When it comes to generating money from email newsletters, it’s important for publishers to focus on enhancing the subscriber experience. In this blog post, we’ll explore the best strategies for publishers to email monetization.
However, with the ongoing developments in digital marketing, one thing remains constant – the high potential in driving revenue from free newsletter subscriptions. For The New York Times, it was reported that their subscribers were actually twice as likely to be converted into paying subscribers.
Publishers need to understand email newsletters are a powerful tool for communicating with subscribers, along with strengthening that relationship. Instead of focusing on the sales component – promoting or selling products and services – the idea here is to use email newsletters to nurture these relationships while building a sense of community.
Alright, let’s cut to the chase – here are the best strategies for publishers to email monetization:
Affiliate Links
Adding a couple of affiliate links into your content is inarguably one of the easiest ways for publishers to make money from email newsletters. It’s a simple process that involves partnering up with other brands and retailers as an affiliate. Then you earn a commission from any sales generated through your affiliate links.
With the right execution, affiliate links can actually be incredibly useful for adding more value to your own content. Chances are, subscribers will appreciate that you provided them with links to relevant products or services that you genuinely think they’ll be interested in.
But when it comes to who you’re collaborating with, choose wisely. Affiliate partnerships can substantially impact or influence how your own brand is viewed or perceived. Simply put, stay away from questionable affiliate partners. It’s ideal to work with brands with a stronger presence or a sense of authority within a relevant industry or even niche brands. Ultimately, they must share the same values.
Paid Subscriptions for Premium Content (Standalone Content)
Every successful email campaign is built on the foundation of providing readers with relevant, high-quality content that they actually look forward to receiving. To monetize newsletters, you can easily take this a step further by offering standalone subscriptions.
You can easily convert your current list of subscribers (to your free newsletters) into paying subscribers – that is if you can come up with premium content that they actually wouldn’t mind paying a fee to access. Similarly to a membership program, paid subscriptions involve a time-based fee that gives readers exclusive access to standalone content, which usually targets more specific interests.
The key is to get your readers stoked about what you have to offer them through your paid subscriptions. Use your free newsletters to provide teasers of all the exceptional content they’re missing out on!
Sponsored Content
Adding sponsored content is another effective method to monetize newsletters. However, your sponsored content should always be relevant, informative, and provide exceptional value to your readers. Otherwise, it compromises the level of authenticity that’s essential to retaining subscribers. In other words, adding sponsored content that subscribers perceive as irrelevant or pointless is the easiest way to lose subscribers.
Whenever there’s sponsored content involved, it’s important to let your readers know about it. You want to be completely transparent about the fact that you will profit off any sales generated from this content. Again, it’s all about authenticity.
Your sponsored content should always align with your own content strategy and branding efforts. Basically, you want it to feel organic. Think of it as a way to give your readers additional info or tips that they’d find useful while including links to products you genuinely think they’d be interested in.
Cross-Selling
At some point in time, we’ve all encountered some form of cross-selling, whether it was online or in the real world at a brick and mortar store. It’s when you take advantage of a sales opportunity to try to sell more products or services – relevant stuff, of course.
When it comes to incorporating this sales strategy into email newsletters, it’s all about delivering the right content to the right people and at the right time. It’s about utilizing a subscriber’s past behaviors, in terms of their browsing history or past orders, to understand their preferences, along with their needs and wants. So, the idea here is to use this information to create customized content that speaks to their pain points – offering them a solution to their problems… when they need it the most!
Community Building
Email newsletters are effective channels of communication that can be used to maintain and strengthen existing relationships with subscribers. In essence, you can use your newsletters to build a sense of community through their shared interests.
Understanding your community is essential because you can use this information to organize it into smaller clusters. Furthermore, segmenting your community makes it easier for you to deliver the right content to the right people. This, in turn, will enhance the effects of your targeted content – increasing engagement levels and leading to higher conversion rates.
Display Advertising
Display advertising is an easy way for publishers to monetize newsletters. It involves conveying an advertising message through visual components, such as images or photographs, animations, videos, audio, and other graphics. And as we mentioned in our previous article, display ads are those boxes that are obviously advertising. Still, to encourage clicks (or increase conversion rates), it’s important to target the specific interests of your subscribers by showing them relevant ads.
Native Ads
Native ads generally appear as ‘promoted stories’ or ‘recommended content.’ What’s great about native ads is that they try to mirror the surrounding content, which makes them appear more relevant and natural within your newsletter. Therefore, such ads can work wonders for encouraging clicks and enhancing engagement levels.
You can read more about how to use native ads to monetize emails here.
When it comes to maximizing your earning potential from email newsletters, inboxAds is a fantastic resource for publishers to generate revenue by using native ads. This advanced email monetization tool operates under a customer-centric model, helping you create customized content based on your readers’ preferences and previous activity.
Focus on Providing Subscribers with an Authentic Experience
Now that you have a better understanding of how to monetize email newsletters, you should be able to easily identify the windows of opportunity or gaps within your existing email campaign that you can capitalize on.
At the end of the day, the secret to a successful (and lucrative) email campaign is for publishers to prioritize authenticity above all. Once an authentic, genuine connection is established with subscribers, publishers can begin to leverage their free newsletters into additional streams of revenue.
Not entirely sure how to get the most out of your email campaign? Take advantage of valuable resources like inboxAds, which can make your life a lot easier when it comes to generating money from email newsletters. The product was designed with publishers in mind – to help you achieve more in less time through a seamless experience with their simplified user flows.
The strength of inboxAds lies in the fact that it’s equally easy to use and effective. Users of this platform can start generating revenue in a matter of minutes without requiring special skills such as coding.
With the easy-to-use features, you can double-check designs, ad placements, and wording in real-time before sending them out. Considering that such high-quality service is available entirely for free, improving your email marketing strategy is faster and simpler than ever before!
Learn more about how inboxAds can help you monetize your email newsletters starting today
