By: Steve Outing A key component of any news company's Internet strategy should be e-mail publishing, in the form of e-mail newsletters and/or e-mailed filtered content delivered to opt-in subscribers.
How do you pay for such a program? Since only a small minority of news sites can successfully charge for their e-mail newsletters, advertising is the obvious answer. But advertising in e-mail publications is a different animal than ads on the Web.
Actually, I would argue that e-mail advertising is undervalued as a revenue source by most online news publishers. Consistently, successful e-mail publishers will tell you that the ads they run get better results than banner ads run on Web sites. Online publishers need to take their gaze off the Web (and wireless, and other trendy content delivery methods) long enough to focus on monetizing e-mail.
The answer: Text!
What should advertising look like in an e-mail publication? Text, text and text.
E-mail publications come in two primary flavors: plain-text and HTML/multimedia. Ideally, you'll want to offer your e-mail newsletters in either form, so the reader decides what form works best. (Many Internet users hold on to the notion that e-mail should be words only, and bristle at being forced to read e-mail that's full of graphics and banner ads.)
But in either text or HTML e-mail, the best advertising is still just words, says Christopher Knight, president of Sparklist, a Wisconsin-based e-mail publishing service bureau and e-newsletter publisher. In the e-newsletters that his firm publishes, ads are always in text, even in HTML versions. The difference is that the HTML-version ads have yellow highlighting on the words, to help bring them attention.
The reason that the ads are text - even when graphics are available in HTML e-mail newsletters - is simply that text performs better. Knight says that when Sparklist used to run banners in HTML newsletters as an option for advertisers, tracking showed a 25% higher clickthrough rate on the text ads - so more than a year ago Sparklist switched to all text ads on HTML newsletters.
Many e-mail publishers offer both text and banners, at the advertiser's option. Geoffrey Kleinman, who publishes an e-mail newsletter for his DVD Talk Web site, offers both to his advertisers, but "typically the text ads have performed higher than the banner ads."
E-mail mode
One possible explanation for better performance of text ads involves the resistance that occurs when a publisher asks an online user to change "modes." As Knight explains, if a consumer is looking at a Web site and an advertiser asks that he make a phone call to get more information, there's likely to be resistance. The same thing goes for someone who is reading e-mail (a newsletter) and encounters a banner ad that will take him to the Web.
Far better, the argument goes, is to keep the e-mail user in e-mail mode. So the best-performing e-newsletter ads are those that are presented in text, and the call to action is for the reader to stay in e-mail mode. Clicking a graphical banner to launch a Web browser changes modes and results in resistance by the consumer to clicking on the ad.
By far the best results come with text e-mail ads that tell the reader to send an e-mail to get more information. (Then the advertiser captures the user's e-mail address into a database for future use, and sends back a promotional e-mail message.) Using this logic, ads on Web sites are best when they get online users to go to another Web site (not pick up the phone or send an e-mail).
They can't filter out text
There are other advantages to text ads over graphical banners. Chris Pirillo, publisher of a popular e-newsletter called Lockergnome, points out that there is software available to let online users filter out banner ads, "but you can't turn off sentences."
More importantly, recent research seems to suggest that online users pay most of their attention to text, and tend to gloss over banner ads and images. This was pointed out clearly in the results of the Poynter-Stanford Online News Eyetrack study, which tracked and analyzed users' eye movements while reading online newspaper sites. Advertisers should take note of the finding that images are barely glanced at by online users, who focus most of their attention on text.
Of the e-newsletter publishers I interviewed for this column, a common theme they brought up was the idea that "people are now trained to ignore Web banner ads." Just as they don't work well on the Web, neither will they in e-mail publications. As Pirillo says, "People look at graphics; people read words." Keep that in mind as you think about ad strategies for your e-mail publications.
Where to place ads
There's not consensus on where ads should be placed in e-publications, but it's common to find them inset - or interrupting - article text. Just as with Web banners, text ads at the top of a page tend to perform less well than those lower down. On some of Knight's e-newsletters which include a single advertiser, they will get a 2-line text blurb at the top of the newsletter, and 7 lines of text in the middle. The results have been improved performance over just running a text ad in the middle of the page.
In terms of length, most e-mail publishers like ads to be between 5 and 7 lines - enough to let the advertiser get its message across but brief enough that users won't get annoyed at having editorial content broken up by an ad.
Ads should include an e-mail address to respond to for more information, or a URL to click on to get to more information on the Web. Randy Cassingham, publisher of a weekly humor e-newsletter called This Is True, says a mistake that many of his advertisers make is to include a long and complicated URL. Make it short and easy to remember - e.g., www.company.com/true/ - so that an e-mail reader will be able to remember it to seek out on the Web later. E-newsletter readers often won't click on a text ad while reading, but rather visit the advertiser's site later (if the ad's message was compelling enough to attract their attention).
Obviously, the wording of text ads is critical. The headline of the ad must be compelling enough to get the reader to focus on the ad and not just skip on by. Knight estimates that a typical e-mail text ad gets one-quarter of a second of a reader's attention before their eyes move on.
Ray Owens, who publishes the daily e-newsletter Joke A Day, limits his advertisers to 50 words. "I tell my sponsors not to 'sell' their product in the ad," he says. "Give the reader the 'sizzle.' Invite - hell, tell - them to take an action. Visit a site. Send an e-mail. Fill out a form. Do the actual selling of whatever it is you're trying to sell on their Web site."
That's an important point about e-mail publication ads. What they're really about is getting people to visit a sponsor's Web sites - which is where the real selling takes place. Says Owens, "I view my job [as a publisher] as getting the reader to take that action [of going to the advertiser's site]. I view the sponsor's job as selling their own product or service."
Publishers should help advertisers craft ads that will work to serve this purpose. According to a Jupiter Media Metrix survey done earlier this year, certain types of ads perform better in terms of clickthroughs. The top performers are:
Ads that feature discounts or coupons. Ads that are informative. Ads that feature sweepstakes/contests.
While those are results for Web banners, the same should apply to e-mail ads.
News companies should be thinking about how to enhance their e-mail publishing programs. Advertising in e-newsletters can be a lucrative endeavor, and the results typically exceed what Web advertisers can expect.
Other recent columns
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This column is written by Steve
Outing for Editor & Publisher Online. Tips, letters and feedback
can be sent to Steve at steve@planetarynews.com
Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher.
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