A Black Art: Digging for Gold in Email Publications

According to Liszt http://www.liszt.com/ , there are over 71,000 email newsletters, discussion lists and ezines on the Net, yet only a handful of these accept any type of commercial sponsorship, and of that handful only a finger full are what I call "Gold Nuggets" in Internet advertising.

Why?

Why, out of 71,000 content publications and discussion lists do only a few accept advertising? Is it because those that publish the lists are not aware that people would buy the space? Or is it because they are from the "Old School", where commercial advertising on the Net was taboo, and the Net was owned by the .edu folks for research purposes?

If you own a discussion list, or an email newsletter or discussion list and you *don't* accept one small sponsor ad, you are missing out on revenue that could help offset your publication costs. If you are a business on the Internet and you are not taking advantage of placing targeted text ads in email newsletters and discussion lists, then you are missing out on one of best forms of targeting a niche marketing on the Net, that could -- and does -- produce better response rates than bulk email and banner advertising combined.

We all know that direct email is cheap and produces marginal response rates. We know that banner advertising is expensive -- it costs $1 to $2 to bring just one visitor to your web site; yet email sponsorship of a trade ezine or discussion list costs pennies and often generates higher response rates with better targeting.

The problem I see is threefold:

1. People who are new to Internet marketing and advertising are not aware that they can target an audience using other ways than unsolicited bulk email.
2. Not enough publication owners realize that they can accept advertising, or have no clue what to charge or how to develop a fee structure.
3. It takes talented ad copywriting to produce a good response.

This is why I call email media buying a "Black Art". Among the average Joe Marketer, very little is known about marketing a business via these lists, where to go or how to conduct a campaign. To illustrate just how cost-effective this type of advertising can be, I just put together a targeted sponsorship package for one of my clients that bought 109,000 exposures of a ten line text ad in 5 publications for $785. That's less than a penny per exposure - to a targeted audience, who usually reads top to bottom the publication your ad is in.

At the office, I keep a private database of lists that I buy from. Many of which I found through sites such as Liszt http://www.liszt.com/ or other indexes like Liszt, which I have listed on a section of my site reserved for email marketing resources: http://www.exposure-usa.com/email/ .

In my scattered travels on the Net in search of obscure publications to advertise in, I have come across just about every fee structure there is. The standard I have seen is usually around $30 cpm, where cpm is "Cost Per Thousand" exposures, and can be obtained by multiplying the number of readers by the number of issues sponsored. Obviously, as is true for banner advertising as well, repeat exposures to the same audience correspond with a diminishing response. Perhaps the most misinformed publication I came across was one who was obviously confusing print/offline advertising costs with Internet advertising costs, and was asking me to pay $2,600 for an email ad in their publication. As of yet, to my knowledge, there is no "standard" cpm for email sponsorship of a trade zine; however given the costs involved in production of an email publication compared to the costs involved in production of a print journal, it is safe to say that print advertising prices cannot and should not be applicable to an email publication.

Adam Boettiger is Vice President of Major Accounts for the Multimedia Marketing Group http://www.mmgco.com/. In addition to moderating E-Publishers Digest, he is also moderator for I-Advertising Digest and editor for Exposure Internet Advertising and Marketing News. You can visit his website for subscription details at http://www.exposure-usa.com/exposure/

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