Outsourced Sponsorship Sales for Editorial Newsletters

We take representation for a newsletter above roughly 12,000 verified and engaged subscribers in a category advertisers already buy. Below that the honest answer is that the founder should still be selling it themselves, and we say so rather than take the retainer. How we charge, and why it decides the work: A monthly retainer plus 12% of booked net revenue. We do not work on commission alone. Pure commission rewards filling the calendar and punishes the seller who turns down a sponsor that would cost the list its readers, and the reader's willingness to keep opening is the whole asset. The retainer buys the right to say no to a booking. One sponsor per send: We sell a single primary sponsor per issue. Two sponsors split the attention and both click rates fall, the renewal conversation gets harder, and yield per subscriber drops even as the sold-through figure improves. Where a title supports it we add a classified block priced on its own and kept visually separate from the primary placement. Reporting a sponsor can verify: Open rate is not a number we report. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, shipped with iOS 15 in September 2021, pre-fetches images for a large share of consumer inboxes and makes the figure uncountable in both directions. We report delivered volume, unique clicks, click rate against delivered, and where the sponsor puts a dedicated landing page behind the link, the post-click events they can confirm in their own analytics. Sponsors renew against numbers they can check on their side of the wire. What has to be in place before we start: An ESP export we can audit. A sunset policy for subscribers with no click in the trailing six months. Authentication set properly, meaning SPF, DKIM and DMARC at enforcement, and a sending domain separate from the publisher's transactional mail. If inbox placement is unstable, representation waits until it is fixed. Selling a sponsorship into a deliverability problem is the fastest route to losing the renewal. Running the desk: An inventory calendar with slots held and released on a stated schedule. Pipeline reviewed with you every fortnight. A deal memo and insertion order for every booking, in English or Arabic. Invoicing stays with the publisher and we never hold your money. Renewal conversations open at the second send of a flight, not after the last one. The number we are judged on: Sponsor renewal rate first, then average rate per thousand delivered. Sold-through is a vanity figure. A calendar filled at half rate is a worse year than one at seventy percent sold with the rate held. Categories we decline: On finance and business titles: crypto exchanges, forex and CFD brokers, and prop-trading offers, whatever the licence says. On health titles: supplement advertisers making a therapeutic claim, and any clinic offer that cannot produce its UAE advertising clearance. We also decline affiliate arrangements presented as sponsorship, and buyers whose real interest is the list itself. Not included: List growth. Editorial. Creative production for the sponsor. Programmatic monetisation of the web archive, which is separate work. And we will not represent two titles competing for the same advertiser category at the same time. Who this is not for: Publishers who want an audit rather than a seller. Newsletters with a mixed and undefined readership, because advertisers buy a reader and a general-interest list prices as remnant at any size. And anyone who wants three sponsors in an issue.