Increase your newsletter renewal rate

Welcome to number 6️⃣ - there’s been some big news in newsletter-land recently.

1. How to boost revenue by bagging more renewals

2. Awesome content on newsletter growth

3. Turn your subscribers into sponsors

4. Free AI meeting recorder

First, it’d genuinely be super helpful if you could answer this quick question…

Thanks! Sneaky polls aside, let’s dive in 🚀

How to increase campaign renewal rates

Selling sponsorships is a great revenue stream, just not quite as scalable or low-touch as recurring monthly SaaS revenue for example. You can use awesome tools such as Passionfroot to streamline the buying process, but the inconvenient truth is that deals take time to acquire and renew.

You can minimise your time-to-revenue-ratio by having a high renewal rate. Repeat bookings equal larger campaigns, more revenue, and less time/resources to close. Win x3.

Be aware that most marketing campaigns don’t ‘work’, even with a great product & audience (an estimated 80% fail). So, even a 50% renewal rate can be considered good, depending on your niche, etc.

The way I look at things, there’s two ways to increase renewal rates.

1. Increase campaign performance. The biggest determiner for renewals, is inescapably the down-funnel results of your partners.

2. Optimise sales processes. Practices to increase renewal conversion rates and deal sizes.

🥇 Performance

Most brands/campaigns are performance sensitive, but the threshold for success, and how strictly they adhere to CAC targets, varies wildly between brands. This mainly depends on budget, the individual’s character, company/team goals and the value/LTV of your audience. If you have a partner with low performance sensitivity, hold onto them dearly. Seriously, hug them tight 👨‍❤️‍💋‍👨

Here’s a few ways to boost overall campaign performance…

🤓 Invest in quality subscribers

Quality is mostly measured by open rates, newsletter CTR and ad CTR. You can also look at web views, reply rates, and demographics like affluence. There is a current debate about how accurate open rates are these days, with the bearish perspective summarised well by Matt McGarry here.

Make sure you track subscriber quality by growth channel, then you can act accordingly, Beehiiv’s audience analytics section makes this super easy. There seems to be a general hierarchy of channels regarding sub-quality, with my understanding of this, here they are from best to worst:

• Organic/posting on socials, newsletter sponsorships, Beehiiv boosts/Sparkloop (etc.), YouTube (or other) sponsorships, paid X, paid Instagram, paid Facebook, lead magnets/giveaways, and co-registrations right at the bottom

Of course, this varies between niches, algorithm changes and so on. Use the above as a reference point, find what works for you and lean into it.

👩‍❤️‍💋‍👨 Work with the right brands

This sounds obvious, but if you’re writing about Human Resources, target HR related companies. It can be tempting to spray and pray with your outreach, or target more hard-to-obtain brands. Focus on the low hanging fruit, which means the companies with customer profiles matching your audience as closely as possible.

Keep track of the campaigns that perform well, both in terms of clicks, and down funnel metrics if possible. You might be surprised why seemingly unrelated products perform well because they’re a demographic-match (e.g. luxury furniture in a financial newsletter).

👁️ Invest in great ad copy and formats

Especially important if your newsletter has a unique voice, or is written in a personal format and/or directly associated with a personal brand. This newsletter is one (fantastic) example. Make sure the ad flows well, and ideally comes across as a genuine personal recommendation, versus a copy/pasted block of text from the marketer. If you’re not a great copy writer, like me, then hire someone who is. I find the best process to balance between effective and efficiently created copy is:

• The brand submits the copy, the majority of it, or at least some previous high-performing examples.

• You/your copy-writer then edits it into your specific tone of voice, and where appropriate into a genuine recommendation format.

🎨 Newsletter design and ad positioning

Less important than the above, but a good looking layout and prime ad-real-estate will drive higher engagement. It doesn’t have to be super flashy, 1440 is a example of a simple (yet effective) newsletter design, that from what I’ve heard on the marketing grapevine, drives great results for clients.

📊 Sales

The ‘salesy stuff’ you can do to increase renewal rates.

🧱Relationship/rapport building

This starts from the first outreach and includes pitching, negotiating, closing, campaign execution and reporting.

Even when you’re not selling, you’re selling.

Effective communication and quality work throughout, conveys competence, trust and that you’re committed to the campaign’s success. I’ve seen clients decide to renew, quoting something like ‘we like you guys, and your copy, so let’s give this another try.’

🏁 Reporting

Report promptly, accurately and honestly. Personally, I think 3 days after the last placement is great. Some wait 1-2 weeks, which works due to the nature of the readers or content consumption. The most important stats to report are unique opens, unique clicks and total clicks. You can also report total opens if they’re significantly higher to convey additional ‘bonus’ impressions.

A simple email or table is fine. A screenshot is nice & quick way to earn some transparency browny points too. Once you have the bandwidth and deal size to justify, the optimum way to report is with reporting decks and post campaign calls…

📹 Post campaign calls

If it’s a large campaign, or strategic partner, you’ll want to ideally jump on a post campaign call. You can showcase the deck, including campaign results, what went well, what didn’t go well, and future opportunities (ideas for the next campaign). Create a report deck template to make this efficient.

There’s a few reasons why post campaign calls can be hugely beneficial to your bottom line:

• You’ll unearth useful information which might lead to more opportunities that you just wouldn’t discover over email. Ask them about upcoming initiatives, launches, customer lifecycle, and how long their funnel can take.

• Have an honest conversation about results, which can help you follow up appropriately, or prevent you from wasting your time! Make sure you ask them about the results on their end in plenty of detail, the more candid/transparent you are, the more they will be with you.

• Add value to your client. Use the deck/call to educate them about results, such as: what copy performed best, specific link clicks (screenshot the overlay), compare their results to similar, brands (anonymously), or any feedback you got from subscribers. This is information that marketers will find very useful!

• Upselling. Use campaign results to come up with creative ideas together, for example, you could say: “The copy on XYZ performed best, so let’s build an SEO optimised evergreen content for readers in ‘partnership with brand name’, we could host a webinar on the topic, and following up with secondary newsletter placements to drive leads and Google traction for the content.” Suddenly, you are talking about a multichannel campaign which will be a much higher ticket, and drive great results. Win x2.

• Convince people who are on the fence. You can use the results to make suggestions on what you’d do better next time, “let’s lean into this copy style, and these topics around your XYZ features.” If their CAC was just below their success threshold, you can discuss dropping your prices to facilitate a renewal, and follow up with a quick-win discounted package.

🧐 Recommended Reading

If you’re not already reading Chenell Basilio’s Growth in Reverse then you have no hope. It’s a great newsletter that back engineers the growth of awesome newsletters. Mainly from a marketing/subscriber perspective.

This isn’t a swap, or paid, it’s just great.

📰 Newsletter News

🤝 This media brand was acquired for $24m, advertising relationships were the KEY factor behind the buyer’s decision.

📈 How Eric grew his newsletter to 235k, and charges $2,500 per hour for consulting!

🤖 The Information snatched up ex-Morning Brew staff, what can we take from these moves?

📊 Turn your subscribers into sponsors easily with this new tool.

👏 Stacked marketer raised at a $3.2m valuation, here’s why.