3 pro tips: How to build brand awareness with ads in email
Facebook, Google, and Amazon have been gobbling up programmatic budgets for years now — accounting for an estimated 65% of all U.S. digital ad spend in 2022. Still, this infamous triopoly is losing its grip as Facebook and Google have recently reported dramatic decreases in ad revenue.
Evidently, marketers are moving away from these walled gardens and looking for more reliable, logged-in ad channels.
Enter: email.
Standing the test of time, email remains one of the most trustworthy and ubiquitous platforms for reaching audiences with programmatic ads. It’s an opt-in, global media channel that reaches over a billion more users than Facebook. And U.S. workers spend almost six hours a day on email; that’s almost as much time as many people spend sleeping.
Meaning, if you’re not using email to launch programmatic campaigns and engage audiences at scale, it’s time to start. And we’re here to help.
Here are three data-backed ways to build brand awareness with ads in email.
1. Think mobile-first, then design for it.
As LiveIntent has found, more than 60% of first impressions in email come from mobile devices. Mobile web traffic has also surpassed desktop traffic since 2016, proving that consumers prefer accessing the internet from smartphones and tablets.
That means brands need to be sure they’re designing mobile-responsive ad creatives and landing pages. This way, customers can move seamlessly throughout the buyer journey — from open to click to purchase — and enjoy intuitive experiences.
2. Leverage deal IDs for customized buys.
You can use deal IDs on email, like on other channels, to reach specific publisher audiences. And they can be a powerful tool when adding programmatic email to your marketing mix.
As a quick refresher, a deal ID is a unique number generated by a publisher’s supply platform to represent a specific bid request. Basically, deal IDs help publishers find the right ad partners for their inventory and vice versa. That’s because they include customized criteria like targeting, minimum bids, and ad sizes.
With deal IDs, advertisers can bid on premium ad inventories, target the right audiences, and spend more efficiently. These IDs are also easy to use with any major buying platform like The Trade Desk, DV360, and MediaMath.
3. Measure engagement over views.
Look ma, no JavaScript!
That’s right. Email is a JavaScript-free environment, void of fancy animations and videos. As a result, viewability can be tough to measure on this channel. So if you’re using viewership metrics to gauge campaign performance, you might have to rethink your approach. Not to mention, recent changes like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection have rendered email opens obsolete.
To truly measure and build brand awareness with ads in email, we recommend using engagement metrics like clicks, quality of website traffic, and time spent on site.
Investment company Gold Alliance, for example, wanted to drive qualified leads beyond social channels, which were proving costly and ineffective. So they worked with LiveIntent to distribute programmatic email ads among targeted publisher audiences. The result? Gold Alliance generated a 2x increase in qualified leads and 300% decrease in costs — proving the power of building brand awareness with ads in email.
