It’s all about the audience
Step 1 to making money with your newsletter: Find out who is in your audience!
As you’ve been writing and growing your newsletter subscribers, you probably have an idea of who they are based on your newsletter topic and any targeting you’ve done from growth initiatives. But if you are planning to bring successful advertisers to your newsletter, you will need to collect some audience data and make sure you get a representative sample of your overall readers as a whole!
So, how do you get that information when your ESP is limited in what data it can provide? Surveys!
Simple surveys are a great way for your readers to give you information about themselves, their interests, and what types of products they might be looking to purchase within your newsletter. Surveys can also help you find out if your advertisements should be geared towards B2B or B2C products. There are 3 great ways to collect data via surveys:
When a subscriber signs up for the email - On the confirmation landing page, create a survey to ask the questions you are looking to have answered. Make sure that it is a voluntary option and not something that readers are forced to do in order to subscribe to your email.
Send out a separate survey email to your mailing list - It is best to be straightforward and let readers know what the survey is about and that you are looking to help bring amazing, relevant sponsors to the email.
Include a link to the survey in your newsletter distribution - You will have to send the link a few times depending on how often you send your newsletter. Depending on the size of your list, a few hundred responses should be enough of a representative sample size to make your decisions. Most statistics say 1,000 responses is the maximum you need to obtain overall.
If you have an established audience but haven’t collected data yet, I would recommend sending a separate survey email and then adding the questions to your confirmation landing page going forward! You should have plenty of responses in no time :).
For more tips on maximizing revenue from your newsletter, check out our Newsletter Monetization Playbook for sale on Gumroad. Here is a link: Newsletter Monetization Playbook!
