Is email advertising one of the most underutilized advertising channels? Is it about to explode in importance and popularity? We definitely think so. Just consider some of these facts:
- Did you know there are 3 times as many email accounts as there are Twitter and Facebook accounts?
- Or that people are six times more likely to click-through a link in an email than on any other channel?
Whether you want to advertise in other people’s emails or make more money from your own emails by selling ad-space, it’s time to start leveraging this opportunity. That is why we’ve prepared a quick guide to help you out.
Buying ad space in newsletters
If you want to buy ad space in other people’s emails, first you must learn the difference between the different kinds of ads. This will help you decide how to go about advertising. The following 3 types of ads exist in both website advertising and email advertising.
Banner Ads (Display ads)
This is the most well-known form of advertising online. Everyone knows what a banner is. We’ve all seen millions of banners since the day we started using the internet. They’re almost on every website you’ll ever visit. But that’s actually where the problem comes in.
As of today, most internet users have developed something that’s known as “banner blindness”. In other words, their brains have become accustomed to filtering out banners. They don’t even perceive that banner sitting on the side, trying to get their attention.
This is why banners on websites today have incredibly low clickthrough rates. It’s also why many advertisers are switching to native ads, but more on that later.
Yet, brands still tend to use banner ads. In 2015 a total of $27.05 billion was spent on display ads alone. And today, designers and advertisers have to fight much harder to get the attention of internet users. They have to constantly come up with new ideas and designs that are pretty clever to get any attention at all.
Retargeting is another strategy that marketers utilize these days to help slow down the death of traditional advertising. With this technology, the banner ads that you see are very personalized to your interests and needs. They are based on your browsing history and the content you read most of the time.
Will retargeting save display ads? Maybe. It uses a similar psychological mechanism as native ads.Click To TweetThe good news here is that when banner ads feel more personal, they can still perform relatively well. This is why retargeting works. It is also why banner ads still do relatively well when displayed inside of emails.
They are received better because they “feel more personal”. If you pick a newsletter that covers topics related to your banner ad, you can be sure it will get a pretty good click through rate.
This means that you can get good results from display ads without having to do so much work. You don’t have to spend a lot of time crafting advanced retargeting strategies or super-clever attention-getting graphics. Just put your ads inside of an email newsletter that people trust. But wait, how do you do that?
This is where AdMailr comes in. We’ve developed a straightforward platform that helps you advertise in emails. While we (at AdMailr) believe that Native Ads are the future of advertising, we still support display ads. In fact, AdMailr might just be the easiest way to dive right in and place some of your display ads in emails. Give it a try.
Native ads
Native advertising is slowly starting to take over the field of advertising, and for a good reason. If you didn’t know, a native ad is basically an ad that doesn’t look like an ad. It’s a special kind of paid advertisement that blends into a given medium. In other words, it looks like it’s part of the website you’re seeing.
A popular example are those widgets you see with “recommended posts” or “recommended reading”. It’s basically a list of items, usually with a thumbnail, title, and a teaser line.
Some of the items will be links to posts on that same website, whilst others will actually link to a 3rd party website. Those 3rd party items are actually native ads, but they don’t look different than the other items on the list.
Now, this is just one example of a “native ad”. There are actually many different implementations of the concept. The one thing they all have in common is that they work much better than traditional display ads. The reason for this is simple – native ads look like they are part of the editorial content.
Fortunately for you, it is now possible to use native advertising inside of emails. Enter AdMailr – a company that’s passionate about being a leader in native email advertising. You can join today and start utilizing the power of native email ads long before your competitors learn about this strategy.
Sponsored content
You might occasionally see a feature editorial in a major publication like the New York Times, and it will say something like “Sponsored By IBM”. This is one major example of how sponsored content works. It’s different than a native ad because it appears on the actual medium in its fullest.
A native ad will blend into the publisher’s content and divert people towards your content, which you actually host on your own medium. Sponsored content, on the other hand, will have the full content being hosted and published on that publisher’s medium.
This option requires more work and investment than native or display ads. This is why you will mostly only see bigger companies using it. And yes, just like the other two types of ads, you can have sponsored content in emails as well.
Unlike with native or display ads, there is no way to automate advertising with sponsored content in emails. You will generally need to reach out to newsletter publishers directly and win them over.
If they like what you write about, you might reach an arrangement where they let you publish sponsored content in their newsletter.
Selling ad space in your emails
Analyzing and improving your performance
If you want to sell ad space in your emails, you must be certain that your emails are well accepted with your list. You constantly need to improve your newsletters, your emailing practices and the quality of your list. It also helps to perform regular list-hygiene.
Want to make more money selling ads in your newsletter? Focus on constantly improving the 3 metrics of email quality.Click To TweetThe three most important metrics of quality for your email list are the open rate, the click through rate and the unsubscribe rate.
You need to watch the un-subscribers rate because it can seriously damage your reputation. If you see that the rate is high, you need to take action and understand the reason why people are unsubscribing.
There can be many reasons why they might be leaving. Look to your email reports to find out if there are specific points at which they drop out. Are there specific emails that produce more unsubscriptions? Does it happen more with certain campaigns?
And if a lot of these unsubscriptions are happening right as people join, you need to review your entire opt-in process. Are you tricking them to join in some way without being fully transparent regarding what they will get into?
If your open rates are low, there are many possible reasons. If it isn’t associated with a high-unsubscription rate, it usually means that you’re not getting the content right. Perhaps much of your content isn’t interesting to most readers, but they choose to stay because you “occasionally have good stuff”.
To improve this situation, you want to do more segmentation and personalization. Delve deep and find out what segments of your list are into which kinds of topics and emails. Then find ways to make a person’s presence on your list more personalized. This is a broad topic in and of itself, but we have you covered on the Emercury blog. Start with our guide on behavioral email marketing.
If the click-through rate is low, this can be an issue, assuming the previous two factors aren’t. If your open rates are high, but people still aren’t clicking on your links, you need to train your readers to become “clickers” or “action-takers”. This is important if you’re going to sell ad space. If they’re not clicking your links much, they won’t click on ads much either.
You want to study subjects like copywriting, conversion and how to craft quality CTAs. Then, set a goal to get more people to click your links early on in their membership. If you train them to click links while they’re new subscribers, they’re more likely to keep clicking later on. This includes both your links and any of the ads.
Finding customers for your ad space
The best customers for your ad space are some of your already existing business partners. Also, you can ask some of your customers if they need your ad space. However, you must remember that each ad must fit well in your email.
For example, if your company is in the fashion industry, the ad can’t be about professional maids. If you can’t find someone to buy your ad space, you can ask for help. At Admailr, we always connect the right ad buyers with the right ad sellers.
Getting help with email advertising
Whether you want to buy or sell ad space, it’s a lot easier with an automated platform that handles it for you. AdMailr is one of the leading email advertising platforms, and we’re still growing. If you want a straightforward way to immediately get into email advertising, this is for you.
You can get an account and set it up in minutes. Give it a try today, it costs nothing to get a peek at how effortless email advertising can be.
