The Email Monetization Model

Successful email monetization is not an afterthought or separate function of email content development and operations. Maximizing email monetization is dependent on how well it’s integrated into your overall email newsletter strategy. With a well executed monetization strategy, your subscribers should view content and advertising equally.  In other words, your goal for email monetization should be for your subscribers to value advertising as much as they value your content.  This is obviously easier said than done.  However, with a few tricks and and quality effort, you can create a great inbox experience greatly evening subscriber optics of content vs. advertising.  

The Email Monetization Model Part 1

Content ≈ Advertising

What this simple model indicates is there should always be a seamless and balanced experience between content and advertising - an integrated process of formatting, content relevancy and salesmanship.

The second part of mastering the email monetization model is making sure you capitalize on both primary and secondary email monetization opportunities.  Primary email monetization is monetizing email impressions (opens) inside the email client. This includes display units, native units, sponsorships, content recommendations and list rentals (standalones). 

The Email Monetization Model Part 2

Primary vs. Secondary Email Monetization

Secondary monetization is monetizing the traffic sent from an email (click) to a website or another digital property such as an app. To the experienced publisher secondary monetization seems obvious, however many experienced publishers often put a quarter to the whole article inside their email newsletters eliminating subscribers’ need to click.  More importantly, The ability to monetize from secondary efforts is vastly greater since the probability of a subscriber engaging with content is higher than with an advertisement.  Additionally, email has many inherent technical limitations, such as the ability to support Javascript. Therefore, the ability to support video and other complex ad units is limited making the case for secondary monetization

These email monetization concepts as well as how to optimize your email monetization are covered in Gold Lasso’s “The Email Monetization Playbook”. Download this definitive guide for publishers -- offering more than 150 tips for optimizing email monetization with concrete examples, illustrations, and pitfalls to avoid.