We talk a lot about how publishers can send less and monetize their list more by increasing the relevance of email offers. However, there’s also a lot of good that comes from sending regular emails (whether retention or acquisition) to your list, in the form of increased hygiene, branding, and more.

By having regular email ads going out to their list, our publisher clients see some interesting benefits that go beyond generating revenue, and I thought we’d share a few of those:

1. Clear out hard bounces regularly.
   Perhaps most importantly, sending email helps with your list hygiene. People’s email addresses change. They close out accounts or stop checking them. More often than not, they won’t think to update their subscriptions (though it can be helpful to remind them periodically that they can log in to your preference center and change their account details). The point is, your list will occasionally include hard bounces as the email addresses on it age.

   Obviously, the more frequently you send emails, the more quickly you get hard bounces out of your list, which decreases the overall percentage of hard bounces you send to with each mailing. A healthy list with a minimal number of hard bounces looks better to the ISPs who ultimately decide if your email gets the inbox or the spam folder.

   Email offers going out to your list on a regular basis can clear out hard bounces (and unsubscribes) on a regular basis so that your list is as up-to-date as possible at all times. If you use a third-party vendor for email ads, make sure that they are notifying you of any hard bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes as they come in.

2. Remind your subscribers who you are.
   Your subscribers joined your email list to get your content and offers. Ideally, you kept them interested after sign up with a welcome series, and your regular content keeps them hooked by being relevant to their interests.

   But consider this: The average email user gets 147 emails per day. Of those, they delete 71. (Stats from Boomerang). With that volume of email, it can be easy for a subscriber to forget your company and why they subscribed if they only see your name in their inbox once a month. Even though you send great content.

   Done right, email ads uses both the publisher and advertiser name in the sender information, reminding your subscribers of your company and that they are subscribed to your email list. This decreases the rate of spam complaints for your own list because people remember why they’re getting email from you. It might even remind them that they haven’t been on your site to check out new content in some time!

   At ividence, we take this one step further and allow our publishers to customize an HTML header that is included in the body of every email that goes out to a publisher’s list.

3. Learn more about your subscribers.
   In order to get behavioral data based on email behavior, you have to send emails. The catch is that you have to send emails with content that is new and relevant to the subscriber to keep their interest. One way to do that is to send very targeted email ads.

   Sending email ads can tell you more about what demographic groups within your email list are most actively engaging with your list. That can help you adjust your content mix to engage different parts of the list or can help you paint a picture of the most engaged members of your audience for advertisers on your website.

What has been your experience with monetizing your list? What benefits have you seen beyond generating revenue?

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A Checklist for Monetizing Your Email List the Right Way
What We Think We Know But May Not
 

Image courtesy of Ramburg Media
 

Kevin Deseuste

Kevin Deseuste joined the ividence team at the beginning of 2011 and directs the implementation and evaluation of advertiser campaigns and publisher lists for the U.S. market. He brings to the team an expertise in monitoring and enhancing deliverability and response rates from both the publisher and advertiser perspective. Prior to joining ividence, Kevin worked in Business Development at technology solutions provider SCC.

He can be reached at kd@ividence.com.