This article is a case study of our personal experience with a Beehiiv sponsored email.
First, a tiny backstory:
It is no secret that Beehiiv is our favorite email marketing platform, and it is the one we use.
Our first priority with email marketing is to grow our email list as much as possible.
2 of the main reasons we chose Beehiiv were:
And
Actually, these 2 features were part of the reason we chose Beehiiv over ConvertKit
ConvertKit is pretty cool too, and has some advantages like better landing page options.
Read our comparison: Beehiiv vs ConvertKit
Anyway, besides simply growing our list, earning a bit of money on the side is nice too, especially if it doesn’t take away from the audience experience.
In my opinion, a tasteful sponsored email is much better than ads on a website in every way I can think of:
Why?
Ads on websites are annoying, especially ones that move around and pop up all over the place. People develop ad blindness, and they try not to read ads for the most part.
Ads in the form of a sponsored email seem less intrusive. If you are an email subscriber of mine, then you already “trust” me to some extent. You know I wouldn’t advertise something terrible.
Also, you can format the Beehiiv sponsored email to show the ad at the bottom of the email, completely out of the way of the main body of the email you are sending.
Beehiiv gives you 4 template options to choose from, depending on your taste.
Anyway, long story short, we decided to try it.
Our Experience with the sponsored email:
During the first week of being on Beehiiv we got an email asking if we wanted to sponsor another email newsletter.
Actually, we have a couple different newsletters in our Beehiiv account. This option is available on the scale plan.
One of the newsletters is from an English learning podcast that we made over 10 years ago. These email subscribers are non-native speakers and they subscribed to us over 10 years ago on average. So we didn’t expect much. This was just a test.
The offer was $1.20 per click (not even subscriber). I’ve seen other ones offer over $3.00 per click, but this was our first offer, and it was on our first week. We had no idea if we would even make anything at all.
So we thought it was pretty good and worth a try.
Even though this list was about English learning, we were trying to bring them over to our website here, AI Growth Guys, which is about making money with AI. The sponsorship offer was to recommend another AI newsletter, so we thought it was a decent match.
It is important to only take sponsorships or ads that are a good fit for your audience, or you will slowly (or quickly) lose trust and credibility with them.
For us, if we got a lot of clicks (and money) but our email subscribers didn’t like the sponsored email, then we’d say that this was NOT worth it.
A good email list is like a goose that keeps laying golden eggs.
You don’t want to kill the goose!
Anyway, we chose a template that was the least intrusive, and we formatted the email so the sponsored part was at the bottom of the email.
We didn’t want it interfering with the main content of our email.
We were not trying to maximize clicks or money. We were trying to minimize any negative impacts it had on our audience. That is why we put it at the bottom of the email.
Note: There was a spot that said “sponsored” at the top of the email, and we were unable to remove that part. But that was fine, as it was small and minimally intrusive.
The results:
How many people did we send the email to?
We sent the email to 2051 people.
How much did we earn?
We got 22 clicks at $1.20 per click, for a total of $26.40
How much did we earn per subscriber?
26.40/2051 = $0.013
So we earned 1.3 cents per subscriber.
Remember though:
- This was a very old list who hadn’t explicitly shown an interest in AI
- We tried to make the ad as minimally intrusive as possible
- Some similar ads pay triple the rate. Meaning we would have earned over $60 from one email
- This was from only 1 email. We can do this again and again.
- If our email list was 200 000, like we’ve had in the past, we would have generated $2600 from one email, and $7800 from one email based on the $3.60 per click like some other offers.
How many people unsubscribed because of this?
7 out of 2051 unsubscribed. Surprisingly, slightly less than the number of people who unsubscribed from the previous email.
How many people complained about the sponsored email?
0.
How many people marked the email as spam?
0.
Would we do another Beehiiv sponsored email in the future?
Definitely, yes. Of course, we’ll try our best to make sure the sponsored content fits with our list.
Sign up for a free Beehiiv trial today.
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