I Bought An Expensive Newsletter Sponsorship in an Attempt to Prove Myself Wrong

I've been marketing SaaS products for about 15 years now. Across that time one of the strongest opinions I've developed on marketing channels is this—newsletter sponsorships are generally a bad investment. Time and again I've seen companies shell out big money to sponsor topically relevant newsletters, and time and again I've seen lackluster results at best.

Now, I'm the first to tell you I'm also a big believer in the idea that just about any of the well popularized marketing channels can in fact work for most businesses if they are executed well. So recently I decided to spend a little money with the objective of proving myself wrong—I bought a sponsorship in Justin Welsh's the Saturday Solopreneur newsletter.

If you don't know Justin, he's one of the most popular "internet creators" out there. He's become the face of the "solopreneurs" and he has massive followings on Twitter, Linkedin, and email. Justin is also a former Outseta customer, a really nice guy, and someone I think very highly of.

Frankly, the decision to sponsor Justin's newsletter in an attempt to prove myself wrong was an easy one. Not only have I published content about Justin's use of Outseta before, but Justin has posted several of his own organic social media messages about Outseta before. Him doing do has brought Outseta a steady stream of customers, and continues to do so. All of which is to say—Justin's audience is super relevant to Outseta and it's been proven in delivering customers to Outseta before. It consists of early stage entrepreneurs and founders, the vast majority of whom have a need for the tools Outseta offers around payments, CRM, and email marketing.

Simply put:

• I have a ton of conviction in the "fit" of Justin's audience with our product
• I think we have a significant advantage in that Justin can speak directly to his use of our product

I also want to mention that I've been thinking about running this experiment for a long time, but something Justin did recently pushed me over the edge:

• I noticed he actually dropped the size of his newsletter list on his sponsorship page from 200,000+ to 175,000+. This is evidence that he's actually cleaned this list and cares about the quality of his list—something almost no one does in an industry where sponsorship pricing is typically based on list size.
• He also dropped his pricing from $3500 to $2500 to sponsor an issue.

Good on Justin!

Cleaner list? Better pricing? I was in. Here's our sponsorship in the February 22nd edition of The Saturday Solopreneur.

Results

So how did the ad perform? Unfortunately, I think I overwhelming proved myself right.

In the week since the sponsorship ran, it drove 469 unique visitors to Outseta's website. While that's a tiny number compared to 175,000 list size, it's still plenty of visitors for us to break even on our ad spend if they signed up for free trials at the same rate as our normal website visitors. Except to date, not a single person has signed up for a trial.

While you can argue that there's some value in the "awareness" generated, I didn't spend $2500 for awareness—this was a clear failure. It's also worth noting that Justin does publish all of his newsletters to his website (including the sponsorship), so there is some longer term potential for this to continue to send traffic to our site. But ultimately looking at the curve of traffic in the days since the sponsorship ran, I don't think I can expect much here either.

Justin, his list, and his audience's fit is not to blame.

In searching to explain the poor performance, the appropriate first place to look is the ad copy and the "offer." I actually think the ad copy is strong, as it's Justin directly speaking to his positive experience with Outseta—what could be more relevant than that?!

The offer is certainly more of the culprit—we simply sent people to our website, where they could sign up for a free trial of Outseta. There was no special offer, no deal that absolutely couldn't be refused. Many would tell you that's a missed opportunity—I should have made some incredible offer, captured a bunch of emails, and nurtured them from there.

While this isn't wrong—there's certainly merit to this idea—I take exception to the idea that software companies should basically drop their pants in order to capture some email addresses and then run an aggressive sales process from there. Our entire customer acquisition strategy has always been based on being direct and saving the people the bullshit—get a relevant product in front of a relevant audience and let them decide whether or not to buy.

They didn't buy here, and in my mind the culprit is pretty simple—it's newsletter sponsorships. Newsletter lists are filled with people generally interested in a particular topic, who typically don't demonstrate any buying intent. There might be people in the list with an immediate need for your product, but if that's the case it's mostly happenstance and the moments in which newsletter readers will see your sponsorship ad are fleeting at best.

This one was a failure and I'm bummed that that was the case— genuinely thought it would perform at least a little bit better than it did.

But I also proved my point once again—if you want to spend money on paid advertising, spend on paid search. Doing so allows you to target keywords that are hyper relevant to potential customers and also show buying intent. That's certainly the vast majority of what what was missing here.