Will your newsletter sponsor be a return buyer?

Hi! I'm Kit, and I'm building NewsletterRadar (https://newsletterradar.com) to help marketers discover the who, what, when, where and how of email newsletter sponsorship and advertising. By alerting

Today I wanted to expand on the first tranche of data we ever collected- 938 ads from 20 prominent newsletters from October 2022 - 2023, focusing on ad frequency- you can see a chart plotting the ad/sponsorship frequency of all advertisers above.

I wanted to find out more about repeat and high-frequency sponsors, so I started by splitting the advertiser data into three buckets:

Low frequency: 297 advertisers have only 1 ad (responsible for 31.73% of all ads).
Moderate frequency: 111 advertisers have between 2 to 5 ads (32.05% of all ads).
High frequency: 24 advertisers have more than 5 ads (the remaining 36.22% of all ads).

Interestingly, around three quarters of the advertisers within our dataset advertised once and never again within the sample. At the other end of the bell curve, the 24 high frequency posters are responsible for over a third of the examples. These high frequency examples often contain newsletters cross-posting to broaden their own audience (Morning Brew is a notable example), as well as direct-to-consumer brands such as the London Sock Company.

Breaking down the most common topics by each group reveals a reasonably consistent result for each:

Most popular topics of Low frequency newsletter advertisers:
Technology: 38 ads
Food and drink: 29 ads
Health and wellness: 13 ads

Most popular topics of Moderate frequency newsletter advertisers:
Technology: 28 ads
Food and drink: 28 ads
Health and wellness: 24 ads

Most popular topics of High frequency newsletter advertisers:
Style: 30 ads
Technology: 24 ads
Health and wellness: 22 ads

I wouldn't have picked that the 'Style' topic group (inclusive of some fashion and apparel keywords) would appear this commonly across high frequency advertisers. Given the small size of the high frequency group, this might be an outlier- I'm hoping to re-run this analysis at some point, so I guess time will tell if this is representative.

Conversely, pricing strategy does appear to change between groups, as evidenced by the below breakdowns:

Low frequency: Approximately 28.28% of ads from the low-frequency advertisers feature discounts.

Moderate frequency: Approximately 42.67% of ads from the moderate-frequency advertisers feature discounts.

High frequency: Approximately 46.90% of ads from the high-frequency advertisers feature discounts.

Discounting is a popular strategy in general, with roughly 4 in 10 ads offering some form of discount, so the results aren't entirely unexpected. That said, it's interesting to see the correlation between ad frequency and the discounting strategy. Are the discounters seeing better results, and coming back for more? Or does the ability to discount reflective of those with a higher marketing budget?

Lastly, I've heard some newsletters encourage purchasing ads in packages (groups of 2-5), so I wonder if some of the Moderate frequency group have run a batch of ads in this fashion and then not continued for whatever reason.

If you've used discounting within your ads, I'd be interested to hear how well it worked (or didn't). And if you've dipped your toes into newsletter sponsorship, were you a return customer?