A Smart Guide to Cross-Brand Newsletter Analytics

Think of a cross-promotion like a pop-up restaurant collaboration. Two chefs team up, sharing their kitchens and introducing their signature dishes to a new crowd of diners. It’s a brilliant way to attract new customers. But at the end of the night, how do they know which new patrons came for which chef? And more importantly, will those new customers come back? Without a system to track reservations and sales, it’s all just a fun experiment. The same is true for your newsletter. A dedicated strategy for cross-brand newsletter analytics is your reservation book and sales report, showing you exactly which partnerships are filling your tables with loyal, paying customers.

Key Takeaways

• Make Tracking Non-Negotiable: Before launching any collaboration, create unique, UTM-tagged links for each partner. This is the only way to accurately measure subscriber growth and conversions, proving which partnerships truly deliver results.
• Prioritize Engagement Over List Size: A small group of highly engaged subscribers is always more valuable than a large, uninterested one. Look beyond the initial numbers and analyze the long-term behavior of new readers to find partners with truly aligned audiences.
• Turn Insights into Your Next Strategy: Don't let your campaign data sit in a dashboard. Use the results from each collaboration to identify successful patterns and inform your next move, whether it's finding similar partners, testing new content formats, or optimizing your send times.

Why You Need to Track Cross-Brand Newsletter Analytics

Collaborating with other brands is a fantastic way to grow your newsletter, but it's easy to get caught up in the excitement of a new partnership and forget the most important part: figuring out if it actually worked. Flying blind means you might be wasting time and resources on partnerships that don't deliver. This is where analytics comes in. By tracking your cross-brand efforts, you can move from guessing to knowing, making smarter decisions that lead to real, sustainable growth. It’s about understanding which collaborations bring in engaged subscribers and which ones fall flat, so you can double down on what’s effective and build a stronger, more profitable newsletter program.

What are cross-brand collaborations?

A cross-brand collaboration—sometimes called a cross-promotion or a swap—is when you team up with another brand to promote each other's newsletters. Think of it as a friendly introduction. You share their work with your audience, and they share yours with theirs. The goal is simple: get your newsletter in front of a new, relevant group of people who are likely to be interested in your content. It’s one of the most effective ways to get new, quality subscribers because you’re tapping into an audience that already trusts your partner’s recommendations.

Why tracking cross-promotions matters

If you’re not tracking your cross-promotions, you’re missing the whole story. Data shows you what’s working and what isn’t. Tracking helps you answer critical questions: Did that partnership actually bring in new subscribers? Are they sticking around and opening your emails? Which partner’s audience was the best fit for your content? Using tools like UTM parameters lets you see exactly how many subscribers you get from each promotion. These newsletter metrics are your guide to understanding what your readers value and how your partnerships are performing. Without them, you can’t prove the ROI of your efforts or make informed decisions about who to partner with next.

How Cross-Brand Newsletter Promotions Work

Cross-brand promotions are a powerful way to grow your audience with warm leads. Instead of shouting into the void, you’re getting a direct recommendation from a source your ideal subscribers already trust. It’s a classic win-win that introduces your newsletter to an engaged audience and provides fresh, relevant content for your partner’s readers. But before you can measure success, you need to understand the mechanics of a great collaboration. Let's break down how these partnerships actually come to life, from the initial agreement to the final send.

Common partnership models

At its core, a cross-promotion is a straightforward exchange. You and another brand or creator agree to promote each other's work, often in your respective newsletters. These are sometimes called "swaps" or "cross-marketing." The goal is simple: get your newsletter in front of a new, relevant audience to attract high-quality subscribers. The most common model is a direct shout-out, where you write a short, personal recommendation for your partner’s newsletter, and they do the same for you. Other models include content swaps, where you feature a guest post from each other, or a simple ad placement in a dedicated section of your newsletter.

How to integrate your content

The best cross-promotions feel like a natural extension of your content, not a clunky advertisement. When you recommend another newsletter, explain why you’re doing it. What do you love about their work? What will your audience gain from subscribing? Weave the recommendation into your regular format with a personal touch. For example, you could say, "If you enjoy my weekly breakdown of marketing trends, you'll love [Partner's Newsletter] for their deep dives into brand strategy." This approach builds trust and shows you’re curating valuable resources for your readers, not just filling space. The promotion should feel like a genuine endorsement you’d give a friend.

How to align your audiences

A successful partnership hinges on audience alignment. It doesn't matter if a potential partner has a million subscribers if none of them are interested in your topic. The key is to find people with similar audiences to yours. This doesn’t mean they have to be in the exact same niche, but there should be a clear overlap in interests, pain points, or demographics. Before reaching out, do your homework. Read their newsletter, check out their social media, and get a feel for their community. Quality over quantity is the rule here; a partnership with a smaller, highly-aligned newsletter will almost always outperform one with a massive but irrelevant audience.

Key Metrics for Tracking Cross-Brand Success

Once your cross-brand campaign is live, it’s time to see how it’s performing. But success isn’t just about a single number; it’s about looking at a handful of key metrics that tell the full story of your collaboration. Tracking the right data helps you understand what worked, what didn’t, and whether a partnership is worth repeating. These metrics are your guide to making smarter decisions for future campaigns and proving the value of your work. Let’s break down the four most important areas to watch.

Engagement

Engagement metrics tell you if the content you shared with your partner’s audience—and the content they shared with yours—actually landed. Think of open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and reply rates. As the team at Beehiiv puts it, "Metrics help you understand what your readers like and don't like. They show you how well your hard work is paying off." A high open rate shows the subject line was compelling, while a strong CTR indicates the content itself was relevant and interesting. Low engagement can be a sign of a mismatch between audiences, giving you valuable feedback for your next collaboration. Keeping a close eye on these numbers is the first step to measuring the true impact of your content.

Subscriber growth and acquisition

One of the biggest perks of cross-promotion is reaching a new, relevant audience. Tracking how many new subscribers you gain from a specific campaign is essential. As one expert notes, "Cross-promotions are a good way to get new, quality subscribers for your newsletter." To do this effectively, you’ll need a dedicated landing page or a unique sign-up form for each partner campaign. This allows you to attribute new subscribers directly to your collaboration. Beyond just the raw number, pay attention to the sign-up conversion rate. This tells you how effectively you turned your partner's audience into your own.

Revenue and conversions

Ultimately, your newsletter needs to support your business goals. That’s where revenue and conversion tracking comes in. A conversion is any valuable action a reader takes. It’s "the percentage of people who take a specific action you want them to (like buying something, filling out a form, or clicking a special link) after opening your email." This could be a direct sale, a demo request, an affiliate link click, or a download. By using UTM parameters on your links, you can trace these actions back to your cross-promotional efforts. This metric connects your newsletter activity directly to bottom-line results, making it one of the most powerful ways to demonstrate the ROI of your partnership.

Audience quality

Not all subscribers are created equal. A successful cross-promotion brings in people who are genuinely interested in your brand, not just a temporary bump in numbers. As Growth in Reverse points out, "A smaller list with high engagement (a 'hot' audience) is often better than a large list with low engagement (a 'flat' audience)." To measure audience quality, look at the behavior of the new subscribers you acquired from the partnership. Are they opening your subsequent emails? Are they clicking on links? A low unsubscribe rate and high engagement from this new cohort are strong indicators that you’ve found a well-aligned partner and a quality new audience. This focus on quality ensures your list growth is both sustainable and valuable.

The Right Tools for Analyzing Performance

Once you know which metrics to track, you need the right toolkit to gather and analyze the data. Relying on guesswork won't cut it when you're trying to build strategic partnerships. The good news is that you have several options, from the basic analytics inside your email platform to more sophisticated systems that give you a complete picture of your campaign's impact. The key is to choose tools that match your team's scale and goals, so you can spend less time digging for data and more time acting on it.

Your email platform's built-in analytics

Your first stop for data will almost always be your email service provider (ESP). Most newsletter platforms have built-in tools that report on your subscribers and individual email performance. These dashboards are perfect for getting a quick snapshot of core metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe numbers for each send. While this is a fantastic starting point for understanding immediate engagement, it often doesn't provide the full context for a cross-promotion. You can see how many people clicked a link, but you won't know what they did next without a little more setup.

UTMs and attribution tools

To see the true impact of your partnerships, you need to track what happens after the click. This is where Urchin Tracking Modules, or UTM parameters, come in. These are simple snippets of text you add to the end of a URL that tell your analytics software where a visitor came from. By giving your partner a unique, UTM-tagged link, you can see exactly how many subscribers and conversions you get from their newsletter. This helps you measure the direct ROI of each promotion and decide which partnerships are worth pursuing again. It’s the most straightforward way to connect a specific campaign to a specific result.

Third-party analytics platforms

As your newsletter program grows, you might find yourself hitting the limits of built-in analytics and UTMs. When you’re running multiple campaigns across different channels, you need a way to see the big picture. This is where third-party analytics platforms come in. These tools pull data from all your marketing channels—your ESP, social media, website, and ad platforms—into one place. This allows you to connect your cross-promotional efforts to broader business goals, like overall revenue and customer lifetime value, giving you a much richer understanding of your performance and how newsletters contribute to your bottom line.

How Letterhead simplifies measurement

Juggling data from your ESP, Google Analytics, and spreadsheets can get complicated and time-consuming. Instead of piecing together reports, a unified platform like Letterhead brings all your essential data into one place. We designed our dashboards to give you a clear, consolidated view of your cross-promotional performance alongside all your other key newsletter metrics. This means you can easily track subscriber growth from specific partners, monitor engagement, and measure revenue attribution without needing a separate business intelligence tool. It’s all about getting actionable insights without the technical overhead.

How to Set Up Your Cross-Brand Tracking

A successful cross-promotion is built on a solid foundation of planning and tracking. Before you launch a collaborative newsletter, you need a system to measure what works. This isn't about getting lost in spreadsheets; it's about getting clear, actionable insights that prove your campaign's value and show you where to invest your energy next. Setting up your tracking framework from the start ensures you capture every important data point without any guesswork later on. It’s the difference between hoping a partnership works and knowing it does.

Your pre-campaign checklist

Before you team up, do your homework. The right partner can introduce you to a new, engaged audience, but the wrong one is a waste of time and resources. It’s essential to check a creator's audience quality before committing to a partnership. Ask for key stats like their list size and average open rate, but don't stop there. Look at their content and social media to see if their audience is genuinely active. Beyond the numbers, clearly define your campaign goals. Are you aiming for new subscribers, sales, or something else? Agree on these KPIs with your partner upfront so everyone is on the same page from day one.

Best practices for collecting data

Once you have a partner, you need a reliable way to track the subscribers they send your way. The most effective method is using unique, trackable links. This is where UTM parameters come in—simple tags you add to a URL that tell your analytics tools exactly where a visitor came from. Using them allows you to see precisely how many subscribers you get from each promotion. This data is gold because it shows you which partnerships are driving real results. Make it a non-negotiable step to create a unique link for each partner and each campaign to understand what’s truly working.

Choosing the right attribution model

A new subscriber rarely discovers you from a single source. They might see your partner's newsletter, then a social post, and finally click a link on your website. This is why choosing an attribution model is so important. A holistic approach, often called cross-channel analysis, looks at all the ways customers interact with your brand at once. This gives you a full picture of the customer journey, not just the last click. By bringing together data from all your marketing efforts, you can see the true influence of your cross-brand campaigns and how they contribute to your overall growth.

How to Measure a Successful Collaboration

Once your cross-promotion is live, the real work begins: figuring out if it actually worked. Measuring success isn't about vanity metrics; it's about understanding what resonates with your audience and whether a partnership is worth repeating. A successful collaboration should align with the goals you set at the beginning, whether that was growing your list, driving sales, or increasing brand awareness. To get a clear picture, you need to look at a few key areas and compare your campaign's performance against your own baseline and industry averages.

Understanding industry benchmarks

Before you can tell if your numbers are good, you need some context. Industry benchmarks are a helpful starting point for understanding where you stand. Think of them less as a strict report card and more as a friendly guide. Ultimately, metrics are simply feedback that helps you understand what your readers like and what they don’t.

While performance varies by niche, some general figures can be useful. In the US, the average email open rate is around 30%, with a click-through rate (CTR) of about 2.3%. If your numbers are in that ballpark, you’re on the right track. However, the most important benchmark is your own data. How did this collaboration perform compared to your last five campaigns? That’s the question that will truly tell you if your strategy is improving.

How to compare your performance

To know if a collaboration was a win, you need to track where your new subscribers came from. The easiest way to do this is with UTM parameters. These are small tags you add to your links that act like a tracking code, showing you exactly how many clicks and sign-ups came directly from your partner’s newsletter. This simple step removes the guesswork and tells you precisely how effective each promotion was.

Remember, quality often trumps quantity. A collaboration that brings in 50 highly engaged readers can be far more valuable than one that adds 500 who never open your emails. A smaller, enthusiastic audience is more likely to convert into loyal fans and customers. When you review your results, look at the engagement rates of the new subscribers you gained. That’s the true sign of a successful partnership.

How to calculate your ROI

Calculating the return on investment (ROI) for a newsletter collaboration helps you understand its financial impact. For every dollar spent on email marketing, businesses see an average return of about $36, so the potential is huge. To figure out your ROI, compare the value you gained (like revenue from new subscribers) to what you spent (like your time or any fees).

If your goal was subscriber growth, you can assign a value to each new subscriber based on your average customer lifetime value. While it’s important to track these numbers, don’t get lost in every small fluctuation. Focus on the bigger picture and the overall trends to guide your strategy.

How to Find and Vet the Right Partners

Finding the right partner is more art than science, but a little data goes a long way. The goal isn't just to get in front of a new audience; it's to get in front of the right new audience—one that will actually care about what you have to say. A successful partnership feels authentic to both sets of readers and delivers real value. This means looking beyond follower counts and digging into a potential partner’s audience, content, and overall brand alignment. When you find that perfect match, it’s a win-win that can lead to sustainable growth for both newsletters.

Researching potential partners

Your next great partner might already be in your orbit. Start by looking at who is consistently interacting with your content on social media or in your comments section. If they also run a newsletter, they’re already a warm lead. You can also use built-in discovery tools on platforms like ConvertKit or Beehiiv, which are designed to help you find creators in your niche. These networks can cut your research time significantly by surfacing newsletters with similar audiences. Make a shortlist of potential partners whose work you genuinely admire and who seem to have an engaged community.

Analyzing audience overlap

Instead of trying to partner with everyone, focus on finding three to five perfect collaborators. The best partners often serve an "adjacent" audience—one that doesn't overlap completely with yours but has related interests. For example, if you write a newsletter about productivity tools, a partner who writes about remote work culture could be a perfect fit. Their audience is likely interested in your content, but you aren't directly competing. This approach expands your reach into new territory while maintaining relevance, ensuring the promotion feels helpful rather than random.

Assessing brand alignment

Before you reach out, do a thorough vibe check. Read through your potential partner’s last few newsletters. Does their tone resonate with yours? Do they uphold a similar standard of quality? A partnership is an endorsement, so make sure you’re aligning with a brand you respect. Once you’ve confirmed the brand is a good fit, it’s time to look at performance. Don’t be afraid to ask about their list size, average open rate, and click-through rate. This ensures you’re partnering with someone who has a genuinely engaged audience and sets clear expectations for the collaboration.

Common Cross-Brand Analytics Mistakes to Avoid

Even with the best intentions, it’s easy to make mistakes when analyzing cross-brand collaborations. The good news is that most of these errors are preventable. By being aware of the common pitfalls, you can ensure your data is clean, your insights are accurate, and your partnerships are set up for success. Let’s walk through a few key mistakes to watch out for so you can get the most out of your analytics and build stronger, more effective collaborations.

Using inconsistent metrics

It’s tempting to apply a one-size-fits-all approach to your analytics, but this can be misleading. Every newsletter and every partner is unique, so your key performance indicators (KPIs) should be too. For example, a collaboration aimed at driving brand awareness will have different success metrics than one focused on direct sales. Applying the same rigid set of KPIs to every campaign can obscure what’s actually working. Instead, define your goals for each partnership first, then choose the metrics that accurately reflect those objectives. This tailored approach ensures you’re measuring what truly matters for each specific collaboration.

Making attribution errors

When you’re running multiple campaigns with different partners, it’s crucial to know which efforts are driving results. Without a clear system in place, you can easily misattribute a new subscriber or a sale to the wrong source. This happens when tracking isn’t set up correctly, leading you to give credit to the last touchpoint instead of understanding the full journey. Using tools like UTM parameters consistently is a great first step. A solid marketing attribution strategy helps you tie your data directly to business outcomes, ensuring you invest more in the partners and campaigns that deliver real value.

Overlooking data integration issues

Your audience doesn’t interact with you in a vacuum. They might discover your partner’s newsletter, click a link to your site, sign up for your list, and later make a purchase. If your analytics tools aren’t connected, you’ll only see isolated pieces of this story. Overlooking data integration creates a fragmented view, making it impossible to understand the complete customer journey. To get a holistic picture, you need to connect the data points from your email platform, website analytics, and CRM. This unified view reveals how collaborations truly impact your business beyond just opens and clicks.

Forgetting segmentation and mobile

A significant portion of your audience is likely reading your newsletters on their phones. If your landing pages and content aren’t optimized for mobile, you’ll see high bounce rates and low engagement, no matter how great the collaboration is. Beyond device type, it’s also important to analyze how different audience segments interact with your collaborative content. Do new subscribers from a partner’s list behave differently than your existing audience? Segmenting your audience helps you answer these questions, allowing you to personalize future campaigns and create a better experience for everyone, regardless of how or where they’re reading.

Use Your Data to Optimize Future Campaigns

The real power of analytics isn’t just seeing what happened—it’s shaping what happens next. After a cross-brand campaign wraps up, the data you’ve collected becomes your playbook for future collaborations. Think of each partnership as a live experiment where you’re learning what your audience responds to, which partners are the best fit, and what kind of content drives real results. This is where you move from simply reporting on metrics to actively using them to build a smarter, more effective newsletter strategy.

By digging into the performance of each collaboration, you can identify patterns that guide your decisions. Did a certain partner’s audience convert at a higher rate? Did a specific content format, like a co-authored guide or a product swap, generate more clicks than others? These insights are gold. They help you refine your partner selection process, pitch more compelling collaboration ideas, and forecast your results with greater accuracy. Instead of starting from scratch with every new campaign, you’ll be building on a foundation of proven success, making each partnership more impactful than the last.

Make data-driven decisions

Your gut instinct is a great starting point, but data provides the evidence you need to act with confidence. Your campaign metrics are a direct line to your audience’s preferences, showing you exactly what they engage with and what they ignore. As the team at Beehiiv puts it, your newsletter metrics help you understand what your readers like and don't like. If a collaboration with a productivity app resulted in a high click-through rate on a shared template, that’s a clear signal your audience values practical tools. You can use that insight to seek out similar partners or create more resource-focused content in the future.

A/B test your collaborative content

One of the most effective ways to refine your approach is to A/B test your collaborative content. This involves creating two variations of a single element to see which one performs better. You can test different subject lines (e.g., one that names your partner and one that focuses on the value proposition), try out different calls-to-action, or experiment with the placement of the partner’s content within your newsletter. The key is to change only one thing at a time so you can accurately attribute the difference in performance. As you run these experiments, you’ll gather valuable data that shows you how to test different versions of your emails to see what works best for your specific audience.

Analyze trends to perfect your timing

A brilliant message can fall flat if it arrives at the wrong moment. Getting the timing right is critical, especially when coordinating with a partner brand whose audience might be in a different time zone. Analyzing your past campaign data can reveal powerful trends. Do your subscribers open emails more on Tuesday mornings or Thursday afternoons? Does engagement spike at lunchtime? According to MoEngage, getting the timing right can be the difference between a successful campaign and making one of the classic email marketing mistakes. Look for correlations between send times and your key metrics to find the sweet spot for your audience, ensuring your collaborative content gets the attention it deserves.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What's the single most important metric to track in a cross-promotion? This is a great question, but the truth is, there isn't just one. The most important metric depends entirely on the goal you set for the collaboration. If your primary aim is to grow your list, then the number of new subscribers you gain from your partner's unique link is your north star. However, if the goal is to drive sales for a product, then your focus should be on revenue and conversion rates. The key is to define what success looks like for each specific partnership before you launch.

How do I ask a potential partner for their stats without sounding demanding? The best way to approach this is with transparency and a collaborative spirit. Instead of asking for their numbers outright, offer to share yours first. You could say something like, "To make sure this is a great fit for both of us, I'm happy to share our average open and click-through rates. Would you be open to sharing yours as well?" Framing it as a mutual exchange for setting clear expectations makes the conversation feel like a strategic partnership, not an interrogation.

Is it better to partner with a huge newsletter or a smaller, more niche one? While a massive list can seem appealing, audience alignment is far more important than audience size. A partnership with a smaller newsletter that serves a highly engaged and relevant audience will almost always outperform one with a huge but disinterested readership. Your goal is to find subscribers who will stick around and engage with your content long-term. Focus on the quality of the audience, not just the quantity.

My partner and I have different list sizes. How can we make the collaboration feel fair? This is a very common scenario, and it doesn't have to be a dealbreaker. A fair exchange is about matching value, not just numbers. If your list is smaller, you could offer multiple promotions in your newsletter over time to equal one mention in theirs. You could also offer to promote them on your social media channels or website to add extra value. The key is to have an open conversation and get creative to find an arrangement that feels balanced and beneficial for both of you.

How soon after a campaign should I analyze the results? You can start looking at initial engagement metrics like open and click-through rates within the first 24 to 48 hours to get an early read on performance. However, the true success of a collaboration reveals itself over time. Give it at least a week to track new subscriber sign-ups. To measure audience quality, you'll want to monitor the engagement of that new cohort over the next several weeks to see if they are opening your emails and sticking around.