Programmatic Email Advertising: Your Ultimate Guide

Programmatic advertising has become one of the most exciting developments in the world of marketing.

When you combine this technology with email — still one of the most effective forms of marketing — you have a low-cost, high-impact way to market your business to your target customers.

Therefore, programmatic email advertising might be the most significant advances in advertising during the coming decade.

With this complete guide, you can learn how to get in on the ground floor of this exciting new marketing technology.

With its blend of two of the most effective — yet budget-friendly — forms of advertising, this new type of marketing is one you’ll want in your arsenal in 2020 and beyond.

Programmatic: The New Standard in Advertising

As a recent Google article put it, programmatic advertising “isn’t just efficient — it leads to more sophisticated and targeted campaigns.”

That last part — targeting — is the key to its success.

With programmatic’s ability to target the exact customers likely to buy your products and services, it can do more for much less.

That’s a game-changer for small, breakout businesses, as well as startups.

Reaching the right customers with the information they need to decide to purchase puts smaller businesses on the same footing as large enterprises.

Larger companies, in turn, can scale up their global presence as they reach new markets.

Programmatic advertising leverages data and machine learning to make smart advertising buys, placing ads when and where target customers will see them.

These ads appear on publishers’ content — and target users through algorithms that sift through data, such as demographics, geolocation, online behavior, likes, and preferred channels.

It offers a wealth of advantages, including:

• Real-time insights: Programmatic provides advertisers with real-time insights, allowing them to tweak campaigns on the fly.
• Powerful, two-prong targeting: Not only does it target the right customers through extensive data analysis, but it also targets the page content likely to interest those customers.
• Ease of tracking performance and budget spend: With traditional advertising, businesses have to wait to analyze their ads’ performance versus the amount they’ve spent and revamp their strategy. With programmatic ads, businesses can view their ads’ performance and tweak them — all in real-time.

Newsletter Marketing: A Virtual ROI Machine

Newsletter marketing is a particularly effective arm of content marketing, pulling in approximately $44 for every dollar spent.

For companies that publish newsletters to keep potential customers informed about how to solve their most pressing challenges, they can earn not only the attention — but also the loyalty — of prospective customers.

Content marketing on its own costs much less than traditional marketing strategies yet produces three times the leads.

When you combine that with the power of newsletter marketing, you have low-cost, high-ROI marketing magic. Magic that you can put to work for your business.

Successful newsletters aren’t brag sheets about your products and services.

Rather, they earn customers’ long-term trust by positioning you as a helpful authority in your field.

Before you publish, do some research on your readers and potential customers.

Find out what keeps them up at night and find ways to ease their worries.

Then create content that lays out, step-by-step, those solutions.

The key to success, like in any effective content marketing campaign, is to put out only the highest quality content.

When you do that, they’ll begin to look forward to receiving your newsletters — and probably tell their friends.

Your subscriptions will grow, as will your customer base.

That’s the beauty of newsletter marketing over the long term.

But there’s also a way to garner short-term financial gain from your email newsletter: programmatic advertising. It’s not just for web browsing anymore.

How to Leverage Programmatic Ads in Your Email Newsletter

It’s a clear advantage to have an email newsletter in your content marketing arsenal.

When you allow advertisers to place programmatic ads in the body of your newsletter, you can monetize your newsletter from the outset, earning money with every clickthrough.

Newsletter Monetization with Short-Term and Long-Term Potential

Monetizing your newsletter and blog with programmatic ads is a double win.

Not only can you start earning money from the get-go, but you’re also getting helpful information into potential customers’ hands, earning trust with every post.

As trust turns readers into paying customers, you’ll have two streams of income for a small investment in time and web hosting fees.

If you go with an email monetization service like ours, the ad placement itself is free.

Use Native Ads for Better ROI

There are two kinds of ads that you can place in your newsletter: display ads and native ads.

Display ads (also called “banner ads”) are salesy, brand-forward ads that display at the top, bottom, or sidebar of your newsletter copy.

To most readers, display ads are annoying.

That factor plays out in their clickthrough rate — less than one-tenth of one percent.

Native ads, though, appear in the body of your newsletter itself.

Usually, they include images and intriguing headlines that promise information that your readers need to deal with the challenges they face.

Unlike banner ads that yield little more than an eye roll, native ads entice rather than annoy.

With products and services that interest readers, they’re likely to drive more clickthroughs and sales — bringing in more money.

For Advertisers, Programmatic Email Ads Are Marketing Magic

When you advertise with programmatic email ads, you never have to pay a dime until someone buys your product or service.

That’s just the tip of the ROI iceberg.

However, you can be confident that your ads will only appear in newsletters with a readership that has a keen interest in your products and services.

Not only that, but your ads will appear within the body of the newsletter copy.

Your ads will appear like links to informative articles — and in essence, they will be.

To maximize their advertising magic, you can use the kind of long-form advertising that builds trust.

It’s like content marketing on steroids. When your ads appear as informative, entertaining articles, they position your business as one that cares enough to take the time to inform as well as promote.

Putting your ads into email newsletters means that you’re getting an audience already tuned into the newsletter’s content.

Anti-spam legislation in many countries mandates that newsletter subscribers confirm their interest in receiving each newsletter not only on the signup form but also through a link that senders include in an initial email.

For that reason, you’re getting your ads in front of subscribers who look forward to receiving information from the sender.

If your ads fit the interests of the newsletter’s subscribers, you’re likely to have access to a wealth of eager customers.

Thanks to AI targeting, we can narrow down the newsletters on which your ads will appear by subscribers’ interests.

That means that your ads will enhance their experience, not annoy them.

Programmatic Email Ads: The Best Advertising Bet for the Coming Decade

Programmatic email advertising, therefore, is likely the best bet for both publishers and advertisers during the coming years.

Low in cost yet high in returns, it’s a no-brainer for businesses of any size.