How to Price a Partnership Before You Sign It

A partner comes to you with a list of 150,000 people in your target market. Access costs $10,000. Is that a good deal?

Most companies answer this on instinct, or on how the call felt. It can be priced properly in about five minutes, and the answer swings by more than an order of magnitude depending on one thing.

Warm and cold lists are not the same instrument

The critical question: is this an audience with a relationship to the partner, or a list they acquired?

A warm list — the partner's own customers or subscribers, people who recognize the sender and have some reason to care — produces roughly one action per 10,000 recipients for an aligned offer to a comparable audience.

A cold rented list produces roughly 0.2% clicks, and then your normal site conversion rate applies to those clicks.

Do not blend these. The gap between them is the whole decision.

Working the example

If the list is warm: 150,000 recipients ÷ 10,000 per action = about 15 customers. At $10,000, that is roughly $667 per customer.

Now compare it to your bar. If your maximum CPA is $300, this deal does not work and no amount of enthusiasm changes that. If your bar is $1,200, it is worth doing.

If the list is cold: 0.2% of 150,000 = 300 clicks. At a 2% site conversion rate, that is 6 customers, or about $1,667 each. Very likely outside your bar.

Same list, same price, wildly different answer — which is why "150,000 people in your target market" is not by itself information.

What to ask before agreeing

Where did the list come from? Their own customers, their newsletter, or purchased. This is the single most important question and partners are usually straightforward about it.

When did they last email it? A list that has not been contacted in two years is functionally cold regardless of how it was built.

What is their normal open rate? If they will share it, this is better than any constant. Under 15% means the relationship is weaker than "warm" implies.

Can we pay per action instead? Frequently the best move. A fixed fee puts all the risk on you; a bounty per order puts it on the partner and prices itself automatically. Many partners will take it, and the ones who refuse are telling you something about their confidence.

The wider point

Every channel that reaches people through someone else's audience can be priced this way before committing: list size, expected response, expected conversion, cost divided by expected customers, compared against your bar.

You will decline deals you would previously have taken, and you will occasionally find one that is dramatically underpriced and move on it quickly. Both are worth the five minutes.

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