Are you wondering how to monetize email lists or what an email ad server does? The email ad server is here to help you leverage a mostly untapped channel of advertising, and that is email advertising.
Seeing that email has long been established as the de-facto highest-converting channel, marketers have always wondered why we can’t utilize ads inside emails the way we do with other channels. This is where the modern email ad server comes in.
The email ad is the equivalent to the ads you see on websites, or even traditional magazines and newspapers. It is essentially where an advertiser purchases space on a web page, magazine page, or a mobile app.
The publisher lets the advertiser place something in this space in return for some sort of a monetization scheme. For all intents and purposes, the advertiser usually utilizes this space to place a well designed graphical ad that calls to action of some sort.
The email ad is essentially a display ad, and it allows the advertiser to tap into a severely underutilized channel full of engaged and ready-to-buy audiences. The email publisher in turn gets to monetize their hard work by simply lending space in an email that’s already crafted for sending as it is.
You could always just manually put ads inside your newsletter by modifying the html code, so what’s the big deal here? If that’s all an ad server does, it’s next to useless. The idea is that it has to allow you to do in a manner that taps into what makes email powerful in the first place - relevance.
The reason email has unheard of conversion rates is because subscribers become loyal to a newsletter or brand, and develop a sort of a relationship of trust with the email sender. When email marketing is done right, it should feel as if an authority figure is helping you solve your problems, one-on-one.
The issue was how do you monetize your newsletter with other people’s ads and still maintain that relevance? Obviously placing random out of context ads would backfire. Until specialized ad email servers the only solution was to manually manage your ad inventory, and manually decide which ads would fit emails sent to which lists and segments.
An advanced email server is one that offers several benefits to both publishers and advertisers. The main ones include:
In essence, the main challenge with email monetization has always been twofold. Namely that finding the clients themselves can be a drain on your time and effort. And secondly, that even when you do get the clients, placing the ads in the right way can become a big effort.
Your job is to ensure that the ads are relevant. However, if you do all of this manually, it can get super-complicated. It might involve having to create endless variations of emails to make sure the right ads show to the right people. Why not just let an ad server do all of this for you?
By this point you’re probably convinced that you need to allow an ad server make your life easier. But here’s the catch, not all ad servers accomplish this. There is actually a mismatch between why ad servers were created and whether solutions out there manage to achieve said goal.
Unfortunately, most ad servers don’t meet the goal of making your life easier or being any better than doing everything on your own, manually.
If you’re going to put your trust into an ad server, it has to offer several benefits, with the main one being ease-of-use. You want an ad server that’s essentially self-explanatory and makes using it feel effortless and simple.
An ability to place relevant ads isn’t a distinguishing feature, it is the bare minimum for an ad server to carry that name. If you really want one that puts monetization (or advertising) on autopilot, you’ll want one that includes a marketplace.
This means that you can simply set what you need, and let it automatically handle things for you. If you’re a publisher, you want it to automatically pick the right advertisers (and ads) for you. And then you want it to charge those advertisers, and deliver you the earnings.
And if you’re an advertiser, you want to choose how you want to advertise and only pay for results. This is crucial, if an ad server charges on any model other than pay-per-click, run as fast as you can.
And then finally, if you are a publisher who already has advertisers knocking on your doors and offering money for your space, you’ll want a private marketplace option. This is where you can essentially add your clients on the advertiser side. Then, simply let the platform charge the clients per result. This ensures that both sides are satisfied.
A pay per click model is the best for all sides concerned. It gives you the publisher the right incentives, and it gives the advertiser long-term satisfaction. This means they are likely to stay around as an advertiser for as long as they have something to advertise.
And finally, it even gives the platform the incentive to make the matching and relevance algorithms as good as possible. When you tie the earnings to the actual results, everyone benefits.
Just like with anything else in business, you only get better results with things that you can track and measure. This however doesn’t mean that all reporting options are equal.
At AdMailr we went out of our way to make sure the reporting feature fits like a glove. It hits that perfect balance between power and simplicity. This means that you will find yourself using this feature more often than not. And in turn, this is likely to end up in massive improvements in your end results.
Not every ad server goes out of its way to build a precise algorithm. You want to see an algorithm that matches the right ads to the right people. Unfortunately, most ad servers are quite simple in how they match ads. This essentially defeats the main purpose of using an advanced ad server.
This is different from AdMailr where we utilize patent-pending personalization and matching technology. Our sophisticated data algorithms and matching technologies make sure you get results. The ads are served in a way that maximizes relevance, and hence clicks. This satisfies both advertiser and publisher.
The good news is that if you’re an advertiser, getting started is quick. All you have to do is signup for an AdMailr account for free. Just visit this page and choose “advertiser”.
If you’re a publisher looking to start monetizing your newsletter, setup is quick and easy. Just visit the signup page, choose the publisher, and then follow the instructions.
On the other hand, if you are a popular publisher with plenty of monetization offers, consider the private marketplace option. This is where you can use our ad server technology to quickly and easily manage your own ads and clients. Read more about that here.
Have you ever thought about leveraging email newsletters to boost your profits? Email Ad Servers are the innovative new “secret” that might be just what you’re looking for. And guess what, this is true whether you own an email list yourself, or want to leverage someone else’s email list.
Let’s face it: no channel has come even close to achieving the level of intimacy or relationship building power that email commands. And yet, building a list or becoming good at building an engaged audience takes time. So if you’re a business looking to connect with a pre-qualified, warm audience, email ads are the perfect solution for you.
And on the other hand, if you’re an email newsletter publisher, you know that managing monetization can be a drain on your energy and time. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just focus on building the list and engagement, and then put monetization on autopilot?
This is where Email Ad Servers come in. They represent a solution that creates a perfect win-win solution for both publisher and advertiser. It makes everyone’s life easier.
So you’ve built up a decent little email list, and you’ve created some great engagement. You know that you’re essentially sitting on a gold mine, and your engaged fans would buy things that you promote. Sounds like an easy way to earn extra money right?
If you’re like most people, you probably dread the idea of having to figure out and manage the monetization. What do you even do? Start contacting a bunch of random people and businesses and pitch them on advertising their offers to your list?
Doesn’t sound like much fun, now does it? Fortunately, there is a solution to skip the dreaded “finding sponsors” phase. A good ad server platform like Admailr comes with its own public ad buying network. This means that you just set up the ad server, and the platform behind it sells ad space in your newsletter.
Are you a popular publisher who has plenty of monetization offers, but starting to find monetization management a chore? If it feels almost like a second extra job on top of maintaining, engaging and building your list, you’re not imagining it!
Without the power of an ad server, you’re doing a ton of manual work for no good reason. A good ad server should support private ad networks. And what’s that you might ask?
Well, imagine that you ran an ad platform where people can just come in and order and pay for apps from one interface. All you do is have them sign up, and that’s it. The ad server platform takes care of everything else for you.
You do not need to negotiate with every client separately, just let the platform manage the orders and serve the paid-for-orders in your name. With a platform like Admailr this is especially convenient, because aside from the easy and quick setup, you can set it and forget it.
There’s a reason why you have a popular and large list, and it has to do with your focus on email marketing and providing value to your readers. Let us help you streamline the monetization aspect so that you can focus on what you do best, delivering valuable, engaging email.
Are you the kind of person who keeps hearing about the power of email, but then shudder at the thought of having to set up email marketing systems, build lists, watch deliverability, master engagement and everything else?
You might be thinking that email marketing sounds like an entirely separate skillset to your main line of work. And you know what, you’re right! The truth is that email marketing is a profession in its own right. So what do you do if you’re unwilling to take on this entire new line of work?
The good news is that you don’t have to! Thanks to ad servers you can leverage all the purchasing hunger of an engaged email list, without having to take years to build one! You can simply piggyback off of someone else’s email list.
And the best part? An advanced ad server leader like Admailr automatically matches your ads to just the right newsletters and subscribers. With our patent-pending technology, we make sure that just the right subscribers will see your offer or ad, at just the right time.
At this point you’re probably seriously considering ad servers a go, but that brings up another, very important question. How do you choose the right ad server platform? Personally, I believe there are several things to look for.
Remember, the whole point of an ad server is to make your life easier. If your ad server ends up being just another headache in your life, that defeats the purpose.
Remember, if you’re an advertiser, the whole reason you’re looking at ad servers is because you want to skip all the work of setting up your own list. The right ad server should involve much less effort on your part than even setting up a basic, but decent email marketing system.
And if you’re a publisher, you could always do your own monetization tasks, whether that’s finding or manually managing ad clients and their ads.
Fortunately, at AdMailr we’ve understood that this is the most important characteristic of a good ad server, so this is built in at the core of AdMailr. Everything that we do is guided by the idea that it should make your life easier, whether you’re a publisher or an advertiser.
Not many people know this, but one of the reasons that Google became a multi-billion dollar franchise quickly, was because they pushed the pay-per-click model. It quickly became the most popular way to advertise online for a very simple reason. It is the most fair model out there.
You would think that the debate has been settled, but unfortunately in email advertising there are still some who sell email ads by impressions. As you might guess, with AdMailr you can expect to find a pay-per-click model.
Tracking and analytics can be a bit of a paradox with anyone doing business online. Looking at your data is often the best way to make good business decisions and grow as a business.
However, the issue is that if the analytics functionality is too overwhelming, it often ends up being less than useful. You should be able to look at the data and immediately “get it”, and understand what it all means. It shouldn’t require studying tutorials and acquiring a new skillset.
This is why AdMailr (and our related platforms) were always built to make looking at reports simple and straightforward.
In modern email marketing, personalization has essentially become a must-have. If you’re going to build a list full of engaged raving fans, you have to utilize personalization. This means delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time.
Now, if you’re a successful publisher, you probably already know about this. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons you even have an engaged list that you want to monetize. But have you considered the advertiser’s side of the story?
Imagine that you’re manually selling ad spots to sponsors. If you’re just going to insert the same static ad to go show to all subscribers, are you really doing the advertiser justice? I mean, they’re looking to get some of the same love from your subscribers that you’re getting.
However, the reason that your subscribers are engaged is because of all the personalization work that you do. Whether this is having quality segmentation, timing or personalized frequency or even content, you do personalize your email marketing.
Now, you could try to manage the ad personalization yourself as well, so you’d manually create different ways to show different ad content based on the segment or other factors. However, at this point you’re basically trying to hack your way into replicating what ad servers do, and poorly at that.
If you’re the publisher, remember that personalization benefits you directly because you’re paid for each click. It is to your own advantage to make sure that the right subscribers are shown the right ads.
Fortunately for you, at AdMailr we’ve worked really hard to create some patent-pending ad serving personalization technology. This means that our data algorithms and sophisticated matching technology help deliver targeted ads without any effort on your part.
The good news is that if you’re an advertiser, getting started is quick. All you have to do is signup for an AdMailr account for free. Just visit this page and choose “advertiser”.
If you’re a publisher looking to start monetizing your newsletter, setup is quick and easy. Just visit the signup page, choose the publisher, and then follow the instructions.
On the other hand, if you are a popular publisher with plenty of monetization offers, but not enough time to manage them, consider the private marketplace option. This is where you can use our ad server technology to quickly and easily manage your own ads and clients. Read more about that here.
If you're wondering whether native ads can fit into your content marketing strategy, this is the easiest answer I can ever give: “Absolutely!”. In fact, these two are a perfect match. If your question is more along the lines of “How can I make native ads part of my content marketing strategy?”, read on for the details.
But first, more on this “perfect match” dynamic. If you look at high-quality native ads, they all basically guide the visitor towards your highly valuable content. In other words, if the visitor clicks on your native ads, they’ll end up checking out the quality content on your website.
Native advertising and content marketing are a perfect match. Why? Both are based on promoting high-value content.Click To TweetAnd what is content marketing again? It’s a strategy where you create a ton of goodwill, trust and adoring fans that love to buy from you. How do you do this? By publishing a lot of highly valuable content. Are you starting to see the commonalities with native advertising?
If you’re doing content marketing, you have already laid the groundwork for making the most out of native ads. All you have to do is point those ads to your highly valuable content.
Here’s where the partnership becomes more apparent. As it turns out, it’s no longer enough to merely “put your awesome content out there”. A while ago, all you had to do was publish lots of good content.
The adage “Build it and they will come” actually worked in the early days. Nowadays, this is simply not enough. You actually have to push that process along by promoting your content. While promoting your content using other channels can work decently, it is native ads that are best suited to this purpose.
Some marketers incorrectly use the term “native ads” to refer to advertorials. An advertorial requires the advertiser to publish a full editorial on the website of a given publisher. Let’s say that the advertiser is IBM, and the publisher is Fortune.
If IBM publishes an advertorial on Fortune, it will appear just like a regular Fortune story, and it will actually be hosted on the Fortune.com website. The advertorial looks exactly the same as that publisher’s regular editorial content, and it’s hosted on the publisher’s website. The only difference from regular articles is that it says “sponsored by IBM”, or whoever is sponsoring that advertorial.
When we talk about native ads, we are referring to the kind of native ads you see served by a native ad platform like Outbrain or Taboola. Oftentimes, this is where you have a recommendation engine that recommends related or relevant content. There is typically a listing of “recommended reading” where each recommended item is represented with a thumbnail and a teaser.
Let’s say that you’re reading TechCrunch. Most of the recommended pieces link to content by TechCrunch itself. Some of them, however, are “native ads” and link to content on third party sites (content from advertisers). The native ad items linking to third-party advertisers will look and feel exactly the same as the items linking to internal TechCrunch content.
You don’t want to view native advertising as this isolated thing you do to “purchase more traffic”. Instead, you want to look at native advertising as an extension of your content marketing. Perhaps even an integral part of your “content marketing strategy”.
It’s kind of like how you write a blog post, and then you write a tweet about your brand new post and how it’s so very informative. Now consider this. Many of your Twitter subscribers will be there because they like the fact you share links to informative content.
So when you write great content and share it on Twitter, your Twitter presence benefits from it. But your content benefits from it being promoted on Twitter as well. Do you see how there’s a synergistic relationship going on there?
It’s similar (but different) with native advertising. Think about it: what does it take to get the most out of your native ads? Ponder on this for a while and you'll start to see how it relates to content marketing.
To get the most out of native advertising, you need to promote content that people want to click and read. You need to match the experience people are accustomed to. When they see your native ad on their favorite blog, the content being advertised needs to provide a similar value proposition and “feel similar”.
So you’re choosing your content to fit the needs of highly-effective native advertising. That, in turn, brings you a massive amount of new people to your content. Then, you can convert these people to email subscribers, Twitter followers, etc.
Choosing your audience when considering native ads is similar to choosing an audience for your general content marketing. You need to identify your target audience, find out what they care about and where you can reach them best.
Native ads are the perfect supplement to your content marketing, they let you reach new and different demographics.Click To TweetKeep in mind that different demographics prefer different content. Different native ads will need to promote different types of content.
The single most common mistake you will see with marketers is that they become overzealous when applying new marketing strategies. This results in disappointment and failure, or additional impatience and even more mistakes.
You want to take your time to do native advertising right, so here are some guidelines on how to do just that:
- Use high-quality content – you already use high-quality content as part of your content marketing strategy. Make sure this is also true with content that you promote using native ads.
- Avoid overly promotional language – Refer to the mantra “educate first, sell second”. You want your native ad content to give a ton of value upfront.
Avoid the temptation to make it into a pitch for your products and services. Find a way to naturally and subtly transition into mentioning your products and services at the end of your content, but only after you’ve delivered several pages of high-quality content.
- Focus on providing value – you want to entertain, educate or inform your readers. Just like you do with the rest of your content marketing.
- Stay true to your business goals – you need to carefully plan and align every part of the tactic. You need to do it in a way it can fit into your overall business goals.
- Stay true to your brand – every piece of content you put out there should resonate with your company culture and brand voice. Don’t forget that.
If you want an easy way to get started with native advertising, I have some good news for you. No, scratch that, I have two great things to share with you.
- As great as native advertising is, there is something even better. Native ads placed inside of popular and trusted newsletters. All the smart marketers are getting in on this and soon, all your competitors will do it, too.
- We’ve worked really hard to produce a super intuitive native advertising platform that lets you run native ads in minutes. It might just be the easiest way to get into native advertising.
Give AdMailr a try today. Creating an account is easy and completely free. You'll be able to run native ads in no time. And better yet, it will be in the highest converting medium of all - email newsletters.
The spending on digital ads has skyrocketed in recent years (some sources estimate the worth of the native industry at around $59 billion). And there’s a good reason for this growth. Native advertising has incredibly high engagement rates compared to all other forms of advertising. It's the ideal way to initiate relationships with consumers.
Yes, native advertising budgets have exploded. No, the trend isn't slowing down, in fact it's accelerating.Click To TweetLooking at all of this, you might be under the impression that it can’t get any better for native. You might assume that native advertising is unlikely to surpass its current rate of growth. However, we believe that it's still in its early years and about to take over traditional advertising. Read on to learn about these trends in more detail.
Although spending on digital and native advertising is at an all-time high, the native ad market remains ripe for expansion. Native is a hot topic in the advertising industry and it’s easy to understand what the fuss is all about.
Publishers and marketers can create ads formatted similarly to their content, giving consumers a much richer experience. Native ads also have soaring click rates, and they are already beating traditional ads in this regard (especially on mobile); Not to mention they are also cheaper to run.
This all leads to increased spending on native ads (better bang for the buck). According to data from BI Intelligence, spending on native ads will grow to $21 billion in 2018. In comparison, only $4.7 billion were spent in 2013.
At one time, big publishers got the bright idea that they could pester users into disabling ad blockers. At the time it seemed like a rational strategy. Unfortunately, it backfired on both publishers and brands.
Popular websites such as Forbes and Wired even pleaded with users that they turn-off their ad-blockers before visiting the websites. Some websites even flat-out refused to let a user read content if they had an ad-blocker enabled.
But these pleadings were seen as being annoying and desperate. Much like those flashy display ads that the user was trying to block in the first place. Readers, for the most part, chose to browse away and go to websites that don’t pester them with such demands.
Ad-blockers have resulted in a loss of revenue for publishers and brands, estimated at around $22 billion in 2015 alone. Scary, isn’t it?
Now, let’s look at where all of this is heading
The main philosophy of most ad blockers is that they’re only trying to block intrusive and annoying ads. This means that native ads aren’t being blocked by the major ad blockers. This is based on the notion that native ads aren’t intrusive or annoying.
There's a reason that adblockers ignore native ads. They're not seen as intrusive. However, this might change.Click To TweetThere is, however, some discussion about the potentially intrusive nature of native ad providers like Taboola and Outbrain. Translation: ad blockers might soon start blocking them. This is quite a realistic possibility for the coming period and something you should consider.
The good news is that even if this happens, it would only apply to those specifics networks, not native ads in general.
You’ve probably heard about this too many times by now. Mobile is taking over the internet. More and more people are primarily accessing the internet from their mobile devices as opposed to their PCs.
According to some reports, the number of mobile (smartphone and tablet) users has already surpassed desktop PC and laptop users. Most ads today are seen on mobile devices.
According to some estimates, native advertising will account for 63.2% of all global mobile display advertising by 2020, up from 52% in 2015.
A lot of popular sites such as CNN and ESPN have embraced “recommendation” native ads as part of their strategy. They incorporate these widgets that display "interesting content from around the web" relevant to their audience. Most of these are actually just native ads.
Expect more and more brands and publishers to embrace this trend and apply similar strategies to capitalize on native ads.
Native advertising isn’t about merely masquerading your ad to “blend in”. It’s about an entire experience that runs on a different philosophy than traditional ads. Yes, you will see plenty of native ads that are traditional ads in disguise. You click on a native ad with a bombastic headline and end up getting a sales pitch.
These are simply direct advertisers (ab)using a native ad delivery platform. The ones who get the most out of native advertising understand the bigger picture. It’s about providing the consumer with a value-driven experience. The same kind of experience they’re used to when they consume content from the publisher they already love and trust.
If you're not doing storytelling in your native ad campaigns, you're not fully utilizing the power of native.Click To TweetThe stories that will improve people’s lives are the stories that will be told by native advertisers. To put it in less poetic terms, native advertisers will have to master the art of storytelling. Expect to see this reflected in the headlines.
The number of headlines that promise the reader a good story for clicking on the ad will grow. And good native advertisers will deliver on the promise, realizing that the story needs to deliver value first, and only promote their product second.
Why do native ads work so well? It’s simple. They utilize the power of relationships. When your native ad appears on a website, that reader has a relationship with this website. They trust and like that publisher. And unlike traditional direct ads, a native ad lets you borrow from that trust and piggyback on that relationship.
Now, focus on that keyword there: relationships. What is the one major marketing channel that best represents relationship-driven marketing? You’ve guessed it - email marketing.
What if you could combine these two powerful strategies? The native ads that capitalize on pre-built relationships, and the email channel that dominates in terms of creating relationships.
Well, you can actually do this, and it’s quite simple. Just run native ads inside of emails. If you think about it, an email-based relationship is much deeper than any website-based relationship.
Sure, people have their favorite websites and feel some level of trust in their favorite bloggers or authors. But no website can come close to the personal feeling that is achieved by email marketing. When a recommended native ad appears inside of an email that those readers love, the level is magnified tremendously.
Hence, expect more marketers to catch on to this and start running native ads inside of popular newsletters. Fortunately, you can beat your competitors and get on the train much sooner.
At AdMailr, we’ve worked really hard to produce the most straightforward email advertising platform. We’re also leading the pack with our passion for email-based native advertising. You can join today and be one of the first in your field to experience the power of email native ads.
If you want to produce a quality native advertising article, you first have to understand native advertising itself. You need to “get” why native advertising works as well as it does, and then use this understanding to your benefit.
I personally like the definition I found on Sharethrough. According to them, native ads are “a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed.”
The reason that native ads work so well? They provide a disruption-free seamless experience.Click To TweetI highlighted the word “experience” for a reason. Many definitions fail to mention this part. You will often hear that a native ad only “resembles” and has the same “look & feel” as the medium in which it is placed.
That is not a sufficient description, though. The reason that native ads work so well is that they offer the consumer a seamless experience. Take traditional ads as a comparison. You’re reading a website, and then some flashy banner appears on the side. It’s a disruption, isn’t it?
A native ad doesn’t feel like a disruption, it feels like an organic part of the context in which it resides. Having similar design to the other website elements helps, but that’s just the first step.
When the reader clicks on the native ad, you don’t want them to experience a sudden transition. You will see many native advertisers make this mistake.
Their native ad will fit in well with the publisher’s medium so it will get a lot of clicks. But then, these people who do click on the ad are in for a shock. After clicking on this ad (which doesn’t look like an ad), they’re suddenly met with a completely different experience. There's no gradual transition.
Even if this visitor does continue reading and eventually converts into a customer, we cannot say that they had a seamless experience. Keep that in mind as you read on and learn how to write your native ad articles.
Think about the reasons you are running a native ad. What do you want to achieve with the ad and what do you expect from consumers?
Do you want consumers to buy your product or service? Perhaps you just want a boost to your website traffic and have no additional goals? Or maybe you want to get some emails from qualified leads. Make sure to note down these goals before you proceed. It will be important.
If you plan on manually arranging a spot on a single publisher’s medium, this is a bit easier. Just talk to the publisher directly about where your ad will display. Then browse their website a bit to feel what it's like for the average reader. Ultimately, use this understanding to make sure your native ad article doesn't stray far from that.
If you’re going to use a native advertising platform, you can't manually explore every possible website that might feature your ad. You will have to make a general ad that "generally fits" most typical websites where it gets displayed.
Find some websites that use the platform of your choice and study how other advertisers are doing it. Notice which ones stick out badly, and which ones do a good job. Analyze these findings and use them in creating your own ad and article.
Native ad articles should be informational, educational and interesting to read. Don’t jump straight to selling your product or whatever your conversion goal is. Offer some background information and key industry info.
Ideally, the first 1/2 of the reading experience should be purely about giving value. No mention of your company, your services or your goals. Just cover the topic that people come to learn about. In a word: make it about them, not yourself.
The information should be as useful as possible, while still leaving readers wanting for more. This makes it more likely that they’ll desire a product you sell or other content that you publish.
Writing native ad articles is an art. Give enough value to establish yourself, but know when to hold back.Click To TweetFor example, if your goal is to get people onto your email list, your content should aim to leave them wanting more information. It's an excellent way to get them to sign up for your email list.
If you want to sell a product, make sure that the information in your article helps in solving most of their pain points, but not all. Hint at the fact that there's a major point which can't be solved by reading an article. In fact, this point is best solved by purchasing your product or service. And that brings us to the next point.
You're publishing a native ad for a reason: you want your customers to buy your webinar course, download your whitepaper or hire you for consulting services.
It can also be about signing up for a newsletter, buying a product or booking a consultation; Any conversion goal you can have in an online environment.
The trick here is to consider the overall experience. You want to make people take action, but you want to do it in a way that feels organic and natural. It needs to be a tie-in to the overall story presented in your article, a logical sequitur, if you will.
You'll want to experiment with several alterations of the title, as well as test different endings and intros. The fact is that you don't know what content will produce optimal results with traffic coming from a native ad. One of your alterations will produce significantly better results than the others.
You can find out what works in one of two ways. You can simply change up the content after it’s been linked to from a native ad. And then, just note which versions produce better results.
Alternatively, you can do exploratory tests in advance. This will give you a better idea what content might perform better as an ad.
Simply point some PPC traffic to the page that hosts the native advertising article, and split test some of the alterations. That way, you’ll have a better idea what content is worthy of being linked to from a native ad.
Did you know that you can now have native ads inside of emails? This method combines two high-potency strategies into one. If you consider why native ads work so well, it’s because they utilize the power of relationship-driven marketing.
When you run a native-ad, your ad is "piggybacking" off of the relationship that the reader has with that publisher. They trust that website, so when they see your native ad, they also trust you. This is because your native ad looks and feels as part of that website.
Relationship-driven marketing is taking over the world as we speak, and for a good reason. It works way better than traditional marketing ever did. People want to buy from those whom they have a relationship with. To utilize this fact, you can do your own content marketing, social media marketing and build your own email list.
But you can also use the relationships that others have built. This is how native ads work. But stop here for a second, and think about the following. Which form of marketing builds the best relationships? All the data shows that this would be email marketing.
Emails have the highest conversion rates of anything out there. People just seem to love buying whatever you sell in your emails. What if you could tap into that power without having to wait for your own email list to grow? This is where native ads for email come in.
At AdMailr we believe that native ads are the future of email advertising. This is why we created a platform which makes it effortless to place your native ads in popular newsletters that readers love and trust. Give it a try today. It might be the best marketing decision you've ever made.
If you have anything to add I'd love to hear from you in the comments area and if you feel like this is worth sharing please share it! 🙂
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When it comes to making money online, email marketing is still king. In fact, it works better than ever. Business owners that do not incorporate email marketing in their way of doing business are losing out - big time.
And in fact, why does it work better than ever? This is actually quite simple. Email marketing is the best way to build a relationship with your current and potential (future) customers. This has always been a tremendous benefit. People are more likely to buy from someone they trust and have a connection with.
Email marketing has always been king, but with relationship-driven trends, its importance has grown even further.Click To TweetToday, however, this is becoming more important than ever. Traditional intrusive marketing is killing itself. People are becoming immune to direct advertising. Nowadays, it looks like a relationship-driven approach is becoming your only choice. In a word, if you’re not utilizing email marketing, you’re leaving a ton of money on the table.
There is a way of getting all these cool benefits while piggybacking on the relationship that someone else has built. This is where native ads come into play. A native ad is basically an ad that appears in a publication alongside its regular content.
It looks indistinguishable from the regular editorial content (it doesn’t look or feel like an ad). In that way, you get all the trust those readers already have for this publisher. You get all the benefits of that relationship, without having to build it yourself.
Native ads are the fastest way to tap into the power of relationship-driven marketing. Now available in emails.Click To TweetNative ads are typically recognized as something you place on a website. But AdMailr is here to change that. Nothing builds a quality relationship the way email marketing does. So why not have native ads inside of emails?
With Admailr, now you can. We've built a truly amazing platform that lets you easily get your ads inside of popular newsletters. You just write your native ad (or traditional display ad), and our system automatically finds the best places to insert it. You do get all the control you need, as you can choose from many targeting options. To learn more or get started, just check out our front page.
Sure, you can use AdMailr to place ads in someone else’s emails. And you should start leveraging this amazing opportunity as soon as possible. But you also want to combine this option with running your own email list. A smart business is one that combines both strategies.
Basically, you want to build your own relationships and leverage other people’s relationships. AdMailr actually helps with both sides of the coin. But more on that later. For now, let’s look at what you need to know about getting started with doing your own email marketing.
It should be obvious, but you need to first identify a quality email provider. Fortunately, over at Emercury, we offer one of the most generous free plans when it comes to email marketing. You can sign up today and start experimenting with even the most advanced email marketing features.
But whichever provider you choose, make sure to learn how it works. Emercury offers a great knowledge base and tutorials for example.
It's important to strike that balance of paying enough attention to detail versus doing too much too soon. For example, it's important to study your email reports and analyze your open rates. But if you have 12 subscribers, it might be a tad too soon for that.
It's never too soon to start learning, though, especially about things like list hygiene and email deliverability. So make sure to study these things as you go along. The emercury blog has plenty of free learning materials on email marketing.
You know what's the worst way to ask people for their email? Say "sign up for our list" and offer no further reasons why they should do it. Even if you have super-enthusiastic followers, most will not sign up without being given a reason why. And that's just in terms of your raving fans.
Without a 'reason why', most people will skip giving you their email address. This even includes your raving fans.Click To TweetIf you want to get the most people to sign up, even people randomly stumbling on your website, you need to learn about incentives, i.e. promising people something of value in exchange for their email address.
Here are a couple of popular incentive-based approaches
So, in summary: You need to identify some "great reasons why" people should sign up to your list in general. You can outline these reasons under your general sign-up form. But additionally, you want to create additional incentivized reasons that encourage people to give you their email address. This will take some experimentation, but over time you will discover great incentives that fill your list with new subscribers.
One of the cornerstones of a successful relationship with your subscribers is trust and integrity. Being a good writer allows you to become an authority in the eyes of your readers. So you definitely want to focus on mastering this skill.
When it comes to email marketing though, you want to pay special attention to develop a casual tone. You want your emails to feel personal. Almost as if they were written for each participant individually.
If you get a lot of people hitting reply and responding to your automated emails as if it were a personal email, you're doing it right. And if you haven't gotten such responses yet, work on your craft until you do.
Sending emails seems straightforward, but there’s always a catch. You don’t want to send too many emails and seem needy or desperate.
If you send one today, don’t send another one tomorrow. The exception to this rule is if you specifically had people sign up for something like this. Perhaps you offer a “7-day course” and people will get an email every day in the next seven days.
But if people are signing up for a general email list, as a general rule, two or three times a week is about right. Alternatively, “an email every couple of days” is also a good "starting guideline" to follow.
Never have a subscriber that goes a long period of time without getting any emails from you. You want to get them habituated to getting emails from you. If you go missing for weeks or even months at a time, you can become a “random stranger in the inbox”.
Many people will forget how they signed up for your list in the first place. They will see your email after a long gap and decide to unsubscribe. Even worse, they might mark you as a spammer.
Scheduling is another strategy you can try in attempting to get that balance right. If you create a specific time and day of the week when you send out emails, you’re making it easier for yourself and your subscribers.
You’ll know that there’s a day in the week when an email should go out. This saves you the mental energy of having to decide when to do it. Your subscribers get used to this schedule and know at which time they should expect an email from you.
Tim Ferriss does something like this with his “5-bullet Friday” series. He has an email that goes out each Friday, and people are used to it. In fact, they look forward to getting that “Friday email from Tim”.
Note, each list and industry is different. All of these suggestions are “safe guidelines” that work quite well for most people. To find what’s optimal for you, however, look to the next tip.
Here’s a little-known secret about email marketing: nobody can teach you what’s “best” for your email list. This is why high-quality email providers provide good analytic tools. They let you delve deep into what your readers are doing, so that you can find out what works well and what doesn’t.
You want to study those email reports and learn what works. Which topics do people respond to positively? When do they have a negative reaction? Is it because of what you’re sending them or how often you do it? If you take the time to study and experiment, you can learn to “feel the pulse” of your subscriber base.
As important as growing your email list is, keeping it in order is just as important. This is known as "list hygiene". It might sound "boring", but it actually affects you in a huge way.
If you let your list "get dirty", it actually means your emails get less and less effective over time. You actually get less opens, fewer clicks and much less profits for every 1000 emails that you send. This is because over time, the list will accrue fake emails, honeypot emails, some of the subscribers will become inactive, etc.
Maintaining proper list hygiene means you can get as much as twice the results from your list. This is because of things like improved deliverability and reputation. But also because you're paying for sending emails that don't convert.
If you want to learn more about this, the Emercury blog has many tips on list hygiene and email deliverability. Furthermore, it's the only ESP that has list-hygiene included with every account, along with a deliverability manager.
The end goal of all types of marketing is producing profits. The same is true when it comes to email marketing. After you apply all the steps listed above, you'll actually want to learn how to best monetize. There are many quality ways of monetizing your email list, and you'll want to look into them.
But consider that we've gone out of the way to build the most effortless and easiest way to profit from your emails. Introducing AdMailr - an innovative platform that lets you sell ad-space inside of your emails. It uses technology that was crafted to make the process automatic.
You just have to configure a few settings, and the platform does the rest. It automatically places the ads in the positions most likely to create profit for you. Additionally, you get all the control you need in terms of what kind of ads can and cannot appear in your newsletter.
Give us a try today, it might just be the most important step you make in your email marketing endeavors.
If you don’t have an email list, you’re leaving money on the table. That’s an indisputable fact. It doesn’t matter what your industry is. It doesn’t matter who your customers are. This is a universal fact. As a business, you always make more money with email lists than you do without.
Whether you already have an email list and are failing to tap into its full potential, or haven’t even started the list yet, keep reading. There are several quick and easy things you can implement today and see your profits increase immediately.
It sounds kind of sinister, but it’s just a cool hack that gets people used to buying from you. A “tripwire” is an easy-to-buy irresistible offer that subscribers get right after they sign up. You want it to have a great value-to-price ratio. Think of a product or service that could easily sell for $50, and offer it to new subscribers for just $7. This achieves many important goals.
The best trick to get your email subs to buy quick? Offer a super-valuable tripwire that gets them hooked on buying.Click To TweetFirst, it gets that subscriber used to clicking on your promotional link
The offer is so good, that they’re more likely to click on that link in your email that leads to the buy page. Even if they don’t purchase that super-valuable and cheap tripwire, it's now more likely that they will click on future links and offers.
Secondly, a high percentage of subscribers are in fact likely to buy this product
If you’re truly giving an amazing value, they would be crazy not to. So you get a high percentage of your subscribers used to the process of purchasing things from you or paying you for stuff.
Thirdly, you get to show off the quality of your purchase process and products
You want to really focus on making the entire process very professional. This will depend on what you’re selling, so we can’t go into every possible scenario, but let’s look at a random example.
Let’s say you're selling consultation services. You might charge hourly fees, but you’re willing to sell a 15-minute consultation for a very low price as a tripwire. You would want to make the purchase process extremely effortless.
People click on that buy button and are immediately redirected to a beautiful page that explains what happens next. They also immediately get an email confirming their purchase. Make them feel like they’ve bought something expensive, not something cheap.
You would then contact them personally, arrange that consultation and make sure that it’s a super high-quality experience. Give them a chance to see how good your service is when they buy the “real deal”. Leave them imagining how awesome it must be to get the "full service" if the tripwire is that good.
The most important thing is how you segment out the purchasers
If you’re using a quality email marketing solution, you should be able to do segmenting properly. Basically, the moment a subscriber buys that tripwire, your email marketing solution should immediately segment them out to a different segment or list - one that’s based around the idea that these are “buyers”. You can then treat them differently, send them more offers, different kinds of offers, etc.
In fact, the best thing would be to acknowledge their purchase of the tripwire. And then write a sequence that is based on this fact. Your wording and introduction of offers would be different. Something like “Since you liked [tripwire product], you’ll probably like this and that, and you might want to look into xyz”.
When you have a quality ESP, this is easy. It should allow you to study the behaviors and preferences of your subscribers and adjust. Additionally, it should let you easily segment out subscribers by behavior.
Let’s get a bit more specific about this though. You might realize that the most important thing in marketing is to properly target potential customers. Trying to pitch the same offer to every person on the planet just means you'll go bankrupt fast. Different people need to be offered different things in different ways.
The first thing you want to do is study and understand subscribers
Part of this is a manual learning process. Send different kinds of offers, promote different kinds of services and discuss different kinds of topics. With a good reporting feature, you’ll be able to see what people react to.
You can study the open rates, the click rates, and whether subscribers forward certain emails. From this, you'll find out whether they like certain topics more than others; prefer different kinds of email structures, etc.
Then you want to automate that segmentation
Fortunately, when it comes to email marketing, this (can be) very easy, with the right tools at your disposal. If your email provider allows it, you should be able to set up different levels of automation.
You may create an automation where if a subscriber clicks on offer A, they get moved to the segment for people who are into those kinds of offers. Or you might design an automation based on open rates. If they open emails from a certain category (topic), they would be moved to a segment catering more to people into that topic.
All of this will improve your earnings
You will make more money off of your email lists if you treat people differently based on their differing preferences. This will also improve your email deliverability, which also increases your profits in the long run.
It might sound paradoxical, but one of the easier ways to make more money is by focusing less on pitching offers. You want your free content to be more valuable and attractive. This will improve deliverability. It means more people will receive your emails and be exposed to your stuff. It will get subscribers to stick to your list longer, which also exposes them to more offers. This, in turn, increases their odds of buying.
Ironically enough, if you push too many offers in the beginning, you sell less in the long run because people will soon unsubscribe. But if you’re more subtle, you will expose them to more offers in the long run. You need to find that balance. It’s easy if you do two things.
First, you have to change your focus
Shift to having the main focus on providing great value in your emails. Make the offers a secondary thing. In fact, you want the offers to be a logically flowing consequence of the free value you’re giving.
An example will probably illustrate this best: you have an email where you teach the subscriber to use a tripod in their photography. You focus on giving the best possible tips, and only then, in the end (in a logically flowing sequence), you recommend some tripods they could purchase.
This isn’t to say you can never have strictly promotional emails. You definitely can. But most of your emails need to be “newsletters” or “value giving emails” where the promotional part is a logical ending to a value giving email.
It’s okay to occasionally throw in strictly promotional emails. But you need to know how many of your emails will be strictly promotional. It's similar to how you watch the ratio in your regular emails, where you want to have many paragraphs of value before pitching something.
The same is true for the ratio of regular emails vs promotional emails. You need to have a sequence of several regular emails before you send out one promotional email.
Use the tools provided by your ESP to learn what works
You can’t educate yourself into having the optimal balance. You want to use the email reporting features in your email marketing software to learn what’s happening. Study the analytics, delve into the reports and “see what’s happening”. Tweak the frequency, experiment with more pitches, fewer pitches, and different ratios. With time, you will learn what works best.
No one can tell you what's optimal for your email list. Read the email reports and learn what works.Click To TweetIf you’re reading this guide because you already have products and services, but no email list, feel free to skip this section. Oh, and get that email list started today. If you’re in the opposite situation, i.e. you have email lists and aren’t pitching your own products yet, please consider that it might be time to do it.
A lot of people procrastinate on creating their own product because they falsely assume it has to be difficult. In fact, you might be here because you think that creating a product to pitch is difficult, so you’re looking for “an easy alternative”.
Yes, we all have that vision of the perfect product. But you don’t have to wait for perfection to get started. In fact, that’s why as businesses we can have different price points and create products that meet different needs.
If you’re mostly making money through affiliate marketing and offering other people’s products, here’s a quick trick. You can create a “mini product” that fills in a gap left by the affiliate product you’re promoting. It can be very easy to create a simple product that only solves a single issue or need.
And consider this, the people on your lists like you. They won’t be judgmental or think badly of you if you create an imperfect product. Especially if, as we said, it’s a supplement to the third-party products you’re promoting as an affiliate.
Oh, and of course, a lot of this will depend on your specific niche or industry. It might be a physical product, a digital download, or perhaps in your case, the “product” can actually be a service that you provide. Perhaps you can offer paid consultations or any sort of service.
If your subscribers like your content, you should offer them even better content for a monthly fee. You can create great, helpful content and make money out of it.
Actually, you have to prepare content that they feel they truly need. It should leave them satisfied and anticipating each next email in that “paid subscribers only” sequence. They need to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth.
Also, it needs to be exclusive content. It should be content that you don’t put anywhere else. This means you can’t pass off your old posts as paid content because they can easily cancel the subscription. Naturally, you don’t want to recycle your paid content and just copy-paste it into a future blog post. Your subscribers will notice this and feel cheated.
This is probably the single easiest way to make more money from your email lists. What if you could install a money-making mechanism in your newsletters that ran on auto-pilot?
Fortunately, this exists and it is called AdMailr. Our ad-serving platform for newsletters makes the entire process effortless for you. All you have to do is perform the quick sign up and you can get started in no time.
Our platform will automatically display the best ads from the right advertisers in the most optimal spots within your newsletter.
And if you really want to make great profits and keep those readers happy at the same time, consider the fact that we're now serving native advertising inside of newsletters. This increases your revenue from ads while improving your relationship with email subscribers at the same time.
Lead generation is essential for business, that’s a given. But this doesn’t just mean generating a lot of leads. What you need are ways to get more quality leads and increase conversion.
You're probably putting a lot of time and effort into lead generation. But if you’re still failing to get promising leads, it’s time to reassess your tactics.
The quantity of your leads irrelevant if they're not the kind who will convert. #lead-qualityClick To Tweet
As is often said, change is the only constant in business. The ability to adapt to market changes and capitalize on them is key to business growth. When it comes to your lead generation tactics, you have to be smart, creative and flexible. Let us look at a couple of things that may be undermining your efforts to generate quality leads.
Your website can be a potent lead generator. But it has to be carefully designed and maintained. If your site is failing to generate leads, you’re not doing something right.
Is your website keeping up with time? Design is important, so don’t go for a generic or outdated look. Make it attractive and unique.
Keep your registration forms simple, with a few qualifying questions. If you make the process too complicated, people are likely to abandon it.
Include a toll-free number beside the registration form. Some of your visitors may be ready to buy immediately. In this case, conversation with a knowledgeable support agent can speed up conversion.
Don’t neglect the importance of search engine optimization. The purpose of SEO is to drive traffic to your site by increasing its search ranking. It makes it easier for people to find you by matching your content to their online searches.
To attract prospects, you need to identify the right keywords for your SEO campaigns. Use high search volume, high relevance and low competition as keyword defining criteria.
Keywords aside, remember to make your content attractive and educational. Post frequently to keep the content fresh and maintain good SEO ranking. Write your content with your audience in mind. Think helpful and relevant.
Allowing this to happen will result in a leaky sales process and loss of revenue. Generating quality leads and closing sales must be a joint effort.
Despite the difference in functions, both teams need to be fully aligned. This includes their goals, strategic approach, access to data, metrics, and accountability.
In practice, disagreements and underrating of each other’s roles happens often. Marketing people are more analytical. They base their decisions on data and stats. They keep their focus on future trends and the competition. Sales teams are focused on closing the sale and addressing customer needs.
Lack of interdepartmental cooperation inevitably creates frustration, conflict, and ultimately poor outcomes.
As a business owner, your job is to ensure both teams function together. Their relationship should be clearly defined so they can work in sync.
Sales teams gather valuable prospect data that marketing can use in lead generation strategies. Encourage them to talk about their processes and objectives and to plan together. This includes lead definition, marketing campaigns, advertising material, content, landing pages and more.
Media diversity is key to good lead generation. Spread your efforts across multiple channels to find out which ones are best for your business.
Social media are a powerful marketing tool. Granted, it’s a bit difficult to quantify their contribution in terms of ROI. But they do deserve a place in your marketing strategy.
If you're not utilizing blogs and social media, you don't really have an 'internet marketing strategy'.Click To TweetSocial networks help foster relationships with prospects and customers. They can also be effectively used to generate leads and increase conversion rates.
People spend huge amounts of time on social media, far more than they interact face to face. This gives you an opportunity to engage your target audience and turn them into leads.
Of course, you need to choose the right social network for your business. Facebook would seem like the first choice, due to the massive user base. Still, for B2B and B2C LinkedIn appears to be the most effective lead generator. Traffic from LinkedIn generates the highest visitor to lead conversion rates.
Don’t forget the importance of blogging. Blogs boost your online presence, help you attract visitors and stimulate conversions. Your blog can be a place where people can read about their concerns and find solutions to their problems. Your posts should portray you as knowledgeable, competent and helpful. An active blog can also do wonders for brand promotion.
Email marketing is powerful. It’s also easy on time and resources. As a targeted marketing tactic, it helps you segment your audience for lead generation and nurturing. You can do it by demographics, location, behavior, lead status and more. This way you can create customized campaigns with the right content for their needs.
Delivering useful content on a regular basis will help you create a relationship of trust. It will also increase brand awareness. Above all, email marketing is easy to track, allowing you to measure your campaign success.
So, are you ready to give email marketing a go? Emercury’s email marketing solution is just what you need. And don’t worry if you’re completely new to this approach. The platform is super easy to master. You’ll have your first marketing campaign up and running in no time.
Emercury offers real-time stats on delivery rates, subscriber retention, bounces, complaints and unsubscribes. And knowing what your audience responds to will help you fine-tune your future campaigns.
Times are changing, learn to roll with them. There are several old habits that will likely cost you leads if you insist on relying on them.
Trade shows are not the best place to generate leads. Nowadays, people do their pre-purchase research online and already know what they want. Not to mention the costs of setting up the display, organization, and travel.
The company-centered marketing approach no longer works. Billboards, TV commercials and print ads are losing power.
Without the ability to collect data and set metrics, you can’t measure campaign success. There's no way to know if your efforts generated leads or revenue.
People spend way more time in front of digital devices than they do watching TV or reading a paper.
Traditional marketing puts the brand in the spotlight, not the consumer. On the other hand, as users become more tech-savvy, their understanding of the market increases. So do their expectations.
It's time to let go of strategies that haven't worked in a long time and enter the era of relationship-driven marketing. This novel form of marketing places the main emphasis on customer satisfaction and retention.
As a major player in this new league, native advertising is gaining momentum fast. It’s one of the best ways to generate leads and promote trust and engagement.
Unlike traditional display ads and banners, native ads are subtle by design. They don’t scream for attention or disrupt the user experience. Instead, they naturally blend into the surrounding content.
In fact, native ads are twice as likely to be shared and looked at than banner ads. Due to the higher viewing rates, they increase engagement and conversion.
Placing native ads into someone else’s newsletter is an effective lead generation tactic. In essence, you reap the benefits of an active relationship between your target audience and the publisher.
Of course, to be noticed and acted upon, your native ads must find their way to the right newsletter. But how can you ensure the best placement every time?
Enter Admailr, the best solution for native ad placement. Admailr makes it easy to reach your target audience. Just place your native ad into the Admailr UI and set the type of campaign, parameters, and budget. Then, let Admailr work its magic and find the perfect placement every time.
Your business can’t exist without a constant supply of leads. If you want your business to grow, getting better leads faster is crucial.
When it comes to generating quality leads, there's one key thing to remember. Your sales strategies should always put the primary focus on the client. Don't focus on "advertising your company and products". Instead, focus on addressing people’s needs.
Generating sales today is all about putting the focus on the customer. Not you, your products or company.Click To TweetWe have entered the era of relationship-driven marketing. Gone are the days when traditional marketing could get you good results and boost your sales.
Today it's rare to find anyone getting good results with traditional direct ads. What works today is forging strong bonds with your existing customers. As well as finding new ways to create relationships with future customers.
People no longer respond to the overt and impersonal approach of traditional advertising. This is mostly because we don’t like being explicitly told to buy a product. Rather, we want to be enticed and subtly persuaded that the product is the best thing for us.
The key to devising a good lead generation strategy is learning all you can about your target audience. This includes their likes, dislikes, behavior patterns and the sites that they visit in search of information.
Demographic data such as age, location, gender, marital status and income is also important. Your data has to be reliable so you can get a clear picture and understand the reasoning behind people’s purchase decisions.
The KEY to engaging your audience? Understand who they are.Click To TweetOnce you’ve done your research, use this data to keep your audience engaged as well as to speed up the conversion. You can segment your prospects into different categories and target them with customized content. Segmentation can be based on location, behavior, age, prior purchases or the readiness to buy.
Make sure to specifically target prospects with the greatest profit potential.
It only takes people a few seconds to decide whether they want to stay on a website. To help you generate customers, your site has to be presentable and trustworthy. How can you achieve this?
First of all, your site must be visually appealing. Design can make a huge difference when it comes to a website generating trust. Avoid using all-caps paragraphs or exclamation points. Pay attention to the colors, fonts, images and of course, the grammar. Keep the layout simple and functional.
To stimulate lead generation, include sign-up forms on every page. However, don’t ask for too much information during this first step. Asking for too many personal details early on in the process is often a deterrent.
And remember, if you're using a quality ESP, you can always append additional info on a person's contact later on. In the initial stages, you just want to get them on board.
To add credibility, include pictures and testimonials from satisfied clients on the pages where you ask for information.
Post informative videos about your products. Keep the videos educational and easy to understand. This way, visitors will be more confident that purchasing your product is the right decision.
In this age of increasingly scary hacks and security breaches, it’s important to show people that your site is safe to browse. By displaying a trust seal, you reassure visitors it’s okay to provide sensitive information. Trust seals are associated with SSL security technology. SSL helps establish an encrypted link between a web server and a browser.
Include a clear call to action and take steps to encourage a response. For example, if you want people to sign up for a newsletter, tell them how often they will receive emails. Make it clear they can easily unsubscribe if they choose to.
Email marketing is undoubtedly the simplest and most affordable way to get quality leads. But make sure that you know how to utilize it to the fullest. Or rather, invest the time to learn about the mistakes you must avoid.
Simply purchasing a mailing list and sending out emails is not the way to go. First, it won’t be successful. Second, you’ll trigger your ESP's spam filters and your content will probably get blocked.
What you need are subscribers that are genuinely interested in what you have to say. Create engaging content that people will look forward to. This way, you can gradually turn them into hot leads and ultimately, customers.
Your emails can work in a variety of ways. You can issue newsletters or send product offers on a regular basis. You can also use your emails to promote other people’s products for a fee.
If you want to give email marketing a try, nothing beats Emercury’s free plan. You’ll have some cutting-edge features at your disposal right from the very start. This will allow you to test out and get a feel for the platform before you choose to upgrade to an advanced plan.
Emercury can also help you create mailing lists in no time at all. Simply place the Emercury sign up box on your website so people can register. To expand your mailing list, you can import any emails you’ve collected from other sources into your Emercury account.
Referral programs are a great lead generation tool. Referrals can help you enhance your brand trust and reach a larger number of prospects. They can also speed up the movement of leads through the sales process.
Satisfied customers generate new customers. This makes word of mouth a powerful (and free) marketing tool. But, you can also consider rewarding the people that recommend your products. Give them an incentive to refer you to their friends, family and business connections.
It can be a financial stimulus such as a referral fee, a discount on future purchases or some other benefit. Businesses with a referral program generate twice as many leads compared to those without one.
Email design matters a great deal. There are several aspects you need to consider when creating your email campaigns.
The subject line is the first thing your subscribers see and a huge factor in getting emails opened and read. Make your subject lines enticing, so they’ll provoke people to read the email. Keep them precise. Say what the email is about - an ebook, a webinar, a free course, or something else.
Keep your content educational. Familiarize people with your offer and its benefits to facilitate conversion.
Use carefully selected images to convey your message. Finish your emails with an invitation to a free webinar or audiobook download.
Include sharing links for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin, so people can share your content with friends.
Native ads are a great way to increase user engagement. They are a form of paid advertisement where the ad matches the visual design of the email. The content of the ad is relevant and blends well into the surrounding content. As a result, the ad doesn't disrupt the visual experience. This is unlike a traditional ad or a banner.
Because of their subtlety, native ads outperform traditional ads when it comes to views and engagement.
One of the most effective ways to use native ads is to integrate them into someone else’s email content. By advertising in newsletters issued by trusted publishers, you capitalize on already established relationships. Since people already view the publisher’s content as valuable, they'll most likely give your content a chance as well.
So, what’s the easiest way to place your ad within a newsletter? Admailr has the perfect solution. Our intuitive platform will select the most suitable newsletter for your native ads. It will also ensure the best possible placement every time.
All you have to do is set your campaign preferences and your budget. Then, just sit back and watch as new quality leads flock to you.
With Admailr, there are no setup costs. You control the campaign expenses and the cost per click. Plus, you don’t pay when your ad is displayed, only when someone clicks on it. There’s no better way to maximize your digital visibility and reach more prospects fast.
If you're even marginally interested in following marketing trends, you must have noticed all the hype surrounding native ads. During the past couple of years, native advertising has become one of the most influential and fastest-growing types of advertising.
There is substance behind the hype surrounding native ads - they do work exceptionally well. Native ads offer a slew of benefits for small and large companies, as well as individual entrepreneurs. Native ads nowadays can be adapted to any format. Be it a blog post, website, or newsletter native ads.
It's wise to note that the rising popularity of native ads is actually part of a more general shift in advertising. As it turns out, traditional and impersonal advertising is dying.
Native ads are killing traditional ads, fastClick To TweetThe old marketing is being replaced by a new kind of relationship-driven marketing. Native advertising itself represents a big player in this "new marketing". Native ads themselves are great at creating a more meaningful relationship with your audience.
The primary focus of native advertising is blending into its surrounding content. The idea is that it shouldn’t stand out. It should feel as if it were a natural part of the editorial content. It doesn’t feel like an ad slapped onto a website or newsletter.
Native advertising doesn't bother the audience or create a distraction. On the contrary, it enhances their experience in consuming and interacting with that content. Even if you are not always aware of it, you see native ads in your favorite publications on a daily basis.
Native ads do not annoy or distract the audienceClick To TweetNo one likes seeing online ads that are aggressively displayed and disrupt the experience of consuming certain content. That kind of advertising is slowly being phased out by a more genuine form of ads. Ones based on a mutually beneficial relationship with the consumer.
So, what makes native ads the future of marketing? Read on to find out.
One of the most useful aspects of native ads is that they produce higher viewing rates in comparison to other types of advertising. They also allow advanced customization. This means that advertisers can represent their offerings in ways that make the target audience more likely to interact.
Furthermore, using native ads can result in outstanding engagement and conversion rates with customers. The reason is simple: the ads blend in with the content without annoying potential customers with countless distracting messages.
This subtle improvement saves the customers time since they don’t have to bother removing the variety of ads and banners that would otherwise occupy their screen.
Ultimately, customers end up staying much longer on websites that incorporate native ads. What’s interesting is that some websites, like Upworthy, get almost 3x more views towards their native ads than their editorial content.
Native ads in general increase the purchase rate in comparison to, for example, banner ads. Yahoo reports that native advertising also increases search activity of users upon viewing native ads (reporting a number as high as 204% of improvement in search activity).
This is mostly due to the seamless blending of the native ads with the content. In short - engagement and monetization are sure to increase if you replace banner ads with native advertisements.
Every business needs a loyal customer base to stay relevant on the market. If you think that flashy banner ads might get you one, think again! Be wiser and incorporate native ads in your strategy.
When consumers come across a native ad on the website of the brand they like, their brains create an emotional connection to what they’re engaging with. This associates your brand or service with content that they already love and so you're much more likely to win sales.
Using native advertising, you're communicating to consumers that you're not solely interested in their wallets. You're aiming to create a lasting relationship that’s mutually beneficial. In return, they will reward you with their loyalty.
Native ads strike a balance where they can blend in, yet still offer transparency. Most native ads openly display the third-party branding. So the consumer knows that this content is third-party content, yet it isn't like a traditional display ad. It is content that that appears to come from a "trusted third party". It is content that's relevant to (and adds value to) the regular content. So they can choose for themselves whether to engage or not.
Native ads are genuine and create instant trustClick To TweetThe best way to describe this is with an analogy. Let's say you're having a conversation with a good friend at his house. His colleague from work is sitting alongside you. She's smart, witty and your friend seems to respect her a lot.
So you're having this engaging conversation with your friend at his house about some topic. And then she chimes in with a very positive and valuable addition to the conversation. You're then drawn into a conversation with her that you find even more engaging. You have every reason to trust her because she is a close friend of your friend, and you've heard lots of good things about her.
Native ads are similar to this kind of "third trusted person". It isn't like some sneaky trick where the advertiser pretends to be the publisher. There is transparency that this is a third party, but there's also a prebuilt relationship and carryover in trust.
All of this makes native ads more appealing than other forms of advertising. The transparency they offer increases your credibility with the customers. As opposed to forcing random banners and irrelevant ads to pop up on their favorite sites or newsletters.
Control is one of the major things native ads offer to publishers. Advertisers who publish ads on websites often have bigger control over the ads than publishers. So if that advertiser displays a random ad that disrupts the look & feel of the website, the publishers just have to "live with it".
This isn't the case with native ads. The publisher doesn't have to tolerate compromises in style and disruptions in flow. Native ads maintain the tone of the website and increase chances of monetization at the same time. The click-through rates are better both on mobile devices and computers.
The publisher, therefore, builds an even better relationship with their readers. The readers love coming to the website and consuming it when there aren't distracting elements (like those traditional random display ads).
Native ads inspire higher engagement and conversion rates. They engage consumers on both an emotional and intellectual level. Even better, native ads can oftentimes encourage consumers to promote your brand.
Native ads get consumers to promote your brand.Click To TweetThis may happen when they share one of your articles. The one that they discovered from clicking on a native ad. The fact that native ads help you make content go viral is probably one of their biggest upsides.
Customers that consume native ads are more likely to trust your brand. However, even native ads can backfire. They might tarnish the reputation of both the brand and the publisher if the placements aren't strategic.
Every advantage that we've discussed so far assumes you're placing the native ads in the right place. Your ad has to add value to the conversation on that page. If there is a mismatch between your native ad and the page it displays on - you won't get much better results than with a display ad.
We've worked really hard to come up with the perfect solution. As you already realize - native ads work because relationship-driven marketing works. The power of native ads lies in the general power of relationship-driven marketing. And it is email marketing that creates the deepest bonds and relationships.
When a person looks forward to someone's newsletters, they open them with anticipation and glee. They look forward to anything this newsletter author will recommend or talk about. This is why email marketing beats everything else in terms of conversion rates and returns.
And incidentally, this is why you should get started with email marketing if you haven't done it yet. It's a surefire long-term investment.
But what about now? You can leverage other people's existing email relationships - starting today. Admailr is a solution that helps you place native ads inside of other people's newsletters.
Our intelligent process chooses where to display your ads, picking the perfect newsletter and placement every time. To create your free account just head on over to our sign up page.
