The From Line

BOING!

That was the sound of your email bouncing.

As a publisher, or anyone involved in email marketing, you might feel there is no worse sound. Except there is. It’s the sound of silence.

It’s the silence of your email never even reaching the recipient’s servers - or reaching the mailbox, and being swiftly and silently escorted to the spam folder by the automatic filters. Because there was no BOING! - you never know.

The percentage of sent emails that actually make it to the inbox (your deliverability rate), is the metric by which email campaigns and email newsletters live or die. It’s not just related to that one email, either. One email campaign with outstandingly bad deliverability (think 40-50% of your emails never made it to their destination) and your future campaigns start with a mark against them.

The Publisher

Spanfeller Media Group (SMG) is a fast growth media company, headed up by Jim Spanfeller, former CEO of Forbes. The Daily Meal (TDM) was the first site launched by SMG in the early months of 2011. Since then it has proven to be one of the fastest growing content sites ever and the fastest growing site within the food sphere.

The Situation

As an online publisher that is constantly producing content for distribution, The Daily Meal was manually compiling newsletters several times per day to distribute to their subscribers. This was time-consuming, resource intensive, and the furthest thing from automated. There was also no monetization effort in place which left TDM feeling like they were leaving money on the table every single day. Jim Spanfeller created an in-house solution--he assembled two teams: one team to search for automation options for their daily email distribution, and another team to look into monetization opportunities. Little did he know that they could find solutions to both at Gold Lasso. 

Native advertising is a tough nut to crack. It’s not just black and white. While it is one of the fastest growing advertising segments, a lot of publishers are still in the dark when it comes to the wide spectrum of native advertising. 

By definition, native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed. Native advertising is NOT content marketing. There’s a big difference. Content marketing is a type of advertising message while native advertising, is a type of distribution.

As publishers, we’re obsessed with content relevance. However, with audience fragmentation it has become quite the challenge to remain relevant since multiple audiences often exist on a publisher’s list. Although there’s  a lot of interest overlap, it’s difficult to hold the interest of an entire audience without losing the attention of a few.

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.