Newsletter swap brokering for parent and teacher lists

A swap is worth running when the two lists overlap by under about fifteen percent and both sides send at least weekly. We measure that overlap before we introduce anyone, through a hashed match neither party can read, and roughly half the pairings that look right on subscriber count fail it. Matching on size is how a trade produces two hundred unsubscribes and one grudge. What we broker: Reciprocal placements between newsletters read by parents, teachers, early-years professionals, association members and institutional donors, in France and in English-speaking markets. Dedicated sends, top-of-fold recommendations, and the postscript slot, which converts worse and is the right ask for a first trade with an operator who does not know you yet. Terms go in writing before anyone drafts copy: placement type, send date, minimum audience after suppression, UTM convention, who writes what, and what happens when one side slips a week. Most swap disputes are scheduling disputes. Before we introduce two operators: We read the partner's sending domain - DMARC policy and whether it is enforced, SPF and DKIM alignment, shared pool or dedicated, and their complaint rate if they will show it. Sustained complaints above 0.3 percent are treated as a problem by the large mailbox providers, and reputation travels with the traffic you accept. We have declined pairings on that number alone. We also read six months of their archive: an operator who has run four affiliate promotions in a quarter is renting their audience, and a recommendation from them carries nothing. What we refuse: Paid-per-subscriber referral networks for any list that reaches children or their parents. Money moves between operators, the subscriber never learns that it did, and a parent list is the wrong place to run that experiment. We do not broker into lists built by giveaway or co-registration. We do not place a fundraising ask inside a trade without the partner seeing the exact wording first. We do not represent both sides of a paid deal, and when a trade is one-sided we say so to the smaller party, including when the smaller party is the one paying us. How we count it: Confirmed subscribers at day thirty who have opened at least once, not clicks on the day. A well-matched pair in this sector retains between fifty-five and seventy percent on that measure. Below forty we call the pairing dead, tell both operators, and do not repeat it. We report the loss side too - unsubscribes and complaints on your own list caused by the outbound placement - which is the number most brokers leave out of the summary. Who this is not for: Anyone whose list is a tenth the size of the one they want access to. A swap is barter between comparable operators and no fee makes an imbalanced trade fair to the larger side. Also not for lists under roughly three thousand active subscribers; there is nothing to trade yet, and the honest advice is to spend the budget on your own acquisition instead. What you receive: A shortlist of operators with the overlap figure, deliverability read and archive assessment for each. Introductions made by us, with our name attached to the recommendation. Drafted copy in both directions, because a trade fails when one side writes a recommendation and the other writes an advertisement. A signed one-page term sheet per placement. A calendar you can run without us afterwards, and relationships that stay yours.