As explained on TME.net, the newsletter can be a great way to communicate to a specific audience.
This means newsletters can also be a great way of advertising.
Here’s what we think is the key information you need:
1) Unique clicks per sponsored post
This stat will tell you the number of visitors you can expect to your website from a post.
2) Unique opens
The term “open rate” has been redefined by some newsletters out there to include repeat opens.
Focus on how many people actually see your ad and ask for the unique opens.
3) Price
Obviously you want to calculate an estimated CPM and CPC with the numbers above.
Whether it’s brand awareness or conversions that you are looking for, that’s the key information you need.
Things to make you wary
But let’s also give you some red flags when it comes to newsletters that should make you skeptical:
1) You can’t get a straight answer for the stats above
If someone cannot tell you an estimate of unique clicks per sponsored post, unique opens, or a clear price, they either are trying to mislead you or they don’t know what they are doing.
2) They brag about subscribers
Do you really care how many inboxes your message gets lost in?
Or do you care about how many people read your message?
3) They push “total” clicks or opens as a way to show engagement
If one person opens an email a million times, does it really help you? Focus on uniques!
4) Low open rates
If a newsletter has under 20% unique open rate, no matter how good the stats look otherwise, it’s bad.
There’s a significant chance the remaining openers are actually just corporate firewalls (aka, bots) and you will get very few humans reading your message.
When you should avoid advertising in newsletters
Newsletter ads can be great, but you should also consider when not advertise in newsletters.
1) New high ticket product with unclear sales process
If you’re selling something at a relatively high price, say $500+ but don’t have a good sales funnel where you go through multiple touchpoints with your leads, newsletters will probably not work.
This is not an issue necessarily for newsletters only, but no matter how engaging and relevant an audience from a newsletter is, it won’t fix a bad sales process.
2) Unclear value proposition
Many new products are guilty of this.
If you can’t explain in maximum of 3 sentences how your product saves time, saves money, or makes money, you are unlikely to have success with newsletter ads.
You are unlikely to see success with any channel – we just say it once again that newsletter ads won’t magically work.
3) When you’re an in-person event taking place in the next 14 days
Newsletters and events can go together, but not if you rush that relationship and expect people to just buy tickets right away.
Newsletters can be a great way to keep your event audience engaged but if you sponsor a newsletter with an event taking place really soon it’s unlikely to work well, unless it’s a hyper-local event sponsoring a hyper-local newsletter.
