However, email monetization didn’t really get its fair share of attention until the pandemic took hold of the world — and then everything changed. Now email newsletter campaigns are considered a prime monetization strategy for all marketing purposes — and it’s a highly profitable strategy at that.

Not to mention, email as a marketing channel has also become an important way for digital publishers to improve their overall revenue.

If you want to know how publishers like yourself can go about implementing an email monetization strategy to drive brand awareness and website traffic, then keep reading. We’ll tell you everything you need to know and more below.

What Is Email Monetization and Why Is it Important?

When we talk about monetizing your email channel, we’re talking about utilizing email as a direct marketing channel to your target audience. Email marketing is a way to let businesses share new products, news, sales, and other eye-catching information directly to their contact list. The contact list in question is comprised of consumers that have purposely opted in to receive these emails, hence the potential for a higher ROI.

Today, email marketing focuses on consent, personalization, and segmentation versus the mass mailings of yesterday. By design, this allows for more precise audience targeting, with several types of marketing emails to boost each campaign. These emails can be promotional or strictly informational. They’re also used to serve the buyer’s journey. For example, it’s common to send out follow-up email notifications along with an incentive for consumers that abandon their digital shopping carts.

Essentially, email marketing campaigns have greater potential for personalization, allowing you to speak directly to your audience since you’re getting access to each of their inboxes.

Email marketing also generates one of the highest ROIs out of all the marketing channels, averaging about $36 for every one dollar spent in a campaign. Email is also one of the most used communication methods in the world to date. It’s also the longest-lasting.

For some perspective, over four billion people use email daily to communicate and stay informed on the latest news and trends in various topics and industries. Therefore, it’s not too surprising that the email marketing industry is currently projected to hit upwards of $17.9 billion by 2027.

So, what we have here is a large and ultra-targetable audience, a positive ROI, and swift growth. These are not things you want to miss out on.

How to Monetize Your Email Lists

There are several ways that businesses and publishers alike can monetize their email lists. Of course, you’d have to pique user interest to garner subscribers first, but from there you can use whichever strategy works best for you.

Here are some of the best ways to monetize your subscriber list:

Monetize Through Ads

Monetization through ads is arguably the simplest and best way to monetize your emails. All it takes is a well-designed newsletter that consistently adds value to your viewers’ lives to generate a favorable revenue stream. 

The best part about email ads is that they’re not viewed as spam, which means they’ll always make it to your audience’s inbox. Unless, of course, they decide to unsubscribe from your email list. More importantly, this is your opportunity to take advantage of targeted ads to deliver a more personalized user experience for those who decide to stick around.

When you take a look at the metrics, personalized email ads can end up boosting your click-through rates simply because users will respond to the content that’s most relevant to them and their needs. 

Use a Paid Subscription Model to Deliver Premium Content

Another great way to monetize your email newsletters is by creating premium content for your subscribers — and charging them for it regularly. 

However, there’s one caveat: You’ll need to ensure that you’re providing your subscribers with unique and valuable content that they can’t get anywhere else. This can be a challenge for publishers, but sometimes all it takes is providing a sneak peek of the type of content you put in your email newsletters to pique enough paid interest.

Just make sure that you have enough free content that allows you to establish yourself as an expert in your niche or an authoritative source of information. Otherwise, you run the risk of putting people off.

Sell Products or Services 

Another common way of monetizing email newsletters is by selling products or services directly to your audience in them. You can even make use of your own solo ads, whether it’s an announcement, a reminder, a special sale, a launch date, and so on.

Just make sure that you’re still delivering the best content possible. After all, that’s what your subscribers are there for — not exhaustive sales pitches. 

Affiliate Marketing

If you don’t have your own products or services to sell, you can always try selling someone else’s products or services via affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is fairly simple as it involves selling someone else’s offering for a commission of those sales.

The key is to choose the brands that will appeal to your audience most and cross-sell the product and services they’re most likely to buy.

Email Monetization Best Practices

Choosing a preferred monetization strategy for your email list is just the first step. You’ll also need to understand how to tweak your strategy so that it works in your favor to keep your momentum going. This requires understanding the best practices of email monetization, as in what to do and what not to do. 

Here are a few important best practices that everyone should follow regarding email list monetization:

Use Analytics to Figure Out the Best Times to Send an Email

A high number of subscribers won’t do you any good if you’re not getting your content in front of their eyes at the right time. Now, the right time for emailing is subjective, just as it is for posting content on social media or on your website. This means you’ll need to keep up with your metrics so you can plan the perfect times to send out each newsletter.

In this case, the metrics that matter most are the open and click-through rates. These are the metrics that give you a clear picture of the most effective times to send out your emails. By measuring these metrics on a daily basis, you can pinpoint the exact times that are yielding the best results so you can start scheduling your emails for the times they’re most likely to be opened and engaged with.

Also, don’t ignore the already proven send times. This would include holidays, anniversaries, and other important dates.

Segment Your Audience For Precision Targeting

Email marketing is all about personalization, which is why it’s important to segment your email list. There are a lot of criteria by which you can segment your email list audience, but the most important piece of information you want to get out of this is who has the best open and click-through rates. 

Knowing which email addresses yield the best engagement results will help you get to know your subscribers better. From there, you can segment them by demographics, open rates, content interests, product interests, past behaviors, and so on. This will allow you to narrow your focus on tailoring your content to these specific groups to ensure you get the best results by targeting the subscribers that are truly interested in what’s next.

Include Native Ads

A lot of ad-based email advertising success is attributed to native advertising. Native ads are already popular for website advertising, and they’re becoming increasingly popular in email newsletters thanks to the automated processes that make them tick.

In addition to not appearing as an obvious ad, native advertising also provides you with options such as content recommendation blocks and custom in-feed placements. They also resemble the type of editorial content that fits into your newsletter organically and seamlessly without disrupting the user experience — which is the whole point. 

Test For Best Performance Frequently

Performance testing is a non-negotiable aspect of anything programmatic or involving marketing. It doesn’t matter if you have a full list of email subscribers, you still need to reduce the risk of alienating any subscribers by running A/B tests to see what’s working and what’s not.

The best thing about email marketing is that you’re already working with a strong base — i.e., the people who have opted into receiving information from you. What’s more, is that many of them have likely already been to your website to consume your content or purchase a product or service from you. 

However, testing the different content elements such as layout, body text, images, offers, CTAs and more will make a significant difference in your engagement results and ROI.  

Email marketing is one of the best ways to attract new customers and retain current ones, and that’s mostly because it offers a great deal of personalization. By implementing the strategy that works best for your business and your audience and keeping up with the best practices in your implementation, you’ll continue to see favorable results with each campaign and newsletter.

The post Best Practices For Email Monetization first appeared on Freestar.

By using email as a direct channel for newsletter advertising, brands are able to not only create relationships with new customers but deliver exponential value throughout each customer journey by ensuring a more unique and individualistic advertising experience.

If you haven’t tapped into advertising via email newsletters or if you have but haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’re going to cover everything you need to know about advertising in email newsletters and then some.

Then and Now: A Brief History of Email

Let’s take a moment to see how far we’ve come from the first email ever sent. 

Believe it or not, the first email to ever exist was sent before the 90s. In fact, the famous America Online (AOL) got started in 1985 — but the first email ever sent was in 1971 by the computer engineer Ray Tomlinson. 

Not too long after, a marketing manager by the name of Gary Thuerk sent the first ever commercial email. Thuerk’s commercial email went out to a 400-person list, which generated upwards of $13 million in product sales for his company: Digital Equipment Corp.

As you can see, email and email marketing isn’t really anything new. At least not newer than the concept of email itself. However, it has evolved significantly since its humble beginnings — as have content consumption habits. Thanks to the rise of mobile and other smart devices, faster and more seamless means of communication have unlocked  a new way for people and brands to do business. 

Today, the average American spends up to three hours each day sifting through their work inboxes and then another two hours tending to personal emails. That’s not even including regular content consumption. With mobile devices becoming more sophisticated as the months pass by, so have the ways in which brands connect with their audiences. 

This is largely because people now reach for their smart devices to check their inboxes and other media channels to access the information they’re looking for. In fact, more than 60% of all consumers state that they’d prefer email as the method that  their favorite brands use to communicate with them. This tells us that email isn’t going anywhere as it only strengthens the brand to consumer relationship.

What Exactly Is Email Newsletter Advertising?

Now here we are in 2022, with email newsletter advertising in full swing and thriving. But what exactly is email newsletter advertising? 

While terms like ‘email advertising’ and ‘email marketing’ are used interchangeably, they’re actually two very different things. 

Here’s the breakdown:

When we talk about email marketing, we’re talking about the use of proprietary email messaging to connect with existing contacts via a subscription list. For example, if you’ve ever sent an email out to your customer contact list or potential customers that came from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database, then you’ve used email marketing as your strategy.

Email advertising, on the other hand, is a subset of paid advertising. It exists to enable brands to further reach their target audiences outside of (or in addition to) their current CRM database. In other words, the consumers receiving these advertisements have consented by actively signing up to receive them. 

With email newsletter advertising, brands and advertisers can access premium ad inventory through reputable publisher newsletters, including the likes of The New York Times and other authoritative sources that nurture higher levels of trust and attention.

The Unique Benefits of Email Newsletter Advertising

No marketing or brand awareness campaign would be complete without email newsletter advertising. This is because email newsletters offer certain benefits and advantages that most of the other marketing channels do not.

Benefits and advantages:

You Get in Touch With Real Audiences

Behind every email newsletter is a subscriber who has logged into their email account and actively consented to receiving your content and messaging. This means that not only will you reach your target audiences almost 100% of the time but you also won’t have to worry about bots or ad fraud when connecting via email. 

Therefore, brands and advertisers can breathe easy knowing that they’re reaching real people and in a more premium environment (aka, and more well-receiving environment since the email newsletters are both expected and desired).

More Engaged Subscribers

As mentioned above, email newsletter campaigns involve a premium environment, meaning that the people receiving the emails actually want to receive those emails. Hence the reason they opt into the emails by signing up for the subscription. 

Because of this, the target audience in question will be more likely to engage with your content and ads compared to when they’re on a website with disruptive pop-ups and banner ads. In fact, they’ll be 16 times more likely to engage with your emails.

Optimal Visibility

One of the best things about email newsletters (for the viewers) is that they’re far less cluttered compared to other advertising channels. For the advertiser, this allows your content and messaging to really stand out.

When you have email newsletter ads placed above the fold and at the top of the newsletter they’re positioned to be even more visible. There are also more ways to get even greater visibility, but we’ll talk more about that later.

It’s Private and Secure

Email newsletters don’t use third-party cookies for their audience segmentation or targeting. Instead, they used hashed emails — which is the use of an email address that runs through a hashing algorithm. 

The hashing algorithm works by returning a series of characters that are unique to each specific email. Each time an email address is run through the hashing algorithm, the algorithm returns the exact same unique value. What’s more, hashed emails cannot be cracked or reversed to show the user’s personal email.

The email hash offers advertisers a method of audience targeting that’s also privacy safe. With the email newsletters, consumers have to consent to the use of their email address, which adds another layer of privacy.

Email newsletters are also completely cookieless — as in data cookies. This means that newsletter advertisers remain mostly unaffected by third-party cookie deprecation. Some email monetization services like LiveIntent use tags to connect with third-party cookies to improve campaign performance, increase conversion, and provide advanced reporting. 

It Furthers Your First-Party Data Footprint 

Put simply, third-party cookies aren’t the most popular among advertisers, publishers, and consumers alike. That’s why they’re on their way out, which means that first-party data is going to become even more critical to the survival of advertisers in a cookieless-world. 

Email addresses are considered first-party data. Since email newsletters specifically leverage email addresses, brands and advertisers can use email newsletters to grow their inventory of first-party data.

Depending on the email newsletter advertising partner you choose, you can gain access to an entire world of audience engagement data. It’s especially beneficial to go with a partner that utilizes cross-device engagement, campaign engagement, customer lifetime value (LTV), and log-level exposure data. These are the valuable insights that you can leverage best for retargeting, audience expansion and much more.

Deterministic ID

When we talk about deterministic data, we’re referring to the information that is both true and accurate because it’s supplied directly by the people it relates to. In other cases, it’s personally identifiable, such as a name or email address, and it’s considered authenticated data because of this. 

Deterministic IDs are perfect for creating audiences and ultra-targeting strategies because, put simply, people don’t typically share their email addresses to avoid spam and annoying adverts. Therefore, any activity and data that’s tied to an email address, like an email newsletter subscription, purchase, etc, directly represents an individual’s consumer habits. This enables brands to create more rich and accurate consumer profiles, even in cross-device environments.

How to Buy Email Newsletter Ad Inventory

By now you can see just how email newsletters are a near-perfect advertising channel. Of course, before you go launching your next campaign, you need to select the right ad inventory and where to buy it.

You can buy email newsletter advertising inventory through several channels, including programmatic direct deals, private marketplaces (PMPs), and even on the open exchange. In order to choose the right way to buy your inventory, you’ll need to understand the advantages of each so you can figure out what will suit your brand, campaign goals, and budget best.

Here’s the breakdown:

Programmatic Direct Buys

When it comes to programmatic direct buying, you can purchase your email newsletter inventory directly from specific publishers. This creates a more personal relationship between the advertiser and publisher, and it’s also the type of arrangement that allows you to buy inventory as either part of a guaranteed or non-guaranteed deal.

With guaranteed deals, the publisher guarantees the advertiser a certain number of impressions for a predetermined and set fee for a period of time.

With non guaranteed deals, the arrangement forgoes a specific timeline and sets a budget for particular impression goals. These types of deals offer more flexibility, enabling advertisers to reach their impression goals without having to commit to an extensive fee.

Programmatic direct buys also typically involve publishers’ more exclusive newsletter inventory. Premium inventory are usually associated with higher fees (CPMs), however, it’s worth it as it creates a secure environment — especially for brand safety and more control over advertisement placement.

Lastly, programmatic direct buys also include Deal IDs. Deal IDs come from the publisher’s supply-side platform (SSP) which arranges ad buying deals that are specific to individual campaigns. From there, the demand-side platform (DSP) sets up the deal using the ID on their side, aligning both sides with specific terms and inventory. This works to guarantee the safety of the ad buying environment.

Private Marketplaces (PMPs)

Private marketplaces are another popular method for brands to buy email advertising inventory. PMPs work similarly to programmatic direct buys, only the method revolves around a direct relationship with just one publisher. 

In lieu of a one-to-one exchange between advertiser and publisher, PMPs offer a one-to-many approach to email newsletter advertising. Essentially, a PMP enables advertisers to compete for the same inventory from a single publisher for a fixed amount within a private environment. The catch is that the publishers have to add the advertisers to their list to allow the DSPs to purchase the ad inventory they have listed in the PMP.

Compared to programmatic direct buys, PMPs enable advertisers to get their hands on premium inventory quickly, easily and usually at lower costs. With PMPs, advertisers with permission get frequent access to these inventory, which makes for a key source of targeted ad placement.

Open Exchanges

The open exchange is another great source for email newsletter ad inventory. Unlike PMPs and programmatic direct deals, open exchanges serve as public ad auctions. Therefore, there are no limitations for advertisers when it comes to entering into the bidding space. It also means there’s no need for a pre-arranged contract with publishers.

With open exchanges, inventory will always be available for advertisers, and they can bid on all types of ad qualities, making them the perfect environment for brands looking to get started quickly.

Open exchanges also offer more extensive inventory compared to the other methods of media buying, which means that brands don’t have to worry about losing out on their campaign scale when it comes to things like audience targeting, frequency capping, geo-targeting, and more. Another difference is that the CPMs in open exchanges are generally lower.

As for brand safety in the open exchange, advertisers can implement allow lists, block lists, contextual keyword targeting and other methods to add security. Either way, open exchanges offer the most accessible and affordable choices, making them best for newer brands trying to make a splash.

The Different Types of Email Newsletter Ads

You’ve likely come across your fair share of email ads in email newsletters. However, you probably never took notice of how the ads were displayed or thought about why they were displayed that way. Just remember, there’s always a method behind the madness, and in that madness there are two different types of email newsletters ads:

Custom Display Ads

Custom display ads in email newsletters are a lot like web display ads in that you can choose from various sizes to suit your display needs. You can also choose to animate them to further catch your viewers’ attention to drive more engagement.

Native Ads

Native ads are ad formats that blend in with their environments, making them less intrusive compared to the other forms of advertising. 

Since native ads have a more seamless integration in email newsletters, readers won’t experience banner blindness or ad fatigue. This results in higher engagement rates compared to regular display ad formats.

How to Get Started Monetizing Your Newsletter

If you’re interested in monetizing your newsletters, please reach out to your Freestar Customer Success Manager and they can help with next steps. If you’re not a Freestar publisher, get started today! 

Freestar is partnered with all of the major email monetization partners and can provide you with the best stack and tools available. We do all the heavy lifting so you can focus on what matters most to you. 

Final Thoughts

Email newsletter advertising is one of the best ways to expand your brand’s reach while also maintaining control over your exposure. It’s also something that allows you to create the perfect audience for your brand messaging in order to achieve your campaign goals. 

All you have to do is define your email newsletter advertising goals and the rest will fall into place regarding where to buy your ad inventory, which formats to choose, and more. You don’t want to leave this valuable resource untapped, so get to work!

The post Everything You Need to Know About Advertising in Email Newsletters first appeared on Freestar.