How to find newsletter sponsors

Most newsletter sponsors are companies that have bought newsletter ads before. So the work is finding which companies sponsor newsletters like yours, reaching the person who decides, and pitching a specific placement. This is how we would do it by hand, and which steps SponsorHawk takes over.

1. Read the newsletters next to yours

Subscribe to ten to twenty newsletters on your topic, including bigger ones. Sponsored sections are usually labelled, so a few weeks of issues gives you a list of companies paying to reach your kind of reader. Note the format too: a main slot, a classified line or a dedicated send.

2. Rank that list

Put first the companies that sponsored a close match to your newsletter recently. Next come companies with other signs of budget: a recent funding round, ads running now, or a new hire in partnerships or marketing. A small list does not rule you out. A company that sponsors niche newsletters is usually buying the audience, not the subscriber count.

3. Find the buyer and pitch

Look for the person who owns sponsorships, often a partnerships, growth or demand generation lead. Keep the email short: the newsletter and who reads it, why the company fits (the comparable newsletter it already sponsors), one ask such as a single issue, and an offer to send your media kit and rates. Follow up once.

Where SponsorHawk fits

You give SponsorHawk your newsletter URL. It works out the topic, audience and category, matches companies that already sponsor comparable newsletters, finds named contacts and writes the pitches. Sending runs on SponsorHawk's own pre-warmed inboxes, so there is no domain or inbox to connect. You review the sponsor list and preview the pitch first, and one click pauses every campaign. Replies come back into SponsorHawk, which can answer from your media kit and hands the thread to you when a sponsor asks about price or a call.

Finding sponsors is free. Each email sent costs about $0.10, with no subscription, and adding a card grants $10 in credits for the first 100 emails. See pricing.

Newsletter sponsor databases

If you want to do the outreach yourself, newsletter sponsor databases sell the list: SponsorGap from $39 a month (SponsorHawk vs SponsorGap) and Who Sponsors Stuff (SponsorHawk vs Who Sponsors Stuff). Passionfroot works the other way round: brands find you on its marketplace (SponsorHawk vs Passionfroot). All of them are compared in best tools to find sponsors.