Pay to Email Someone Else's Subscriber List

Objective: Generate highly targeted traffic to your content that has the potential to convert against your business goals.

How: There are a few ways you can go about this, and it largely depends on both how you want to work with the partner and how targeted you’d like the audience to be.

I always start with a campaign idea. Let’s say you’re promoting a free online course that you want to funnel into a paid product – getting this in front of a targeted list of subscribers could result in a ton of subscribers. For this example I’d ideally want to have either a dedicated email sent or a substantial mention within an email.

Depending on how prominently you’re mentioned in an email send will impact both pricing and availability. Some brands won’t actually offer a dedicated send but will instead allow you to have a mention within a section of the email. Both can work but you need to decide what would work better for your specific campaign and budget.

Next up is finding the right partner. You could use an advertising marketplace like BuySellAds where you simply search for partners based on a few criteria. I’ve done this in the past with varying results, to be honest.

My favorite approach is to get a list of hyper-relevant publications online and reach out to them (most will have a specific email address for advertising inquiries). Within the email I’ll ask the following:

• How big is your email list?
• What types of people are subscribes to your list?
• What’s the typical open/click rates of campaigns you run?
• What advertising options do you offer? (dedicated email, etc.)
• How much do you charge?

From there I’ll get data back from a few different partners and decide on the best one. A little advice here if it’s your first time doing this – start out small to test the conversion rate. Once you have proved it works on a small scale then you can go about scaling it up.