Death of the Dedicated Email! 💀

Since I can remember, we’ve rented our email lists on a CPM basis to advertisers who want to reach our audience.

Advertisers would provide the email copy they wanted us to send out and we would place that into our template and blast away.

This was the way…

And it was very lucrative.

Advertisers would pay anywhere from $5-$10/CPM based on the size of our email list.

(Other publishers could get $25-$50/CPM based on their niche, like Finance.)

Our email lists averaged about 250K subscribers, so we would get $2,500 every time we sent out a dedicated promo. 🤑

Book up the calendar, multiply it by the number of newsletters we own, and you can do the math.

Until it wasn’t…

Unfortunately, over time the ISPs got smarter.

Since advertisers were using proven ad copy and creatives that were known to convert for them, they would make all of their publishers send out the same emails.

This was the death trap!

Because of this, the ISPs could easily fingerprint the content that was being sent by multiple publishers.

As they identified these emails as strict advertisements sent by multiple publishers on a constant basis, it became increasingly difficult to inbox the creatives.

This resulted in:

• Lower engagement

• Fewer results for the advertiser

• And a heavy hit on deliverability

Dedicated emails are known to have lower click rates than normal newsletters and email content.

These low metrics over time would affect how the ISPs perceived our emails and would then lower the engagement on future emails.

The writing was on the wall…

We took a serious hit on deliverability to a number of our newsletters.

We decided over a year ago to stop sending dedicated emails for advertisers and focus on banner and native ad placements in our newsletters and monetization on our websites.

Since making this change we’ve dodged any serious deliverability issues from occurring on our newsletters, and any issues that have arisen have been mitigated very quickly.

Utilizing email ad networks like Live Intent and Jeeng (formerly Power Inbox) allows you to fill your inventory automatically without having to have a sales team find advertisers that would like to sponsor your newsletters.

This has been the newsletter Ad arbitrage game for a while now, but the new kids on the block “Beehiiv” are changing the game with their integrated Ad Network as part of their newsletter platform.

Here’s how it works!

1) Beehiiv's Ad Network offers inbound advertising opportunities by automatically presenting ads from premium Advertisers that are well-matched for you, which you can access and review anytime through your Ad Network dashboard.

2) You have full control over selecting ad placements for your newsletter, ensuring that only the brands that fit your criteria are chosen.

3) Send out your sponsored newsletter and Beehiiv will inform you of your earnings and handles payment processing within a few weeks, along with all tracking, reporting, and invoicing tasks.

But, what if you are “DEAD” set on still sending dedicated emails?

There may still be a way…

Over the last few months of 2024 we’ve been testing a new concept of sending dedicated emails as a one-to-one connection.

What do I mean by this?

We are triggering the sending of a dedicated email based on a specific action a subscriber makes.

For example, if we publish an article about the top 10 places to visit in the United States, when a subscriber clicks to read the article, we could email them a promotion from an airline or hotel company.

By implementing these action-based techniques we are able to send promotions to less subscribers and get ridiculously high engagement rates vs what you would normally see sending a bulk blast to your entire email list.

The initial stats and conversions are promising for the New Way!

Once I have more data on the performance of these campaigns I’ll share a complete breakdown of what we have accomplished and how you can too.

Make sure to dedicate a little one-on-one time,

Chris Miquel
Co-Founder of SoVi Digital

Follow me on Twitter: @miqchris

and on LinkedIn: chrismiquel