For smart newsletter operators, a SparkLoop Partner Program is the most effective way to grow your audience at scale.

It's a complete game-changer. The only channel where you can:

BUT...

Your Partner Program success hinges on one thing: Setting up effective quality controls.

In this guide, you'll learn how to set up effective quality controls for your newsletter's Partner Program. So you can sit back, relax, and watch the high-quality subscribers roll in.

Let's get started...

As a smart newsletter operator, you know that "subscriber count" is just a vanity metric.

You aren't creating a Partner Program to just acquire lots of new subscribers... you want to acquire (only) lots of high-quality, engaged subscribers.

And this causes some newsletter operators to make a huge mistake: They go into "control-freak" mode.

Control-freak mode causes you to do silly things you think are "protecting" your Partner Program, but are actually setting it up for failure.

The two biggest red flags are:

The data on this is 100% clear: If you do either of these things, your Partner Program is almost certain to be a failure. Not only will you get a low volume of referrals but — ironically — the few referrals you do get will be worse quality.

So what should you do instead?

To get amazing results from your Partner Program, you need to adopt an "easy come, easy go" mentality.

This involves three key steps:

This wide→narrow funnel is the winning mindset for rapid newsletter growth, but it can be a hard one to adopt. Especially for smart newsletter operators who've used other platforms before SparkLoop, where the 3rd step "cut ruthlessly" wasn't possible.

Let's take a look at how to implement it for your own Partner Program.

There are many different levels of quality control and anti-fraud which go into ensuring your Partner Program only acquires high-quality, engaged subscribers.

Here's a high-level overview of how it works — and how we keep our "fraud" level below 0.01% !

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Without exception, all partner newsletters in the Partner Network are heavily vetted.

They know they'll only earn payouts for referring high-quality subscribers. So they're completely incentivised to only recommend publications that are a good fit for their audience.

But it's your job to give partners the information they need to be able to decide if your publication is a good fit for their audience or not!

✏️ Take the time to create a useful Ideal Subscriber Profile

✏️ Include a link to a document where you give examples of how to effectively pitch your newsletter, and who to pitch it to

Examples for inspiration:

To be approved for the Partner Network, partner newsletters must have a majority of their audience be English-speaking. Located in North America and Western Europe.

But that still means a significant minority of referrals they make to your publication may be subscribers from other locations around the globe.

It's likely that your publication, content or revenue streams make subscribers from certain countries very valuable, and others not valuable at all.

✏️ If this is the case for your newsletter, it's your responsibility to set clear geographical restrictions on which locations you'll pay for subscribers from, and which you won't...

To keep things fair for partner newsletters, you need to do this proactively. Before they recommend your publication.

Geographical restrictions ensure your publication is only displayed to users in approved locations, thanks to Upscribe's geo-optimized recommendations.

For example, if you accept worldwide referrals for your partner program, your publication is displayed to anyone in any country. However, if you only accept referrals from USA, Canada, and the UK, your publication will only be displayed in Upscribe to users in those locations.

When a new subscriber is referred by a partner, you can set a "quarantine" period, called the screening period.

Normally this is anywhere between 7-14 days after sign-up.

If the new subscriber unsubscribes during this time-period, they won't count towards payouts.

This is useful. But smart newsletter operators go one step further and set custom engagement conditions — criteria a new subscriber must fulfil during the screening period in order to count towards payouts.

For example:

✏️ Choose whatever screening period and custom engagement conditions you like.

However it is your responsibility to:

Here's a quick video overview of how to set up this last, automatic filtering step:

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If you need support in figuring out or setting up your custom engagement condition filtering in your ESP, please reach out to your SparkLoop account manager.

We're more than happy to help with both strategy and implementation.

Of all the steps in this guide, this step is the one newsletter operators are most likely to skip.

But that's a terrible mistake... because it's the most important step for unlocking huge quantities of high-quality subscriber growth.

Partners can refer subscribers to your publication via three acquisition sources:

When used correctly, all of these acquisition sources result in extremely high-quality, engaged referrals.

By default, subscribers referred via Upscribe have lower awareness of your publication (because they haven't seen your website yet).

So they need a different, context-heavy welcome sequence, with a clear CTA to change their minds and opt-out.

Here's a video explaining how to set up this extra, contextual welcome sequence:

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If you need help setting this up in your ESP, please contact your SparkLoop account manager who can help with strategy and implementation.

Most Partner Programs who follow the steps above never experience even a single issue with the quality of partner referrals.

If you're one of the unlucky few who do, just follow this three step process:

Nine times out of ten, the best solution to an issue with partner referral quality is to improve your filtering, welcome sequences, the info you share with partners, or your geographical restrictions.

If however, this isn't enough for a specific partner, here's what to do...

Report them using the "report partner" button and our team will investigate and handle for you.

If there was a genuine instance of fraud, any referrals they've made will be rejected (even confirmed ones) and they'll permanently be banned from the platform.

You can archive their campaign. Any referrals they have already made (pending + confirmed) will count towards payouts as normal, however they won't be able to make any referrals at all in the future to your publication.

Depending on your publication's target audience, it's possible that a partner newsletter might be obeying all the rules. And sending you genuine, engaged subscribers from the right locations, who love your newsletter.

But — for whatever reason — you might look at those email addresses (or the partner) and just have a feeling in your gut (or your Business Intelligence dashboard) that the subscribers they're sending you aren't *quite* as valuable as others.

In this case, you don't have to ban them completely though.

Instead, you can adjust their budget or CPA to a level that better reflects how valuable you think their subscribers are!

You've read the guide, now you want to implement your Partner Program — without forgetting anything important!