Newsletter Advertising: How to succeed and common hurdles to clear
Newsletter advertising has always been one of the most effective marketing channels for brands and publishers, big and small, across many industries.
Not only does this powerful marketing tool allow for direct connection and communication to your audience, but it can also be a significant revenue driver for your business.
Year after year, newsletter advertising continues to increase in volume. According to Litmus & Statista, the global email marketing market was valued at $7.5 billion in 2020 and is projected to increase to $17.9 billion by 2027. There are 4 billion daily email users. This number is expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025.
Successful publishers understand email’s value in reaching their users, expanding web and app audiences, and leveraging first-party data. However, more recently many publishers are understandably frustrated by the additional tech, cost, complexity, and having to work through the technical nuances of our industry.
Therefore it is important to work with the right software, tools, and support team who can navigate an ever-changing digital publishing landscape and grow your newsletter revenue.
OAO, is a leading advertising operations services and technology provider who, in addition to the rest of their sell-side ad ops offering, are driving newsletter ad serving and monetization for their clients.
OAO is the creator of a proprietary technology known as OAO EAC, which was built as a means for digital publishers who use Google Ad Manager to streamline their newsletter ad deployment and minimize the amount of email-related technical issues affecting them.
Leif Kramer, Product Director, OAO shares some of the main issues affecting publishers when it comes to newsletter advertising, as well how OAO EAC helps to solve them.
OPERATIONAL AND TECHNICAL WORKFLOW
Your ad ops team is busy pretty much all the time, so you should always avoid adding unnecessary work to their plate. Using an additional ad server to serve ads into your newsletters disrupts a clean operational workflow by introducing an additional system for trafficking, reporting, troubleshooting campaigns, consolidating reports before sending final campaign data to an advertiser, etc.
OAO EAC is built to work with Google’s AM360 ad server, which helps to streamline the publisher’s ad ops workflow. If the publisher is already working with AM360, they no longer need an additional ad server to monetize their newsletters. OAO EAC brings AM360 back to serving ads within newsletters, allowing publishers to serve, manage, and report on campaigns in the same ad server they use for desktop, mobile, video, and audio advertising.
AD SERVING CAPABILITIES AND PROGRAMMATIC MONETIZATION
Gone are the days of only being able to serve exclusive sponsorships in newsletters. OAO has built additional functionality into OAO EAC that enables publishers to rotate ads in newsletters in addition to standard sponsorships.
OAO EAC can also fill a publisher’s newsletter inventory with programmatic advertising via our selected partners. Being an ad ops company, OAO always works to ensure publishers are maximizing revenue with their available inventory. Case in point, we don’t take a rev-share for programmatic or direct-sold advertising that serves via OAO EAC.
REPORTING ERRORS AND DELAYS
OAO approached building our OAO EAC platform as a “GAM first” solution. This means we have little-to-no error rates in impression and click reporting where other services struggle for direct in-GAM reporting, or completely lose impression and click data. This also means OAO EAC reports the clicks and impressions in near-real-time to GAM, so reporting is single source and always up to date.
FLEXIBLE AD PLATFORMS
We relied on our 20+ years of industry experience when we built OAO EAC, knowing that publishers are successful because of their unique offerings and that there is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach to anything they do. With that understanding, we made sure that OAO EAC could be easily modified and customized to meet publisher needs, from custom API access to pre-rendering of images and HTML response formatting.
To learn more about OAO EAC and to ensure you have the support you need to work with the ever-changing online publishing landscape, reach out to OAO to discuss your business’s newsletter ad serving needs.