🤖 Newsletter Bots

🤖 Attack of the Bots?

There’s been interesting discussions on newsletter Twitter over the last week about the impact of newsletter bots on your list.

First up, Manu from Stacked Marketer posted an epic tweet about lessons from selling over $1.5M+ of newsletter sponsorships. In my opinion, no-one packages ads better than Manu, and I’ve certainly modelled this approach with Wisdom Media.

Manu stated some potential red flags for sponsors when looking at the quoted open and click rates:

I replied arguing that due to Apple Mail’s policy, I think you should actually aim for open rates higher than 55%. And also that I have subscribers who open every email and who click exactly 5 links every time and whether the subscriber in the image below is a bot:

To which Manu replied:

This newsletter has a 64% open rate and an 8% click through rate so I wanted to check that you, dear reader, are not a bot. So I created segments in beehiiv:

I found that only 0.6% of subscribers open every email, and only 50% of those open and click every email. So if you are a bot, then you’re welcome to stay :)

And Manu followed up with another tweet yesterday saying that his Stacked Marketer generates significantly more clicks than much bigger newsletters who do not attempt to remove bots:

I’m certainly aware of big list newsletters who have been getting poor results for sponsors.

💸 Six Figure Recommendations

Louis, the co-founder of Sparkloop, confirmed that its Partner Network is guaranteed to pay out over six figures next month to multiple newsletter operators that run paid recommendations:

I actually met with Louis IRL at newsletter dinner in London last night and learned more about what it takes to earn such a signifiant payout.

But what goes on at Dine & Deliver stays at Dine & Deliver :)

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☝️ One More Thing

Ben Tossell from the 120K+ sub AI newsletter Ben’s Bites tweeted yesterday that he got fed up dealing with newsletter ad agencies (something the Sponsorships.com Newsletter Agency is designed to improve).

So he worked with Adam Tossell who built what looks an awesome and simple way to book one or multiple ad spots, without the need for any communication with the client:

AI Authority replied asking about the need for vetting scams, and I love Ben’s reply of a human actually has to run/pay for the ad:

This may work in the AI niche, but would not work for an NFT newsletter where 80%+ of potential sponsors will be scams/rugs.

And Michele from the sponsorship management tool Sponsy replied asking how do you handle bad copy to which Ben replied it’s not his job:

I think this is a really refreshing approach.

I personally don’t do this with my newsletter as I run native ads where I write the copy and I’m very fussy about vetting sponsors. In fact it needs to be someone I’ve worked with or a platform/tool/service I use, or I will just promote my own products.