If Publishers Do This, The Money Will Roll In

Everyone knows that the key to any successful email program is subscriber engagement. The same goes for email monetization. The challenge lies in training your subscribers to engage, not just "skim" through your emails without any action. Ensuring your subscribers click is paramount to your monetization success. Subscribers should know exactly where to locate value quickly and click on it. 

When you do not provide constant and multiple ways to engage, you are leaving money on the table. There are four main components required to train your subscriber's to engage. It's easy to remember them, D.A.R.T. 

D. Design

A. Amount

R. Relevance

T. Technology

We’ll start with Design. Email design is for sure the heaviest variable in the D.A.R.T. framework. All the old school concepts you learned years ago no longer apply. Social and mobile media have completely changed the landscape of consumer behavior. 

There are three extremely important design concepts for email monetization:

1. F-Pattern

2. Fitt’s Law

3. Streams and Feeds

We’re all about the F-Pattern now. New media has forced consumer behavior to digest small pieces of information very quickly. It comes at us all day long in every direction, on every device. It’s weakened our attention spans. We don’t read anymore, we scan in columns and in streams. The F-Pattern is the new norm. See the below heat map example of the F-Pattern.

Fitt’s Law demonstrates that the “heavier” an object is, the more focus a user will give it. The heaviest objects in your newsletter – usually your images and headlines should be actionable and linked. Sounds like a no brainer, but you’d be surprised how many publishers don’t follow Fitt’s Law. Below is an excellent example of Fitt's Law in use. 

Streams and Feeds are everywhere – Facebook, Twitter, News sites, LinkedIn. We know them well. We are used to them. We like them. A lot. If you think about it, your inbox is a stream and so are Google search results. They do the best job of incorporating the F-Pattern and Fitt’s Law concepts. We know where to click to get what we want. We are trained to engage with streams and feeds. Below is an example of a typical Facebook feed, which I am sure you recognized right away. Facebook has mastered the art of training to engage. 

Stay tuned as we dive into the next D.A.R.T. component, Amount, and show when executed effectively, it will get you results! 

The D.A.R.T. components, examples and recommendations are fully covered in Gold Lasso’s “The Email Monetization Playbook”. Click here to download this definitive guide for publishers -- offering more than 150 tips for optimizing email monetization with concrete examples, illustrations, and pitfalls to avoid.