GUIDE

The Power of Newsletters in Advertising

Email newsletter advertising is one of the most efficient, yet overlooked ways to grow your revenue

Intro

The Power of Newsletters in Advertising

2. The Power of Newsletters in Advertising

3. What is Newsletter Advertising?

4. Why Should Publishers Offer Newsletter Advertising?

6. Advertising in a Newsletter

7. How to Advertise in a Newsletter

8. What Makes a Good Campaign?

9. Newsletter Ad Best Practices

10. How Much Do Newsletter Ads Cost?

11. The Power of Newsletters in Advertising

Intro

The Power of Newsletters in Advertising

Email newsletter advertising is one of the most efficient, yet overlooked ways to grow your revenue. These handy digital marketing tools have everything you need to strengthen your connection and engagement with your audience and build a winning brand. Newsletters can help you build an email list and launch the most efficient marketing campaigns on the market. With an ROI of $38 for every $1 spent, email marketing is a powerful way to grow your business, acquire new clients, re-engage old customers, and retain the current ones.

The Power of Newsletter in Advertising

1. The Role of Newsletters

A newsletter is a superior marketing tool used by businesses to share valuable information with their customers, prospects, and subscribers. Newsletter advertising grants you direct access to your subscriber’s inbox. It allows you to share helpful and engaging content that can drive traffic to your website, increase sales and above all, improve loyalty.

While newsletters provide updates to people on your list about your business, products, and services, they’re not suited for a hard sell.

A successful newsletter will feel like an email from a helpful friend instead of a pushy salesperson.

For e-commerce businesses and publishers, newsletters are the life force of their marketing campaigns. They’re the perfect medium to build brand awareness and cultivate a strong relationship with prospects and existing customers. Advertising in newsletters helps such businesses enhance the information-sharing experience by creating additional touchpoints. They offer a focused way to engage customers and prospects. This leads to a cult-like following, loyal customer base, and repeat business and eventually builds a solid and stable company.

More than 60 percent of consumers prefer emails when communicating with brands and services. Email newsletter advertising lets you deliver your brand message just the way the customers wish to see it.

With Google blocking third-party cookies, email newsletters are proving a formidable marketing tool in the post-cookie world. With a newsletter, you can build an email list and gather first-party data from your audience. First-party data is valuable, highly targeted, and free of charge. Moreover, it’s super easy to collect with the right data management system as it has minimal privacy concerns.

2. Monetising Email Newsletters

Email newsletter publishers must be careful when monetising their newsletter to avoid scaring away the readers. Luckily, there are numerous ways to monetise your newsletter while improving customer experience.

Create premium content: The quality of your content determines the newsletter’s effectiveness in attracting subscribers. First, you need to create a great product to attract subscribers. Premium content results in a high subscriber base, high newsletter open, and clickthrough rates for the newsletter.

Sell affiliate products: Affiliate marketing is among the easiest way to monetise a newsletter and create a passive income revenue stream. You earn affiliate revenue by recommending products and linking to them in the newsletter. Then, if the prospect buys the product from the seller, you earn a commission from the sale.

Sponsorships and donations: Once you’ve built a sizeable audience that can drive results, you can arrange for sponsorship deals. You can acquire sponsors by placing banners on your website asking prospects to advertise with you. Or reach out directly to companies and sell them advertising space. If your newsletter targets a specialised audience, you may offer a free subscription but ask your subscribers for donations.

Sell your own products and services: A newsletter lets you harness the power of email marketing when selling your company’s products and services. You can send regular offers, promotions, and invite subscribers to try your newly launched products

Placing and selling ad space: Once you’ve built a sizeable and highly engaged audience, you can start selling newsletter ad space. You can reach out to firms in your industry or region and offer them advertising space.

3. What is Newsletter Advertising?

Newsletter advertising is when you buy advertising space in a newsletter run by an independent publisher.

Publishers create newsletters that target highly engaged
audiences that they have cultivated with interesting content, and often sell ad spaces in these newsletters to add extra revenue to their existing subscriptions.

Native Email Ads

These ads are designed to match the newsletter and are included there as regular content. Short newsletters have only one native ad, while longer ones can have three or more ads. Typically, there are three native ad placement slots on a newsletter.

The Hero: These are premium ads at the top of the newsletter. They are large and attention-grabbing and include your logo, a large image, headline, body copy, and CTA

The primary: These ads are placed within the body of the newsletter and are highly preferred because they blend with the editorial content. It’s the perfect spot when you crave sufficient space to describe your product or service.

The snippet: These ads comprise a sentence or two at the bottom of the newsletter. Many snippets use click-bait style headlines to entice readers since they compete with the rest of the newsletter for reader’s attention.

Dedicated Emails

These are emails where the entire content is dedicated to your brand. Dedicated email lists have a higher ROI and are popular with most newsletter publishers — but these often come with a very high cost.

4. Why Should Publishers Offer Newsletter Advertising?

Should I sell ad space in Newsletters?

If you have a sizable mailing list, you may consider monetising it by selling ad space in your newsletter to willing advertisers. With a proper strategy, selling ad space in your newsletter can increase your revenue without losing subscribers.

You’re a good candidate to sell ads in newsletters if:

You have a sizable email list: Ideally, you need a list with between 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers to generate a reasonable amount of income from selling ad space. Advertisers avoid small email lists because organising an ad buy and tracking only to score a few sales isn’t worth the effort.

Have an above-average email open and click through rate: If your newsletter matches or outperforms the average open and click through numbers, you’re in good shape to sell ad space on your newsletter. Conversely, if your numbers are a little lower, consider lowering your asking price to attract prospective advertisers.

A highly active subscriber list: An engaged subscriber list translates to higher email open and click through rates, which increases the advertiser’s ROI. It signifies a high level of trust between you and your subscribers, meaning they’re likely to follow your recommendations.

Double opt-in subscribers: Double opt-in is having subscribers join your list and confirm their subscription by clicking a link in a follow-up email. A list with confirmed opt-ins is more valuable because it signifies a higher interest in the business or topic while eliminating spam addresses

Niche target audience: A list with a niche target audience can be more valuable to an advertiser than an extensive list with unproven interest. Advertisers may be willing to pay a higher cost per mille (CPM) to advertise on newsletters targeting a small group of people with a known interest in a topic. That amounts to advertising to a pool of warm leads, which increases the conversion rates and ROI.

One of the potential downsides of selling ad space in your newsletter is the loss of credibility, leading to a loss of subscribers.

Besides, the people on your list might become suspicious that the advertisers are shaping your opinion.

Being picky with the number and type of adverts you allow can help prevent such a fallout, and so can the format, look, and feel of the ads you include.

5. How to Sell Ad Space

You must pitch your newsletter to advertisers to sell advertising space. Pitching is a delicate undertaking that requires you to find advertisers, communicate the value your newsletter brings, and fill ad spots at the best rates. So, naturally, the first step is finding advertisers in your niche.

While some advertisers promote products across the board, most prefer a highly targeted audience. Therefore, you should find brands relevant to the topics you write about and target the same target demographics.

Once you’ve identified potential customers, you need to pitch them and introduce your brand. Again, keep each pitch concise while providing essential information.

Quickly introduce your brand, tell them who you are, and describe your subscribers through their brand’s lens. Be sure to make a clear connection between their brand and your target audience to show that you’ve done your homework.

Your pitch should include a media kit that explains your brand and topics you cover, the demographic of people on your list, and email metrics — including the size of your list, email open rates, and clickthrough rates.

Simply put, pitching advertisers is a laborious process. If you’re keen to avoid this hassle, you might consider joining a newsletter advertising platform such as Passendo.

Advertising networks act as intermediaries between advertisers and publishers. The networks do all the heavy lifting to create a meaningful and profitable experience for you. They’ll handle everything from finding advertising partners to collecting and sending payment, managing ad placement, and monetising the newsletter.

Joining an ad network has the potential of growing your revenue stream because the network will always connect you with advertisers looking to pay for ad space. You’re not required to have existing advertisers join an ad network, saving you the hassle of pitching potential advertisers.

How much Should I Charge for Advertising Space in a Newsletter?

You have three options when pricing newsletter advertisements:

Cost per mille (CPM) or cost per 1,000 subscribers: You can charge a fixed fee for a thousand subscribers on your list. If you set an average CPM rate of $30, a list with 30,000 subscribers would net you $300.

Cost per Click: This a more advanced metric that considers the number of subscribers and the click rate of a particular sector or country. It entails multiplying the click rate with the number of subscribers to get the number of clicks then dividing it by the CPM.

Cost per lead: Unlike other pricing models that use estimates, CPL uses accurate data, which allows you to command higher rates. Advertisers only pay for qualified leads with this model, so you need to track how many leads an ad generates to bill the advertiser.

The rate you charge for advertising space depends on the type of readers your newsletter attracts. For instance, you can charge $10 — $15 CPM for ads in a general newsletter because the list isn’t highly targeted. On the other hand, a newsletter with a more targeted readership, such as woodworkers, quilters, or beekeepers, could carry a $15 — $25 CPM because the ROI is likely to be high.

Customer orientation also plays a role when pricing ads, with business-to-business (B2B) newsletters commanding a higher rate. Companies often buy in large quantities, and advertisers are willing to splurge big bucks for advertisements.

If you have a targeted B2B newsletter, such as one targeting physicians, pharmaceutical companies might pay up to $100 CPM. Discretionary spending power varies between various groups, and it determines the amount of money an advertiser is likely to spend on ad space.

Initially, you might want to price your newsletter ads lower than the market value to gain traction on the market. Once you’ve participated in a few campaigns, you can leverage the numbers from your results to negotiate better rates. Tangible data demonstrating your campaign’s efficiency will help you negotiate and secure higher advertising rates.

The Power of Newsletter in Advertising

Newsletter Open and Clickthrough Rates

An open rate is the percentage of successfully delivered newsletters opened by subscribers. Email marketing software comes with handy technology to let you track these metrics. Clickthrough rate or click rate measures the number of people clicking on a CTA, hyperlink, or image in the newsletter. It’s the most critical metric in lead generation.

Email open rates and click rates are critical metrics because they offer insights into each campaign’s performance. A high open rate indicates that your subject lines resonate with the target audience. Excellent click rates show that you produce relevant content that’s helpful to your audience. These are valuable when building a relationship and creating brand awareness.

There’s no standard open or clickthrough rate because the rates vary considerably from one audience to the next and across industries and markets. The rate varies depending on the device a prospect uses to access the internet, with desktops traditionally outperforming mobile devices. However, the popularity of mobile devices may reverse this trend soon.

The average newsletter open rate is 17 percent, but it varies widely across industries from 9 percent in automotive services to 23 percent in childcare services. The average clickthrough rate is 10.29 percent but ranges from 8.76 percent in accommodation to 10.64 percent in social membership.

Although the metrics vary across the board, advertisers have certain expectations from a publisher regarding newsletter performance. Therefore, the ideal metrics should be:

These metrics matter because the primary objective is to get people to click on the CTAs. The higher the number of people engaging with your newsletter, the higher the ROI on the advertisement campaigns.

How to Improve Newsletter Engagement

Low email open rates result in low customer engagement and lower your ability to attract advertisers. A newsletter with a low open rate indicates one of three issues:

Weak subject lines. The best subject lines describe the contents of your email newsletter. Write a few variations, and A/B test the email headlines to find the formula that resonates with your subscribers.

Unsegmented audience: Segmenting your audience according to locations, demographics, and interests lets you furnish them with helpful information. It’s easier to address the pain points of a hyper-targeted audience than a diverse one. Breaking up a diverse audience by their interests can improve click rates.

Sending frequency is problematic: If you’re running a targeted campaign with tested subject lines, but your open rate is still low, you should adjust the sending rate. Sending too many emails will lower the newsletter engagement level and have many people unsubscribing from the list.

Here some additional ways to improve newsletter open rates:

Top-notch copy lets you create a valuable and helpful newsletter instead of slamming your subscribers with a sales pitch. It drives engagement and entices people to subscribe to your list.

Don’t make assumptions about the effectiveness of your email copy. Instead, use A/B testing to determine which version draws more clicks and engagement. Constantly test various elements, including length, tone, topics, image, and offer placement, until you develop a winning formula. Keep up with the periodic testing even when your campaigns are doing well.

High bounce rates and low delivery rates indicate a list with lots of dead weight. Cleaning up the mailing list will reduce its size but will improve your efficiency and improve the metrics. Send out an email asking subscribers to opt if they wish to continue hearing from you. That doesn’t mean dropping everyone who doesn’t respond. Rather, reclassify the non-responsive address into a different category and come up with strategies to re-engage them.

Avoid using generic phrases such as ‘click here’ as your CTA. Instead, use clear and descriptive text to tell the reader what to do and what to expect when they click the link. Make sure the URL points to a relevant service, product, or resource for more information.

Having multiple embedded links in a single campaign increases the conversion rate. Sprinkle the CTAs and links across the email, and be sure to vary the link text throughout the newsletter. But be sure to test out the links, CTAs, and buttons for efficiency.

How to Build a Successful Subscriber List

Building a subscriber list is all about collecting email addresses from people visiting your site. An emailing list allows business communication with existing and prospective clients in the future. An email list is also a great asset for your business because it’s immune to algorithm changes, allows unmetered access to your prospects, shapes your brand story, and is more personal and cost-effective.

Building a comprehensive emailing list doesn’t happen overnight, but there are fast and effective ways to go about the process.

Pairing a CTA with a downloadable resource generates a higher submission rate than a regular call-to-action. For example, you can create a valuable PDF resource and craft a CTA that asks them to download the resource to access its content.

Set pop-ups prompting the user to sign up for your newsletter and customise them to the web visitor’s behaviour. For example, you can have them slide in after a reader spends a certain amount on a page, tries to exit a page, scrolls down a page, and more.

Visitors often feel invested in your content after spending some time with it. So, you can reach out to visitors on specific pages of your website with a simple survey that requests their email addresses. The survey feels like a fair trade-off, and the visitor will part with their email address readily.

Also known as content upgrades, this approach entails creating gated content or resources. You can provide the basic information on the site and prompt the visitor to sign up to access the more comprehensive content. The gated content can be a guide, an offer, a catalogue, and more.

Squeeze pages place certain content or offer behind a signup form. It’s a dedicated lead capture page created to ‘squeeze’ the information from the web visitor. Such a page should describe what the visitor is getting and a simple opt-in form. In addition, you should place CTAs leading to these pages across the entire site to drive up conversion.

The Power of Newsletter in Advertising

6. Advertising in a Newsletter

Newsletter advertising may not be as hyped as other forms of online marketing such as SEO, Google Ads, and social media. But none of these methods can hold a candle to email marketing. On average, an email marketing campaign can generate an ROI of $38 for each $1 spent, which amounts to growing your revenue by a staggering 3800 percent. Unfortunately, none of the other methods comes close to matching this return.

Not only is advertising in newsletters lucrative, but it also gives you complete control of your marketing efforts. Unlike SEO and social media platforms that are governed by algorithms, email marketing puts you in direct contact with your customers and prospects. You get to play by your own rules and never have to worry about overnight changes that can ruin your entire marketing campaign. Of course, your biggest concern with newsletter marketing is getting the target audience to open the email. But what is a good email open rate in 2020?

According to Smart Insights, the average email open rate in 2021 is about 17 percent, varying from 10 percent to 23 percent in different industries. At first glance, the numbers might seem low, but most newsletters have tens of thousands of subscribers. For instance, a newsletter with 10,000 subscribers and a 10 percent open rate might deliver 1,000 potential customers for a small business.

Better yet, newsletter publishers create newsletters that target specific interests or business sectors. At the very least, the people on a publisher’s emailing list have expressed an interest in that sector. With targeted newsletter advertising, the publisher connects you with a large pool of warm leads. Naturally, warm leads have a high conversion rate, leading to impressive ROI.

Newsletter ads are highly cost-effective because the cost of advertising is pegged on the size of the list. Since the cost is batched per thousand subscribers, a good CPM is anything from $10 to $30, which amounts to paying $100 to $300 to reach 10,000 prospects. If you’re so inclined, you might decide to use more granular metrics such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per lead (CPL).

As is the case with most digital marketing efforts, newsletter advertising generates trackable results. There are numerous metrics to help you gauge the progress and success of your marketing campaign. Most popular metrics include email open rates, clickthrough rates, and bounce rates. You can use the results to tweak and improve your marketing efforts until you have it down to an art form.

7. How to Advertise in a Newsletter

To get started in newsletter marketing, you need to find the publishers who target your ideal customers. For this, you must create detailed buyer personas for your business and find publishers who target people in the same field or fit the demographics.

You have two options to achieve this feat — forge your own connections or use email networks. Forming your own partnerships is a delicate but gratifying endeavour. It entails reaching out to companies that send out newsletters and purchasing ad space.

But first, you must vet the newsletter’s metrics, target audience, and sending frequency, and more to ensure that they align with your objectives. One of the perks of this approach is that it builds a personal connection with the publisher, which might lead to future cooperation.

For a more seamless advertising experience, you may opt to use network services such as Passendo. Enlisting the help of such a network connects you with businesses that run super-targeted and effective newsletter marketing campaigns. Partnering up with such publishers is a sure-fire way to launch revenue-boosting campaigns.

Email networks also vet each publisher on their network for efficiency and commitment to delivering credible results for advertisers. Such service providers do all the heavy lifting to let you focus on growing your business. Better yet, you can buy ad spaces in as many newsletters as you wish and scale your business to higher levels.

With the Passendo email server, you get to screen email lists for efficiency and ensure that you’re getting the best bang for your bucks. You also have access to valuable metrics such as user engagement, open rates, clickthrough rates, mailing frequency, and more.

Metrics help you gauge the success of a newsletter before jumping onboard.

Naturally, you want a newsletter that aligns with your specific goals — whether short-term or long-term.

8. What Makes a Good Campaign?

A good newsletter advertising campaign delivers the trifecta of any successful online marketing campaign — increased engagement, conversions, and sales. But not all newsletters can help you achieve these lofty goals. Therefore, you must vet each publisher carefully before engaging their services.

Some of the critical key performance indicators of a good email advertising campaigns include:

Relevancy

A smaller list of super-targeted subscribers will consistently outperform an extensive list with general subscribers. For example, email clients make it easy for people to delete or mark irrelevant emails as spam. But a subscriber will click and open an email from a trusted and relevant publisher because they’re sure it’s both helpful and valuable. They will engage with the content, increasing the likelihood of interacting with your ad and buying your products.

People only click on adverts that are in line with their interests. Hence, you should only pick mailing lists geared towards your specific field or those that target the same demographics as your customers. For example, you’ll have more success advertising a SaaS solution in a tech newsletter than one that targets manufacturers or cooking enthusiasts.

Highly Engaged Subscribers

Despite the number of people on a mailing list, publishers don’t guarantee you a view. That’s why it’s essential to consider crucial metrics that highlight subscriber engagement. A highly targeted email list has excellent engagement rates since the subscribers have a genuine interest in the subject matter. They’re more likely to open and read the emails and probably click on your ads if they find the product attractive and valuable.

Good Ad Placement

With newsletter advertising, you have a choice of three ad placements. You can use banners at the top of the page, native ads within the body, interest-based ads, or adverts at the newsletter’s footer. Ad placement varies from one publisher to the next based on their target audience and their interests.

9. Newsletter Ad Best Practices

Unlike web ads, newsletter ads are more textual than visual. Readers signing up for a newsletter are often invested in reading the content because they find the content valuable and helpful. Therefore, eye-catching visuals may only get you so far with email marketing. Instead, you should focus on creating spell-binding content that thrills the reader while blending with the newsletter content. The last thing you want is for your advert to scream that it’s an ad.

You have a choice of three ad types when advertising on a newsletter — banner ads, native ads, or sponsored content and emails. While prominent, banner ads aren’t as effective since they have a meagre 0.06 percent clickthrough rates. But you can achieve great results with banner ads if you pick the right newsletter. Ideally, you should create a beautiful banner and pair it with text capable of spurring the reader into action.

Native ads feel like a natural part of the newsletter content and often follow the publisher’s editorial guidelines. They are well-written articles that revolve around your brand and products or simply mention them. The ads fit seamlessly with the rest of the content to allow high-level consumer engagement. Since they’re structured to look a lot less than an advert, native ads drive more engagement as readers find them interesting and engaging.

Sponsored emails amount to simply renting an email list from a publisher and having them send out content that’s entirely about your brand and products. Another approach is to sponsor content and have the publisher endorse the product or so you can place an offer or advertisement in the article.

You have a choice of three ad types when advertising on a newsletter — banner a

Content to ads ratio: The ideal newsletter carries more educational material than sales material. HubSpot proposes that a newsletter should be 90 percent information and 10 percent sales content.
Ad relevance: All included ads in email newsletters should align with the reader’s interest. It wouldn’t do to have car repair ads in a newsletter targeting baking enthusiasts.
Ad transparency: The newsletter should help readers identify native ads by assigning the correct labels such as sponsored or advertisement. Or they may give the ads a unique design to help readers tell them apart.
Ad design: The size and format of the ad influence engagement and results; hence, it’s best if the newsletter offers various ad designs.
Ad placement: The position of the ad in the newsletter determines the engagement. The publisher should allow you to experiment with different placements, so you can run A/B tests.
Display technology: Some publishers use technology that allows interest-based display ads customised to each reader, while others use square display needs. Weigh each option against your needs to get the best results.

The Power of Newsletter in Advertising

10. How Much Do Newsletter Ads Cost?

Publishers use a cost per thousand subscribers (CPM) as a base unit while charging for newsletter ads. The size of the list, delivery rate, level of engagement, clickthrough rate, and bounce rates are some of the metrics that determine the CPM. Calculating the CPM helps you to compare the cost of working with publishers with different list sizes.

To calculate the CPM, you simply divide your campaign spend by the size of the email lists. For instance, a $300 campaign sent to a list with 20,000 subscribers would cost you $15. However, spending $500 on a list with 50,000 subscribers would lower your CPM to $10.

The CPM also depends on the list you intend to use. Highly targeted list with excellent open and click rates might carry a $30 CPM. General topic publishers might have lower open and click rates; hence their CPM may be lower. The CPM is lower for sponsored emails and higher for dedicated emails.

While email CPM is the most popular metric when running newsletter ads, it only accounts for the list size. It doesn’t account for email opens or the number of people who click the ads.

Hence, it’s helpful to consider other pricing modules such as cost per click and cost per lead or acquisition. These methods use different metrics to calculate engagement rates and offer real insights into your campaign performance.

To calculate the CPC of an email campaign, you simply divide the size of the list by the publisher’s click rate. For instance, a list with 20,000 subscribers and an open rate of 10 percent delivers 2,000 clicks. Therefore, at a $20 CPM, running the campaign will cost you $400. Thus, the CPC of this campaign is ($400/2000 clicks), which is 20 cents.

You can refine your calculations further and calculate what it’ll cost you to acquire a lead from each campaign.

To calculate the cost of acquisition, you’ll divide the number of clicks by the conversion rate. In this case, you might have 2,000 clicks with a 4 percent conversion rate, which is 80 conversions.

You can then divide the total cost of the campaign by the number of conversions or sales — ($400/80 sales = $5 CPA).

Both CPA and CPC help you to determine the value of a newsletter marketing campaign right off the bat.

They also provide you with a metric that’s comparable with other online marketing platforms. You can compare the ROI of email marketing to that of the display, social, and other ads.

By calculating the potential CPA and CPC of using a publisher, you can make an informed choice if their CPM rates are worthwhile or not. Therefore, you should use these metrics as part of your vetting process when considering running newsletter ads.

11. The Power of Newsletters in Advertising

Email newsletter marketing towers over all popular digital marketing platforms to deliver some of the best ROI in the internet space. No other online marketing platform has ever come close to providing a 42:1 or a 38:1 ROI, as seen in email marketing.

On top of the impressive return, email marketing eliminates many of the common pitfalls in digital marketing. You can build brand loyalty, acquire new leads, and re-engage old customers to grow your sales without worrying about algorithm changes. Your business is no longer at the mercy of the search engines and their whims.

Newsletter advertising is a potential gold mine for both advertisers and publishers.

Careful vetting, coupled with excellent and helpful content, can help publishers build a formidable newsletter with high-level engagement. In addition, businesses are keen to advertise their products with publishers who run newsletters with high open and click through rates. That results in a highly beneficial financial arrangement between both parties.

Publishers with a highly targeted emailing list sell ad spaces to relevant businesses and generate additional income without incurring additional expenses. In exchange, advertisers get to connect with a large pool of warm leads, leading to increased sales. Publishers who continually generate excellent results for their advertisers will have the advantage of cultivating a massive pool of return clients.

Modern technology makes it easy for anyone to venture into and reap the rewards of newsletter advertising. Once you’ve built your email list to at least 2,500 subscribers, you can join an email network such as Passendo and hit the ground running.

Passendo connects you with a rich pool of businesses eager to run email newsletter marketing campaigns. It provides you with a hassle-free and straightforward way to monetise your mailing list and grow your business revenue.

The Power of Newsletter in Advertising

GUIDE

The Power of Newsletters in Advertising

Email newsletter advertising is one of the most efficient, yet overlooked ways to grow your revenue

Intro

The Power of Newsletters in Advertising

Email newsletter advertising is one of the most efficient, yet overlooked ways to grow your revenue. These handy digital marketing tools have everything you need to strengthen your connection and engagement with your audience and build a winning brand.

Newsletters can help you build an email list and launch the most efficient marketing campaigns on the market. With an ROI of $38 for every $1 spent, email marketing is a powerful way to grow your business, acquire new clients, re-engage old customers, and retain the current ones.

1. The Role of Newsletters

A newsletter is a superior marketing tool used by businesses to share valuable information with their customers, prospects, and subscribers. Newsletter advertising grants you direct access to your subscriber’s inbox. It allows you to share helpful and engaging content that can drive traffic to your website, increase sales and above all, improve loyalty.

While newsletters provide updates to people on your list about your business, products, and services, they’re not suited for a hard sell.

A successful newsletter will feel like an email from a helpful friend instead of a pushy salesperson.

For e-commerce businesses and publishers, newsletters are the life force of their marketing campaigns. They’re the perfect medium to build brand awareness and cultivate a strong relationship with prospects and existing customers. Advertising in newsletters helps such businesses enhance the information-sharing experience by creating additional touchpoints. They offer a focused way to engage customers and prospects. This leads to a cult-like following, loyal customer base, and repeat business and eventually builds a solid and stable company.

More than 60 percent of consumers prefer emails when communicating with brands and services. Email newsletter advertising lets you deliver your brand message just the way the customers wish to see it.

With Google blocking third-party cookies, email newsletters are proving a formidable marketing tool in the post-cookie world. With a newsletter, you can build an email list and gather first-party data from your audience. First-party data is valuable, highly targeted, and free of charge. Moreover, it’s super easy to collect with the right data management system as it has minimal privacy concerns.

2. Monetising Email Newsletters

Email newsletter publishers must be careful when monetising their newsletter to avoid scaring away the readers. Luckily, there are numerous ways to monetise your newsletter while improving customer experience.

Create premium content: The quality of your content determines the newsletter’s effectiveness in attracting subscribers. First, you need to create a great product to attract subscribers. Premium content results in a high subscriber base, high newsletter open, and clickthrough rates for the newsletter.

Sell affiliate products: Affiliate marketing is among the easiest way to monetise a newsletter and create a passive income revenue stream. You earn affiliate revenue by recommending products and linking to them in the newsletter. Then, if the prospect buys the product from the seller, you earn a commission from the sale.

Sponsorships and donations: Once you’ve built a sizeable audience that can drive results, you can arrange for sponsorship deals. You can acquire sponsors by placing banners on your website asking prospects to advertise with you. Or reach out directly to companies and sell them advertising space. If your newsletter targets a specialised audience, you may offer a free subscription but ask your subscribers for donations.

Sell your own products and services: A newsletter lets you harness the power of email marketing when selling your company’s products and services. You can send regular offers, promotions, and invite subscribers to try your newly launched products

Placing and selling ad space: Once you’ve built a sizeable and highly engaged audience, you can start selling newsletter ad space. You can reach out to firms in your industry or region and offer them advertising space.

3. What is Newsletter Advertising?

Newsletter advertising is when you buy advertising space in a newsletter run by an independent publisher.

Publishers create newsletters that target highly engaged
audiences that they have cultivated with interesting content, and often sell ad spaces in these newsletters to add extra revenue to their existing subscriptions.

Native Email Ads

These ads are designed to match the newsletter and are included there as regular content. Short newsletters have only one native ad, while longer ones can have three or more ads. Typically, there are three native ad placement slots on a newsletter.

The Hero: These are premium ads at the top of the newsletter. They are large and attention-grabbing and include your logo, a large image, headline, body copy, and CTA

The primary: These ads are placed within the body of the newsletter and are highly preferred because they blend with the editorial content. It’s the perfect spot when you crave sufficient space to describe your product or service.

The snippet: These ads comprise a sentence or two at the bottom of the newsletter. Many snippets use click-bait style headlines to entice readers since they compete with the rest of the newsletter for reader’s attention.

Dedicated Emails

These are emails where the entire content is dedicated to your brand. Dedicated email lists have a higher ROI and are popular with most newsletter publishers — but these often come with a very high cost.

4. Why Should Publishers Offer Newsletter Advertising?

Should I sell ad space in Newsletters?

If you have a sizable mailing list, you may consider monetising it by selling ad space in your newsletter to willing advertisers. With a proper strategy, selling ad space in your newsletter can increase your revenue without losing subscribers.

You’re a good candidate to sell ads in newsletters if:

You have a sizable email list: Ideally, you need a list with between 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers to generate a reasonable amount of income from selling ad space. Advertisers avoid small email lists because organising an ad buy and tracking only to score a few sales isn’t worth the effort.

Have an above-average email open and click through rate: If your newsletter matches or outperforms the average open and click through numbers, you’re in good shape to sell ad space on your newsletter. Conversely, if your numbers are a little lower, consider lowering your asking price to attract prospective advertisers.

A highly active subscriber list: An engaged subscriber list translates to higher email open and click through rates, which increases the advertiser’s ROI. It signifies a high level of trust between you and your subscribers, meaning they’re likely to follow your recommendations.

Double opt-in subscribers: Double opt-in is having subscribers join your list and confirm their subscription by clicking a link in a follow-up email. A list with confirmed opt-ins is more valuable because it signifies a higher interest in the business or topic while eliminating spam addresses

Niche target audience: A list with a niche target audience can be more valuable to an advertiser than an extensive list with unproven interest. Advertisers may be willing to pay a higher cost per mille (CPM) to advertise on newsletters targeting a small group of people with a known interest in a topic. That amounts to advertising to a pool of warm leads, which increases the conversion rates and ROI.