A Black Art: Digging for Gold in Email Publications
By Adam Boettiger
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Advertising in an E-Mail publication can be one of the most effective investments ever made. For roughly
1.5 cents per reader, a business can reach a targeted audience of thousands of readers -- all of them
*subscribed* to receive the publication that the advertisement is in.
According to Liszt http://www.liszt.com/ , there are over 71,000 email newsletters, discussion lists and
ezines on the Net, yet only a handful of these accept any type of commercial sponsorship, and of that
handful only a finger full are what I call "Gold Nuggets" in Internet advertising. Why?
Why, out of 71,000 content publications and discussion lists do only a few accept advertising? Is it because
those that publish the lists are not aware that people would buy the space? Or is it because they are from the
"Old School", where commercial advertising on the Net was taboo, and the Net was owned by the .edu
folks for research purposes?
If you own a discussion list, or an email newsletter or discussion list and you *don't* accept one small
sponsor ad, you are missing out on revenue that could help offset your publication costs. If you are a
business on the Internet and you are not taking advantage of placing targeted text ads in email newsletters
and discussion lists, then you are missing out on one of best forms of targeting a niche marketing on the
Net, that could -- and does -- produce better response rates than bulk email and banner advertising
combined.
We all know that direct email is cheap and produces marginal response rates. We know that banner
advertising is expensive -- it costs $1 to $2 to bring just one visitor to your web site; yet email sponsorship
of a trade ezine or discussion list costs pennies and often generates higher response rates with better
targeting.
The problem I see is threefold: 1. People who are new to Internet marketing and advertising are not aware
that they can target an audience using other ways than unsolicited bulk email.
2. Not enough publication owners realize that they can accept advertising, or have no clue what to charge
or how to develop a fee structure.
3. It takes talented ad copywriting to produce a good response.
But where do you go to place an ad? How much should it cost? Is there a directory of email publications
that accept sponsorship?
This is why I call email media buying a "Black Art". Among the average Joe Marketer, very little is known
about marketing a business via these lists, where to go or how to conduct a campaign. To illustrate just how
cost-effective this type of advertising can be, I just put together a targeted sponsorship package for one of
my clients that bought 109,000 exposures of a ten line text ad in 5 publications for $785. That's less than a
penny per exposure - to a targeted audience, who usually reads top to bottom the publication your ad is in.
At the office, I keep a private database of lists that I buy from. Many of which I found through sites such as
Liszt http://www.liszt.com/ or other indexes like Liszt, which I have listed on a section of my site reserved
for email marketing resources: http://www.exposure-usa.com/email/ .
In my scattered travels on the Net in search of obscure publications to advertise in, I have come across just
about every fee structure there is. The standard I have seen is usually around $30 cpm, where cpm is "Cost
Per Thousand" exposures, and can be obtained by multiplying the number of readers by the number of
issues sponsored. Obviously, as is true for banner advertising as well, repeat exposures to the same
audience correspond with a diminishing response.
Perhaps the most misinformed publication I came across was one who was obviously confusing
print/offline advertising costs with Internet advertising costs, and was asking me to pay $2,600 for an email
ad in their publication. As of yet, to my knowledge, there is no "standard" cpm for email sponsorship of a
trade zine; however given the costs involved in production of an email publication compared to the costs
involved in production of a print journal, it is safe to say that print advertising prices cannot and should not
be applicable to an email publication.
If anyone on this list would like to discuss forming a list of their own, or discuss how they might place ads
in email newsletters or accept advertising in their own, I invite you to join a discussion list that has been set
up specifically for list owners and any other interested parties: E-Publishers Digest
http://www.mmgco.com/e-pub/
To Subscribe by email, e-pub@groupserver.revnet.com
In the BODY of your message, put: JOIN.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Adam Boettiger is Vice President of Major Accounts for the Multimedia Marketing Group
http://www.mmgco.com/. In addition to moderating E-Publishers Digest, he is also moderator for I-
Advertising Digest and editor for Exposure Internet Advertising and Marketing News. You can visit his
website for subscription details at http://www.exposure-usa.com/exposure/
To Subscribe by email, exposure@groupserver.revnet.com
Put SUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.