.
However, you have no chance of pitching these premium advertisers without some preexisting track record.
By tracking leads, you develop that track record.
Here’s the structure of a cold email which I recommend sending to potential advertisers:
Hi {owner_first_name},
I run {newsletter_name}, a {newsletter_frequency} newsletter here in {city_name}.
We have {number_of_subscribers} subscribers, about {open_rate}% of whom read our emails each week.
Last month, {other_business_name} ran ads with us, and we got them {number_of_leads} new leads, of whom {number_of_conversions} converted to clients, leading to {revenue_generated} in additional revenue per month.
Interested in discussing the possibility of running ads with us?
Best,
{your_name}
All that work to create a landing page is for that third sentence (or sentences), where you have credible claims about the business you drove to the advertiser.
It gives you a much stronger position from which to pitch ads to new advertisers.
The Framework for Selling Local Newsletter Ads
Once you have a method for tracking leads, you can now follow the following framework for selling ads, with no prior track record:
- Offer free ads to some advertisers.
- Track leads on the free ads to those advertisers.
- Use data collected on leads generated to negotiate a price for ads with the advertisers to whom you offered free ads.
- Use data collected on leads generated as evidence in cold outreach to new advertisers.
- Keep tracking leads and conversions throughout, refine your landing pages, and use your mountain of evidence to negotiate higher prices, and prove your worth to higher value advertisers.
My Offer to You
Ostensibly, I’ve given you everything you need to implement this framework yourself.
However, there remain many details to consider:
- How - technologically - do you easily spin up landing pages?
- What’s the best way to design landing pages? What best practices does the industry/marketers use to close leads?
- How do you collect leads?
- How do you deliver the leads to the advertiser?
- How do you follow up with the advertiser about whether they converted a lead?
- How can you collect testimonials from advertisers, and publish those testimonials as evidence, which you can then link to in your cold outreach?
If you don’t want to worry about these details - here’s my offer:
I’m building out a service to help implement this framework.
I’ll help you set up the landing pages, collect leads, do your cold outreach, and follow up with advertisers - for free.
My goal is to create a paid service - but first I want to prove out the concept with a few local newsletter operators.
Interested? Fill out this form and I’ll get back to you.
