Newsletter Advertising in Salt Lake City: Who Sells It and What It Costs

How a newsletter ad works

A newsletter ad is a block of text, an image, or both, placed inside an email that people signed up to get. The publisher sends the issue, your ad rides along, and readers click through to your site or call you.

Most local newsletters sell some mix of four placements. A presenting sponsor gets its name or a big image ad at the top of the issue, where every reader sees it. A mid-issue mention is a short text ad between stories. A closing spot sits at the end and reaches the readers who finish the email. A dedicated send or sponsored article is a whole email or post about your business.

The Deseret News, for example, lets advertisers either sponsor a newsletter, with the sponsor's name at the top of each issue, or buy a premium contextual ad: a 1024 by 365 image, a 140-character header and a 300-character body. Building Salt Lake sells a banner and an inset ad in its daily email, plus dedicated emails. If you are still deciding whether email belongs in your plan at all, our guide to where to advertise in Salt Lake City lays newsletters next to Google, billboards, KSL and direct mail.

Salt Lake newsletters that sell ads today

We confirmed each of these takes advertisers on its own advertising page or media kit as of November 1, 2026. Figures are the publisher's own.

How newsletter ads are priced: flat fee, CPM and CPC

Local lists usually charge a flat fee per issue, per week or per month, like the Deseret News at $110 a day for Utah Today. Larger national newsletters often price by CPM, the cost per 1,000 subscribers or opens, or by CPC, the cost per click. Paved, a newsletter ad marketplace, says most traditional email sponsorships it sees land between $1 and $5 per click.

Whatever the publisher calls it, turn every quote into one number: dollars per 1,000 opens. Take the price, divide by the opens you expect, multiply by 1,000. That lets you set a Deseret News list next to a small Salt Lake County list and see what you are paying for each reader who actually opened the email.

Then compare that number with what you already pay for a lead. Our marketing cost guide for Salt Lake City has Google and Meta benchmarks to check against.

What Salt Lake lists cost per 1,000 readers

Here is that math using each publisher's own numbers. The Deseret News open rates are from its January 2025 rate card. Our open figures are our own estimates from our advertising page.

• Gastronomic SLC does not publish an open rate. Its $750 article works out to about $147 per 1,000 subscribers, and it includes a 500-word written story, a Facebook post and a page that stays on its site.
• Building Salt Lake lists a $2.20 to $4.10 CPM for its annual site sponsorships, which put Gold Sponsor logos in the daily email. It quotes email ads separately.

Count only the readers you can serve

Per open, Utah Today costs about a quarter of what The Closer does. It also reaches readers you may not be able to serve: the Deseret News says 80% of its overall audience lives outside Utah. If you run a plumbing company in Sandy, an open from a reader in Arizona is worth nothing to you.

So run the math a second time with only the readers you can serve. Ask each publisher what share of the list lives in Salt Lake County, or in the cities you cover, and multiply. A list of 2,500 people who all live in the valley can cost less per useful reader than a list of 75,000 spread across the country.

Match the list to the buyer too. Building Salt Lake's own guide says its readers include brokers, developers, builders and legislators, which fits an architecture firm or a commercial lender. Gastronomic SLC fits a restaurant opening in Sugar House; see our restaurant marketing guide for the rest of that plan. A general county list like ours fits home services, dentists, med spas and anyone who sells to households in places like Draper and Murray.

Questions to ask before you pay

Ask every Salt Lake publisher the same questions in writing, and pass on any that will not answer the first three.

• What is the open rate, and over what period? Ask for the last 10 issues, not the best one.
• What click rate did past ads get? Opens overcount. Apple Mail's Protect Mail Activity setting downloads images in the background when an email arrives, so many lists show opens from people who never looked. Clicks are harder to fake.
• Where did the subscribers come from? Ask whether they signed up on the publisher's own site, entered a giveaway, or were imported from another list.
• How many live in Salt Lake County? Ask for the number and how they measured it.
• How many other ads run in the same issue, and will a competitor be next to me?
• Who writes the ad, and do I approve it before it runs?
• Do I get a tracked link and a report afterward? If not, add your own UTM link or a promo code.
• Can I test one issue or one month before signing a longer deal?

Our newsletter, The Salt Lake Valley

We publish The Salt Lake Valley, a free email about events, food and news in Salt Lake County that goes out Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We sell ads in it, so read this section knowing we have a stake.

On November 1, 2026, the list had 2,441 subscribers. Each issue carries at most three ad spots: a top image ad, a mid-issue text mention and a closing spot. We write the copy for you, you approve it before it runs, and every ad gets its own tracked link.

The plans: The Closer is $149 a month for the closing spot in four issues. Neighbor is $179 a month for a text mention in two issues. Local Favorite is $539 a month for the top image ad, a mention and a closing spot, and we sell one of those a month. An event can be pinned to the top of our events page for $59. A Local Directory listing is $49 a month. The Closer, Neighbor and Local Favorite bill monthly and cancel anytime. The full details and a sample issue are on our advertise page.

Where we fall short: our list is small, and per open it costs more than a Deseret News list. If you need to reach the whole state in one day, buy Utah Today. If your customers all live in the valley, ask the same questions above of us and of everyone else, and compare.

How to run a fair test

Buy one month from one newsletter and change nothing else that month. Give the ad its own landing page or a promo code that only appears in that email, like SLV20 or TRIB15, so every sale or call can be traced to it.

At the end of the month, count clicks, calls and sales, and divide the price by the number of customers. If that beats what a Google or Meta lead costs you, run it again. If it does not, try a different placement in the same newsletter once, then move on.

Plan for at least four issues before you judge, and keep the offer the same across all of them so you are testing the newsletter, not the coupon.